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Constantine the Great The Man and His Times. By MICHAEL GRANT. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994. xii + 267 pp. 9627.50.
The list of Michael Grant's titles includes another "the Great," the other being Herod. The problems of writing about the two are rather similar, partly because their lives were not dissimilar. Both succeeded beyond ordinary expectations; both regularly used murder as a political tool; both left inadequate sources for biography, whether on purpose or not. But Herod left no portrait comparable to the huge head of Constantine in the Conservatori at Rome, though his big building blocks were as awe-inspiring as any portrait. And since Herod died in...