The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (46 page)

Unrest on the northern frontiers of empire began to simmer too, and in the winter of 235, Alexander and Mamaea both made for the Rhineland to deal with the threat from German tribes. Their decision to try diplomacy once more did not go down well with troops eager for war and the spoils that went with it. On 22 March 235, in a repeat of the fate of Elagabalus and Soaemias, twenty-seven-year-old Alexander and his mother Julia Mamaea were set upon by soldiers under the command of an officer named Maximinus Thrax. Just as Elagabalus and Soaemias were said to have clung together as the death-blows were struck, Alexander reportedly died hiding behind his mother, blaming her for his misfortune as they were both hacked to death.
¹⁰⁰

Alexander was the last Severan emperor, and Mamaea its last empress. Their dynasty had lasted a relatively impressive forty-two years, including the brief interval in which Macrinus temporarily assumed control, but their downfall ushered in a mini dark ages in Roman imperial history. This was reflected both in terms of the meagre historical sources available to record it, and in the bewildering roll-call of emperors who lined up and fell like dominos over the next fifty years. As a consequence, no Roman woman makes more than the faintest impression on the history of the period.

When a semblance of stability was eventually restored, the political landscape looked very different. Caracalla’s uprooting of his court from Rome to Antioch in 214 foreshadowed the creation of new capital cities across the empire during the late third and fourth centuries, necessitated by the strategic needs of different emperors. The dynastic set-up itself was under revision, with multiple rulers often sharing power between themselves. Most significantly of all, and in counterpoint to
Elagabalus’s failed attempts to introduce an Emesene god into the state pantheon, a dominant new religious force was on the verge of revolutionising the political, social and cultural agenda of the empire for good. It was a development that was also to transform the face of imperial womanhood.

8

The First Christian Empress: Women in the Age of Constantine

It is reported (and I, for one, believe it) that some few years ago a lady prominent for her hostility to the Church returned from a visit to Palestine in a state of exultation. ‘I got the real low-down at last’, she told her friends. ‘The whole story of the crucifixion was made up by a British woman named Ellen. Why, the guide showed me the very place where it happened. Even the priests admit it. They call their chapel ‘the Invention of the Cross.’

Author’s preface to

Evelyn Waugh’s novel
Helena
(1950)

In 1945, shortly after the publication of his novel
Brideshead Revisited
, Evelyn Waugh embarked on a new writing project with the working title, ‘The Quest of the Empress Dowager’. Over the next five years leading up to the book’s appearance in print in 1950, it was a project that alternately enthused and deeply frustrated him, and one that he rightly anticipated would bring him some of the worst reviews of his career. Yet Waugh regarded this now little-read work as his ‘great masterpiece’. According to his daughter Harriet it was the only one of his books that he liked to read aloud to his family. Its subject, one highly personal to Catholic convert Waugh, was the life and times of Helena, mother of Rome’s first Christian emperor and a woman whom Waugh later accurately described as ‘at a time, literally, the most important woman in the world. Yet’, he added, ‘we know next to nothing about her.’
¹

Thin on the ground though biographical details about her life are, the footprint left on history by Constantine’s mother goes deeper than that of Livia, Messalina, Julia Domna and the rest of Rome’s cohort of imperial women combined. From her canonisation as a Christian saint to her name’s appearance on numerous sites on the global map, including the island where Napoleon spent his final days, Helena’s historiographical and fictional credits are truly astounding.
²
All in tribute to an obscure woman of unknown parentage and humble
upbringing who, thanks to a series of erratic turns taken by the Roman imperial juggernaut in the late third and early fourth centuries, rose in her old age to the rank of
Augusta
.

