ABSTRACT
In 327 Constantine founded the city of Helenopolis in honour of his mother Helena at the village of Drepanum, ‘The Sickle’, on the south side of the gulf of Nicomedia and close to the famous hot springs of Yalova, which had been part of the territory of Byzantium for centuries and now served as a natural resort for the court of Constantinople.1 She had chosen the site herself since it harboured the remains of one of the most famous martyrs of the Great Persecution, St Lucian of Antioch. This was no guarantee of its suitability as a future urban settlement and, indeed, little more than two centuries later John Malalas punningly renamed it Eleeinoupolis, City of Misery, its last appearance in our surviving sources before it disappeared from history.2 The foundation, according to Sozomen,3 was designed to perpetuate Helena’s memory, and Constantine thereby followed in the footsteps of any number of other rulers who had named or renamed cities after their wives and female kin, the Apameas, Laodiceas, Stratonicaeas, and probably most appositely of all Faustinopolis, formerly the village of Halala in the northern foothills of the Taurus near the Cilician Gates, which Marcus Aurelius had founded to commemorate his wife Faustina, who had died there.4
