The Empresses of Rome

by Joseph McCabe

It seems clear that Eusebia first espoused his cause in a pure feeling of humanity. The officials had impeached the innocent youth of twenty-three or twenty-four, chiefly on the ground of having visited Gallus, and his life was gravely threatened. Eusebia threw all her influence in the scale against the malignant officials, and, though they prevented Constantius from hearing him, she saved his life. He was housed in the suburbs of Milan, and was taken one day to see Eusebia. “I seemed to see, as in a temple, the image of the goddess of wisdom,” he afterwards wrote in his “Letter to the Athenians.” The splendid figure of the beautiful Empress can easily be imagined to have made a remarkable impression on the bookish youth. Eusebia was differently, but favourably, impressed. Julian was a well-made youth, of moderate stature and broad shoulders. He had the soft curly hair of his brother, a straight nose, large mouth, and brilliant eyes. The humane feeling of the Empress assumed a more tender and personal complexion, and she set to work to make Julian’s fortune.

He was sent for a time to Como, and, as her influence prevailed, recalled to Milan, and permitted to reply to his accusers before the Emperor. He was then permitted to retire to his mother’s small estate in Bithynia, but Eusebia induced Constantius to impose on him the pleasant sentence of an exile to Athens. From the beloved schools of Athens he was, after a few months, recalled to Milan, to hear the astounding news that he was to receive the purple robe of Cæsar and the hand of the Emperor’s sister Helena. He shrank in tears from the political world that opened to him, but Eusebia tactfully overcame his opposition and guided his conduct. Her eunuchs ran continually between the palace and his lodging. The beard and cloak of the philosopher were laid aside, and Julian blushed to find himself accoutred in the splendid trappings of a commander. The jeers and intrigues of the court were at length silenced, and, on November 6th, 355, he stood on a lofty platform before the troops while Constantius invested him with the purple and exhorted him to sustain the honour of Rome. The marriage with Helena followed, and in December Julian and his bride, with a valuable collection of books as the gift of Eusebia, set out for Gaul.

Julian never saw Eusebia again, and cannot have had the least correspondence with her. Even in Milan he had, on reflection, torn up a letter in which he modestly wished his patroness the reward of a succession of children. On his side there was nothing but a pure feeling of gratitude and reverence. She was, says Zosimus, “a woman of erudition and prudence above her sex”; a shining example of spiritual and bodily beauty, according to Ammianus. She had most probably saved his life, and most certainly made his fortune. But it is believed by many writers that Eusebia’s feeling for Julian was of a less ethereal nature. Gaetano Negri, whose life of Julian is one of the most distinguished biographies of a Roman Emperor, justly repudiates the suggestion of improper feeling on her part, and it is a superfluous inference. But one may, without casting the least reflection on her virtue, hesitate to think that the only link between them was a sympathy of culture. Such sympathy we may well assume between a cultivated Greek lady and an ardent Hellenist, but so cold and spiritual a relation may very naturally and pardonably have been strengthened by a warmer feeling. Julian had no sensuous attractiveness for a beautiful woman. But his manly person and character, his vast superiority to the crowd of ignoble parasites she daily encountered, and to her weak and mediocre husband, must have excited an admiration less purely intellectual than an appreciation of his learning.

The person of Flavia Julia Helena remains faint and elusive in the ample chronicle of the time. She was much older than Julian, who was in his twenty-fifth year, while Helena cannot have been less than thirty.[27] She had not been previously married, Ammianus says, and the long maidenhood would not tend to make her attractive. The marriage was arranged by Eusebia in the political interest of Julian, and it probably retained the chill that a mariage de convenance, with such disparity of age, would naturally bear. In Julian’s abundant, and largely autobiographical, writings she is barely mentioned. It was the marriage of an old maid—for the Roman world—with an austere, if conscientious, philosopher. The gradual discovery of Julian’s secret loyalty to the old gods would not make their relations more cordial.

