Helena Augusta

By Julia Hillner,

Book cover of Helena Augusta

Book description

In the middle of the third century, a girl was born on the north-eastern frontier of the Roman empire. Eighty years later, she died as Flavia Iulia Helena, Augusta of the Roman world and mother of the first Christian emperor Constantine, without ever having been married to an emperor herself.…

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1 author picked Helena Augusta as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Dr. Hillner, Professor of Roman Imperial and Late Antiquity Studies at the Reinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat Bonn, has offered an ambitious biography of St. Helena, the mother of Rome’s first Christian Emperor Constantine the Great, who lived in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries.

Unlike the abundant literary and material sources available for her famous son, there are only a few scattered references to Helena in fourth century sources—primarily dealing with her relationship to Constantine’s father Emperor Constantius I, to her son Constantine I, and to her imperial relatives and descendants; and then many unreliable later legends about her life. Using…

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