Chapter I - Helena in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

Summary

LEGENDARY ACCOUNTS of Helena's life and achievements arose during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages in the absence of reliable contemporary records. Despite her imperial status as Augusta, mother of the emperor Constantine, most of the details of her biography are obscure. There are two reasons for this: her humble origins, and Constantine's control over information concerning the imperial family. Helena's early life is unrecorded because she was simply socially unimportant until she made a liaison with a high-ranking Roman soldier and official, Constantius ‘Chlorus’; and her later life defines her in terms of the achievements of her son, Constantine. Of course, this lack of information is not unusual. Some aspects of Constantine's own life, such as his date of birth and baptism, are similarly unrecorded or contentious, not least because of his policy of suppression of compromising information. This biographical vagueness left medieval writers free to construct the Helena of their choice, modified by the early legends which arose within a century of her death. The claims that Helena discovered the Holy Cross and facilitated the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman empire were the most widely disseminated of these stories (though they were certainly not the only ones, and themselves were not consistently adopted). These legendary achievements conferred the status of saint on Helena and initiated the creative processes of hagiography, first within the cult of the Inventio and later in her own traditions.