Constantine the Great

Abstract Some of the parallels between Constantius I and Septimius Severus in Britain were certainly not literary inventions. The last campaign of each was his war in northern Britain. And the coincidences went further: both had their sons with them; both returned to York after a victorious campaign, and there died. In the Severan case, however, the succession was clear, but the subsequent struggle between Caracalla and Geta inevitable. In 306 Diocletian’s newly established constitutional system ought to have made the succession indisputable. Constantius’ Caesar, Flavius Valerius Severus, should have become the western Augustus without question, and a new Caesar should have been appointed to replace him. Unfortunately, old traditions reasserted themselves. It is not clear that Galerius originally planned to have any western colleague at all in the same rank as himself, but the army at York forestalled whatever was intended. They proclaimed Constantine as Augustus, encouraged by a Germanic king, Crocus, who had been put in command of a cohort of Alamanni, a fact that may have influenced Constantine in his subsequent liking for German troops and officers. He certainly made much in later years of the origin of his rule in distant Britain, across the Ocean, and liked to dwell on the notion of a divine mission that had swept his power from the far west of the empire to its extreme east.