Helena

The rise of Helena is one of the more improbable careers of the late Roman world. Ancient testimony to her origins is unflattering and probably reliable: Ambrose calls her a stabularia, a stable-maid or innkeeper, and later sources place her birth in humble circumstances, traditionally at Drepanum in Bithynia (the town Constantine later renamed Helenopolis in her honour). She became the consort, whether wife or concubine is disputed, of the soldier Constantius Chlorus, and about 272-273 bore him a son, the future emperor Constantine.

When Constantius rose to the imperial college he set Helena aside for a politically advantageous marriage, and for a time she disappears from view. Her fortunes were restored spectacularly by her son. After Constantine became sole ruler, he brought his mother to court, conferred on her the exalted rank of Augusta, struck coins in her name, and gave her access to the imperial treasury and honours rarely granted to a woman.

The atlas records this well-attested imperial career as the secure historical core of Helena. She is a genuine figure of the fourth century, mother of the emperor who turned Rome toward Christianity, and a powerful patron in her own right, before ever the later legend of the relic-finder was attached to her name.

Late in her long life, about 326-328, Helena undertook a pilgrimage to the eastern provinces and the Holy Land, an event that is solidly attested by her contemporary Eusebius in his Life of Constantine. He describes an aged and devout empress travelling through the East, distributing imperial bounty, freeing prisoners, and endowing churches, and he credits her with the building of two great basilicas at the holiest sites: the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem and the Church on the Mount of Olives at the place of the Ascension.

This journey was part of a wider programme, driven above all by Constantine himself, of monumentalizing the Christian holy places, of which the greatest expression was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, raised over the traditional site of the crucifixion and tomb.

What Eusebius conspicuously does not report is any discovery of the cross of Christ. Writing within a few years of the events and eager to praise both emperor and mother, he describes the pilgrimage and the church-building in detail, yet says nothing of relics of the Cross or of Helena finding them. This silence, from the best-placed contemporary witness, is the pivot on which the historical assessment of her most famous deed turns.

The story for which Helena is best remembered, the inventio crucis, or Finding of the True Cross, is later than her lifetime and legendary in its detail. In its developed form it relates that at Jerusalem Helena had the site of Golgotha excavated, uncovered three buried crosses, and identified the true one when a touch of it healed a sick or dead person, thereby recovering the Cross of Christ along with the nails and the titulus.

The tradition first surfaces at the very end of the fourth century. Ambrose of Milan, in a funeral oration of 395, some sixty-five years after Helena's death, is the earliest writer to credit her with the finding. Slightly later church historians, Rufinus, Gelasius of Caesarea and others, elaborate it, and from them it passed into universal medieval belief and into collections such as the Golden Legend.

Modern scholarship, following studies such as Jan Willem Drijvers's, distinguishes sharply between the historical pilgrim and the legendary discoverer. That some cult of relics of the Cross grew at Jerusalem in the fourth century is likely; that Helena personally found the Cross is a legend that attached her prestigious name to those relics a couple of generations after she died. The atlas dates the tradition to its late-fourth-century sources and labels it as legend, not history.

Whatever its historical basis, the legend made Helena the patron figure of the relics of the Passion, and it is as their reputed finder that she anchors several of the relics recorded here. The Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme at Rome, traditionally founded in her own palace, the Sessorian, houses fragments venerated as the True Cross, an iron nail, thorns, and the wooden Titulus Crucis panel, the whole corpus attributed to relics she was said to have brought from Jerusalem about 325. The atlas relates this collection to Helena as a debated association, noting both the late and legendary character of the finding tradition and the specific scientific result that radiocarbon dating of the Titulus panel returned a medieval date, debunking that piece.

In Christian memory Helena became the archetype of the pious empress: relic-finder, church-builder, and mother of the first Christian emperor. She is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and other churches, often paired with Constantine as one of the "Equals to the Apostles."

The atlas holds both Helenas together without confusing them, the attested Augusta and pilgrim of the fourth-century record, and the legendary discoverer of the Cross of the later tradition, and it is chiefly through that second, legendary role that her name reaches the relics she is honoured for finding.