Not that his father was particularly demonstrative. He was reserved, guarded about his emotions, and acutely conscious of always maintaining his personal dignity. But he was not a pretentious man, and the great role he played in the world had never gone to his head. For more than thirty years, Constantine the Great had been one of the chief men of his times, and for the last dozen years he had been the sole ruler of the Roman world. But he often stressed to young Constantius that "beneath the purple robes and the grand titles, we're still just a pair of sturdy Illyrian peasants, you and me."

Over time, young Constantius came to realize that his father seemed still to be characterized by a lingering feeling of social inferiority and insecurity. It might have been those Illyrian peasant roots, or perhaps his mother Helena's even more questionable social status – they said she'd been a "bargirl," but even as a teenager Constantius knew that there were coarser synonyms to describe young women who served men in taverns. Yet his father plainly venerated her. Constantius could tell that his father had never entirely forgiven his grandfather and namesake Constantius Chlorus for putting Helena aside so he could marry Theodora, the stepdaughter of Constantius's other grandfather, the Augustus Maximian. "That's the most important advice I can give you," his father had told Constantius one day as they were riding together in the countryside near Nicomedia. "Once you let politics determine whom you marry, you can say goodbye to any chance of happiness."

It had been eleven years since the death of Constantius's mother Fausta, but his father still found it impossible to talk about her. Constantius's understanding of their relationship was based on an odd mix of sources and clues: recollections from his boyhood (he had been only eight when she died), things he had heard from some of his father's old companions, churchmen and family retainers, and his father's painful, tongue-tied inability to actually speak about her. Constantius was absolutely certain about only two things: that his father had – in a strange and conflicted way -- loved his wife very deeply, but that he had never really trusted her, or had much of any idea at all of what she really felt about him.

She was beautiful, Constantius remembered, even when she was well into her forties. Fausta was strikingly petite, with brunette hair that fell in ringlets about her pale face with its delicate features (that slightly upturned nose, that delicate chin) and almost translucent skin. She had a lovely, lilting soprano voice and a delightful laugh, but Constantius never remembered a moment when he thought his father and mother seemed fully relaxed in each other's presence. It was as if, to the end of their days together, they always seemed to be ambassadors from enemy camps brought together, doubtful and distrusting, for a necessary parley.

And, in fact, that was essentially what they had been. Fausta was the daughter of Diocletian's colleague, the Augustus Maximian, who had reluctantly joined Diocletian in declaring his retirement in 305. A year later, Fausta's brother Maxentius had proclaimed himself Emperor at Rome, while the army had declared Constantine Augustus at York on the death of his father Constantius Chlorus. Maxentius needed support against the eastern Emperor Galerius, and Constantine wanted recognition for his own position in Gaul, England, and Spain, so Fausta went forth to bind the families of Maximian and Constantius Chlorus into an everlasting alliance.

The shadow across his parents' relationship was that their marriage had outlasted the political alliance that originally brought them together. Constantius's other grandfather, the old Augustus Maximian, was not like his former colleague Diocletian, able to happily surrender his worldly power for a life of planting cabbages in the gardens of a luxurious coastal villa. Maximian was an inveterate schemer and plotter whom his parents had always spoken about with an odd mix of bemusement and embarrassment. When his son Maxentius had summoned him from retirement to help him consolidate his position at Rome, Maximian had responded by trying to push his son aside and reassume the purple. When that bid failed, Maximian fled across the Alps to seek protection from his son-in-law Constantine, and then likewise tried to organize a coup against him. When that effort failed, Constantine forgave him -- but the old snake could not change his stripes. In 310, he tried to raise another revolt against Constantine. It, too failed, and this time Constantine did not forgive him. In respect for Maximian's status as his father-in-law and his former station as emperor, he permitted him to choose his manner of execution. Maximian chose strangulation, and so his restless, grasping life came to an end.

Two years later, Constantine and his brother-in-law Maxentius went to war. Maxentius's financial exactions, the violence of his troops, his prosecution of Christians, and his sexual licentiousness and lust for other men's wives echoed earlier Roman tyrannies. Constantine marched south to remove the tyrant, while the cross-eyed Maxentius relied more and more on his sorcerers to save him. When none of their spells put an end to Constantine's life, Maxentius found himself forced to hazard everything on a battle at the Milvian Bridge, north of Rome. His unseasoned troops fled at the first shock of the hard-fighting veterans from the north, and Maxentius himself drowned in the Tiber while trying to escape the rout.

