The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (48 page)

Constantine complied, and from 312 onward, as he assumed control of the western empire comprising Gaul, Britain, Spain, Italy and North Africa, and formed an alliance with his eastern opposite number Licinius, who defeated Maximinus Daia for control of the eastern territories, the fortunes of Christianity took a turn for the better. In 313, echoing Octavian’s and Antony’s peace accord at Brundisium, Constantine and Licinius met in Milan to formalise their pact, which was sealed with the latter’s marriage to Constantine’s half-sister Constantia. A declaration was issued in both emperors’ names, stating an end to the persecution of Christians.

However, the next decade then saw the uneasy concord between Constantine and Licinius disintegrate into all-out war for outright control. One of the key battlegrounds between the two was for the religious soul of the empire. Though not following so suicidal a path as to throw over Rome’s traditional gods and alienate the empire’s non-Christian population, Constantine devoted an increasing amount of time and imperial resources to the Christian Church, styling himself as its champion against Licinius’s increasingly intolerant treatment of its followers in the east. In 324, Constantine defeated Licinius under a Christian battle standard, and reunified the empire. Despite Constantia’s attempts to extract a plea-bargain for her husband, Licinius was murdered a year later, and Constantia returned to the household of her brother, now Rome’s sole emperor. Helena, now almost in her eighties, was in due course proclaimed
Augusta
, a title she shared with her daughter-in-law Fausta.
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The next generation of Roman empresses would take their cue directly from Constantine’s mother.

The Christianisation of the Roman Empire that followed Constantine’s victory in 324 had a lasting impact on the role of women, not just those who played the part of
Augusta
from now until the end of Roman rule in the west in the late fifth century, but also for females from
different walks of life across the empire. It carried social and legal implications for issues affecting them such as marriage, divorce, childbirth, health, sexual ethics and financial inheritance, while also providing women with opportunities to play various kinds of minor leadership role within the new religion, whereas previously they had been all but excluded from the administrative hierarchy of traditional Roman cults (the Vestal Virgins representing the notable exception). This may explain why, before Constantine came along, more women than men of the Roman upper classes seem to have been drawn to membership of the faith. Some Christians even cultivated a theology with a built-in female principle, with the worship of the Virgin Mary (dubbed the
Theotokos
) alongside the Son and the Father. A new breed of female role model also emerged in the literary and historical sources of the period – the Christian heroine or martyr – whose virginal ideals evoked comparisons with one of Rome’s most long-standing paragons of chastity, Lucretia.
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There was, however, an important difference between Lucretia and her Christian sisters. Whereas Lucretia had once represented the consummate Roman matron, who heroically sacrificed her life rather than allow the dishonour of her rape to tarnish her marriage, the fourth century witnessed the development of a new ideal for women – that of forgoing marriage, preserving one’s virginity and living an ascetic life. This new template of virtue was pitched into competition with traditional Roman civic values of marriage which had always cast women in the role of wives and as symbols of fertility and procreation. The contradiction became a crux of serious division between different wings of the newly empowered faith, which was already riven with theological disputes and schisms over the official definition of what it was to be Christian.

