Constantine could not wait, and various artificial methods were adopted in order to provide inhabitants for the vacant inclosure. Patricians were induced to abandon Rome by grants of lands and houses, and it is even said that several were persuaded to settle at Constantinople by means of an ingenious deception. Commanding the attendance in the East of a number of senators during the Persian war, the Emperor privately commissioned architects to build counterparts of their Roman dwellings on the Golden Horn. To these were transferred the families and households of the absent ministers, who were then invited by Constantine to meet him in his new capital. There they were conducted to homes in which to their astonishment they seemed to revisit Rome in a dream, and henceforth they became permanent residents in obedience to a prince who urged his wishes with such unanswerable arguments.[1] As to the common herd we have no precise information, but it is asserted by credible authority that they were raked together from diverse parts, the rabble of the Empire who derived their maintenance from the founder and repaid him with servile adulation in the streets and in the theatre.[2]
By the spring of 330[3] the works were sufficiently advanced for the new capital to begin its political existence, and Constantine decreed that a grand inaugural festival should take
- ↑ Anon. (Banduri), p. 5; Codinus, p. 20. The stories of these writers do not deserve much credit. Glycas, however, accepts the tale and is a sounder authority, iv, p. 463. "It is well known that the flower of your nobility was translated to the royal city of the East," said Frederic Barbarossa, addressing the Roman Senate in 1155 (Otto Frising, Muratori, Rer. Ital. Script., vi, 721).
- ↑ Eunapius in Aedesius. Burchardt jeers at C. and his new citizens.
- ↑ Idatius, Descript. Consul. (Migne, S. L., li, 908). The accepted date.
