Helena Augusta: Mother of the Empire

In the preface to her book “Helena Augusta: Mother of the Empire,” Julia Hillner notes the difficulty inherent in writing a history about someone best known for having done something she did not do: discover the true cross. She stresses that, unlike so many others, she did not want to write a book about the legend of Helena and her path to sainthood, but instead a biography of her actual life. In this, she succeeds remarkably well given the deficiencies of the written sources available to her.

Who is Helena?

Despite her later fame and status as a saint, many basic facts about Helena’s life are unknown, including where she was born. Her social status at the time she met the later emperor Constantius is also not clear. It was certainly very low, but was she merely a peasant, a slave, or even a prostitute? Hillner devotes considerable attention to this issue, and though she can’t answer it definitively, her best guess is that she or her family were innkeepers, which, given the reputation for vice that profession had at the time, left later writers to speculate and moralize.

What’s Helena’s Relation to Constantius?

Also in question is her relation to Constantius. Was she ever actually married to him, or was she a long-term concubine? In the pre-Christian empire, marriage was a private affair, and many high-status and upwardly mobile army men lived and even had children with lower-status women before entering into a politically useful marriage later in life. Constantius, a rising star in the army, lived with Helena for at least ten years, and brought Her and their child Constantine along during his first major political appointment as governor of Dalmatia, residing in its seaside capital of Salona. This brief period of social prominence ended when Helena was “cast aside” so that Constantius could marry Theodora, daughter of the emperor Maximian, bringing his son with him. Almost nothing is known about her life from this point until her son succeeded his father as an emperor in the West.

The Tetrarchic period

Hillner spends the time until Helena’s reappearance in history to describe the often-confusing series of political and social changes during the Tetrarchic period and its collapse into civil war, focusing on the ways other imperial wives and mothers lived, died, and were portrayed in imperial propaganda. The tetrarchy, established by the emperor Diocletian, created two senior emperors called Augusti, and two junior emperors called Caesars, to better administer the empire after decades of instability. Its immediate collapse after his retirement in 305 and the death of Constantius, one of his successors Augusti in 306, led to several civil wars resulting in the deaths of multiple emperors and even the execution of the empress Valeria and her mother. Hillner does an excellent job of clearly describing not just the political turmoil of the time, but also the changing role and prominence of imperial women of this era. Competing imperial men used their wives and mothers to assert their superiority and the trends, down to hairstyles and jewelry set by Romula, Galeria, and Valeria would influence the very public role Helena would display later on, in contrast to the more reserved image of imperial women of earlier times.

In the end, Constantine was the last emperor standing. Whatever Helena’s relationship with Constantine had been during the years after she had been set aside, he brought her to court when he assumed the throne, and she began to be represented on his coinage and in other imperial art, second in seniority to his wife Fausta.

Constantius and Crispus

Much like his father Constantius I, Constantine had a son before his marriage to Empress Fausta. This son, Crispus, was an experienced Caesar who had led his father’s fleet in his successful war against his rival Augustus in the east, Licinius. He was headquartered in Gaul when Constantine traveled to Rome in 326 to celebrate 20 years in power. On the way, Constantine had Crispus executed. Sometime later, he also executed Fausta. Their names were removed from family monuments and their faces stopped appearing on coins. With no official explanation for these deaths, outside observers have spun wild theories ever since.

One theory went like this: Fausta had accused Crispus of rape, and after his execution, Constantine’s mother Helena presented him with evidence that Fausta was lying. She had been in love with Crispus and concocted the assault in a rage when he rejected her. One reason to doubt this story is how closely it follows the plot of a play by Euripides, with Constantine in the role of Theseus, Fausta as Phaedra, and Crispus the doomed Hippolytus, namesake of the play. Ancient writers had a habit of using familiar tropes to fill in the gaps in their knowledge.

Other writers speculated that they were indeed having an affair, and were possibly planning a coup, or that Fausta’s death, supposedly by being suffocated in the bath, was a botched attempt at an abortion. The question of why Fausta would act against the interests of her children by allying with Crispus puts this theory in doubt as well.Complicating matters is the fact that Fausta was the younger sister of Theodora, the woman who Constantius had left Helena for decades before. Was there something to the idea that family tensions bubble over into violence?

Such complicated and tangled family arrangements certainly made it easy for writers ancient and modern to spin melodramatic scenarios over very limited information.

The Most Prominent Woman of a Dynasty

We will never know the actual reasons Constantine put his son and wife to death, or whether Helena had any role in these events at all. What we do know is that Helena now became the most senior and prominent woman of the dynasty. She became the female face of the family, was promoted on coinage, was involved in the establishment of churches in Rome, and soon took the famous trip to the holy land for which she has been best known ever since.In the popular imagination, this trip has become known as a pilgrimage, during which Helena, with divine help, discovered the remains of the true cross, and founded churches like the church of the Nativity. Hillner doubts these claims, believing the cross relics had been found before her arrival, and were merely presented to her before being sent to Constantine. She is also at pains to stress that, unlike other empresses of her era Helena, not being a daughter of an emperor or senator, would not have inherited the kind of wealth that would allow her to independently endow churches. She may, as in her earlier time in Rome, have been involved in some aspects of administering the emperor’s funds, but these were always his projects, not hers. She was completely dependent on her son.

Final Thoughts

Modern audiences may be disappointed in this lack of personal autonomy and agency on her part. Nevertheless, Hillner makes the case that she was an impressive woman, and the final section of her book traces the waxing and waning of her prominence in historical memory over the century after her death, depending on the needs and interests of the dynasty, and which branches of it came to power, before exploding into the standard story that ensured her sainthood in the Middle Ages.