The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (49 page)

There are nonetheless more durable reminders of Helena’s impact on the landscape of Constantine’s empire. These include her son’s renaming of her reputed birthplace of Drepanum as Helenopolis, mirroring Marcus Aurelius’s gesture to his wife Faustina when the city of Halala was dubbed Faustinopolis after her death there.
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Drepanum was identified as the modern Turkish village of Hersek by the British topographer Colonel William Leake in the early nineteenth century. Strong traces of Helena’s links with the city of Rome also survive in the south-eastern corner of the city, enough to suggest that this area, which formed part of the wealthy district of the Caelian hill, became her principal residence during her son’s reign, despite the marginalisation of Rome as the empire’s political epicentre under the tetrarchy. Some time after her son’s defeat of Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in 312, Helena acquired a large estate here, the
fundus Laurentus
, the revenue from which provided funds for the Church. This area became a focal point for the new imperial family’s avowal of itself as a Christian household, and provides the majority of our evidence outside the Holy Land for Helena’s activities as a patron of buildings both Christian
and non-Christian. One of Rome’s first churches, named for Saints Marcellinus and Peter, was built on her estate. An inscription discovered near the local Basilica di Santa Croce in Gerusalemme also preserves the information that Helena restored baths nearby which had been destroyed by fire, and which are referred to as the
Thermae Helenae
(‘Baths of Helen’) in tribute.
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The basilica itself, one of Rome’s most famous Christian shrines, is today a rich repository for relics of Helena’s life-story. It stands in the footprint of a building complex known as the Sessorian Palace, a private imperial residence adjoining the
fundus Laurentus
which, on top of the restored ‘Baths of Helen’, once boasted amenities including a circus, a small amphitheatre and gardens. The Sessorian Palace is widely thought to have been given over to Helena’s use and to have served as her Roman home. Only a few remains of its original shell survive, but during Constantine’s reign, probably in the late 320s, one of the rooms in the palace was reinvented as a chapel, known variously in its early years as the
basilica Hierusalem
(the basilica of Jerusalem) or the
basilica Heleniana
(Helena’s basilica). The Basilica di Santa Croce in Gerusalemme (‘the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem’) is its modern incarnation, and is home to several statues and paintings eulogising Constantine’s mother. Both the theme of these artworks, and the different names given to the building over the years, reflect the famous legend attached to the chapel’s construction – that it was built to house a relic of the True Cross, salvaged by Helena from Jerusalem. That most famous chapter of Helena’s life was about to begin. But not before family tragedy plunged her son’s fledgling dynasty into new and damaging controversy.

In 326, two years into his reign as sole emperor, Constantine made a rare visit to Rome, to celebrate his
vicennalia
– the twenty-year anniversary of his acclamation as emperor following his father Constantius’s demise in 306. That same year, he introduced his reforms of the marriage laws, with their harsh penalties for sexual offences. Constantine’s draconian moral agenda did not endear him to certain sections of the Roman public already smarting at plans to found a ‘new Rome’ in the shape of the glittering, grandiose new city of Constantinople. The beautification of Constantinople, which loomed like an albatross over the narrow sea peninsula separating Europe and Asia on the site of the old city of Byzantium and the modern city of Istanbul, was eventually to come at the expense of Rome’s non-Christian artistic heritage, which was liberally plundered to fill the new city’s blank
show-spaces. Constantine courted further antagonism with Roman traditionalists during the
vicennalia
by electing not to climb the steps of the Capitoline temple of Jupiter and make the usual imperial sacrifice to Rome’s guardian deity, the first time he had so blatantly snubbed Rome’s old religious pantheon.
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The year 326 was an
annus horribilis
for Constantine on a domestic front too. The bizarre deaths of both his eldest son Crispus and his wife Fausta cast a shadow over his emperorship and fuelled denigration of him in later years by anti-Christian authors, who also implicated Helena in their accusations of foul play. The product of Constantine’s relationship with the obscure Minervina, Crispus had enjoyed an auspicious career in his father’s court, elevated to the junior rank of Caesar in 317 when he was still in his teens, and earning plaudits for his key role in commanding the fleet that destroyed Licinius’s naval capacity. In 321 or 322, he married a woman named, by bizarre coincidence, Helena, and there is one school of thought that would have it that the palace in Trier was in fact
their
marital abode and that the Helena myth that sprang up in Trier had confused the two women. Despite Crispus’s mooted illegitimacy, he was trumpeted repeatedly on official coinage and contemporary panegyric literature as the empire’s mascot and his father’s right-hand man:

