Constantine celebrated his victory over Licinius by founding a new city in the east. He had never felt at home in Rome, and he began to envision a new capital, a metropolis that would be free of the monuments and memories of pagan Rome, a city built from the ground up as a fitting embodiment of the new religion and a throne for himself. He chose a place where a small Greek city, Byzantium, had existed for centuries. It was a promontory on the northern shore of the Sea of Marmara, on the European side near the entrance to the Bosporus, surrounded to the east by a deep inlet known as the Golden
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