The Life of Constantine (Vita Constantini or On the Life according to God of the Blessed Emperor Constantine, the title prefixed to chapter headings in the manuscript) is a work by Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea on the life of Roman Emperor Constantine I. It was written in the interlude between Constantine's death on 22 May 337 and Eusebius' own death on 30 May 339.[1] The genre of the work has been contested; as it survives, it has been judged an unhappy combination of biography and panegyric, with similarities to saints' lives. Modern scholars, following G. Pasquali's research in the 1960s, hold that this results from the structure of the component works. Eusebius, on this line of argument, did not write the Life in its present format, but two separate works, a continuation of his Ecclesiastical History and a eulogy on the death of Constantine. These two works were combined by an editor after Eusebius death (most likely the subsequent bishop of Caesarea, Acacius). Eusebius' authorship was once a matter of scholarly dispute, most notably by the scholar Henri Grégoire, for whom a supposed pseudo-Eusebius wrote the accounts of Constantine's vision and conversion. The authorship of these passages is no longer contentious, though multiple revisions of the text by Eusebius himself, and final editorial revisions after his death by his episcopal successor Acacius, have been detected.
The most famous passage in the Life concerns Constantine's celestial vision and conversion before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge on 28 October 312.[2] Eusebius assures the reader that the emperor communicated the vision to him in person, but much modern scholarship assumes that the passage is either a fabrication, a retrospective reconstruction (either by Eusebius or by Constantine himself), or a convenient misinterpretation of the facts. It is usually read in parallel with Lactantius' account of the battle in his On the Deaths of the Persecutors of 315, which describes a vision that shares few similarities with Eusebius'. Discrepancies between the Life and Eusebius' own Ecclesiastical History (which saw multiple revisions between ca. 300 and 325/6) have also been noted.