Equestrian Statue of Constantius/Equus Constantii

In 350 an officer named Magnentius was proclaimed emperor in Gaul, and Constans, the youngest son of Constantine and ruler of the western empire, was killed while fleeing. Magnentius took Italy and Rome. Constans’s surviving brother Constantius II, who ruled the East, broke the usurper’s army at Mursa in 351 and forced him out of Italy the following year. Within weeks of that withdrawal Rome had a new prefect, Neratius Cerealis, and Cerealis marked the change by raising an equestrian statue of Constantius in the Forum, close to the Arch of Septimius Severus at the north edge of the square.

The inscription, recorded in the standard corpus of Latin inscriptions from Rome, hails Constantius as restorer of the city of Rome and of the world, extinguisher of a pestilent tyranny, victor and triumphator, forever Augustus. The choice of the word tyranny matters. In fourth-century usage it meant illegitimate rule rather than cruelty, and Magnentius was still alive when the inscription was carved; he did not die until August 353. Naming his regime a tyranny recast a war between two Roman armies as the removal of a man who had never lawfully been emperor, which is how the Senate had described Maxentius forty years earlier on the Arch of Constantine.

Cerealis had spent the war on the winning side. He was at Sirmium in Constantius’s entourage in 351 while Magnentius held Rome, took office as prefect on 26 September 352, and served until December of the following year. Because new public building was an imperial prerogative, statues and restorations were the main channels through which a senator could make a visible mark on the center of the city, and the men who held the urban prefecture used them heavily.

The base survives, which makes this monument unusual among the Forum’s lost bronzes. It was found in 1547 in front of the Arch of Septimius Severus alongside the base carved for the tenth anniversary of the Tetrarchy, and both were still standing there in 1575, when Étienne Du Pérac, a French architect and engraver working in Rome, published his views of the city’s ruins. Before 1594 the two were moved to the Farnese Gardens on the Palatine and set on either side of the Vignola gate. The Constantius base was brought back to the Forum at the end of the nineteenth century and replaced on its brick core near the arch, where the text can still be read.

The statue itself is gone, melted down at an unrecorded date. Constantius had never been to Rome when it went up, and he did not arrive until April 357, four years later. Ammianus Marcellinus, the fullest surviving historian of the period and an officer who served in Constantius’s armies, describes that visit: an emperor overwhelmed by a city he was seeing for the first time, halting in the Forum of Trajan and saying that the only thing there he could hope to equal was Trajan‘s horse. A horse of his own had been standing in his honor a few minutes’ walk away since 352.

FURTHER READING

1. Mark Humphries. “Roman Senators and Absent Emperors in Late Antiquity.” Acta ad Archaeologiam et Artium Historiam Pertinentia 17, 2003. [Source: Journals UiO, open access]
2. Machado, Carlos. “Building the Past: Monuments and Memory in the Forum Romanum”. Social and Political Life in Late Antiquity. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789047407607_010 Web.
3. Kalas, Gregor. “‘Memorials of the Ability of Them All’: Tetrarchic Displays in the Roman Forum’s Central Area.” Political Landscapes of Capital Cities, edited by Jessica Joyce Christie et al., University Press of Colorado, 2016, pp. 65–96. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1dfnt2b.8. Accessed 1 Aug. 2026.
4. Kelly, Gavin. Ammianus Marcellinus: the allusive historian. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
5. Grig, Lucy, and Gavin Kelly, eds. Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in late antiquity. Oxford University Press, 2012.