The Life of Helena

The historical Helena: born of humble stock, probably at Drepanon in Bithynia, around 246–250; joined to the officer Constantius, who set her aside for a dynastic marriage when he entered the tetrarchy; long obscure while her son rose; and raised to the rank of Augusta once Constantine ruled. This file treats the contested facts of her origin and status honestly, and the solid outline of her life beneath the later legend.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Origins and the Stabularia Question

Helena’s origins were humble, and the sources say so without embarrassment; the exact degree of humility is disputed. She was born, most probably, at Drepanon in Bithynia (on the Gulf of Nicomedia) — the town her son later refounded in her honor as Helenopolis — around 246–250 (Drijvers, Helena Augusta, Leiden: Brill, 1992, chs. 1–2, on origin and date; the Helenopolis refoundation is in Procopius, Buildings 5.2, and noted by Drijvers). The most famous testimony to her low birth is St. Ambrose of Milan, who in his funeral oration for the Emperor Theodosius (395) calls her a stabularia — an inn-servant or stable-maid — and turns the humbleness into praise: “a good stable-maid,” he says, who sought the manger of the Lord, God raising her from the dung-heap to a throne (Ambrose, De obitu Theodosii 42; ed. and discussion in Drijvers, Helena Augusta, 1992, ch. 2). [Disputed: Helena's occupation and birth-status. Ambrose (*De obitu Theodosii* 42, 395) is the source for the *stabularia* ("innkeeper/stable-maid") tradition, likely reflecting her low social origin; whether the word records a literal trade or is a rhetorical topos of humble origins exalted is debated (Drijvers, *Helena Augusta*, 1992, ch. 2). What is agreed across the sources is that she was of undistinguished, non-aristocratic birth.] This obscurity is theologically pointed for the Church: the mother of the emperor who freed the Church, and the traditional finder of the Cross, was a woman of no rank — an isapostolos raised, in Ambrose’s image, from the stable to the palace (see Equals-to-the-Apostles).

Wife or Concubine of Constantius?

Helena’s relationship to Constantius, Constantine’s father, is genuinely uncertain in the sources and matters for her status. She was joined to him around 270 and bore him Constantine around 272; but whether she was his lawful wife or his concubine (in the recognized Roman sense, a stable but lower-status union) the ancient testimony does not settle, and it divides modern scholars. [Disputed: whether Helena was the wife or the concubine of Constantius. Some sources and scholars hold she was his legitimate wife, later repudiated for reasons of state; others, following hints in the sources (and the ease with which Constantius set her aside), hold she was a concubine (*concubina*) in a socially recognized but non-marital union — the view Drijvers, *Helena Augusta*, 1992, ch. 2, inclines to, while noting the evidence is inconclusive. The uncertainty does not affect Constantine's recognized legitimacy as Constantius's son and heir, which was never in serious question.] What is not in dispute is that, when Constantius was raised to the tetrarchy as Caesar in 293, the dynastic logic of the new system required a marriage into the ruling house, and he set Helena aside to marry Maximian’s stepdaughter Theodora (see The Diocletianic World). Helena passed into obscurity, and the sources fall silent on her for the three decades of her son’s rise.

The Long Silence and the Elevation as Augusta

For the years of Constantine’s civil wars Helena is almost invisible in the record — a measure of how far she stood from power until her son secured it. Her re-emergence is tied to his victories. After Constantine became sole ruler by defeating Licinius in 324, he raised his mother to the highest rank a woman could hold: Augusta, empress, honored on the coinage as Flavia Iulia Helena Augusta and given a place in the imperial household and its public image (Drijvers, Helena Augusta, 1992, ch. 3, on the coins and the title; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, on the family’s rehabilitation). Coins struck in her name and Fausta’s present the two Augustae as the matrons of the new dynasty; and Helena was given access to the treasury and a public role in benefaction that she would exercise on her pilgrimage (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.47; Drijvers, Helena Augusta, 1992). Her elevation, late in a long life, made the once set-aside inn-servant the first lady of a Christian empire — the reversal Ambrose would later preach.

Helena’s Christianity

When and how Helena became a Christian is not recorded, and the honest answer is that we do not know. Eusebius credits Constantine with having made his mother “so devout a servant of God” that it seemed she had been a disciple from childhood — implying that her active piety followed, and perhaps was fostered by, her son’s own turn to the faith (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.47; Drijvers, Helena Augusta, 1992, ch. 3). Whatever its beginnings, by the mid-320s Helena was a conspicuously devout Christian, and it is as such that she undertook the journey that made her name. Her personal faith, like her son’s, reaches us through the providential lens of Eusebius and cannot be reconstructed behind it; what the sources securely attest is her public Christian benefaction from the 320s — the churches and charities of her pilgrimage (see The Holy Land Pilgrimage).

The Shape of the Life

Beneath the later legend, then, lies a coherent and moving human outline, all of it well within what the sources can bear: a woman of obscure and humble birth on the Bithynian coast; a union with a rising officer and the bearing of a son who would change the world; a setting-aside for reasons of state and three decades of eclipse; and, at the very end of a long life, an astonishing elevation — Augusta of a Christian empire, pilgrim to the Holy Land, builder of churches over the places of Christ’s birth and ascension. The finding of the True Cross, the deed for which she is most famous, belongs not to this securely attested life but to a tradition that grew up two generations later, and is treated as such in The Attestation Ledger. The Church venerates the historical Helena — the humble woman raised up and turned wholly to Christ — and does not need the legend to honor her.

See Also

References

  • Ambrose of Milan. De obitu Theodosii 40–48. (395; the stabularia tradition, §42; the earliest attribution of the Cross-finding to Helena, treated in Section 07.)
  • Barnes, Timothy D. Constantine and Eusebius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
  • Drijvers, Jan Willem. Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross. Leiden: Brill, 1992. (The definitive study; origins, status, title, and legend.)
  • Eusebius of Caesarea. Life of Constantine 3.42–47. Trans. Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.
  • Procopius. Buildings 5.2. (The refoundation of Drepanon as Helenopolis.)