Who do you think are the great women of
history?
Here is one of my candidates:
Flavia Iulia Helena!
Any discussion of this remarkable woman,
mother of Constantine the Great, must begin with her humble origins. As John Julius Norwich notes about the Emperor's
mater, ". . .
his mother
Helena was a humble innkeeper's daughter from
Bithynia . . . Only later in her life, when her son
had acceded to the supreme power, did she become the most venerated woman in the Empire; only in 327, when she was already over seventy, did this passionately enthusiastic
Christian convert make her celebrated pilgrimage to the
Holy Land, there miraculously to unearth the True
Cross and so to achieve sainthood" (Norwich, John Julius.
A Short History of Byzantium.
London: Viking, 1997. 3-4).
While much of what we know about
Helena seems spun with saintly proportions (handy attributes for the service of a new, unifying state religion), there is no denying her religious fervor
nor her temporal power.
