remembering maxentius 249

His attempt to make amends by facing his rival was no compensation.

Finally he decided to emerge from behind the city’s wall: “he marched
out to battle dressed in armor.” The Tiber now seemed to mark the
northern boundary of his empire, and by crossing the river he was seem-
ingly initiating his own campaign beyond a frontier. The only military
battle Maxentius ever commanded in person was against Constantine
in 312. That battle ended in disaster.44

Forgetting Maxentius
The Tiber was a river of oblivion. The bodies of executed criminals were
dumped in the Tiber; so might be the bodies of disgraced or unpopular
emperors. When the news of Tiberius’ death was announced in 37, some
witty residents of Rome shouted, “Tiberius to the Tiber!” Vitellius was
executed in 69 and his corpse dragged into the Tiber; in 222, soldiers
decapitated Elagabalus and dunked his body in sewers before throwing
it in the Tiber. After the battle at the Milvian Bridge, Constantine’s
soldiers retrieved Maxentius’ body from the river and paraded into
Rome carrying his “wicked head” on a spear.45
Constantine himself was guilty of identity theft. With the approval
of the senate he commandeered Maxentius’ buildings and monuments
at Rome. He may have confiscated his rival’s estate in the suburbs to
erect a statue of Claudius Gothicus, an earlier emperor whom he was
advertising as an ancestor, on the center barrier of the circus. He also
appropriated Maxentius’ family. Fausta, Maxentius’ sister and Constan-
tine’s wife, was blended into Constantine’s dynasty of Flavian emperors
with the official name of Flavia Maxima Fausta. After Eutropia, Maxen-
tius’ mother and Constantine’s mother-in-law, supposedly announced

44
In armor: Panegyrici latini 12(9).8.6. For the Tiber as a “frontier,” note Procopius, Bella
5.19.2–3: during their siege of Rome in 537 the Ostrogoths worried that destruction of the
Milvian Bridge would separate their encampments on the left bank “inside the river” from
access to the right bank “outside the river as far as the [Mediterranean] sea.”
45
Suetonius, Tiberius 75.1, Vitellius 17.2. Elagabalus: Dio, Historiae Romanae 80.20.2, Hero-
dian, Historia 5.8.8–9, SHA, Antoninus Elagabalus 33.7. Head and procession: Panegyrici
latini 12(9).18.3, and Zosimus, Historia nova 2.17.1. In the panel on the arch of Constantine
depicting the battle at the Milvian Bridge, Speidel (1986) 258, suggests that the soldier shown
drowning in the river at the feet of Constantine was Maxentius himself.