Constantine the great: The man and his times by Michael Grant (PDF)

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1998 Barnes and Noble edition. Perfect condition.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I didn’t need to read this book since I already read Wikipedia. I didn’t learn anything interesting, so I was very disappointed. I’ve read other books by him that were better, like Ancient Israel.

⭐good read

⭐Easy read and quite comprehensive biography

⭐it provided me with the information i was looking for…..

⭐Somewhat dry, but not insanely so. My takeaways from this book are that Constantine was an able military commander, but he was a little in over his head as an emperor: his overspending led to ruinous levels of taxation, which caused people to give up farming and become hermits or bandits, he continued to waste resources on a ruinous rivalry with Persia, and his division of the Empire between his children led to a series of pointless civil wars. On the other hand, the failures of his successors suggest that maybe he was in a no-win situation: maybe the Empire was simply too large and overstretched to be financially sustainable or politically manageable.Grant suggests that his conversion to Christianity, although probably sincere (and perhaps based on a dream), was rational because Christians were a relatively cohesive and well-organized group, and having their support was helpful. However, his efforts to unite the Empire around Christianity failed because Christians were internally divided.

⭐Great book

⭐While other emperors and generals in antiquity were styled as “Great” or Magnus in their time (Caesar’s rival Pompey being the best example), it’s usually only Constantine who’s remembered in modern history as having this title. Indeed, it’s rare to see his name used without the accompanying honorific. This can largely be attributed to Constantine’s role as the first Christian emperor, a man who played a key, if not crucial, role in the advancement and eventual triumph of this faith as the sole recognized religion in Europe and other parts of the world for centuries to come. Largely due to this achievement, the life of Constantine has been obscured by hagiography, tendentious, outright propaganda that see the guiding hand of the Lord behind every action or statement Constantine ever made. All of this raises questions. Can we ever really know what sort of person Constantine was, given the huge temporal gap between when he lived and the present day and the obvious unreliability of many contemporary historical sources? Can we ever confidently conclude that Constantine was indeed a “great” person?The author, Michael Grant, is a former Cambridge don and has written a number of well received books on various subjects pertaining to antiquity. Like the reputable scholar he is, Grant takes a careful, measured approach to his subject, always striving for objectivity. He begins his biography with a sober evaluation of the contemporary sources on Constantine’s life, both pagan and Christian. Grant notes the ideological bias that motivates many of the latter sources, discussing the flaws and strengths of such writers as Eusebius of Caesarea, but also recognizes the inherent prejudices of Constantine’s pagan critics (who were many).This just the facts, ma’am, approach allows the author to reach several well supported conclusions. Grant does a good job of describing Constantine’s strengths: his military prowess (although Grant notes that the majority of his victories were won in civil wars against other Romans); his enormous capacity to plan and implement ambitious, empire wide schemes; his gift for dissembling and conspiracy, absolutely essential qualities in an atmosphere of palace intrigue and backstabbing; and his subtlety in advancing his pro-Christian agenda in the face of a still overwhelmingly pagan elite. Grant also effectively rebuts conjectures that Constantine may have been simply seeking tactical advantage in employing Christianity as a unifying principle and that he may also have had lingering pagan sympathies if not outright beliefs. He documents the emperor’s sincere, unswerving Christian faith.At the same time, Grant is also careful to examine and evaluate Constantine’s flaws as a ruler and a human being. He notes how Constantine’s basic, soldierly approach to Christianity left him completely unsuited to understanding the torturous, complicated arguments over the nature of Christ’s divinity that resulted in violent, irremediable conflict between schisms, Arianism being one of the most well known. Even more importantly, Grant points out how Constantine’s looking to Christianity as a unifying principle for the empire contained a fatal flaw, his complete failure to consider the fissiparous, quarrelsome nature of the early Christians, their failure to achieve any unity of their own that continues to this day. Grant also describes Constantine’s personal failings, the worst of which undoubtedly has to be the murder of his first born son, Crispus, followed shortly thereafter by the assassination of his wife Fausta. As the author reasonably concludes, these are horrible, unforgivable crimes and simply cannot be excused even during a period as brutal and turbulent as late antiquity. Grant also notes Constantine’s geopolitical failures, the most egregious of these being his decision to provoke a war with the Sassanian Empire (located in what is now Iran) in the face of increasingly serious threats from barbarians in the Danube and along the Rhine.I recommend this book both to scholars of antiquity and also to laymen who are interested in learning more about this historical period. Those who seek to have their prejudices reinforced, however, would do better to go to the original source and read Eusebius.

⭐shipped in good time, condition matched what was advertised, good price for college students needing used books

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