Free The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 by John Julius Norwich

jubilee in the early summer of 330 - only a year and a half away - so construction work continued at a furious rate, concentrating above all at the eastern end of the peninsula, on and around the old acropolis.
    The focal point here was the Milion, or First Milestone. It consisted of four triumphal arches forming a square and supporting a cupola, above which was set the most venerable Christian relic of all - the True Cross itself, sent back by the Empress Helena from Jerusalem a year or two before. From it all the distances in the Empire were measured; it was, in effect, the centre of the world. A little to the east of it, on a site occupied in former times by a shrine of Aphrodite, rose the first great Christian church of the new capital, dedicated not to any saint or martyr but to the Holy Peace of God, St Eirene. A few years later this church was to be joined - and somewhat overshadowed - by a larger and still more splendid neighbour, St Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom; but for the time being it had no rival. A quarter of a mile or so away from it towards the Marmara stood Constantine's huge Hippodrome, in the central spina of which was erected one of the most ancient classical trophies in the city - the so-called 'Serpent Column' brought by Constantine from Delphi, where it had been erected in the Temple of Apollo by thirty-one Greek cities in gratitude for their victory over the Persians at the battle of Plataea in 479 bc . 1 Half-way along its eastern side, the imperial box gave direct access by a spiral staircase to that vast complex of reception halls, government offices, domestic apartments, baths, barracks and parade grounds that was the Palace.
    Directly westward from the Milion ran a broad thoroughfare, already begun by Severus, known as the Mese; and where this crossed the old Severan walls the Emperor laid out a magnificent new forum, oval in
    1 The heads of the three intertwined bronze serpents are believed to have been chopped off by a drunken member of the Polish Embassy to the Sublime Porte in 1700; a part of one of them was recovered in 1847 and can be admired in the Archaeological Museum.
    shape - it was probably inspired by the somewhat similar one at Gerasa (Jerash) in Arabia - and paved entirely in marble. At its centre stood a great hundred-foot column of porphyry, brought from Heliopolis (the City of the Sun) in Egypt, itself standing on a twenty-foot marble plinth. Within this plinth had been deposited a number of remarkable relics, including the hatchet with which Noah had built the ark, the baskets and remains of the loaves with which Christ had fed the multitude, St Mary Magdalen's jar of ointment and the figure of Athene brought back by Aeneas from Troy. On the summit stood a statue. The body was that of an Apollo by Phidias; but the head, which was surrounded by a metal halo with representations of the sun's beams radiating from it, was that of Constantine himself. The right hand carried a sceptre, while in the left was an orb in which had been placed a fragment of the True Cross. 1
    Once again, Christian and pagan elements are combined; but this time Apollo, Sol Invictus and Jesus Christ all seem subordinated to a new supreme being - the Emperor Constantine. We shall never know for certain, but the existing evidence surely points to the fact that by the last decade of the Emperor's life he was rapidly giving way to religious megalomania. From being God's chosen instrument it was but a short step to being God himself, that summus deus in whom all other Gods and other religions were subsumed.
    Beyond the forum, there was as yet relatively little building: the Mese turned north-west, and after running a mile or so through open fields split into two, the left-hand branch leading towards Thessalonica, the right-hand towards Adrianople. Around the Palace, the Church and the Hippodrome, however, tens of thousands of labourers and artisans worked day and night; and, thanks to the wholesale