“There is no hurry,” he assured her. “I plan to remain in Arles for a while; it will be easier to keep in touch with events in Italy from there.” Both of them understood that with Maximian and Maxentius not to be trusted, it would be prudent for him to be in a position where he could march into Italy quickly by way of the passes through what were sometimes called the Maritime Alps.
The wedding of Constantine and Fausta at Arles was the most
I elaborate ceremony ever staged in southern Gaul. His investment with the imperial purple and the official title of Augustus which most of his subjects thought he already possessed took place a day later and was patterned after a Roman triumph. Subject kings from the territory along the Rhine were present with their retinues and even the German lords who after the example he’d made of the rebel kings, Ascaricus and Regaisus had decided to support the Pax Romana.
Maximian rode together
Constantine and Maximian rode together in the golden chariot to the Temple of Apollo where, at Maximian’s insistence perhaps because he knew of Constantius’ leaning toward the Christians the new Augustus presided at the usual sacrifice of a young bull. Only then did Maximian officially name Constantine ruler of Gaul, Britain and Spain and drape the rich purple cloak he had brought from Rome about the younger man’s shoulders.
The division of the Empire was now complete and six Augusti Constantine, Maximian and Maxentius in the West and Galerius, Licinius and Maximin Daia in the East each theoretically of equal power, ruled it. What had been a united nation under Diocletian, was now broken into six parts, but the prospect of conflict, inevitable though it seemed, did not trouble Constantine. With the strongest army and one of the most populous and prosperous territories of the Empire under his rule, he was now ready to move on to wider spheres of activity when the occasion presented itself. Nor was it long in coming.
Enchanted with love for his bride though he was, Constantine did not fail to keep a close watch on the dramatic battle for
control being waged in Rome and Italy, the ancient center of the Empire. For that purpose, to say nothing of a pleasant place to spend a prolonged honeymoon, he could not possibly have chosen better than the sundrenched city on the banks of the Rhone near its mouth known to citizens of the province everywhere as the “little Rome of Gaul.”
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