Free The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 by John Julius Norwich Page B

Empire were ransacked for works of art with which the growing city was to be adorned - preference being normally given to temple statues of the ancient gods, since by removing them from their traditional shrines and setting them up in public, un-consecrated places for aesthetic rather than religious purposes, Constantine could strike a telling blow at the old pagan faith. Among the most important appropriations were the Zeus from Dodona, the Athene from Lindos - though this may have been taken by Theodosius the Great half a century later - and the Apollo from Delphi; but these were accompanied by some thousands of other, lesser sculptures of unknown description and unrecorded provenance. The speed of the new city's transformation seemed to its inhabitants, native and immigrant alike, almost a miracle in itself 1 - the more so in that the Emperor was simultaneously engaged on another vast work of self-commemoration at Cirte in Numidia (which he had decided to call by his own name, Constantine) and a complete reconstruction, in honour of his mother, of the little town of Drepanum on the Asiatic shore of the Marmara which he had named, predictably, Helenopolis.
    Meanwhile in 327 Helena herself, with all the zeal of a passionate convert, had set off at the age of seventy-two for the Holy Land, where Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem took her on a tour of the principal shrines and where, according to tradition, she found the Cross in a cistern beneath a temple to Aphrodite - distinguishing it from those of the two thieves by laying it on a dying woman, who was miraculously restored to health. Eusebius, curiously enough, while writing at some length about the Empress's journey and her benefactions to the various churches, fails to mention this momentous event; on the other hand we find Macarius's second successor, Bishop Cyril - who was himself, as a very young man, almost certainly in Jerusalem at the time - speaking of
    1 'A particular description, composed about a century after its foundation, enumerates a capitol or school of learning, a circus, two theatres, eight public and one hundred and fifty-three private baths, fifty-two porticoes, five granaries, eight aqueducts or reservoirs of water, four spacious halls for the meetings of the senate or courts of justice, fourteen churches, fourteen palaces, and four thousand, three hundred and eighty-eight houses which, for their size or beauty, deserved to be distinguished from the multitude of plebeian habitations' (Gibbon, Chap. XVII).

    it only a quarter of a century later as if it were common knowledge. Further corroboration is provided by a significant action of Constantine himself: soon after the Cross arrived in his new capital, he sent a piece of it to Rome, to be placed in the old Sessorian Palace which his mother had always occupied during her visits to the city and which he now ordered to be converted into a church. Still known as S. Croce in Ger usalemme, the building has been indissolubly associated with St Helena ever since. 1
    The Empress, Eusebius reports, having been granted by her son 'authority over the imperial treasury, to use and dispense monies according to her own will and discretion in every case', was taking full advantage of her prerogative. Thanks to her, endowments were provided for the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem and that of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives, together with others at Mamre (the shrine near Hebron associated with Abraham), Tyre and Antioch; most important of all, however, was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, where Helena gave new impetus to the ambitious building programme which her son had initiated in 325 to mark the successful conclusion of the Council of Nicaea. As a result of this undertaking, the whole uneven surface of the rock which surrounded the Tomb was levelled to form a vast courtyard, with a portico along one side and colonnades around the other three. At one end was the Tomb itself, enclosed in a small