The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (50 page)

For Aelia Eudocia and her fellow fourth- and fifth-century female
travellers, including her sister-in-law Pulcheria and granddaughter Eudocia – whose stories will round off our gallery of Roman women – Helena was the figurehead. It was she who prescribed the model for the philanthropic behaviour they would emulate and who established the itinerary for the holy sites they and other Christian pilgrims would visit. One of these of course was Jerusalem, where Helena had been entrusted by Constantine with monitoring building works in the city. Shortly before his mother’s departure, Constantine had written to the Bishop of Jerusalem, Macarius, commissioning a magnificent church to be built over a recently excavated area near the crucifixion site of Golgotha, where what was believed to be the tomb of Jesus had been discovered.
⁶⁰
Although a few later writers assumed that the resulting Church of the Holy Sepulchre was the personal commission of Constantine’s mother – and the pilgrim Egeria wrote in her travel diary of 381–4 that Helena had personally overseen her son’s decoration of the building – it is virtually certain that the church and the excavations which attended its construction could only have been initiated on the say-so of Constantine. Still, despite the fact that no commentator during her lifetime referred to the revelation, it was during her activities in Jerusalem that history credited Helena with the personal discovery of the hiding place of the True Cross, the cross on which Jesus had been crucified and the most revered symbol in Christianity.
⁶¹

That an object considered to be the True Cross was indeed discovered in the first half of the fourth century, perhaps in the excavations beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, is very plausible. Certainly a profusion of highly coveted ‘relics’ from it appeared during that period in churches as far afield as North Africa. In around 350, Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem referred to the dispersal of these wood fragments of the cross all around the Mediterranean and in a letter to the ruling emperor of that time, Constantius II, even spoke of the ‘saving wood of the Cross’ being found in Jerusalem during the reign of that ruler’s father, Constantine.
⁶²
But the earliest surviving account of Helena’s personal role in its discovery dates some sixty years after her death, when Bishop Ambrose of Milan delivered his obituary for the emperor Theodosius I on 25 February 395. Recalling the mother of the Christian dynasty whose mantle Theodosius had inherited, Ambrose described how Helena resolved to search for the wood of the cross at Golgotha, and how she identified the True Cross from a jumble of rival candidates:

And so she opens the ground; she casts off the dust. She finds three forked-shaped gibbets thrown together, which the debris had covered; which the enemy had hidden … she hesitates, as a woman, but the Holy Spirit inspires a careful investigation, with the thought that two robbers had been crucified with the Lord. Therefore, she seeks the middle wood, but it could have happened that the debris mixed up the crosses one with another, and chance interchanged them. She returned to the text of Gospel, and found that on the middle gibbet a title had been displayed ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’.
⁶³

Ambrose’s Helena proceeded to scrabble around for the nails with which Christ had been crucified, and on discovering them, had one worked into a bridle and the other into a jewelled crown, both of which she sent to her son. These most Christian of symbols thus came into the guardianship of the Constantinian dynasty, and effectively become part of the Roman crown jewels – a useful epitaph to a sermon aimed at glorifying one of Constantine’s Christian heirs.

Ambrose did not invent the story of Helena’s discovery himself. It can be traced at least as far back as an author named Gelasius of Caesarea, who published a version (now lost but reconstructed thanks to fragments) of the finding of the cross a few years earlier in around 390. His account, in which Helena was able to identify the True Cross when its application against the body of a seriously ill woman cured her, spawned a number of fifth-century imitations.
⁶⁴
Scholars to this day remain locked in debate over the question of whether Helena’s really could have been the hand behind the cross’s discovery. The most convincing argument against her having found the cross, its authenticity notwithstanding, is that Eusebius, Constantine’s hagiographer and contemporaneous author of the only account we have of Helena’s journey to the Holy Land, makes absolutely no reference to it. Why would Eusebius have missed the opportunity to publicise such an enormous coup for Constantine and his mother?
⁶⁵