Fausta had never denied that her father Maximian was an unscrupulous intriguer, fatally bitten by the love of power, and she likewise freely admitted that her brother had become an evil tyrant. But as he grew older, Constantius could understand the doubts that had troubled his father: what did it say of Fausta that she was sprung from such stock?

Those doubts must have fed on themselves and grown over the years, like a poisoned vine worming its way into the deepest parts of Constantine's soul. Meanwhile, the imperial family's political and marital fault-lines were growing ever more complicated and dangerous. In 324, Constantine and the eastern Augustus Licinus finally squared off for the climactic showdown that had been building between them for ten years – notwithstanding the fact that Licinus was married to one of Constantine's half-sisters and that he was likewise the father-in-law of Constantine's first-born son, the Caesar Crispus. Constantine had smashed Licinus's huge eastern army on the plains outside Adrianople, while Crispus, commanding the Western Empire's naval forces, had forced the Dardanelles against Licinus's superior fleet and annihilated it in the Sea of Marmara. Trapped in his capital at Nicomedia, Licinus at length submitted and threw himself on Constantine's mercy. As a seven-year-old boy, Constantius saw his father become the unquestioned ruler of the entire Roman world.

But it was a triumph that soon turned to ashes as the imperial family was suddenly ripped apart by the unbearable stress of its internal tensions and contradictions. As the popularity of his son Crispus grew, Constantine grew more and more distrustful of him. The first clear sign that serious trouble was brewing came in the fall of 325, only a few months after Constantine had deliberated with hundreds of bishops about fundamental issues of Christian doctrine in the great church of Nicaea. The Emperor suddenly issued a declaration promising rich rewards to anyone who came forward with knowledge of those making disloyal statements or plotting treasonous designs against his person. Not surprisingly, this proclamation generated responses from a crowd of dubious characters who, having already perceived the nature of the Emperor's suspicions, were quick to point accusing fingers at Crispus and leading members of his personal circle.

Nevertheless, for a number of months, nothing happened, and it appeared that the Emperor's more sober counselors had managed to restrain his less rational impulses. Then, in the summer of 326, when the court was at Rome to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Constantine's proclamation as Augustus, he suddenly declared that Crispus had been exposed in a treasonable plot with his father-in-law, the deposed eastern Augustus Licinus. Crispus, Licinus, and Licinus's son were all put to death.

Constantius had been appointed Caesar at the tender age of seven and sent away to rule one of the Gallic provinces in the fall of 324, so he had been a distant and uncomprehending spectator to the fall of his elder half-brother. Still not quite nine years old when the axe fell on Crispus, Constantius was baffled and troubled by the sudden denunciation and execution of his half-brother, unable to know whether the affable, able and popular Crispus had actually been dissembling treasonous designs and murderous intent, or whether his father had somehow been deceived into striking down the son who had previously been his highly effective junior partner.

After his execution, even young Constantius, far away in Gaul, could sense that Crispus's ghost would not be quietly put to rest. Constantine's mother, the Augusta Helena, in particular was openly skeptical of the charges against her grandson. She was in her seventies by then, but her enthusiastic embrace of the Christian religion had not dulled the sharp instincts for reading the intentions and motivations of those around her that she had first honed in an Illyrian tavern a half-century earlier. Crispus had been unquiet in his grave for less than six months when the imperial family was riven by another major explosion: his mother Fausta was accused of an adulterous liaison with a slave in her household and put to death. The execution occurred within the confines of the imperial palace itself: she was confined to her bath, which was then filled with steam until she suffocated.

Constantius was hundreds of miles away when his mother breathed her last, but he could readily imagine the sounds of muffled cries from within the locked chamber, perhaps a small fist pounding on the door as she pleaded with her husband to soften his heart. Afterwards, various other explanations for Fausta's execution had reached his ears. Some claimed Constantine had discovered that she had arranged for the informers to falsely impugn Crispus's loyalty in order to promote her own sons to the throne. There was also a version of the Biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, which claimed that Fausta had arranged for Crispus's downfall out of revenge when he refused to respond to her amorous advances. But such stories commonly circulated whenever a still-attractive older woman and a handsome younger man found their lives interlaced in some domestic tragedy. Constantius had never been able to bring himself to ask his fearsome and self-contained father about the double executions of Crispus and Fausta, which were clearly related in some terrible, obscure connection. These subjects became the imperial family's ultimate taboo. All Constantius could know with certainty was that Crispus was now almost universally conceded to have been falsely accused, while the exact nature of his mother's real crime remained shrouded in mystery.

[To Be Continued]