The First Ladies of Rome

by Annelise Freisenbruch

  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.29

  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.30

  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.31 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.32 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.33 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.34

  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.35

  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.36 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.37

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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.38 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.39 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.40

  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.41 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.42

  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.43 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.44 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.45

  There are nonetheless more durable reminders of Helena’s impact on the landscape of Constantine’s empire. These include her son’s renaming of her reputed birthplace of Drepanum as Helenopolis, mirroring Marcus Aurelius’s gesture to his wife Faustina when the city of Halala was dubbed Faustinopolis after her death there.46 Drepanum was identified as the modern Turkish village of Hersek by the British topographer Colonel William Leake in the early nineteenth century. Strong traces of Helena’s links with the city of Rome also survive in the south-eastern corner of the city, enough to suggest that this area, which formed part of the wealthy district of the Caelian hill, became her principal residence during her son’s reign, despite the marginalisation of Rome as the empire’s political epicentre under the tetrarchy. Some time after her son’s defeat of Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in 312, Helena acquired a large estate here, the fundus Laurentus, the revenue from which provided funds for the Church. This area became a focal point for the new imperial family’s avowal of itself as a Christian household, and provides the majority of our evidence outside the Holy Land for Helena’s activities as a patron of buildings both Christian and non-Christian. One of Rome’s first churches, named for Saints Marcellinus and Peter, was built on her estate. An inscription discovered near the local Basilica di Santa Croce in Gerusalemme also preserves the information that Helena restored baths nearby which had been destroyed by fire, and which are referred to as the Thermae Helenae (‘Baths of Helen’) in tribute.47

  The basilica itself, one of Rome’s most famous Christian shrines, is today a rich repository for relics of Helena’s life-story. It stands in the footprint of a building complex known as the Sessorian Palace, a private imperial residence adjoining the fundus Laurentus which, on top of the restored ‘Baths of Helen’, once boasted amenities including a circus, a small amphitheatre and gardens. The Sessorian Palace is widely thought to have been given over to Helena’s use and to have served as her Roman home. Only a few remains of its original shell survive, but during Constantine’s reign, probably in the late 320s, one of the rooms in the palace was reinvented as a chapel, known variously in its early years as the basilica Hierusalem (the basilica of Jerusalem) or the basilica Heleniana (Helena’s basilica). The Basilica di Santa Croce in Gerusalemme (‘the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem’) is its modern incarnation, and is home to several statues and paintings eulogising Constantine’s mother. Both the theme of these artworks, and the different names given to the building over the years, reflect the famous legend attached to the chapel’s construction – that it was built to house a relic of the True Cross, salvaged by Helena from Jerusalem. That most famous chapter of Helena’s life was about to begin. But not before family tragedy plunged her son’s fledgling dynasty into new and damaging controversy.

  In 326, two years into his reign as sole emperor, Constantine made a rare visit to Rome, to celebrate his vicennalia – the twenty-year anniversary of his acclamation as emperor following his father Constantius’s demise in 306. That same year, he introduced his reforms of the marriage laws, with their harsh penalties for sexual offences. Constantine’s draconian moral agenda did not endear him to certain sections of the Roman public already smarting at plans to found a ‘new Rome’ in the shape of the glittering, grandiose new city of Constantinople. The beautification of Constantinople, which loomed like an albatross over the narrow sea peninsula separating Europe and Asia on the site of the old city of Byzantium and the modern city of Istanbul, was eventually to come at the expense of Rome’s non-Christian artistic heritage, which was liberally plundered to fill the new city’s blank show-spaces. Constantine courted further antagonism with Roman traditionalists during the vicennalia by electing not to climb the steps of the Capitoline temple of Jupiter and make the usual imperial sacrifice to Rome’s guardian deity, the first time he had so blatantly snubbed Rome’s old religious pantheon.48

  The year 326 was an annus horribilis for Constantine on a domestic front too. The bizarre deaths of both his eldest son Crispus and his wife Fausta cast a shadow over his emperorship and fuelled denigration of him in later years by anti-Christian authors, who also implicated Helena in their accusations of foul play. The product of Constantine’s relationship with the obscure Minervina, Crispus had enjoyed an auspicious career in his father’s court, elevated to the junior rank of Caesar in 317 when he was still in his teens, and earning plaudits for his key role in commanding the fleet that destroyed Licinius’s naval capacity. In 321 or 322, he married a woman named, by bizarre coincidence, Helena, and there is one school of thought that would have it that the palace in Trier was in fact their marital abode and that the Helena myth that sprang up in Trier had confused the two women. Despite Crispus’s mooted illegitimacy, he was trumpeted repeatedly on official coinage and contemporary panegyric literature as the empire’s mascot and his father’s right-hand man:

  Employing God, the universal king, and the son of God, the saviour of all men, as their guide and ally, the father and the son, both together … readily gained the victory [over Licinius].49

  Eusebius, Constantine’s most partisan biographer, wrote these words in 324 or shortly afterwards, in the wake of the victory in question. But in a later edit of the work, this gushing encomium was cut, and no more mention was made of Constantine’s eldest boy.50 Some time in the spring or summer of 326, Crispus was put to death, and his name, as Eusebius’s sudden clamming-up implies, subjected to damnatio memoriae. Subsequent attestations as to the manner of his demise are confused and contradictory. But all reports agree that Constantine’s was the hand behind Crispus’s death warrant, one adding the detail that the execution took place at Pola, on the western coast of Croatia. Shortly afterwards, Fausta, Constantine’s wife of almost twenty years, was also put to death, in gruesome circumstances, scalded or suffocated to death in a deliberately overheated bath.51

  The reasons behind these brutal eliminations were contested for centuries afterwards. One of the
earliest surviving accounts, written at the end of the fourth century, made a much-repeated claim that Crispus had rejected the sexual advances of his stepmother, and that a vengeful Fausta had then accused him of rape. After having his son executed, Constantine was then stricken with remorse and, egged on by his outraged mother Helena, he ordered Fausta to be forced into her boiling grave. Though details of the story varied according to different accounts, this tale of seduction and betrayal evidently provided much food for gossip during the fourth and fifth centuries, despite being dismissed as slander by Constantine’s literary supporters. But it bears too much resemblance to a plot from Greek tragedy, or a biblical scenario such as the attempted seduction of Joseph by Potiphar’s wife, for us to be able to take it at face value.52

  Alternative arguments have more recently been put forward to account for Fausta’s death, including the theory that it was accidental, the result of a botched attempt to induce an abortion in the hot steam of the bath.53 Among many abortion methods recommended by Roman medical practitioners – including heavy exercise, bleeding, and vaginal suppositories made of cardamom, myrrh, brimstone and absinthium – long hot baths, scented with linseed, fenugreek, mallow and wormwood, were indeed regarded as essential preparations for the detachment of the embryo.54 But the tell-tale scars of damnatio memoriae, including one example in Sorrento where an inscription originally dedicated to Fausta has obviously been doctored and reinscribed to Helena instead, are proof enough that there was a damaging scandal of some sort, perhaps relating to political tensions between Crispus and the offspring of Fausta. It was a subject that one of Constantine’s nephews and successors, the stubbornly non-Christian Julian the Apostate, would taunt him with, claiming that he had turned to Christianity in a bid to seek atonement for his sins.55