The murder of Fausta is even more perplexing. Even if the late and negligible stories of Philostorgius and Zonaras were true, she was not executed, but brutally murdered. The only firm point in the conflicting evidence is the persistent association of her death with the anger of Helena. We have no evidence of any value in regard to her relation to Crispus; but the words of Zosimus, which are not inconsistent with the earlier writers, enable us to extend the above theory to her. Constantine, on this view, put Crispus and Licinius to death because they were possible nuclei of the conspiracy which he believed to pervade the Empire. Adopting a familiar device, however, he concealed his motive under a charge of amorous irregularity, or too great a familiarity with the Empress. Helena, who was greatly attached to Crispus, seems to have insisted that, if there was any guilt, both were guilty, and Constantine savagely completed his work by murdering his wife. The Christian historians describe Fausta as opposing Constantine’s progress in his new faith, and, as we have no evidence that Crispus had embraced it, one may not implausibly wonder whether the two did not attract the favour of the pagan Romans, to the extreme anger of the Emperor. No charge against Fausta was made public. During the lifetime of Constantine’s eldest son, Julian described her, in one of his orations, as not only one of the most beautiful, but one of the most virtuous and noble ladies of her time. Even if we make allowance for the licensed flattery of a panegyrist, the description would be too glaringly inconsistent with any Imperial theory of her infidelity. She was probably in her thirty-fourth or thirty-fifth year at the time when she met her appalling death.
Constantine hastened to remove the gloomy, stricken court from the disdainful eyes of Rome. The pagans pointed with fierce scorn to these fruits of the new religion, as they expressed it. One day it was found that some one had fastened a Latin couplet—written, the pagans of a later day boasted, by the hand of the Emperor’s chief counsellor, Ablabius—on the gate of the palace:
Say ye the Golden Age of Saturn breaks again?
Of Nero’s bloody hue these jewels are.
Either at once, or in the course of the next year, the court broke up. Constantine went to direct the building of the new capital of the West, which was to bear his name. Later pagans said that he fled from the theatre of his crimes and the scorn of Rome, but the ample lines of Constantinople had been traced long before, and the site had been chosen for its strategical importance. Helena sought the land in which Christ had lived and died, and her pious munificence won for her the halo of sanctity. The legend of her finding the cross does not appear until seventy years afterwards, and Eusebius tells us that it was Constantine, not she, who found the sepulchre and built a church over it. But Helena, who had now great wealth, covered the land with churches, and returned with a great repute for piety. She died soon after her return—in 328, Tillemont thinks—having passed her eightieth year.
Europia also went on a pilgrimage to Palestine, and seems to have settled in the East. We find her a few years later urging Constantine to scatter the pagans who are defiling some sacred spot with their impure ceremonies. Theodora seems to have died, at some unknown date, before the year of the murders. Constantia died in, or about, the year 329. Her Arian friend Eusebius had been banished, at the triumph of the Athanasians, but she obtained his recall, and adhered to his Unitarian creed. In her last hours she succeeded in recommending an Arian priest to Constantine, and prolonged the religious struggle. We pass to a new generation of Empresses, and may dismiss briefly the ten years which remain of Constantine’s rule and introduce us to the events of the next chapter.
In the month of May of the year 330, the new city of Constantinople was solemnly dedicated. The curious reader will find in Gibbon a splendid restoration of its princely proportions, its stores of art gathered from all parts of the Empire, its superb palace, its great hippodrome, its churches and temples, its spacious fora, and its lofty column of porphyry, surmounted by a gigantic statue, in which the head of Constantine replaced that of Apollo, and the various attributes of the god he still admired were hesitatingly redeemed by emblems of the jealous God of his new faith. The enormous sums absorbed in the building of the new city were regarded by the pagans as one of the causes of the decay of the Empire, and the bitter strife of Arians and Athanasians, which distracted it, irritated their resentment. But their day was closing. The arguments with which they clung to a Jupiter and a Venus in whom they no longer believed were hollow; the rewards of conversion were great. The grey gods saw their crowds of worshippers becoming thinner and less joyous. The Empire lifted the humble cross into the sunlight from Persia to Britain.
The last decade of Constantine’s life was inglorious. We might distrust the partial and severe accusations of Zosimus, but the substance of his charge is found in the other authorities. His vast and hurried enterprise in building forced him to lay heavy burdens on his enfeebled Empire, and we have the authority of Ammianus Marcellinus that he “encouraged those about him to open devouring jaws” in a lamentable degree. Conversion was the first right to favour and wealth. The later Emperor Julian, we are not surprised to find, pours acrid satire on him. In the treatise (“Cæsares”) in which he introduces the Emperors of Rome to the Olympic court, he makes Constantine turn to the goddess Luxury, as the one congenial deity, and she introduces him only to her sister Prodigality. He ridicules Constantine’s womanly finery in dress and jewels, his elaborate crown of false hair, his complete lapse into effeminate ways. Aurelius Victor gives us the proverbial judgment of the next generation on Constantine: in his first decade he was admirable, in his second decade thievish, in his third decade a squanderer. He made the final blunder of—without naming a successor—dividing the Empire among his sons and nephews, of gravely unequal character, and died in 337, leaving them and their supporters to engage in a murderous struggle for supremacy.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE WIVES OF CONSTANTIUS AND JULIAN
When the announcement of Constantine’s death had been borne by swift couriers to the distant provinces, and the body, in its golden coffin, had been transferred to Constantinople, there was a nervous rush of aspiring Emperors and Empresses to the capital. The unification of the Empire under Constantine had cost the State some hundred and fifty thousand of its finest soldiers, who perished in civil warfare while powerful nations pressed against its yielding frontiers. In his later years he had so distributed these provinces, whose unity had been so dearly purchased, among his sons and nephews, worthy and unworthy, that dismemberment was certain to follow his death. His eldest son, Constantine, now in his twenty-first year, ruled Gaul and Britain; Constantius, the second son, a youth of twenty, was the Cæsar of the East; the third son, Constans, aged seventeen, held sway over Italy and Africa. His nephew Delmatius, also entitled Cæsar, controlled Thrace, Macedonia, and Greece, and the younger nephew Hannibalian bore the ornate title of King of Kings in Pontus and Cappadocia. The two brothers of Constantine, and the husbands of his two sisters, were not left without a share of the Imperial provision.