The First Ladies of Rome

by Annelise Freisenbruch

  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.

  With the advent of the tetrarchy, not one, or even two, but four women shared the duties of empress. Very little is known about either Valeria or Theodora, or indeed Diocletian’s wife Prisca and Maximian’s wife Eutropia, despite their symbolic role in binding the tetrarchs together as a family. There was no indication at this stage that Diocletian intended any of the tetrarchs’ own biological sons to be part of future succession plans, and thus there was no advertisement of their wives as maternal guarantors of a dynastic inheritance. But it is clear that their experience as female figureheads of empire was quite different to that of Livia or even a more recent empress such as Julia Domna.

  Rome, which had seen less and less of the emperor and his family since military pressures on the empire’s frontiers demanded the second-century emperors’ attention elsewhere, was no longer the bustling, buzzing hub of empire. It remained the home of the Senate and retained a symbolic cachet as the empire’s ancestral capital, but the city was now sidelined as a political headquarters, and the old Palatine residence, principal home of the Roman princeps and his family since the days of Augustus and Livia, was left virtually unoccupied, the cinnabar-and saffron-painted halls which had once echoed to the sounds of Julia’s laughter and witnessed the bloody assassinations of Caligula and Geta, reduced to a dust-gathering second home for occasional imperial visitors.14 Palaces in the new tetrarchic strongholds of Trier, Milan, Aquileia, Serdica, Sirmium, Thessalonica, Antioch and Nicomedia now assumed primary importance.

  This was not the only departure from the days of Augustus and Livia. The pains to which the first emperor and his family had gone to affect the personal lifestyle of a ‘normal’ family in their style of living and dress were nowhere to be seen now. Instead head tetrarch Diocletian sought to enhance the dignity of the imperial office by adopting the glittering trappings more usually associated with an eastern court. These included eunuch chamberlains whose social and physical handicaps stopped them from being a threat to the emperor’s own position, but who controlled access to him and offered him counsel. A requirement was also introduced that those admitted to his closely guarded inner sanctum prostrate themselves before him, kissing the hem of his robes if permitted, as if he were superior to ordinary mortals.15

  The artistic tradition of idealised family portraits of the emperor standing alongside his wife and children was also gradually disappearing in favour of an iconography of the tetrarchs in discrete, jewelled isolation, set apart from ordinary mortals.16 Valeria, Theodora and the faces of the other tetrarchic wives still appeared on coins and individual portraits, their hair styled in the mode of the day, a kind of braided bun, diamond-patterned like a hairnet and in the shape of a cobra’s head, held in place with jewelled pins.17 But group portraits of the whole imperial family in marble and stone of the kind that had dominated town squares and streets between the first and third centuries began to be phased out in favour of bullish, bearded, crew-cut portraits of the tetrarchs in military or ceremonial dress, the homogenised similarity of their features helping to present a united front. The most famous preserved example is the porphyry group of Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius and Constantius ‘hugging’, which can now be seen on the south-west corner of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice. No room for any wives here. Running the empire was unequivocally a man’s job.

  Although each of the tetrarchs spent most of his time on the road with his vast cortège comprising thousands of advisers, secretaries and personal armies, all four established ties to certain cities more than others. Diocletian’s palace complex in Nicomedia, which reputedly covered over 7 acres (208 hectares) and was a little city in itself, contained a ‘house’ apiece for his wife and daughter.18 For Constantius and his wife Theodora, ‘home’ was the strategically well-placed city of Trier on the River Moselle, in Gaul, a prosperous city renowned for its wine production. Divergences in the policies of the eastern and western tetrarchs could already be discerned. In February 303, Diocletian, a vigorous promoter of traditional Roman religion, declared a war of persecution on the empire’s Christian population. Although the edict demanded measures such as the burning of scriptures and even the torture and execution of the most stubborn recusants, Constantius showed little inclination to follow the prescription to the letter in the west, restricting himself to the demolition of churches. Much of the traditional hostility from Roman authorities towards Christianity stemmed from the fact that as a monotheistic religion, it demanded allegiance to one god and forbade worship of deified emperors. Yet the very characteristics of dogmatic devotion to a single deity that invited such suspicion would later be harnessed to spectacularly powerful political effect by Constantine. Within twenty years, this persecuted minority cult, whose adherents at the time made up no more than a tenth of the population at most, would be heavily promoted as the officially favoured religion of empire.