The impact on western civilisation of her son Constantine’s decision to champion the hitherto minority cult of Christianity when he became Roman emperor in 306 is almost impossible to overestimate, utterly transforming as it did the social, political and religious landscape of antiquity and bequeathing a legacy that shaped history through the Middle Ages and beyond. It also had profound repercussions for the lives of Roman women from the fourth century onwards. Where Livia had once laid the groundwork for how the role of Roman first lady was conceived, Helena now became the beacon and role model for a new kind of empress – the Christian helpmate – the pathfinder for the generation of Roman and Byzantine empresses who followed in her wake. To those she inspired, the honour of being dubbed a ‘new Helena’ became the ultimate accolade.

Following the murder of Severus Alexander and his mother Julia Mamaea in the spring of 235, something akin to a dark age descended on Roman imperial history, both in terms of the lack of documentation that survives for it and the political and military chaos that are the hallmark of that era. Pressure from the revitalised Persians in the east, incursions by German tribes such as the Goths on the Roman Empire’s northern frontier and a serious cash-flow problem incurred thanks to the heavy costs of repelling military threats on so many fronts, and of keeping the army’s pockets well-lined enough to ensure the soldiers’ loyalty to the ruling house, combined to create a combustible atmosphere at the heart of government. More than ever, third-century emperors were required to be soldiers as well as sovereigns, increasing the chances of their dying in battle or being murdered by disgruntled troops. Poor man-management of their officials and general economic discontent could create further resentment at court. No fewer than fifty-one legitimate and illegitimate claimants to the purple were declared emperor between 235 and 284.
³

The rot was temporarily halted in 270 by the arrival in power of Aurelian, who during his briefly successful bid to re-establish some stability, repudiated the depredations on Roman territory by the best-known woman of the period, Syrian queen Zenobia of Palmyra. Zenobia had acted as regent for her young son Valballathus since the death of her husband Odenathus in 268, and had reputedly claimed
ancestry from Cleopatra in seizing possession of Egypt and other eastern territories. As part of her bid to put her son in a strong position from which to bargain for accommodation with the Romans, she even had herself and Valballathus declared
Augusta
and
Augustus
. Yet she was defeated by Aurelian on Julia Domna’s old home turf of Emesa in 272, and he brought her in humiliated triumph to Rome, whereupon she was freed to live out her days respectably at a Roman villa in Tivoli. Aurelian himself was murdered in 275, and the usual chaotic service in Roman politics was soon resumed. Little is known about the wives of these short-lived emperors of the mid-third century, and none had time to do much to influence the trajectory of the Roman first lady.
⁴

Around the same time that Zenobia and the Roman Empire were locking horns for control of the eastern provinces, one of Aurelian’s bodyguards, a young Illyrian-born army officer named Constantius – who was later destined to become emperor of Rome – found himself, if popular report is to be believed, passing through the marsh-sodden seaside village of Drepanum in Bithynia (Asia Minor). Pausing to rest overnight in this provincial backwater, his eye was caught by an attractive young stable-maid, Helena, with whom he would satisfy his lusts and sire a son, Constantine.
⁵

Despite a medieval tradition which tried to claim her as a royal native of Britain, Bishop Ambrose’s late fourth-century description of Helena as a
stabularia
– a stable-girl, or perhaps a serving girl at an inn – was accepted without demur in late antiquity. Indeed such lineage suited those hostile to Constantine, who less charitably referred to her as a common harlot, but also a Christian tradition rich in stories of prostitutes and low-born women who found redemption through faith.
⁶
Based on the obituary composed by her son’s most vociferous champion, Eusebius of Caesarea, who stated that she was eighty years of age at the time of her death in 328 or 329, we can place her date of birth around 250, making her perhaps twenty years old when she became involved with travelling soldier Constantius. From this moment on, Helena’s early biography assumes all the idiosyncrasies of a fairytale or parable. Medieval chroniclers, enabled by the uncertainty of her origins, wove uninhibited narratives around this unlikely romance. In one of the most fanciful, Constantius seduced the innkeeper’s virginal daughter while on his way back from a diplomatic mission. The next morning, convinced by a vision from the sun-god Apollo that he had made Helena pregnant, he gave her a purple chiton and
a gold necklace, and told her father to look after her. Some years later, when a group of Roman travellers staying at the inn mocked the young boy Constantine for claiming to be the son of an emperor, Helena proved her son’s claim by producing the purple chiton, its colour the exclusive hallmark of the emperor, and report of the extraordinary tale back in Rome led to father and son being eventually reunited.
⁷

