Adam Serfass: Maxentius as Xerxes: A Herodotean Echo in Eusebius’ Accounts of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge

Ancient accounts of Maxentius’ defeat at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge are numerous and contradictory. All of the authors writing soon after the battle do agree that Maxentius and his troops cross the Tiber to face the forces of Constantine, but only Eusebius of Caesarea (HE9.9, VC1.38) says that they do so on a jury-rigged bridge of boats. When Maxentius’ men retreat, the bridge collapses and their inundation is likened to the drowning of Egypt’s army in the Red Sea (Ex 14-15.21); Eusebius’ identification of Maxentius with Pharaoh and Constantine with Moses has often been explored in recent scholarship. Taking a different approach, this paper argues that Eusebius’ versions of the battle evoke the historian Herodotus’ famous description of the boat-bridge erected over the Hellespont by the Persian emperor Xerxes during his invasion of Greece (7.33-58). The paper then briefly unfolds the implications of this Herodotean echo. The story of Xerxes’ bridging of the Hellespont had a long afterlife in classical antiquity. Roman historians cast “bad” emperors prone to megalomaniacal building projects as latter-day incarnations of Xerxes; in rhetorical schools, Xerxes’ bridging of Europe and Asia was remembered as a cautionary tale of superhuman arrogance and transgressing divinely-established boundaries. In short, Eusebius’ implicit comparison of Xerxes and Maxentius adds another dimension to his portrayal of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge as the culmination of a struggle between an impious tyrant who had enslaved his people and their pious liberator.