The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor (AM 5816) states that *Helena (empress and mother of Constantine, S00185) had a vision instructing her to excavate the sacred sites in Jerusalem. Chronicle compiled in the Byzantine Empire in the early 9th c., using extracts from earlier Greek texts.
Evidence ID
E07994
Type of Evidence
Literary - Other narrative texts (including Histories)
Major author/Major anonymous work
Theophanes
Chronicle of Theophanes, AM 5816 [AD 323/4]
Τῷ δ᾿αὐτῷ ἔτει Ἑλένην, τὴν θεόφρονα αὐτοῦ μητέρα, ἔστεψε καὶ μονήταν ὡς βασιλίδι ἀπένειμεν. αὕτη δὲ ὀπτασίαν ἑώρακε κελεύουσαν αὐτῇ καταλαβεῖν τὰ Ἱεροσόλυμα καὶ τοὺς ὑπὸ ἀνόμων καταχωσθέντας θείους τόπους εἰς φῶς ἀγαγεῖν. ἡ δὲ τὸν παῖδα Κωνσταντῖνον ᾐτήσατο τὰ θεόθεν αὐτῇ κελευσθέντα πληρῶσαι.
'In this year he crowned Helena, his god-minded mother, and assigned to her as empress the privilege of coinage. She had a vision which ordered her to go to Jerusalem and to bring to light the sacred sites which had been buried there by the impious. She begged her son Constantine to fulfil these commands sent to her from God. And he acted in obedience to her.'
Text: de Boor 1883, 23.
Translation: Mango and Scott 1997, 37.
MiraclesMonarchs and their family
Apparition, vision, dream, revelation
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesMonarchs and their family
Women
Source
Theophanes (759/60-818) came from a wealthy and politically prominent family from Constantinople. After marriage and a brief career as a secular official, he became a monk, living in the monastic communities centred around Mount Sigriane in Bithynia, and eventually abbot of the community known as Megas Agros. He acquired the epithet 'Confessor' (Homologetes) through his resistance to the renewal of Iconoclasm by the emperor Leo V (813-820), which led to Theophanes' imprisonment and then exile to the island of Samothrace, where he died. For full discussion of the evidence for Theophanes' life, see Mango and Scott 1997, xliv-lii, and, for a briefer summary, his entry ('Theophanes 18') in the Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire (http://www.pbe.kcl.ac.uk).The Chronicle of Theophanes covers the period from 284/5 to 812/813. It was a continuation of the Chronicle of George Synkellos (ob. c. 810) which ran from the creation of the world to 284. George had apparently intended to continue his chronicle down to his own time but died before he could do so; the extent to which Theophanes, in producing his chronicle, was simply editing and polishing material already collected by George remains uncertain (see Mango and Scott 1997, liv-lv). The Chronicle of George Synkellos contains some material relevant to the cult of saints, up to its stopping point in 284; however, this is not included in the CSLA database because the sources for all George's information (chiefly Eusebius) survive and have database entries in their own right.
Theophanes and his sources
The key characteristic of Theophanes’ Chronicle is that it is not a composition of Theophanes’ own, but a patchwork of extracts from earlier sources, collected and arranged in chronicle form, in other words under an entry for each year. Theophanes’ role was confined to piecing the patchwork together (i.e. removing pieces from their original context and placing them under individual years), and to some extent condensing and abbreviating material. As he put it in his preface: 'I did not set down anything of my own composition, but have made a selection from the ancient historians and prose-writers and have consigned to their proper places the events of every year, assigned without confusion' (trans. Mango and Scott 1997, 2). Since many of Theophanes’ sources are still extant, the extracts in his chronicle can often be compared with the original, which shows that that this was indeed his method of compilation, though he makes occasional editorial interventions, and sometimes misunderstands source material (Mango and Scott 1997, lxxii, xci-xcv; Howard-Johnston 2010, 272-3, 276-84).
It is because Theophanes' Chronicle is essentially a compilation of earlier sources that a number of extracts from the Chronicle are included in the CSLA database, even though the work itself dates from more than a century after AD 700, our usual cut-off point for evidence. We have not included material which reproduces sources that have their own entries in our database (such as Eusebius, John Malalas, Theodore Lector, Procopius, and Theophylact Simocatta), but have included entries (for the period up to 700) for items in Theophanes whose original source is lost.
For discussion of Theophanes' work as a whole, see the introduction to Mango and Scott's translation (Mango and Scott 1997, xliii-c); Howard-Johnston 2010, 268-312; and the essays in Jankowiak and Montinaro 2015.
Chronology
Theophanes' chronology is based primarily on the annus mundi (year since Creation). There was more than one system of calculating AM dates: the one used by Theophanes, following George Synkellos, was the Alexandrian era, which started from the equivalent of 5492 BC, thus making the first year of the chronicle, AD 284/5, the AM year 5777. The first day of the year under the Alexandrian system was 25 March, and this was used by George Synkellos; however, it is evident that Theophanes (without ever stating his practice explicitly) used 1 September as the first day of his chronicle years, thus matching the standard secular dating system in the Byzantine empire (indictions): see Mango and Scott 1997, lxvi. While the year-by-year chronology is based on the annus mundi, Theophanes includes considerable other information in the heading for each entry (not given here): the year from the Incarnation (the same principle as AD dating, but the system used by Theophanes dated the Incarnation to AD 8/9), and the regnal years of the Roman emperor (Theophanes only ever lists one emperor here, normally the one ruling in Constantinople), the king of Persia (the Caliph in later entries), and the bishops of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. The accuracy and mutual consistency of these different forms of dating varies considerably across different entries. In the body of each entry, Theophanes often preserves the form of dating used by his source, such as consular years or indictions. For a full overview, see Mango and Scott 1997, lxiii-lxxiv.
Discussion
While the role of Helena in discovering the True Cross during her visit to the Holy Land (probably in 327) is a commonplace in later literature, the claim that she was inspired to investigate the holy sites by a vision is unique to the tradition represented by Theophanes and Alexander the Monk (on whom see the discussion in E07993).(Users of our database should note that, while her discovery of the True Cross was central to the emergence of a cult of saint Helena, we have not systematically entered all the texts that relate to the finding of the Cross, a relic of the Crucifixion, rather than of a saint. There is a summary discussion of the relevant evidence in the Discussion section of E02994.)
Bibliography
Edition:de Boor, C., Theophanis Chronographia (Leipzig: Teubner, 1883).
English translation and commentary:
Mango, C., and Scott, R., The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History AD 284-813 (Oxford: OUP, 1997).
On Theophanes:
Howard-Johnston, J., Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Oxford: OUP, 2010).
Jankowiak, M., and Montinaro, P. (eds.), Studies in Theophanes (Travaux et mémoires 19; Paris: Centre d'Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, 2015).
Record Created By
David Lambert
Date of Entry
11/10/2020
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00185 | Helena, empress and mother of Constantine, ob. 328 | Ἑλένη | Certain |
|---|
Please quote this record referring to its author, database name, number, and, if possible, stable URL:
David Lambert, Cult of Saints, E07994 - http://csla.history.ox.ac.uk/record.php?recid=E07994