Gibbon et Constantin

The purpose of this study is not to define the way Gibbon considers Constantine, but to examine how he proceeds as an historian and writer when conceiving and writing his chapters on the first Christian emperor in Decline and Fall. The study analyses the structure of those pages, which strangely remind us of the pagan historian, Zosimus, whose arguments Gibbon nevertheless rejects, considering them as excessively partial. Among the more specific details dealt with there are the way Gibbon exploits the Histoire des Empereurs by Le Nain de Tillemont; how he resorts to Lactantius' De mortibus persecutorum; how he presents the foundation of Contantinople, Constantine's institutional reforms, the battle at the Milvian Bridge, and the questions of Constantine's conversion.