  Helena’s whereabouts during this period are unknown.19 Her son Constantine had been receiving his education at Diocletian’s court in Nicomedia, presumably under Prisca’s aegis though no surviving sources give her credit for it, and on the military campaigns of Galerius, also in the east. This reinvented the tradition of princes of eastern royal houses being brought up on the Palatine, ostensibly as guests under the supervision of imperial ladies such as Antonia, but also as security in return for their families’ loyalty. Whether Helena accompanied Constantine to Nicomedia is unclear. But there is certainly no evidence of any contact between them. However, whatever the case, a reunion was not far around the corner. On 1 May, 305, the elderly and physically ailing Diocletian persuaded his reluctant co-Augustus Maximian to abdicate with him, and Constantius and Galerius were jointly elevated to senior honours. Their replacements as Caesar were named as Severus, another military insider, and Galerius’s nephew Maximinus Daia. Although Constantius’s three children with Helena’s successor Theodora were too young to rule, Constantine, now over thirty, might have seemed an obvious choice to fill one of the junior spots. The omission was said to have reflected concerted lobbying by Galerius to sideline Constantius, and on the e
vidence that Constantine was later mocked as the ‘son of a harlot’ by his future tetrarchic rival Maxentius, tacit allusions to Constantine’s dubious legitimacy may have been used in the argument, harking back to the days when Octavian and Antony had exchanged insults about each other’s peccadilloes.20

  But then in 306, the symmetry of the tetrarchy was thrown completely out of kilter when Constantius died at Eboracum (York) in Britain, and Constantine, who had ridden to be by his side, was proclaimed his successor by his father’s armies on 25 July. Despite the fury of the other tetrarchs at this unauthorised rewriting of their script, they were forced to accept this new member into the imperial college, though they only allowed him to come in at the junior rank of Caesar, and elevated Severus to become Augustus instead. Constantine duly took up the reins at his father’s main headquarters in Trier. It was in this city that some of the strongest legendary traditions about Helena took root, from which it is assumed that Constantine, now aged in his mid-thirties, invited his mother to join his court. Numerous clues in favour of this theory that Trier became Helena’s home have been cited, some archaeological, some based on references in literature. In the ninth century, for example, Altmann of Hautvillers wrote a Life of Helena, which claimed that she was born in Trier, to a wealthy, noble family, and that she had donated a palace to the bishop of Trier to be reused as the city’s cathedral, a story much repeated elsewhere.21

  During excavations begun underneath Trier’s cathedral in 1945–6, aimed at repairing bomb damage, the tiny fragmentary remnants of a painted ceiling fresco were uncovered 3 metres (3.2 yards) below the modern floor of the church, in the remains of a Roman house built in the early fourth century. It took almost forty years for all of the delicate plaster fragments to be retrieved and painstakingly pieced together, but when the jigsaw was complete, it was seen to consist of fifteen trompe-l’oeil-framed square portrait panels, laid out in a chequer-board pattern, each containing an image of a different figure. Four of the portraits were of women richly gowned and dripping with heavy jewels, in various poses – one with a lyre, one extracting a string of pearls from a jewel-box, another holding a mirror, and the last a silver kantharos, or drinking vessel – and all surrounded by a nimbus, a precursor of the Christian halo.22