Employing God, the universal king, and the son of God, the saviour of all men, as their guide and ally, the father and the son, both together … readily gained the victory [over Licinius].
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Eusebius, Constantine’s most partisan biographer, wrote these words in 324 or shortly afterwards, in the wake of the victory in question. But in a later edit of the work, this gushing encomium was cut, and no more mention was made of Constantine’s eldest boy.
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Some time in the spring or summer of 326, Crispus was put to death, and his name, as Eusebius’s sudden clamming-up implies, subjected to
damnatio memoriae
. Subsequent attestations as to the manner of his demise are confused and contradictory. But all reports agree that Constantine’s was the hand behind Crispus’s death warrant, one adding the detail that the execution took place at Pola, on the western coast of Croatia. Shortly afterwards, Fausta, Constantine’s wife of almost twenty years, was also put to death, in gruesome circumstances, scalded or suffocated to death in a deliberately overheated bath.
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The reasons behind these brutal eliminations were contested for
centuries afterwards. One of the earliest surviving accounts, written at the end of the fourth century, made a much-repeated claim that Crispus had rejected the sexual advances of his stepmother, and that a vengeful Fausta had then accused him of rape. After having his son executed, Constantine was then stricken with remorse and, egged on by his outraged mother Helena, he ordered Fausta to be forced into her boiling grave. Though details of the story varied according to different accounts, this tale of seduction and betrayal evidently provided much food for gossip during the fourth and fifth centuries, despite being dismissed as slander by Constantine’s literary supporters. But it bears too much resemblance to a plot from Greek tragedy, or a biblical scenario such as the attempted seduction of Joseph by Potiphar’s wife, for us to be able to take it at face value.
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Alternative arguments have more recently been put forward to account for Fausta’s death, including the theory that it was accidental, the result of a botched attempt to induce an abortion in the hot steam of the bath.
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Among many abortion methods recommended by Roman medical practitioners – including heavy exercise, bleeding, and vaginal suppositories made of cardamom, myrrh, brimstone and absinthium – long hot baths, scented with linseed, fenugreek, mallow and wormwood, were indeed regarded as essential preparations for the detachment of the embryo.
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But the tell-tale scars of
damnatio memoriae
, including one example in Sorrento where an inscription originally dedicated to Fausta has obviously been doctored and reinscribed to Helena instead, are proof enough that there was a damaging scandal of some sort, perhaps relating to political tensions between Crispus and the offspring of Fausta. It was a subject that one of Constantine’s nephews and successors, the stubbornly non-Christian Julian the Apostate, would taunt him with, claiming that he had turned to Christianity in a bid to seek atonement for his sins.
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It was against the backdrop of this sorry affair that Helena embarked on the journey which has come to define her life, a journey undertaken when she was approaching eighty years of age and just a couple of years away from her own death. As the dust settled on Fausta’s and Crispus’s deaths, the emperor’s elderly mother departed in around 327 on a ‘pilgrimage’ to the Holy Land, accompanied only by her own entourage. The aim, according to Eusebius, was to trace the footsteps of Jesus Christ, and ‘to inspect with imperial concern the eastern provinces with their communities and peoples’. He went on to record
the highlights of the trip, which included her dedication of churches on the sites of important episodes in Christian history, including the cave of the nativity in Bethlehem and the point on the Mount of Olives where Jesus was said to have ascended to heaven. Besides the Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Ascension, she supervised the construction of a large number of other churches in the region, all in the name of her son. As the
Augusta
’s impressive cavalcade passed through each new town, crowds of townsfolk gathered to see her go by, hoping to benefit from the generous cash and clothing handouts she doled out to the poor, courtesy of the imperial treasury on which Constantine had given Helena permission to draw. Others such as soldiers and mine-workers also profited from her largesse:

