Newsweek reports on the apparent discovery at Spello in central Italy of a temple for the pagan cult of the Emperor and his family from the time of Constantine the Great. The suggestion is that the temple was built in the 330s, the last years of Constantine’s reign.
The significance of the discovery is that it shows the co-existence of a traditional pagan, patriotic cult alongside the newly enfranchised Christian church which received such munificent patronage from the Emperor. The fact that Constantine managed to balance a plurality of beliefs under his rule is well-known. This latest archaeological discovery indicates the vitality of the Imperial cult and its continuing appeal to important sections of Roman life and society.
Constantine and his successors increasingly managed to blend the idea of offering religious honours to the political leadership with the new recognition of that leadership as being Divinely sanctioned by the Christian God to produce the Byzantine and Orthodox synthesis.
The article can be read at Archaeologists' pagan temple find challenges history of Roman Christianity
A while ago I came upon a video about a reconstruction of the great statue of Constantine whose remains are to be seen in the Capitoline Museum in Rome. The scale, the absolute monumentality, of such sculptures of deities and Emperors is brought out well, and not least by Constantine as Emperor, as the depute of Jupiter/Zeus, but also as a prefigurement of representations of Christ in Majesty and in Judgement. The Imperial cult was very clearly alive and flourishing under the first Christian Emperor.
The video can be seen at How did they rebuild Colossal Constantine?
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