IN the year 335 the Emperor Constantine, feeling the nearness of death,
called his sons and nephews to his side, and divided among them, with the
folly of fondness, the government of the immense Empire that he had won.
To his eldest son, Constantine II, he assigned the West--Britain, Gaul, and
Spain; to his son Constantius, the East--Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt; to his
youngest son, Constans, North Africa, Italy, Illyricum, and Thrace, includ-
ing the new and old capitals--Constantinople and Rome; and to two nephews
Armenia, Macedonia, and Greece. The first Christian Emperor had spent his
life, and many another, in restoring the monarchy, and unifying the faith, of
the Roman Empire; his death ( 337) risked all. He had a hard choice: his rule
had not acquired the sanctity of time, and could not ensure the peaceable
succession of a sole heir; divided government seemed a lesser evil than civil
war.

Civil war came none the less, and assassination simplified the scene. The
army rejected the authority of any but Constantine's sons; all other male
relatives of the dead Emperor were murdered, except his nephews Gallus
and Julian; Gallus was ill, and gave promise of an early death; Julian was
five, and perhaps the charm of his age softened the heart of Constantius,
whom tradition and Ammianus credited with these crimes.¹ Constantius re-
newed with Persia that ancient war between East and West which had never
really ceased since Marathon, and allowed his brothers to eliminate one an-
other in fraternal strife. Left sole Emperor ( 353), he returned to Constanti-
nople, and governed the reunified realm with dour integrity and devoted
incompetence, too suspicious to be happy, too cruel to be loved, too vain to
be great.

The city that Constantine had called Nova Roma, but which even in his
lifetime had taken his name, had been founded on the Bosporus by Greek
colonists about 657 B.C. For almost a thousand years it had been known as
Byzantium; and Byzantine would persist as a label for its civilization and its
art. No site on earth could have surpassed it for a capital; at Tilsit, in 1807,
Napoleon would call it the empire of the world, and would refuse to yield
it to a Russia fated by the direction of her rivers to long for its control. Here

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