Unlike a lot of folks I don’t get my hate on when it comes to Constantine the Great since he was basically an opportunistic devotee of Dionysos who exploited the potential for social cohesion in the nascent church to bolster a floundering Rome. At this point the empire had been greatly destabilized by close to a century of petty foreign wars and civic strife, and was on the brink of economic collapse. There had also been massive droughts and famines and a plague that wiped out close to a tenth of the population. He attempted to reform Rome’s institutions from within to address these problems and met with little success since the senatorial class was deeply entrenched and resistant to change lest they lose their power base so he looked outside to the church as a model for social and political cohesion, repealing the ban on the religion and granting it official imperial patronage. This eventually proved a disastrous move, but it’s unfair to fault him for making it considering the problematic situation the empire found itself in. He was pretty much fucked no matter what he did. So he made a deal with a devil – a deal, by the way, which permitted the Western Roman empire to limp along for another hundred years or so and the Eastern branch to persist until the fifteenth century. In that light his efforts must be seen as something of a success.
But the man himself was no conventional Christian – he continuously put off receiving baptism until his deathbed, at which point he was too weak to protest further and the sacrament may have been performed on him without his consent. When he rededicated a city on the site of the ancient Byzantium to serve as the new imperial capital (the first fully Christian city according to tradition) temples to Tyche and the Dioskouroi were built. A court panegyrist hailed him as being under the divine protection of Apollo and Jupiter years after the incident at the Ponte Milvio and the court historian Zosimus (himself a pagan) recounted how Constantine erected numerous statues to Apollo. Even after he began using the Chi Rho symbol Constantine minted coins with the image of Sol Invictus. Though he made legal concessions to the growing Christian elites (for instance substituting hanging for crucifixion for capital offenses and passing laws that privileged the church with state support and outlawed magic and divination) his primary goal was fostering religious tolerance. He permitted sacrifice in the temples and the celebration of festivals, provided that they were non-compulsory, and gave local, regionally specific cults imperial sanction:
“Let no one disturb another, let each man hold fast to that which his soil wishes…”
But his true allegiance was to the cult of Dionysos, as his grandson the Emperor Julian made clear. In his satirical piece The Caesars (written for the occasion of the Saturnalia) Julian has the great emperors of the past summoned to a feast of the gods with Dionysos advocating for the inclusion of Constantine:
In the silence that followed, Kronos turned to Zeus and said that he was astonished to see that only martial Emperors were summoned to the competition, and not a single philosopher. “For my part, he added, “I like philosophers just as well. So tell Marcus to come in too.” Accordingly Marcus was summoned and came in looking excessively dignified and showing the effect of his studies in the expression of his eyes and his lined brows. His aspect was unutterably beautiful from the very fact that he was careless of his appearance and unadorned by art; for he wore a very long beard, his dress was plain and sober, and from lack of nourishment his body was very shining and transparent, like light most pure and stainless.
When he too had entered the sacred enclosure, Dionysos said, “King Kronos and Father Zeus can any incompleteness exist among the gods?” And when they replied that it could not, “Then,” said he, “let us bring in here some votary of pleasure as well.”
“Nay,” answered Zeus, “it is not permitted that any man should enter here who does not model himself on us.”
“In that case,” said Dionysos, “let them be tried at the entrance. Let us summon by your leave a man not unwarlike but a slave to pleasure and enjoyment. Let Constantinus come as far as the door.”
Constantinus was allowed to speak next. On first entering the lists he was confident enough. But when he reflected on the exploits of the others he saw that his own were wholly trivial. He had defeated two tyrants, but, to tell the truth, one of them was untrained in war and effeminate, the other a poor creature and enfeebled by old age, while both were alike odious to gods and men. Moreover his campaigns against the barbarians covered him with ridicule. For he paid them tribute, so to speak, while he gave all his attention to Pleasure, who stood at a distance from the gods near the entrance to the moon. Of her indeed he was so enamoured that he had no eyes for anything else, and cared not at all for victory. However, as it was his turn and had to say something, he began:
“In the following respects I am superior to these others; to the Macedonian in having fought against Romans, Germans and Scythians, instead of Asiatic barbarians; to Caesar and Octavianus in that I did not, like them, lead a revolution against brave and good citizens, but attacked only the most cruel and wicked tyrants. As for Trajanus, I should naturally rank higher on account of those same glorious exploits against the tyrants, while it would be only fair to regard me as his equal on the score of that territory which he added to the empire, and I recovered; if indeed it be not more glorious to regain than to gain. As for Marcus here, by saying nothing for himself he yields precedence to all of us.”
“But Constantinus,” said Silenus, “are you not offering us mere gardens of Adonis as exploits?”
“What do you mean,” he asked, “by gardens of Adonis”?
“I mean”, said Silenus, “those that women plant in pots, in honour of the lover of Aphrodite, by scraping together a little earth for a garden bed. They bloom for a little space and fade forthwith.” At this Constantinus blushed, for he realised that this was exactly his own performance.