… she showered countless gifts upon the citizen bodies of every city, and privately to each of those who approached her; and she made countless distributions also to the ranks of the soldiery with magnificent hand. She made innumerable gifts to the unclothed and unsupported poor, to some making gifts of money, to others abundantly supplying what was needed to cover the body. Others she set free from prison and from mines where they laboured in harsh conditions, she released the victims of fraud, and yet others she recalled from exile.
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Eusebius was adamant that Helena’s journey was motivated by personal Christian piety, but acknowledged too the demands of imperial duty that required her attention. The timing of the trip has inevitably fostered the suspicion that Helena’s departure was connected to the deaths of Faustus and Crispus, that it was a stunt designed to distract attention from the unpleasant aftertaste of the murders, as well as to appease discontent in the eastern provinces, so recently won from Licinius. The reported presence among the party of Fausta’s mother Eutropia adds fat to the fire, intimating that the latter had perhaps been co-opted into a demonstration of Constantinian family unity.
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As with the question of whether Constantine’s ‘conversion’ to Christianity was genuine, Helena’s own personal religious faith has been the subject of close scrutiny. In his obituary for her, Eusebius declared that Constantine had ‘made her Godfearing, though she had not been such before’. This version of events was both embellished and subverted by Christian writers of late antiquity and their medieval counterparts, who claimed that Helena was a follower of Judaism,
and that she had written to Constantine from her home town of Drepanum, trying to persuade her son towards that faith too. But Pope Sylvester, popularly known in art and literature as the man who baptised Constantine after curing him of leprosy, had triumphed in a public theological debate with twelve rabbis, and through his miraculous resuscitation of a dead bull, stunned Helena into switching sides, and converting to Christianity. Meanwhile, other chroniclers insisted that it was Helena who converted Constantine, not the other way around.
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Although women had indeed played a significant role in proselytising on behalf of Christianity, long before Constantine came along, the question of whether Helena came to Christianity before or after Constantine, and how fervent was her conviction in her adopted faith, can never be known. The sight of an
Augusta
touring the empire’s holdings, making charitable handouts and dedicating new building projects, was of course by no means a novelty. Livia, Agrippina Maior, Sabina and Julia Domna had all spent long periods on the road as companions to their husbands, doing just that, and the familiarity of such foreign tours provides a counterweight to conspiracy theories which insist Helena’s journey must have been a hastily orchestrated gesture aimed at smoothing the waters after Fausta’s and Crispus’s deaths. Nor did Helena invent the concept of pilgrimage to the Holy Land – other Christian wayfarers had gone before her.

But Helena was the first pilgrim about whom detailed information survives, and crucially, what makes her different from Sabina, Domna and her counterparts is that Helena was the first imperial woman to make such a journey alone – in other words, without her husband or son accompanying her – and under a banner of personal religious conviction. In doing so, not only did she popularise pilgrimage to the Holy Land, she became the trailblazer for a generation of imperial and elite women who followed in her footsteps. These women included Paula, a close intimate of Jerome, who wrote an epitaph recording her journey of the 380s; Egeria, travelling in the same decade, who wrote her own account of her travels; and the two Melanias – Melania the Elder, an ascetic member of the senatorial elite who founded monasteries in Jerusalem, and her granddaughter Melania the Younger. The latter was a friend of Aelia Eudocia, wife of fifth-century emperor Theodosius II, and inspired the empress to make the trip to the Holy Land not once, but twice.
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