We may, therefore, regret that the single line of inquiry which we pursue will compel us to leave almost unnoticed the brilliant episode of the reign of Julian. The more liberal taste of our time has removed the violent and conflicting colours which the partisan writers of the fourth century laid upon the portrait of Julian. To Gregory of Nazianzum he was a faint impersonation of Antichrist; to the pagan writers a modest incorporation of Apollo. In modern history he is a most conscientious thinker, a humane and unselfish ruler, a very capable commander, a conceited and unattractive personality. His character, in spite of the shade that clings to it as a trace of the enforced dissimulation of his early years, is great: his ability and achievements are just entitled to be called brilliant.

Helena and Eusebia appear little in the years that follow, and we must narrate the necessary events very briefly. The frame of mind in which Constantius sent Julian to Gaul as Cæsar is not at all clear. The frontier was obliterated; the barbarians overrunning the country in formidable strength; the military force inadequate, except with fine control. Some writers are disposed to think that Constantius was sending his cousin to death. At all events, the faith of Eusebia, that her young and shrinking scholar would surmount these difficulties, was great; and it was rewarded. Julian at once discovered a bravery that none had suspected. He cut his way through a region occupied by the barbarians, surveyed the devastated frontier, and passed the first year of his inexperience with only one small disaster. The difficulty of his task seemed greater when, in the winter, he was besieged in Sens, and the commander of the troops in the neighbourhood refused to go to his relief. In the trouble that followed Eusebia obtained for him the full command of the troops, which had been withheld from him, and from that moment he entered on a career of victory.

It is probable that Helena did not share his peril in this winter (356–7). We find her at Rome in April, with Eusebia and Constantius, and a curious story of their relations is put before us. Constantius in that month bestowed his first and only visit upon the ancient capital of the Empire. Sitting in a chariot that glittered with gold and gems, preceded by officers whose spears bore silken dragons, so fashioned as to hiss in the breeze, on their golden and bejewelled tips, followed by his legions in battle-array, their breastplates and shields gleaming in the sun, the Emperor passed with affected indifference between the dense lines of spectators and the great monuments of Rome; though both the vast crowds and the ancient structures, shining with a beauty that his decaying Empire could no longer produce, wrung from him in private an expression of astonishment. Eusebia had invited Helena to join them in this visit to Rome.

At a later point in his narrative Ammianus makes a reference to this visit that has perplexed every thoughtful reader. When he comes to record the death of Helena, he says that it was due to a poisonous drug administered to her by Eusebia, during the visit to Rome, to prevent her from having children, and that in the previous year, when she was pregnant, Eusebia sent a midwife to destroy the child under pretence of attending her. It does not seem to occur to Gibbon and other historians, who adopt this story, that it suggests in Eusebia a character in complete contradiction to that ascribed to her by Ammianus himself and every other Roman writer. A jealousy of Helena, whether on account of her own childlessness or on account of Julian, that could force her to such a malignant course, is utterly inconsistent with the description we have quoted of her. The story is peremptorily rejected by Miss Gardner and Signor Negri, and its discord with all that we know of Eusebia is noticed by most writers.

One is tempted to inquire if it may not be an interpolation, but the text of Ammianus lends no support whatever to the idea. We can only suppose that Ammianus incorporated a piece of idle gossip, and was inattentive to its inconsistency with his high moral praise of Eusebia. Many legends, we shall see, sprang up after the death of Helena. Some of them assail Julian, and are easily traced to their source. It is possible that the courtiers who opposed Eusebia, and doubtless misrepresented her zeal for Julian, started the rumour, and Ammianus heard it in Italy years afterwards. It is a mere feather in the scale against the authorities for the high character of the Empress.

From Rome Constantius was summoned to repel fresh invasions in the East, and Helena returned to Gaul. She remains unnoticed until the spring of the year 360, and we will not follow Julian through the brilliant campaigns in which he reduced the most powerful tribes of the barbarians, and restored peace and prosperity to his stricken province. But while Julian succeeded in the West, the campaign of the troops of Constantius in the East won for the Emperor few laurels, and entailed grave disasters. The intriguers now doubled their charges against Julian, and plausibly suggested that he would be prompted to claim a higher title than that of Cæsar. It was decided to reduce his power by removing a number of his finest legions to the East.