Despite Eusebius’s omission, it would be impossible to overstate the popularity and scope that the legend of Helena’s discovery enjoyed in the literature and art of late antiquity right through to the present era. Several splinter versions of Ambrose’s main narrative developed in the fifth century, including a Syrian account which ignored Helena altogether and instead claimed that a fictional wife of the Emperor Claudius named Protonike discovered the cross. The most famous and influential narrative, however, was the so-called
Judas Cyriacus version, also originating in Syria, which had it that a recalcitrant Jew named Judas reluctantly led Helena to the burial place of the three crosses whereupon she proved which was the True Cross by using it to revive a dead man. Convinced by this miracle, Judas was converted and baptised under the new Christian pseudonym of Cyriacus (‘the Lord’s own’), and the story concludes with Helena ordering that all the Jews should be banished from Judaea. In the Middle Ages, this version was a particular favourite, no doubt thanks to its anti-Semitic sentiment, surviving in over 200 manuscript accounts from the sixth century onwards, and used as source material for early English poems such as Cynewulf’s ninth-century
Elene
and for Jacob of Voragine’s thirteenth-century compilation of saints’ legends, the
Legenda Aurea
, one of the most widely read and translated books in western Europe.
⁶⁶

Art, as well as literature, adopted Helena’s popular association with the True Cross in myriad forms. Paolo Veronese’s
The Dream of St Helena
in the National Gallery in London, shows a young Helena propped up by her elbow against the frame of an open window, dreaming as a cross supported by two cherubs appears in the sky above.
⁶⁷
A standard iconographical type of Helena and Constantine standing on either side of the cross developed from the late fourth century onwards in Byzantine art, an interpretation of which can be seen today on a small gilt-silver altar in the collection of New York’s Pierpoint Morgan Library, known as the Stavelot Triptych. This exquisite object, thought to have been brought from Constantinople to the west in around 1155, features various scenes from Helena’s life alongside Constantine’s, including her discovery and verification of the cross, while in the centre panel, Helena and Constantine are portrayed on either side of what is said to be a reliquary of the True Cross.
⁶⁸
An estimated 1,150 separate relics of the cross have been counted in total from the available sources since the fourth century. Today, in churches all over Europe which boast relics of the True Cross among their collections, one can be almost certain of finding a fresco or stained-glass window depicting Helena too, be it in the cathedral of Cologne, or Rome’s Basilica di Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.
⁶⁹

Helena returned to Rome from the Holy Land in 328 or 329, and died not long afterwards. The exact date and place of her death are unknown, but since coins featuring her image ceased to be produced after the spring of 329, it can be inferred that she did not live beyond
that date. According to Eusebius, she carefully put her affairs in order as her end approached, drawing up her will in favour of Constantine and her grandchildren and dividing up her estate and possessions between them. Her son was with her when she died, ‘ministering and holding her hands … her very soul was thus reconstituted into an incorruptible and angelic essence as she was taken up to her Saviour’.
⁷⁰

The fate of Helena’s remains, like so much of her life, is full of plot twists. According to Eusebius, a military escort accompanied her as ‘she was carried up to the imperial city, and there laid in the imperial tombs’. Since the imperial city in question almost certainly referred to Rome, the implication is that she was not in that city when she died, and since Constantine seems to have been in Trier campaigning against German tribes in the autumn of 328, it may well have been here that Helena breathed her last.
⁷¹
But a writer in the fifth century, Socrates Scholasticus, took the imperial city to mean Constantinople, where Helena’s son was entombed, thus giving birth to a medieval tourist industry in which travellers came to marvel at the tomb of ‘Constantine and Helena’. An alternative claim was peddled that after the fall of Constaninople in 1204, Helena’s relics were moved to Venice.
⁷²

