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It has long been acknowledged that although the reign of Constantine (d. 337 c.e.) brought new prosperity to the Christian churches, it was also an age of ever-escalating division. This essay suggests that recent scholarship on populism can help us to understand the role of conflict in Constantinian Christianity. Structured conflict, we suggest, had a recognized value as a tool for cultivating the loyalty of a following. The creation of factional loyalty, rather than spiritual unity, seems to have been the aim of the fourth-century Christian bishops and clergy. Yet it is less clear whether this goal was shared by the emperor himself.

1. Tab. Sulis 98, in Roger Tomlin, “The Curse Tablets,” in The Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath, ii: The Finds from the Sacred Spring, ed. Barry Cunliffe (Oxford: Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, 1988), 59–280, at 232–33; trans. Caroline Humfress, “Law in Practice,” in Philip Rousseau, A Companion to Late Antiquity (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 377–91, at 387 (slightly modified). Christianity, Private Power, and the Law from Decius to Constantine: The Minimalist View

(In all former alimentary systems, flavor was considered as an emanation of the food, just as indissociable from its substance as can be the sound from the violin which emits it. From this time forth, in the likeness of synthesized sounds, food was decomposed in ingredients capable of being recomposed artificially, here including flavor (and color), added as extras, as the last and next-to-last components, the additives necessary to your palates still infatuated with nature.