While Julian is harsh in his judgments on his grandfather (and gets in a couple good swipes at Jesus later in the piece) it’s important to keep in mind that τρυφἠ was an essential quality in the Dionysian model of kingship promulgated by the Ptolemies and other Hellenistic monarchs. (Plus Julian had an axe to grind since a lot of his family had been executed and he himself was forced into exile early on during the dynastic squabbles of Constantine’s sons.)
Another indication of Constantine’s Dionysian character was his choice of location when he summoned representatives of the Christian churches to iron out their theological and personal differences. The ecumenical council (where he basically locked the bishops in a room and told them that if they didn’t reach consensus he was going to have them all killed) took place in the Anatolian city of Nikaia which had originally been founded by Dionysos himself:
This city is named after the nymph Nikaia who is said to have been the daughter of Kybele and Sangarios, the ruler of the country. Preferring virginity to cohabitation with a man, she spent her life hunting in the mountains. Dionysos fell in love with her, but she rejected his advances. After his rejection Dionysos tried to achieve his desire by a trick. He filled the spring, from which Nikaia used to drink when she was worn out from hunting with wine instead of water. She suspected nothing and, acting as normal, took her fill of the deceptive liquid. Then drunkenness and sleep took hold of her, and she submitted to the wishes of her lover. Dionysos had intercourse with her, and fathered Satyros and other sons by her. (Memnon, History of Herakleia 28.9)
One wonders if this naiad was involved in Constantine’s famous vision while crossing the Tiber, when the words Εν Τούτῳ Νίκα appeared before him in the heavens.
A church built by Constantine to celebrate the miraculous healing of his daughter from a disease very similar to the one suffered by the Proetides was later mistaken for a temple of Dionysos, further attesting a link between the two. But the real cincher for me is Constantine’s posthumous activities, primarily his involvement in the Orthodox Greek festival Anastenaria:
The Anastenaria is a traditional ritual of fire walking which dates back to pagan times. Barefoot villagers of Ayia Eleni near Serres, and of Langada near Thessaloniki, and other places, annually walk over hot coals. As there are variations in the ritual from place to place, the following description is largely based upon the performance of the festival as celebrated at Ayia Eleni, the most authoritative Anastenarian community, and the illustrations are from the ritual at Langada. On the eve of the feast of Saints Constantine and Helen (May 20th) the Anastenarides gather in the konaki, where the participants dance and sing to the music of the Thracian lyra, and a large drum. After some time, the dancing generates extreme emotional and ecstatic phenomena in the devotees, particularly in those dancing for the first time. This manifests itself in the form of violent trembling, repeated rocking backwards and forwards, and writhing. The archanastenaris hands out icons from the shelf to some of the dancers. The Anastenaridesbelieve that during the dance they are “seized” by the saint, and enter a state of trance. On the morning of the saints’ day (May 21st) the Anastenarides gather at the konaki before leaving together in procession, accompanied by musicians and candle bearers to a holy well, where they are blessed by the holy water. Next, they sacrifice one or several animals to the saints. In Ayia Eleni, the animal must be over one year old, and of an odd number of years of age, the most acceptable being seven. The beast must also be unmarked and it must not have been castrated. It is incensed, and then led up to a shallow pit excavated in a place previously indicated by the Archanastenaris in a trance, usually beside the roots of a tree or at the agiasma. At one side of the shallow pit candles are lighted, while, on the other stand pots of holy water and the sacrificial animal. The beast is turned upside down, with its head tilted upwards, at the edge of the pit. Its throat is cut in such a way as to allow its blood to soak into the earth. The carcass is hung and skinned to the sound of music, and the raw flesh and hide cut up into equal parts put into baskets and distributed, amongst the families of the village in a procession from house to house.
Though attached to the name of one of Christianity’s greatest saints, the church attempted to suppress these practices as a survival of Dionysian ecstatic worship:
Among scholars the origins of the Anastenaria, as opposed to what the cult has become today, are a matter of considerable dispute. Although there is no evidence in ancient literature of fire-walking rituals associated with the god Dionysos, most scholars connect the Anastenaria with the widespread cult of that divinity. This association was also made by the Church authorities when they condemned the practices of the cult. Folklore scholar George A. Megas observes that “the cradle of Dionysiac worship was precisely in the Haemus area where the Anastenaria are danced today, passed down by the Greeks to the neighboring Bulgarian villages.” This latter point is made clear by the fact that the prayers used by the Bulgarian Anastenarides are recited in Greek, and that the transmission of the rites from Greeks to Bulgarian settlers in the area is a matter of historical record. Moreover, the evidence of mid-winter and carnival customs is that much that was associated with the Dionysian cult has survived throughout northern and central Greece. Katerina Kakouri has established a close connection between these customs and the Anastenaria in Ayia Eleni.
There are some amazing videos of Anastenaria on Youtube that you should check out if you’re interested in seeing the Dionysian parallels for yourself.