It is virtually certain, however, that Helena’s real resting-place was a vaulted mausoleum which Constantine built on her
fundus Laurentus
estate, adjoining the basilica dedicated to Marcellinus and Peter.
⁷³
It is known today as the Tor Pignattara, and medieval guidebooks to the area recognised this spacious, single-roomed structure’s claim to be Helena’s tomb. A list of the opulent gifts Constantine was said to have left in his mother’s mausoleum, including four 12-feet-high (3.6-metres-high) silver candelabra weighing 200 pounds (90 kg) each and a chandelier decorated with 120 dolphins, records that an enormous silver altar stood before the great porphyry tomb. In the mid-twelfth century, Pope Anastasius IV decided that the sarcophagus should serve as his own tomb and instructed that it be relocated to the Lateran basilica, and eventually, under the aegis of Pope Pius VI, it found its way to the Vatican, where, by now heavily damaged, it was restored. It has remained there ever since, a vast, curiously militaristic affair, indicating that it was once intended for the remains of a male member of the imperial family, perhaps even Helena’s son himself.
⁷⁴

When Anastasius appropriated Helena’s sarcophagus for his own funeral, it was, however, almost certainly empty. A ninth-century source reported that in 840, during evening prayers, a monk named Theogisus stole some of Helena’s treasured remains and carried them
back to the Benedictine abbey of Hautvillers, near Reims. Three centuries later, to prevent further depredations on the tomb, Pope Innocentius II (1130–43) ordered what was left of Helena’s corpse, including her head, to be moved for safe keeping to the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, in the centre of Rome. Today, visitors to this church, situated on the old Capitoline hill, will find a porphyry urn whose inscription bears the claim that it holds the remains of St Helena.
⁷⁵

Santa Maria in Aracoeli is one of many churches and monasteries across Europe which have claimed ownership of relics of Helena’s body at one time or another, from Trier Cathedral to Echternach in Luxembourg. Given the roaring trade in relics in the Middle Ages, which led to her ‘tomb’ at Hautvillers being raided repeatedly between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries, there is every reason to believe medieval reports that Helena’s tomb was a prime target for grave-robbers, even if many relic-merchants were inevitably trading in fakes.
⁷⁶
Everyone wanted a piece of Helena, whose sainthood was a generally recognised fact in both the west and the east by the eleventh century, and from her death to the present day, rival cities and churches have keenly contested the right to claim true ownership of her story.
⁷⁷

In consequence, Helena’s afterlife is a richly colourful tapestry woven of claim and counter-claim, fact and fiction, history and myth. Among those who have claimed her most passionately for their own is the English town of Colchester, which still names Helena as its patron saint. In the twelfth century, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s influential and doggedly nationalistic
Historia Regum Britanniae
was greatly responsible for popularising the belief that Helena was no humble stable-girl from Asia Minor but actually a native of Britain and, furthermore, a daughter of Colchester’s own King Coel (‘old King Cole’ of the nursery rhyme). These legends were in part preoccupied with the canonised Helena who had discovered the True Cross, and whose feast day in the western church calendar was celebrated at least from the ninth century onwards on 18 August, but also with the
Augusta
Helena – the imperial Roman woman who could provide a link between Britain and the Roman emperor who was claimed as an ancestor by British monarchs including Henry VIII.
⁷⁸

That Britain, the cold northernmost corner of the Roman Empire’s territorial portfolio, should have one of the richest Helena traditions may seem odd, but it is rooted in the strong links between Constantine’s father and the province which later enabled Henry
VIII’s claims – Constantius Chlorus died at York, and Constantine was proclaimed emperor there in July 306. One glance at a map of that region reveals countless testimonies to Helena’s popularity there – the city of St Helens on Merseyside, and thirty-four churches named after her in Yorkshire alone.
⁷⁹
Henry of Huntingdon’s
Historia Anglorum
was one of the twelfth-century British histories which suggested that Constantius had signed a peace treaty with Coel and then married the British king’s virtuous daughter Helena.
⁸⁰
It was this Helena whom Evelyn Waugh used as his model for the creation of the eponymous heroine in his finished novel, which he ended up naming
Helena
rather than the original ‘Quest of the Empress Dowager’. Waugh also claimed in correspondence with his friend John Betjeman to have been inspired by the poet’s wife Penelope, which may in part account for the grating tendency of this 1940s Helena to use expressions such as ‘bosh’ and ‘beastly’.
⁸¹