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Melvyn Bragg

Christopher Kelly

Lucy Grig

Greg Woolf

Simon Tillotson

In Our Time: Constantine the Great

Constantine the Great

05/10/2017

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Constantine the Great

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Roman emperor Constantine the Great.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who made Constantinople his capital rather than Rome and who legalised Christianity across the Empire.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, reputation and impact of Constantine I, known as Constantine the Great (c280s -337AD). Born in modern day Serbia and proclaimed Emperor by his army in York in 306AD, Constantine became the first Roman Emperor to profess Christianity. He legalised Christianity and its followers achieved privileges that became lost to traditional religions, leading to the steady Christianisation of the Empire. He built a new palace in Byzantium, renaming it Constantinople, as part of the decentralisation of the Empire, an Eastern shift that saw Roman power endure another thousand years there, long after the collapse of the empire in the West. 

With 

Christopher Kelly
Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Cambridge 
and President of Corpus Christi College

Lucy Grig
Senior Lecturer in Roman History at the University of Edinburgh

and 

Greg Woolf
Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

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