  The lavish nature of the decoration scheme, with its heavy use of the colour purple, the most expensive and exclusive pigment in the ancient palette, has convinced many that the ceiling and the room in which it was found were part of Constantine’s imperial palace in Trier; more controversially, that the four women depicted were members of Constantine’s family, one of them Helena – though no one can agree on which one. But the theory that this expensively appointed building formed part of the imperial complex is much more persuasive. The styling of the women in these frescoes, which reproduces a trend during the later empire for bigger, bolder jewellery, also demonstrates that luxury, pleasure and rich personal adornment were all still very much part of the elite Roman woman’s vocabulary of aspiration in Helena’s day, though that notion would come under a challenge after the rise to power of Helena’s son.23

  One of the other women identified on the Trier ceiling fresco was Fausta, the daughter of tetrarchy founding member Maximian and sister of Constantius’s widow Theodora. In 307, the teenaged Fausta was married to Helena’s son Constantine, a case of history repeating itself, in that it required Constantine to cast off his previous companion Minervina, with whom he had had a son, Crispus. Constantine’s marriage to Fausta cemented a long-standing alliance between himself and ex-tetrarch Maximian, who had chafed against the abdication imposed on him in 305, and had recently emerged from retirement. The wedding was celebrated in a panegyric of 307 addressed to both the groom and his new father-in-law. Its anonymous author did his level best to imply that the engagement was of long standing, even though this was demonstrably untrue, claiming it had been predicted by a painted portrait in the imperial palace at Aquileia, which showed Fausta as a child, ‘adorable for her divine beauty’, offering an engagement gift of a plumed helmet to her youthful swain.24

  Fausta’s and Constantine’s marriage was a double celebration, marking Constantine’s promotion to the rank of Augustus. It also coincided with a ratcheting up of tensions within the tetrarchy. In Rome, Maximian’s ambitious son Maxentius, determined not to let his new brother-in-law Constantine steal a march on him, had bribed the imperial guard to acclaim him emperor on 28 October 306. He established the old capital city as his stronghold, giving the Palatine a permanent tenant again, and repudiated all attempts to shift him. Despite lending his son initial support, Maximian soon became estranged from him, and Maxentius also began to lose the support of Rome’s inhabitants, their tempers frayed by famine. An appalled Diocletian attempted to reassert his old authority, convening a meeting with Galerius and Maximian in 308 to promote a new tetrarch, Licinius, as a replacement for Severus – who was forced to abdicate for failing to suppress Maxentius’s rebellion – and condemning Maxentius himself as a usurper. But then Maximian’s stubborn attempts to claw back some of his old power resulted in his arrest and suicide in 310; Galerius died of bowel cancer in 311 and Diocletian once more retired bitterly to his great palace in Split where he ended his days either from illness or suicide. His wife Prisca and widowed daughter Valeria met with a more brutal fate, according to the hostile account of Christian contemporary Lactantius. Valeria was cast out from the protection of Maximinus Daia after she refused his offer of marriage, and condemned to a year of poverty-stricken exile before she and Prisca were later beheaded and their bodies cast into the sea.25

  Four tetrarchs now vyed for supremacy: Maxentius, Constantine, Licinius and Maximinus Daia. In 312, Constantine met Maxentius just outside Rome at the battle of Milvian Bridge to decide who would emerge triumphant in the struggle for the western half of the empire. The occasion would be remembered partly for the farcical way in which Maxentius was defeated, hoisted by his own petard when the collapsing bridge he had rigged up to ambush Constantine’s armies rebounded on his own troops, sending them plunging into the Tiber; but also for the moment the night before battle, when Constantine claimed to have witnessed a vision in the sky, a vision that became the defining moment of his life and a pivotal touchstone in the history of Christianity. Accounts of the episode are wildly contradictory, and have spawned a number of enterprising, if far-fetched, theories attempting to rationalise what Constantine might have seen, from an atmospheric phenomenon known as the halo effect to a comet shooting across the heavens. But the key part of the story was that, either in a dream or waking state, Constantine saw a cross-shaped symbol in the sky – not a cruciform cross, but the chi-rho, a monogram symbol comprised of the first two letters of Christ’s name as written in Greek – and was urged by a voice to send his troops into battle with this sign of God marked on their armour.26

  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, Con
stantine 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.27

  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.28