The contest between champions of asceticism and marriage was not simply, as one might expect, split along lines of Christian versus non-Christian. For mainstream Christians, marriage retained its traditional importance and Constantine directed many of his legal reforms at strengthening that institution. Inviting comparison with Augustus, Constantine’s agenda in the area of family law included the introduction of draconian penalties for sexual misdemeanour within marriage, with the burden of proof stacked heavily against the female party. Women could only divorce husbands who were murderers, sorcerers or desecraters of tombs, and a false accusation would result in a woman’s deportation. While a man was also required to produce
equivalent grounds for divorce, he was still permitted to commit adultery with impunity unless he seduced a married woman. Women who committed similar indiscretions were subject to the death penalty. Slave women who aided and abetted their mistresses in sexual misdemeanour faced having boiling lead poured down their throats. Constantine even argued that a girl who had been raped should face punishment for not having saved herself by screaming for help.
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One of the most precious archaeological discoveries from the fourth century – a 2-feet-long (0.6-metre-long) solid silver casket donated as a wedding gift to a young Christian heiress named Proiecta in around 380, part of the treasure trove found by workmen digging at the base of the Esquiline hill in 1793 – testifies eloquently to the meeting between Christian and non-Christian ideology in late antiquity. While the casket’s dedicatory inscription to the bride and groom read, ‘Secundus and Proiecta, live in Christ!’, its imagery, featuring scenes of both the goddess Venus and a wealthy woman attending to their respective toilets with the aid of servants – scenes which probably attest to the actual function of the casket as a luxurious vanity case – proclaimed that a woman could live a Christian life without giving up the exterior trappings of wealth and beauty.
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Such a message, however, sat uncomfortably with the criticism of Christian writers such as Jerome who took regular aim in the later fourth century at the rich, well-dressed Roman lady who preened herself in silks and jewels.
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Jerome was no Juvenal. Like a number of other church fathers, he made a virtue of counting a number of women among his closest intimates. But what these female friends of his shared was their decision to tread a new path in life, a path of celibacy and ascetic simplicity.
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Because for the first time, with the aid of the Constantinian revolution, women had the option of rejecting traditional duties to the family. No longer were they irrevocably obliged to marry and have children. Spinsterhood was a rarity prior to the fourth century. Marriage was what had always given women respectability, and although a few Roman women like Antonia had carved out a niche for themselves as
univirae
(women who did not remarry after the death of their first husbands) remaining single, unless one was a Vestal Virgin, rendered women of Antonia’s class at least liable for higher taxes.
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But in 320, prior to his defeat of Licinius and in keeping with his new religious sympathies, Constantine abolished those penalties on celibacy that had been on Rome’s statute books since the reign of Augustus. The old laws that forbade women from
acting for themselves in law or business were also dropped and prohibitions against women’s inheritance were relaxed.
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As a result, a small but prominent class of women emerged in the fourth century, wealthy, independent and educated, and fêted in Christian literature as ‘brides of Christ’, who had swapped fidelity to any one man for fidelity to God. They studied the Scriptures, learnt Hebrew (a rare accomplishment even for a man at the time), trekked to the Holy Land in the east where they founded monasteries for the benefit of fellow-minded ascetics, and, in the case of a woman from Gaul named Egeria, wrote diaries of their travels. Some were even admitted to the church hierarchy, appointed as deaconesses who could assist with the private instruction of female worshippers.
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Did all of this represent ‘progress’ for women of the Roman Empire? Some would say yes, that Constantine’s legislation and the ascetic movement combined were liberating for Christian women, freeing them from the bonds of marriage, the dangers of childbirth and domestic tyranny, and granting them opportunities for travel, study and platonic friendships with men that would have been denied them before.
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Others would point out that such arguments played into the church fathers’ propaganda, and that the ascetic life was still highly restrictive. Stereotypes of women as daughters of Eve – vain, frivolous and dangerous – prevailed, and women who won praise from the increasingly powerful ascetic wing of Christianity were those perceived to have risen above the weakness of their sex. They included women such as the early third-century Christian Vibia Perpetua, a victim of her church’s persecution by Septimius Severus, who shortly before her martyrdom in the amphitheatre of Carthage, wrote of a vision she had had in which she turned into a man and handed defeat to her opponent the Devil; and the fourth-century ascetic pilgrim Egeria, who according to admirer Jerome, conquered the Egyptian desert with ‘manly courage’. Whereas first-century wives like Fulvia, Agrippina Maior and Agrippina Minor had been routinely castigated for acting mannishly, Christianity now encouraged their faithful counterparts to shrug off the temperamental shackles that limited their sex. This set ascetic woman on a collision course with the traditional Roman
matrona
, who still represented the moral majority, yet who, as the fourth century drifted into the fifth and beyond, found herself increasingly excluded from membership of Rome’s moral elite.
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Despite these fourth-century challenges to traditional family dynamics, the importance of dynastic continuity remained a preoccupation of imperial and aristocratic houses, and the image of the emperor and his family, on coins, statues and paintings, in public and private art and architecture, remained as omnipresent as ever under Constantine and his successors.
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The elevation of Helena and Fausta from the status of
nobilissimae feminae
(‘noblest of women’) to the rank of
Augusta
, following Constantine’s victory over Licinius in 324, was an honour proclaimed on widely disseminated coins, in keeping with the treatment of previous imperial women. Helena’s coinage displayed her captioned bust crowned with a jewelled headband, while an allegorical female figure standing with a child in arms under the legend
SECURITAS REIPUBLICE
(‘Security of the republic’) occupied the reverse face.
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Fausta’s coins were similarly styled, and showed her in company with the young male members of her alliteratively named brood – Constantine II, Constantius II and Constans. In total, Fausta and Constantine had five children – three sons and two daughters (named Constantina and Helena) born between 316 and the early 320s.
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Some of the less official tributes that were produced in honour of the new emperor and his family in the provinces had all the kitsch value of modern coronation paraphernalia. For example, the discovery in November 1992 in the Suffolk village of Hoxne of a silver cache buried in the fifth century, unearthed an extraordinary novelty item in the shape of a hollow silver pepper-pot, complete with a rotating disc for grinding this expensive imported Indian spice, and moulded to represent an empress – possibly even Constantine’s mother Helena herself.
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There was nonetheless a serious and particular political urgency about Constantine’s ennoblement of his mother. Following her proclamation as
Augusta
, inscriptions appeared around Rome and other parts of the empire, registering her under her new title and reminding viewers of her status as both ‘wife’ and ‘spouse’ to the deceased Constantius Chlorus, and mother and grandmother to Constantine and his offspring. Those local dignitaries who sponsored such inscriptions, usually the accompaniment to honorific statues or routine tributes, thus showed themselves willing to act as co-conspirators in Constantine’s bid to prove himself the legitimate heir to the empire, and fend off potential rival claims from his half-brothers by Constantius’s marriage to Theodora.
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Contemporaneous sculptural or painted portraits of Helena and her daughter-in-law Fausta are hard to identity, despite attempts to
match them with the women from the painted ceiling panels in Trier. In Helena’s case, inscriptions survive from that time, which, along with later literary evidence, prove such sculptures once existed, in the forum of her son’s new capital city Constantinople, for example.
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But they have been separated from those statues, and thus no securely identified image of her can be agreed on, not even the most famous one commonly said to depict her, the head of a seated statue in the Capitoline Museum which was once so admired it became the model for great Italian sculptor Canova’s famous early nineteenth-century portrait of Napoleon’s mother Letizia Bonaparte in the collection of Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. At the time, though, the sculpture was thought to be of one of the Agrippinas – an infelicitous choice of model for Napoleon’s mother if it had turned out to be the younger version – and it was only tentatively recategorised as Helena in the 1960s.
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Undoubtedly the coiffure of the Capitoline Helena, with its thick plait wound around the head, accords far better with the snood-like hairstyle that was to become popular among fourth-century ladies than with the ringleted clusters sported by Agrippina Maior and her daughter. Such uncertainty of identification is a common complaint about the female portraiture of late antiquity which even more than its early imperial predecessors, focused far less on a distinct, individualised physical likeness than on a generalised expression of virtue.
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