Constantine the Great

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, reputation and impact of Constantine I, known as Constantine the Great (c280s -337AD). Born in modern day Serbia and proclaimed Emperor by his army in York in 306AD, Constantine became the first Roman Emperor to profess Christianity. He legalised Christianity and its followers achieved privileges that became lost to traditional religions, leading to the steady Christianisation of the Empire. He built a new palace in Byzantium, renaming it Constantinople, as part of the decentralisation of the Empire, an Eastern shift that saw Roman power endure another thousand years there, long after the collapse of the empire in the West.

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Guests

• Christopher Kelly No other episodes
  Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Cambridge
• Lucy Grig 2 episodes
  Senior Lecturer in Roman History at the University of Edinburgh
• Greg Woolf 8 episodes
  Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London

Reading list

• Constantine and Eusebius
  T. D. Barnes (Harvard University Press, 1981)
• Eusebius: Life of Constantine
  Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall (Clarendon Press, 1999)
• Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance
  H. A. Drake (John Hopkins University Press, 2002)
• The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine
  Noel Lenski (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
• Constantine the Emperor
  David Potter (Oxford University Press, 2013)
• The Roman Revolution of Constantine
  Raymond van Dam (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

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Programme ID: b096gjw0

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b096gjw0

Auto-category: 937 (Roman Empire)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, Constantine the Great ruled the Roman Empire longer than anyone else other than Augustus and by his death in 337 AD the empire was transformed.