“That is so, but he was executed in Drepanum by Maximinus. You must visit there on your way home and give it your blessing.”
No doubt that would please Constantine, I thought unhappily. My son had taken to calling himself the thirteenth apostle, a status which in practice seemed to demand the adulation formerly reserved for gods. The Roman Emperors had been deified for centuries, but normally they waited for death to assume full godhead. Constantine seemed to be adopting the Eastern fashion of looking upon rulers as living avatars of a god. Obviously no one dared to remind him that the kingdom of Jesus had not been of this world.
“It is time I made plans for my departure,” I said aloud. The words of the anchorite echoed in my memory, and images of Avalon haunted my dreams. But my present life of privilege was also a prison—how could I escape it? For now it would be enough to return to Rome. Perhaps from there I would be able to see my way.
By the time I left Palestine a full year had passed. I did not detour to visit Drepanum, preferring to remember it as it had been when I lived there with Constantius. Martha, her fervour undiminished, had remained to serve in the household of Bishop Macarius, but my faithful Cunoarda was still with me, and my Canaanite dog, and the little thorn tree. With us came several chests full of souvenirs, both gifts and things I had somehow ended up buying—Palestinian robes and pottery, Tyrian textiles and glass from Askalon. It was Rome that now seemed strange, a vast labyrinth of decaying splendours which included the Domus Sessorianum.
Constantine was still in the East, supervising the demolition of the old town of Byzantium so that he could create a new Rome that would bear his name. The little boy who had built fortresses in our back garden now had an entire city to play with. Even the Emperor Hadrian’s building projects had stopped short of such ambition. When Constantine had finished with Constantinople, would he compel God, I wondered, to let him re-create the world?
Shortly after my return I went to the church of the saints Marcellinus and Petrus to attend services and to donate a golden vessel that had been given to me by the Procurator in Palestine. In one of the courtyards stood a sarcophagus of white marble with reliefs of horsemen. Constantine had ordered it, said the priest, but now the Emperor was planning a great mausoleum in Constantinople, and no one had said what was to be done with the thing.
I suppressed my amusement and assured him that they would no doubt find some use for it, and encouraged him to return to his report on the church’s charities. I had had some thought of occupying my days by helping out here, but it was clear that Helena Augusta was far too important a figure to be allowed to dirty her hands in that way. At least I assumed that the reverence with which I was treated was due to my position. But since I returned from the Holy Land the offerings of flowers had begun to appear at my door again, and sometimes people would make me an obeisance that even the Emperor did not demand. It was disquieting, and I realized that I would either have to become a recluse, or go about the city in disguise.
Cunoarda was scandalized, but in Palestine I had grown accustomed to a simpler life. I was now nearly eighty years old, and surely, as I told her, I had earned the right to do as I pleased, or at least as much of what I pleased as my ageing body would allow. Too often the old were thrust into a corner, sent off to some country cottage where they would not get in the way of their descendents, or even put into the street, if they had no children who would, however grudgingly, provide for them. To become a gilded icon, set safely in a niche on the wall and brought out on holidays, was only a more comfortable way of being put aside.