Constantine's pagan Arian orthodox Christianity

This business of people in history were some particular religion -- in this case Christians -- mainly for political reasons rather than out of deep conviction -- brings to my mind the Emperor Constantine, who as we know "converted" to Christianity and enabled Christianity to later become the state religion.  It so happens I just finished watching a series of lectures on the subject, so my mind is fresh with it and a lot I learned is new to me.

Constantine seems, all his life, both before and after becoming a Christian, to have been a fairly typical Roman "pagan," in that he was mainly superstitious and wanted the favor of any deity who happened to be around, including Jesus.  The Romans had never really denied Jesus as a god of some sort -- they just didn't like the sectarianism (we have the truth and you are going to Hell) attitude of the Christian churches.

There was a small political gain in giving tolerance to Christians and even favoring them in certain ways, but not a huge gain as at the time maybe ten percent were Christians.  However, one of these was his mother, so he no doubt had been influenced by her to some extent.  So the gain may have been more familial than political.  Of course once the lay of the land became clear, ambitious people all over began becoming Christians -- not necessarily hypocritically -- people are great in finding truth in whatever to them is convenient.  I think Augustine was an example of this.

Once he had stopped the anti-Christian laws, he may have regretted it.  He seems never to have understood the niceties of detail the Christians fought and killed each other over, and seems to have favored Arianism (when he finally was baptized it was by an Arian priest in Arian ritual) as more logical, but of course he was not a priest and Christianity did not allow him much of a say except to use his power to force settlements they agreed to.  Standard pagans never had riots over the proper form of some belief statement or the exact nature of some demi-urge's being.  This sort of thing was rather alien to them, and no doubt the cartoon buffoonery of the Alexandrian theatre attacking the hoomousia vs. houmisia (or whatever) really burned the local bishop.