Hello and welcome to the history of Rome, episode 132 in this sign.

So as I'm sure you can guess by the title, we have arrived at one of the seminal events

in Roman history.

The moment Constantine decided that he was going to go out a conqueror and for Jesus.

Of course, is a massive oversimplification of a convoluted series of events, but still

it gets to the heart of the matter.

Constantine is about to begin the long process of seizing control of the Empire, and he

will attribute his success in this endeavour to the Christian God.

At least we're pretty sure he attributed to the Christian God, he attributed it to God

anyway, and he will use Christian symbols to give him power, or at least he appears to

have used Christian symbols, some of them might not have become Christian symbols until

after Constantine adopted them.

But at least we know that Christ himself will come to Constantine in a dream and tell

him to conquer in this sign.

Or was that an earlier vision he had had after staring at the sun for too long, and was

that sign across, a Cairo, a Storogram, and maybe it was all made up after the fact?

I am confused.

Constantine was a complicated man living in complicated times.

Did you really think his relationship with Christianity was going to be simple?

But before we get into all that, there is one last little bit of business we should

dispense with.

Conceptually, it should have probably come at the end of last week's episode, but there

...