historian even claimed that Helena was the daughter of the British king who is immortalized in the nursery rhyme “Old King Cole.” The fact is, however, that Helena was a commoner, and the ancient chronicler Eutropius hints at the real state of affairs when he characterizes her relationship with Constantius as “a marriage of the more obscure kind.” 2 Ancient pagan sources boldly call Helena a concubine, and some of them even claim that she served as a prostitute in her father’s inn before she met Constantine’s father. 3
Helena’s questionable origins and the dubious nature of her relationship with Constantius apparently rendered her unsuitable to her husband’s upwardly mobile career in public service. The ruling class of pagan Rome was, contrary to twenty centuries of Christian moral censure, rather fussy and even puritanical on the subject of sex, especially in outward appearances. Once he was raised to imperial rank, Constantius separated from the innkeeper’s daughter—“dismissing” her, as befits a concubine, rather than divorcing her—and made an advantageous marriage with the stepdaughter of the emperor Maximian (c. 240-310), a woman of noble birth called Theodora.
Son of the God
When Constantius the Pale was “raised to the purple”—the phrase refers to the color that was reserved for use in the apparel of royalty and worn as a badge of high office by kings and emperors throughout the ancient world—he was only one of four men who ruled the Roman empire. Thanks to an elaborate system of power sharing invented by Diocletian, no single one of them could claim to be the emperor of Rome. Indeed, just as pagan Rome recognized the divine authority of a great many gods and goddesses, the Romans submitted to the political authority of a great many men.
Here we encounter another core value of polytheism, one that is expressed in politics rather than religion. Some of the oldest and most revered political traditions of Rome, like those of Greece, were based on the simple idea that no single man was entitled to rule as an autocrat. Greece was the birthplace of a primitive form of democracy, and Rome deposed its last reigning king in favor of a republican government in 509 B.C.E. Of course, neither of these early forms of democracy were very democratic in the modern sense—political power was shared only by wealthy and highborn males who enjoyed the privilege of sitting in the assemblies and making decisions that were binding on everyone else, including the women, the poor and the slaves who made up the majority of the population. But the proto-democracies of the ancient world embodied one of the fundamental assumptions of paganism—just as the pagans of Greece and Rome did not worship a single all-powerful god, they did not submit to a single all-powerful king.
But, significantly, the old assumptions began to change shortly before the radical new idea of Christian monotheism first appeared. Octavian, a grandnephew of Julius Caesar, prevailed over Marc Antony in the civil war that followed his great-uncle’s assassination and elevated himself to the rank of emperor in 27 B.C.E. The newly minted emperor began to call himself Augustus (“Sacred One”), a term that would later be used as a title of office by his successors on the imperial throne. He followed the example of Alexander the Great in accepting an honor previously afforded only to deities and dead emperors—statues were fashioned in his image, and worship was offered to him as a living deity.
Even so, Octavian dared not abolish the Senate, which retained much of its old prestige and many of its old privileges, and he never repudiated the republican traditions of Rome. The very first Roman emperor, according to law, ruled not as an all-powerful autocrat but as the Princeps —that is, the “first man” but not the only man to exercise political authority in Rome. Octavian accepted worship as “son of [the] god,” a reference to the
Helena’s questionable origins and the dubious nature of her relationship with Constantius apparently rendered her unsuitable to her husband’s upwardly mobile career in public service. The ruling class of pagan Rome was, contrary to twenty centuries of Christian moral censure, rather fussy and even puritanical on the subject of sex, especially in outward appearances. Once he was raised to imperial rank, Constantius separated from the innkeeper’s daughter—“dismissing” her, as befits a concubine, rather than divorcing her—and made an advantageous marriage with the stepdaughter of the emperor Maximian (c. 240-310), a woman of noble birth called Theodora.
Son of the God
When Constantius the Pale was “raised to the purple”—the phrase refers to the color that was reserved for use in the apparel of royalty and worn as a badge of high office by kings and emperors throughout the ancient world—he was only one of four men who ruled the Roman empire. Thanks to an elaborate system of power sharing invented by Diocletian, no single one of them could claim to be the emperor of Rome. Indeed, just as pagan Rome recognized the divine authority of a great many gods and goddesses, the Romans submitted to the political authority of a great many men.
Here we encounter another core value of polytheism, one that is expressed in politics rather than religion. Some of the oldest and most revered political traditions of Rome, like those of Greece, were based on the simple idea that no single man was entitled to rule as an autocrat. Greece was the birthplace of a primitive form of democracy, and Rome deposed its last reigning king in favor of a republican government in 509 B.C.E. Of course, neither of these early forms of democracy were very democratic in the modern sense—political power was shared only by wealthy and highborn males who enjoyed the privilege of sitting in the assemblies and making decisions that were binding on everyone else, including the women, the poor and the slaves who made up the majority of the population. But the proto-democracies of the ancient world embodied one of the fundamental assumptions of paganism—just as the pagans of Greece and Rome did not worship a single all-powerful god, they did not submit to a single all-powerful king.
But, significantly, the old assumptions began to change shortly before the radical new idea of Christian monotheism first appeared. Octavian, a grandnephew of Julius Caesar, prevailed over Marc Antony in the civil war that followed his great-uncle’s assassination and elevated himself to the rank of emperor in 27 B.C.E. The newly minted emperor began to call himself Augustus (“Sacred One”), a term that would later be used as a title of office by his successors on the imperial throne. He followed the example of Alexander the Great in accepting an honor previously afforded only to deities and dead emperors—statues were fashioned in his image, and worship was offered to him as a living deity.
Even so, Octavian dared not abolish the Senate, which retained much of its old prestige and many of its old privileges, and he never repudiated the republican traditions of Rome. The very first Roman emperor, according to law, ruled not as an all-powerful autocrat but as the Princeps —that is, the “first man” but not the only man to exercise political authority in Rome. Octavian accepted worship as “son of [the] god,” a reference to the
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