After the fall of Licinius it appears most probable that Constantine, as a memorial of his accession to undivided power, gave Byzantium the name of Constantinople.[1] When, however, he transformed that town into a metropolis, in order to express clearly the magnitude of his views as to the future, he renamed it Second, or New Rome. At the same time he endowed it with special privileges, known in the legal phraseology of the period as the "right of Italy and prerogative of Rome";[2] and to keep these facts in the public eye he had them inscribed on a stone pillar, which he set up in a forum, or square, called the Strategium, adjacent to an equestrian statue of himself.[3] To render it in all respects the image of Rome, Constantinople was provided with a Senate,[4] a national council known only at that date in the artificial form which owes its existence to despots. After his choice of Byzantium for the eastern capital Constantine never dwelt at Rome, and in all his acts seems to have aimed at extinguishing the prestige of the old city by the grandeur of the new one, a policy which he initiated so effectively that in the century after his death the Roman Empire ceased to be Roman.[5]
- [Footnote: of which only he professes to treat ([Greek: ta pros ton theophilê]), Vit. Const.,
i, 11.]*
- ↑ The name occurs in Cod. Theod. from 323 onwards, but also as a palpable error at an earlier date. See Haenel's Chronological Index. It is thought coins stamped CP. were issued as early as 325 (Smith, Dict. Christ. Biog., i, p. 631). Had Constantine fixed on any other place it is probable that "New Rome" would have passed into currency as easily as "New York." But the Greeks did not call their city Constantinople till later centuries. Thus with Procopius, the chief writer of the sixth century, it is always still Byzantium.
- ↑ Socrates, i, 16; Sozomen, ii, 3; Cod. Theod., XIV, xiii, etc.
- ↑ Socrates, loc. cit.
- ↑ Anon. Valesii, 30.
- ↑ The last Roman emperor, in name only, Romulus Augustulus,