Despite Helena’s and her son’s importance in the historical traditions of Christianity, even details such as Constantine’s year of birth are hard to pin down. His birthplace at least was firmly established as Naissus (Nis, in Serbia), but how Helena came to give birth to him there is a detail unexplained by those who place Helena’s meeting with Constantius at Drepanum, though it is plausibly assumed she must have accompanied him there as he continued to carry out his tour of duty.
⁸
Whether or not Helena and Constantius were married before or after Constantine was born is yet another bone of contention. While Christian panegyricists such as Eusebius wrote that Constantine was the ‘lawful’ son of Constantius and referred to Helena as the latter’s
uxor
(‘wife’), other, less partisan sources described Helena as a
concubina
.
⁹

There was nothing clandestine about the practice of concubinage in the Roman Empire. If this were the nature of his relationship with Helena, Constantius would have found himself in good company. As we have already seen, Nero, Vespasian and Commodus all chose to live with concubines during their tenures as emperor. Moreover,
concubina
did not have the sense of a casual mistress or prostitute, but of a monogamous, and long-term, union.
¹⁰
However, it was one thing for an emperor to live with his concubine, it was quite another thing for that concubine to be accepted as the prospective ancestress of his future family line and for any offspring he fathered with her to succeed him. While a number of surviving inscriptions from her son’s reign refer to Helena as the
uxor
or
coniunx
(another word for ‘wife’) of Constantius, the advertisement of any other kind of relationship would have been unprecedented and unthinkable. As many of his predecessors had discovered, the onus on Constantine to prove his legitimacy, his right to rule, was to hover urgently over his reign as emperor. The vacuum of evidence for his mother’s origins, the muddying of the waters over her relationship with Constantius, provided a smokescreen highly convenient for Constantine’s ambitions, one that he perhaps deliberately encouraged. It also created a blank canvas on which later
writers, whether favourably inclined to his legacy – or otherwise – could create the Helena of their imagination.
¹¹

Having made a fleeting entry into the history books, Helena quickly faded out again. In November 284, a humbly born staff officer named Diocletian, continuing the trend of recent years for emperors to hail from obscure origins, assumed the reins of empire and put a stop to the revolving-door syndrome that had seen dozens of emperors ejected in the past fifty years. On 1 March 293, to enable more effective policing and administration of the empire’s increasingly vulnerable borders, Diocletian established the tetrarchy, a radical new ruling arrangement whereby power was divided up between a college of four ruling emperors. This would consist of two senior colleagues, both sharing the title of
Augustus
, and two junior emperors or ‘Caesars’, who would shadow them. Diocletian, who retained overall executive authority, and his colleague Maximian took the senior roles, while as their deputies they appointed a proven military talent named Galerius, and Helena’s seducer Constantius – later nicknamed
Chlorus
meaning ‘the Pale’.
¹²

The four tetrarchs would rarely be in the same place at the same time. Though none was confined to a single diocese, each gravitated towards certain cities and areas more than others. Diocletian and Galerius spent most of their time in the east, and Maximian and Constantius policed the western provinces. The threads that bound the four together were nonetheless strengthened by adoption and marriage. Galerius, who was adopted and mentored by Diocletian, was the husband of the latter’s daughter Valeria. Constantius, meanwhile, put aside Helena for Maximian’s daughter Theodora. The date of these marriages is unclear, thus we cannot be sure whether Diocletian and Maximian simply chose to promote the men who were already their sons-in-law, or whether the weddings were planned specifically to cement Galerius’s and Constantius’s places in the tetrarchy.
¹³
In either case, Constantius must have recognised from the start that Helena, the barmaid from Bithynia, was no politician’s wife. No more is heard of her or her whereabouts for the next fifteen years.