[26] Gibbon, Professor Bury, and Mr. Firth make Zosimus coincide with Zonaras. The reader will see from my literal translation of his words that he differs very materially. He does not suggest that Fausta accused Crispus, or that she was really guilty of any misconduct; but he pointedly accuses Helena.
[27] Miss Gardner observes, in her life of Julian, that we do not know if Helena was older than Julian, But, while Julian is known to have been born in 331 or 332, since he was in his sixth year at the time of the massacre of 337, and died at thirty-two, Helena’s mother had been murdered in 326.
[28] Philostorgius says that, as she lay ill with her malady, Constantius recalled Bishop Theophilus from exile, and he cured her. But Zonaras makes her die of this very malady, scouting the Arian miracle.
[29] The Alexandrian Chronicle repeatedly calls her Marina, and we have no coins to determine the full and accurate name. Cohen, at least, gives no coins, though Tillemont refers to them.
[30] Lib. xxviii. 1: He says that Gratian put a certain man to death “on the advice of his mother.” Zonaras says that Severa still lived at the time of the second marriage.
[31] Gratian, the youthful son of Severa, had been clothed with the purple by Valentinian, “at the instigation of his wife and father-in-law,” says the epitomist of Aurelius Victor, in the autumn of 367. On the other hand, Justina’s brother was killed, in the service of Valentinian, in 369, The second marriage falls most naturally in 368.
[32] Yet St. Augustine, who was in Rome the year after the death of Gratian, says in his “Confessions” (viii. 2) that “nearly the whole nobility of Rome” still clung to the old religion.
[33] Hence Tillemont and others, who give these dates, must be wrong in placing the quarrel with Eutropius in 399. Philostorgius expressly says that she had two daughters in her arms when she appealed to Arcadius.
[34] See Professor Puech’s “Saint Jean Chrysostome,” 1891.
[35] The curious reader will find Chrysostom’s surprising strictures of the clergy more than confirmed in the letters of Jerome, and his fierce denunciation of the monks borne out in Augustine’s treatise on them.