by Mary Harrsch © 2025
I inadvertently began work on another article. I've been reading novels in the series The Sertorius Scrolls by Victor B Davis II and I've reached book 5, "Sulla's Fist", which is focused on The Social War between Rome and her Italian allies in the 1st century BCE. I knew Rome granted citizenship to almost everyone south of the Po river after this conflict but wondered why Rome was so fiercely against this request. I thought it might have to do with the grain dole and indirectly it did. Roman aristocrats insisted granting citizenship to its Italian allies would trigger a mass migration to Rome so they could qualify for the grain dole. In actuality though, this "fear" was a distraction from the real reason. The Roman elite in Rome did not want to dilute their power and influence by extending admittance to the Cursus Honorum to provincial elites.
Anyway, in the course of my research on the topic with ChatGPT I learned that the grain dole was later used by Constantine in the 4th century to divert power and resources away from Rome to his new capital at Constantinople along with his plunder of the treasures stored in pagan temples. Here's a sidebar that will be included in my new article. To illustrate it I created an image of a plundered statue being hauled into the Forum of Constantine while a Byzantine-era Roman soldier directs the delivery in Constantinople.
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| A statue plundered from a pagan temple is hauled into the Forum of Constantine under the watch of a Roman soldier in 4th-century Constantinople. Reused as political trophies, such statues symbolized the empire’s shift in power and illusion of faith—stripped of their sacred roles and repurposed to glorify the new "Christian" capital. Image produced with Adobe Firefly and Photoshop Generative Fill by the author. |
I was able to develop the basic image with Adobe Firefly but ended up resorting to Photoshop's generative fill to improve the historical accuracy based on ChatGPT's analysis of the image. The AI pointed out the wagon driver's red tunic was too short for the 4th century, the Triumphal Arch too weathered, the statue needed restraints to hold it on the wagon, and I needed a porphyry column to represent Constantine's column in the center of the space.
I tried to make these corrections in the prompt but could not get the image to look appropriate. So, I opened the image in Photoshop and used its generative fill feature to change the length of the wagon driver's tunic, "repair" the entrance columns to the triumphal arch so it looked newer and remove trees that could be seen through the arch and place a red column in the center distance. I also had to remove some odd bits and create a second leg for the wagon driver. I had told the AI the wagon driver was wearing brown leather boots so I double checked that by the 4th century closed leather boots had come into use, especially in the east due to proximity to the eastern desert tribes.
Here is my sidebar article:
Constantine’s economic transformation of the empire relied not only on diverting grain and undermining the Roman aristocracy, but also on systematically extracting and repurposing the wealth of pagan temples. These institutions, often centuries old, held vast deposits of gold and silver, controlled extensive landholdings, and served as local financial centers in cities across the empire. By embracing Christianity, Constantine gained ideological cover to confiscate these assets—not as wanton destruction, but as a kind of moral purification. In practice, however, it was a calculated transfer of resources from traditional religious elites to the imperial court and church (Curran, 2000; MacMullen, 1984).
Rather than smashing pagan icons in a wave of destruction, Constantine reused them with deliberate symbolism. Throughout Constantinople, temples were quarried for building materials, and pagan statues were installed in prominent public spaces. The clearest example is the Forum of Constantine, completed around 330 CE. This ceremonial center was ringed with colossal statues taken from temples across the Mediterranean world—Athens, Ephesus, Aphrodisias, and Baalbek (Elsner, 1998; Mango, 1990). These were not subtle appropriations: gods once venerated in their original sanctuaries now stood as decorative trophies in the emperor’s new city.
One striking example is the statue of Athena Promachos, likely brought from Athens or a provincial temple and installed in the Forum or palace precinct. Stripped of her sacred context, the goddess no longer symbolized civic protection, but imperial domination—her presence a demonstration that the old gods now served the emperor's aesthetic and ideological aims. According to Eusebius, Constantine's agents “collected innumerable works of art from every province” and displayed them in Constantinople not for worship, but to glorify the imperial city (Life of Constantine 3.54–55; Eusebius, trans. Cameron & Hall, 1999).
At the same time, the wealth hidden behind these statues—the temple treasuries—was funneled into building programs and Christian patronage. The Lateran Basilica in Rome, the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem were all funded, at least in part, by redirected temple resources (Rousseau, 2012; Curran, 2000). Some confiscated lands were redistributed to imperial loyalists, ensuring that Constantine’s economic restructuring also reshaped the political landscape (MacMullen, 1984).
What emerges is not a portrait of religious zealotry but of imperial opportunism. Constantine did not destroy paganism outright—he gutted its infrastructure and appropriated its symbols. The gods still stood, but now as mute witnesses to their own defeat.
Echoes in the Present
Constantine’s strategy of cloaking resource seizure and institutional overhaul in the language of moral renewal has not been lost to antiquity. Even in the 21st century, some political leaders now appear to be taking a page from his playbook—invoking divine sanction, cultural identity, or national morality to justify the extraction of wealth, the dismantling of established institutions, and the reallocation of symbolic capital. The result, now as then, is a recoding of power: not through open destruction, but through appropriation and recontextualization.
Bibliography
Curran, J. (2000). Pagan City and Christian Capital: Rome in the Fourth Century. Oxford University Press.
Elsner, J. (1998). Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire AD 100–450. Oxford University Press.
Eusebius of Caesarea. (1999). Life of Constantine (A. Cameron & S. G. Hall, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work written ca. 337 CE)
MacMullen, R. (1984). Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100–400). Yale University Press.
Mango, C. (1990). Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome. Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Rousseau, P. (2012). The Early Christian Centuries. Longman.