It was a day to turn a boy’s thoughts away from the schoolroom where he had spent the morning at the feet of his tutor, old Lucullus and the packet of scrolls slung over his shoulder by a strap looped around his wrist. As he walked along in the warm spring sunlight, kicking up the dust of the street in little puffs with his sandals, the thoughts of Flavius Valerius Constantinus known to his friends as Constantine, the Greek variant of his name was far away from Naissus and the Dalmatian uplands where he had been born and had spent his childhood. In his imagination, he was hotly pursuing a band of fleeing Visigoths, leading his turma of thirtytwo mounted fighting men in a slashing attack that sent the enemy reeling back and opened a breach in their lines, which the legions, doggedly advancing on foot behind him, could turn into a mortal wound.
Just now changing from boy to youth, Constantine moved with the coltish grace that came from limbs growing faster than the body to which they were attached. He never thought of himself as anything but the leader of the turma, except perhaps in larger actions when he would command an entire regiment, or ala, made up of twelve turmae in a single formation. For after all, was he not the son of Emperor Diocletian’s most famous general, Constantius Chlorus?
Freeing Thessalonica
And of royal birth as well through descent from the Emperor Claudius Gothicus, who had defeated a southdriving Gothic horde a few years before Constantine was born, sending them reeling in retreat up the Vardar Valley, until finally he was able to pin them down before this very city of Naissus and destroy them? From a low rise in the homeward road, Constantine paused to look down upon the scene of the great battle that had ended the campaign, freeing Thessalonica from siege and rescuing Greece, Rhodes, Cyprus and the completely Ionian coast from the heavy hand of the ruthless Teutonic invader. He stood proudly erect for, in his imagination, he was now Emperor Claudius himself, receiving reports of the fighting from the tribunes commanding the legions and sending couriers back with orders that spelled final doom for the invaders.
The city of Naissus and the Dalmatian uplands around it were the only world Constantine knew intimately. But his vivid capacity for fancy left him free to roam the whole range of the Roman Empire, stretching from Hadrian’s Wall across Britain in the Northwest to the lands of Persia beyond the Euphrates in the East, as well as from the Danube in the North to the cataracts of the Nile far to the South in Egypt.
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