Shawn, Thanks for the comments about the
captives and who/what they were. That’s very helpful. It gets to the main questions of my “
captives”
collection.
It sounds like the period where the
Christian vs. Non-Christian imagery was strongest was probably right after
Constantine, when
Constantius II and
Constans were showing a lot of clearly Eastern (Persian,
Parthian, Sassanid)
captives being held under the
labarum. (Though not exclusively Eastern.)
But, yes, there’s clearly a big change by the late 4th, and I need to put more thought into that. It’s interesting that
Christian symbols were so prominent on coinage if the army wasn’t especially so, since the army may have been a primary intended audience for at least some of the numismatic imagery. (How the typical
Roman received those images is a very interesting additional question.)
I’ve been assuming the practice
still held of not celebrating victories against other
Romans. At least that’s my understanding of earlier coinage, though there is reason to question it at least by
Constantine, if not earlier. (I’ve also wondered about
Constantine’s
London ADVENTVS captives; were they
his Roman enemies, or a promise of future
captives?)
And that, while the late 4th century
captives might have defined themselves as
Christian, one of the major divides at that time was who counted as a proper
Christian, wasn’t it? I’ve been reading Douglas Boin’s
Alaric the Goth, and the impression I take is that the
Romans (
Theodosius and successors) defined very narrowly who counted as “actual Christians,” excluding large segments of their society and its neighbors (e.g., Goths and others).
I need to look more closely at exactly which conflicts might have been reflected in the coins at each period, and how exactly the
Romans understood their different enemies, internal and external.
But my thinking has been that, while the “non-Christian
captives” might have considered themselves
Christian, perhaps the Emperor did not. But I don’t mean to take a strong position on that -- it’s what I need to learn more about.