<i>Helena Augusta: Mother of the Empire</i> by JuliaHillner, Oxford University Press, 2023, p. 432, ISBN: 978‐0‐1908‐7529‐9.

Julia Hillner's new book, Helena Augusta: Mother of the Empire, is poised to become the definitive reference for all subsequent studies on Constantine's mother and, more broadly, on court women of late antiquity. Flavia Julia Helena was one of the most powerful women in Rome at the side of her son Constantine and a fellow protagonist in the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity in the IV cent. CE. Prior to that history, however, Helena was a simple innkeeper, who rose in the court thanks to the extraordinary destiny of her son. She also became a model of Christian piety and the protagonist in many legends related to the discovery of the fragments of the true cross of Jesus. She paved an exceptional path for women of the time, that put her in a position first on the margins and then at the centre of the empire's power relations. As Hillner states in the initial acknowledgments, the book is the culmination of extensive research conducted over several years, enriched by ongoing dialogue with numerous colleagues who, around the same period, focused on studying and reconstructing the lives of women, both within and outside the court, during these crucial centuries. As a result, the volume contributes to broad scholarship across Europe and beyond that centres on female biography which often yielded surprising results based on meticulous research. The book begins by examining how a new biography of Helena can invigorate research on the empress mother. The available documentation does not permit definitive answers to the numerous questions surrounding her: was she truly an innkeeper or a prostitute before meeting the young officer and future tetrarch Constantius Chlorus, who was the father of Constantine? Was she a pagan or a Jew before converting to Christianity? Was she responsible for Constantine's conversion, or was she influenced by him? How much did she affect her son's political and religious choices and certain dramatic events at court when she was proclaimed Augusta, rising to the highest rank in the Empire alongside her son in 324, such as the murder of her grandson Crispus and Constantine's second wife, Fausta? What were the real motivations for her journey to the Holy Land and the subsequent rediscovery and promotion of evangelical sites towards the end of her long and extraordinary life? Is she genuinely responsible for the primary event associated with her memory, namely the discovery of the fragments of what was considered the true cross of Christ? And, above all, if this is not the case as generally believed today, why was such a discovery attributed to her, with all the cultural, geopolitical, geo-ecclesiastical and theological-political implications it entailed? We lack new documents or recent testimonies that could help illuminate the many shadowy areas surrounding her figure, and naturally, as has occurred for most female figures of the past, we do not possess anything written or produced by her own hand (the so-called ‘ego-documents’). This renders any attempt at reconstruction extremely challenging, and the difficulty increases considering that our documents are all of male origin, thus subject to the bias of the perspective and patriarchal mentality of the time: sources in which, as happens for almost all female figures known to us from antiquity, Helena appears as a collateral character to her son Constantine. Therefore, in the absence of new documentation, one might assume yet another biography of Helena would inevitably reproduce, albeit in new words, the already known state of our knowledge. However, methodology makes a significant difference between one historical reconstruction and another. In her recent biography of Helena, Julia Hillner innovatively focuses on material testimonies, alongside literary ones, and the forms of representation of the empress mother (statues, inscriptions, coinage, cameos, engravings, jewellery). These considerably enrich her biography, contributing to the reconstruction of the places and environments in which she moved, her network of relationships, the customs and mentality of the time and her forms of self-representation, as well as providing insights even into the periods when her figure completely disappears from written sources (the so-called ‘gaps’ in the documentation). Therefore, Hillner's biography demonstrates a specific focus on material and visual culture. Combined with written sources, which are usually considered separately, this focus manages to produce a vivid portrait not only of the Augusta mother but of many court women of the time, especially female characters with ‘dynastic potential’ (for example, Galerius' mother Romula, Constantine's half-sisters Constantia, Eutropia the younger, Anastasia, Constantine's wife Fausta, his mother-in-law Eutropia, his daughter Constantina, etc.). Hillner situates these women in their mutual relationships, the concrete environments in which they lived and late antique regionalisms. The story of the discovery of the Cross was the greatest enterprise attributed to Helena by ancient sources. However, according to Hillner, Helena was not involved in this at all – although ‘it is not inconceivable that Helena had been given a relic of the Cross during her trip to Jerusalem’ (p. 159). In this perspective, the finding of the Cross appears in the background, dissolved in the twists of later reworkings of her life, less central compared to the significant effort to reconstruct the realia in Helena's biographical path. The book does contain some suggestive hypotheses but these are not properly supported by sources. This includes, for example, the presumed conversion of the empress mother to Christianity in Salona, the capital of Dalmatia, where she would have followed Constantius in performing his duties as praeses Dalmatiarum or Dalmatiae, thus before 310 (pp. 46–47), and the involvement of Bishop Sylvester in the rich ecclesiastical building programme undertaken by Helena in Rome (p. 155), both possible but unverifiable events. It also extends to the dating of the Church of Santa Croce in Jerusalem (ancient Hierusalem) to the mid-fourth century which would exclude Helena's involvement, but is anticipated in many of the recent studies. Nonetheless, the analysis of sources presented here significantly enriches what appears to be one of the most comprehensive and vivid portraits of Helena Augusta produced so far.