Constantine fought his rival Maxentius
at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome in three-twelve.
The night before, he saw a cross of light,
or chi-rho sign, and a voice did delve:
"In hoc signo vinces." In this sign, conquer.
He put the Christian monogram on his shields,
won the battle, credited Christ,
and ended Christianity's persecution fields.
The Edict of Milan in three-thirteen
legalized Christianity throughout the empire.
Confiscated churches were returned.
Worship was free. The martyrs could retire.
Constantine moved the capital east to
Byzantium, renamed Constantinople,
"New Rome," the city of the emperor,
strategically placed on the Bosphorus people.
He called the Council of Nicaea in three-twenty-five
to settle the question of Christ's nature.
Was the Son created or eternal?
Was he of the same substance as the Father's furniture?
Arius said the Son was created,
the first and highest creation but still made.
Athanasius said the Son was eternal,
homoousios with the Father, the same grade.
Constantine pushed for consensus. The creed
was written. Homoousios won the day.
Arianism was condemned, though it would
persist among the Goths for centuries to stay.
The Nicene Creed became the foundation
of orthodox Christian theology:
one God, three persons, Father, Son, Spirit,
consubstantial, coeternal trinity.
Constantine was baptized on his deathbed.
Whether sincere or political, who can say?
His mother Helena went to Jerusalem,
found (she said) the True Cross where it lay.
After Constantine, his sons divided
the empire, fought civil wars, returned
to fragmentation. Julian the Apostate
briefly tried to restore the old gods burned.
But it was too late. The church was too strong.
Julian died in battle against the Persians.
The Theodosian reforms would make Christianity
the state religion, exclusive, without diversions.
Theodosius I in three-ninety-two
outlawed pagan worship entirely.
The old temples were closed or converted.
The Olympic Games were ended, purely.
The Visigoths sacked Rome in four-ten
under Alaric. The unthinkable happened.
The city that had not fallen in eight centuries
was looted by barbarians now unchained.
Augustine wrote The City of God
in response — Rome had fallen because
it trusted in earthly power, not heavenly.
The true City endured beyond human laws.
The Vandals sacked Rome again in four-fifty-five.
The Western Empire was fragmenting fast.
Britain was abandoned. Gaul filled with Franks.
Spain filled with Visigoths from Rome's past.
Romulus Augustulus, a child emperor
with a diminutive name ironic in sum,
was deposed by the Gothic general
Odoacer in four-seventy-six. Rome was done.
Or rather, the Western Roman Empire was done.
The Eastern Empire at Constantinople
continued for a thousand years more
as Byzantium, Greek-speaking, ecclesiastical.
Justinian would briefly reconquer
parts of the West in the sixth century,
taking Italy back from the Goths, North Africa
from the Vandals, with Belisarius' bravery.
He codified Roman law as the Corpus Juris Civilis,
built the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople,
closed the Academy of Athens which had run
for nine hundred years as philosophy's steeple.
The Platonic philosophers fled to Persia
to Khosrow I, who welcomed them kindly,
though they eventually returned homeward
under guarantee of tolerance, blindly.
Justinian's reconquest exhausted the East.
The plague of Justinian killed millions.
The Sassanid wars drained what remained.
The Arabs would strike these weakened civilians.
But that is the next arc. For now, mark
the transition: the classical world ended.
The Western Roman Empire fell.
Christianity became what Rome defended.
The old gods were gone from public life.
The temples were churches or ruins now.
A new Christian civilization was forming
on the old Roman frame, altered somehow.
Stand.