316
CONSTANTINE SOLE EMPEROR.
great battle of Adrianople, in which Constantine gained the
victory by the superiority of his western troops over those of
the East. Crispus conquered the Ileet of Licinius, entered Asia,
and there gained a second victory over the ιeserve of Li-
cinius in the neighbourhood of Scutari. Licinius fled to
Cilicia and there capitulated. Constantine promised that his
life should be saved, but the promise was not kept : Licinius
was put to death, and even his son, a harmless and promising-
boy, was executed. These are the first instances of Con-
stantine’s cruelty, of which no traces had appeared before.
In the year a.d. 324 the whole of the eastern provinces
were recovered by the defeat of Licinius; and the outward
unity of the Roman empire was restored. The remaining
part of the reign of Constantine is not rich in events, and we
hear of hostilities only against the Goths and Sarmatians.
The latter appear to have then occupied the country from the
Theiss as far as Moravia, the Goths ruled over Dacia. The
dominion of the Sarmatians embraced several German tribes,
which they had subdued. At a time of great danger arms had
been restored to these Germans, but they afterwards availed
themselves of the opportunity to recover their independence.
The Sarmatians were thus obliged to seek the protection of the
Romans. Constantine distributed the Germans in various pro-
vinces of the empire under the name of the Limigantcs, and
if we may trust the statement of Ausonius in his “ Mosella,”
many of them received settlements on the banks of the Moselle.
Wc may safely suppose that Constantine, like Diocletian, was
master of the world from the wall in Scotland to Kurdistan
and to mount Atlas in Africa. It is one of the dishonesties
of the pagan writers towards the Christians that they do not
mention the fact, that even Aurelian had ceded a large
territory to the barbarians; in like manner they forgot what
their favourite Diocletian had done. This is the dishonesty
which we always meet with in factions, where no party is ever
strictly true in its statements.
The recovery of the empire, which had commenced under
Diocletian, proceeded under Constantine and his sons, and
there were only two circumstances that weighed heavily on
the people and were a clog to the progress of returning pros-
perity, viz. the system of taxation, which had been introduced
by Diocletian, and was completed by Constantine, and the
STATE OF ROMAN COINAGE.
317
system of the indictiones. Every province was rated at a
fixed tax, which was distributed among the capita of the
province. This tax was levied according to an arbitrary
valuation. It often happened that several shares fell upon
one caput, and on the other hand several capita had sometimes
to bear only one share. What the amount for each caput was
is not known, and cannot be ascertained. The tax was ex-
tremely heavy, but the state could not do without it. To
this land and poll-tax several others were added1. They
became more and more oppressive, as the expense of the armies
became greater, owing to the increasing prevalence of the
system of hiring mercenaries; and the money thus went to
the barbarians. The value of all kinds of produce had
evidently declined.
The thorough change of the coinage, which appears about
this period, may with tolerable certainty be attributed to
Constantine. In the earliest times the Romans had only
copper coins, but afterwards silver also was introduced. In
the third century of the Christian era, when the state was in
great difficulty, bad silver coins had been issued, as in Prussia
at the time of the Seven years’ war. The gold coins remained
unaltered. The state seems to have made its payments in
bad silver, and to have required its subjects to pay gold in
proportion to the old good silver coin. In the period of
Constantine wc hear chiefly of aurei ; sesterces arc no longer
mentioned. Aurei had in the earlier times been chiefly used
for the Soldiers1 pay, but are mentioned only rarely. The
extreme badness of the silver money, of which all the col-
lections of coins in Europe contain numerous specimens—during
the period from Valerian to Probus we find nothing but bad
silver—induced persons to forge it in great quantities and in
various parts of the empire, as might easily be conceived2.
This system of issuing bad silver coinage accounts for the
otherwise very singular event in the reign of Aurelian, viz.,
the insurrection of the coiners (monetariι) at Rome, which
was headed by Felicissimus, the master of the mint (rationalist).
ɪ Savigny’s Essay Ueber die Jlomisehe Steiierverfassimg is excellent, although
the subject has not yet been satisfactorily examined.—N. See above Leet. cxx.
p. 238, note 3.
2 Many matrices and whole apparatuses of false coiners have been discovered
in France, and all of them belong to this period. — N.
3 Vospiscus, Aurehan 38.