However, on 26 June 221, forced to heed Maesa’s warnings of the precariousness of his position, sixteen-year-old Elagabalus did agree to adopt his twelve-year-old cousin Severus Alexander, son of Julia Mamaea, giving him the title of Augustus and naming him as his heir. Thus two camps and two rival Augustae were created in the imperial household, with Soaemias on one side and her sister Mamaea on the other. Mamaea played her cards shrewdly, we are told, keeping her son well away from his disreputable cousin’s sphere of influence and fulfilling the Roman mother’s traditional duty of overseeing his educational curriculum. When Elagabalus’s jealousy of his young cousin’s popularity became obvious, Mamaea ensured that only her own most trusted servants were allowed to prepare and serve Alexander’s food. Meanwhile, she began to slip money to the praetorian guard to further ensure her son’s protection, abetted by her mother, Maesa, with whom Elagabalus had never been a favourite, and whose years in Domna’s inner circle had given her a thorough education in palace politics.90
The tension in the family finally came to a head when Elagabalus’s attempt to have Alexander murdered rebounded on him, and on 12 March 222, Elagabalus and Soaemias were themselves brutally assassinated. Cassius Dio’s account of their deaths paints a horrific scene, in which the struggling eighteen-year-old Elagabalus was dragged from his hiding-place, Soaemias clinging to her son. Their heads were cut off, their bodies stripped of their clothes and their naked corpses dragged around the streets of Rome before Soaemias’s body was discarded and Elagabalus’s thrown in the Tiber. Although other Roman first ladies had been brutally treated in death, this desecration of Soaemias’s remains was the first and only time an imperial woman’s dead body had been subject to such abuse.91 It was a reflection, not just of the hatred and bitterness that had festered between the two wings of the family, but of the increased visibility of women in public life, that it should be necessary to make their execution and humiliation so public an event.
Fourteen-year-old Severus Alexander thus became the second Syrian emperor of the fledgling dynasty hatched by Julia Maesa, and Julia Mamaea now took her sister Soaemias’s place as Roman imperial matriarch. Both she and her son attracted far less vitriol from ancient historians than their immediate predecessors, though like Elagabalus, the new emperor was said to be very much under the thumb of his mother: ‘she took over the direction of affairs and gathered wise men about her son, in order that his habits might be correctly formed by them; she also chose the best men in the Senate as advisers, informing them of all that had to be done.’92 Such filial meekness earned Alexander the appellation in literary sources of ‘Alexander Mameae’ – ‘Alexander son of Mamaea’ – a reversal of the usual convention whereby a Roman man would be recognised by the name of his father. Tiberius had of course angrily repudiated a similar title identifying him as ‘son of Livia’ when he assumed the throne. The fact that Alexander’s matronymic was used on official inscriptions, referring to him as Iuliae Mamaeae Aug[ustae] filio Iuliae Maesae Aug[ustae] nepote’ – ‘Son of the Augusta Julia Mamaea and grandson of the Augusta Julia Maesa’ – proves that in her case the title was not just a piece of mockery cooked up by later commentators, but proof of the highly visible and enshrined role of the emperor’s mother and grandmother in the new regime’s public image.93
Alexander won early praise for his sober conduct, judicious handling of the Senate and several well-received political appointments. Cassius Dio himself was delighted to be awarded his second consulship, the reward of which concluded his history of the period. The provocation of allowing women into the chamber of the Senate was not repeated, and a resolution was passed condemning anyone who let one in again, confirming that the political access once afforded Soaemias and Maesa did not reflect any real shift in deeply entrenched Roman attitudes towards the prospect of women in government.94 Despite the united opinion of ancient commentators that his mother and grandmother manipulated Alexander as a puppet, choosing his advisers and selecting his friends for him, no extravagant or exceptional honours were publicly paid to either Mamaea or Maesa, certainly not in the first years of his reign. Instead, they contented themselves with the titles that had already been paid to previous Augustae, while Mamaea’s reported preference for a frugal lifestyle constituted a shrewd appropriation of Livia’s and Plotina’s example.95
With her mother Maesa’s death (and subsequent deification) in around 223, Mamaea assumed the senior female role in the family, a position she did not relinquish even when her son married in 225 and another woman once more shared the title of Augusta with her – Sallustia Orbiana, daughter of the powerful senator Sallustius. Swiftly, the machinery of government set to work stressing a message of family ‘concordia’ via the imperial mint. Orbiana was Mamaea’s personal choice for her son, and coins struck to celebrate the royal wedding featured Orbiana and Alexander on one side and the bride’s new mother-in-law on the other. But in 227, after just two years of marriage, when Sallustius was executed on a charge of conspiracy, Orbiana was in turn banished to Libya, the victim, it was said, of Mamaea’s jealousy of her title, even though inscriptions and coins suggest Mamaea was given top billing anyway.96
Unlike Caracalla, Alexander was reputed to have loved his wife Orbiana, but fear of his mother prevented him speaking out against her fate. This presentation of Alexander as a cowed mummy’s boy and Mamaea as a ruthless dominatrix was diluted by more favourable historical accounts of Alexander as a devoted son who built his mother a palace and pool near Baiae and Mamaea as a righteous woman who gave her son sage counsel. The portrait of devoted motherhood caught the imagination of later Christian writers who recruited Mamaea as a potential convert, claiming she once summoned the theologian Origen to give her religious instruction.97
Eight years of Alexander’s reign remained, during which the choice of slogans and patron deities on his and Mamaea’s coinage acknowledged the growing military threat from the east. In 224, the Persian ruler Ardashir had killed the last king of the Parthian Empire, Artabanus, the prelude to his foundation of the mighty Sassanid dynasty which would rule that region for the next 400 years. After attempts at diplomacy with Rome’s new rival failed, in 231, Alexander declared war and coins were issued in which Alexander was styled as the great soldier and Mamaea was associated with Venus Victrix – ‘Victorious Venus’.98 Largesse was distributed to the soldiers in the name of both the emperor and his mother, aimed at stiffening their backbone for the fight and guaranteeing their loyalty. But several scrappy and unsuccessful encounters later, discontent had infected the army, and blame was targeted at Mamaea, castigated for the ‘female timidity’ which reinforced the old adage that a woman had no place on the field of battle.99
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 look
ed 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 mee
ting 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
The First Ladies of Rome Page 33