We must look a little closer at the family of Constantine. The Emperor himself was in the very prime of middle age, just turning his fiftieth year. His eldest son, by his first marriage with Minervina, was the hope of the Empire. Crispus, as we have seen, had won distinction on the Rhine, and had just given signal proof of his capacity by his victories over the navy of Licinius in the Hellespont, which had facilitated the capture of Byzantium. He was immensely popular, and the Empire looked to him, as it had looked to Tiberius and Drusus three centuries before, as to a strong pillar of the Imperial throne. But Crispus—if the usually accepted theory be right—had a bitter and implacable enemy in the Empress Fausta, who regarded him as standing in the path of her own children, and menacing their interests by his proved merit and abilities. The eldest of her sons, who bore his father’s name, was not yet in his teens; the second, Constantius, had been born in 319; the third, Constans, was a year younger. Her three daughters were infants or not yet born. These three young princes, like Caius and Lucius,—to pursue the Augustan parallel,—threatened rivalry to Crispus as they grew up, the more so, perhaps, because Constantine had always possessed the domestic virtues which were rare in a Roman Emperor. In his young days one of the court Panegyrists had eulogised him as a latter-day miracle—a prince who had never sowed any wild oats, who had actually had a taste for matrimony while still young, and, following the example of his father, Constantius, had displayed true piety by consenting to become a father.[107] Another Panegyrist praised him for “yielding himself to the laws of matrimony as soon as he ceased to be a boy,” and Eusebius, more than once, emphasises his virtues as a husband and parent. Constantine, we suspect, was a man easily swayed by a strong-minded woman, ambitious to oust a step-son from his father’s favour. ----- Footnote 107: _Novum jam tum miraculum juvenis uxorius_ (_Pan. Vet._, vi., c. 2 et 4). ----- [Illustration: “CONSTANTINE THE GREAT AND HIS MOTHER, ST. HELENA, HOLY, EQUAL TO THE APOSTLES.” FROM A PICTURE DISCOVERED 1845, IN AN OLD CHURCH OF MESEMBRIA. FROM GROSVENOR’S “CONSTANTINOPLE.” ]