Helen, the wife of Constantius Chlorus, and mother of Constantine (247–328), may be regarded as having most brilliantly inaugurated the era of Christian charity in the Middle Ages. Simple and modest, kind to the suffering and to the needy, she tended and consoled the poor with maternal solicitude; her fortune was exclusively devoted to their relief. When, in her extreme old age, this pious lady went to visit the Holy Places in Palestine, she made most munificent gifts to the sick soldiers, whom the imperial government left without relief; also to the places where the inhabitants were poor; and to the religious houses and churches, whose mission it was “to succour the suffering members of Jesus Christ” (Fig. 265), according to the figurative expression which the new faith used to characterize human misery. She recalled the exiles, ransomed the captives, released from the mines the unfortunate men who had been condemned to labour underground, and obtained for them the means of living in open daylight, thus causing them to bless her name and that of her God. Her daughter Constance also devoted herself to works of charity; she was accompanied by a band of maidens whom she animated with her example--and this was, in fact, the first school of Sisters of Charity. Despite the religious disputes of this century, Christian charity did not stop here; it received a further impulse during the reign of Theodosius, thanks to Placilla his wife, and to Pulcheria his daughter, both of whom were canonised after death. Placilla and Pulcheria were the guardian angels of the imperial palace, Placilla especially being full of compassion for all those who were in distress. She would go, without attendant, to visit the poor in their hovels; she passed whole days with the sick in the infirmaries attached to the canonical churches and convents, never shrinking from any charitable service, however repugnant it might be. Pulcheria, a worthy rival of her mother, was associated with her in all these good works by their eloquent panegyrist, St. Gregory of Nyssa. She was, nevertheless, outdone by another Pulcheria, grand-daughter of the great Theodosius, who was called _augusta_, and who already, at the death of her father the Emperor Arcadius, though at that time only sixteen, was a model of piety and wisdom; she established so severe a rule of life and such complete asceticism around her, that her palace was commonly “the convent” (_asceterium vulgo diceretur_). For forty years she reigned like a saint and a great empress, and this period was for the Church a golden age. [Illustration: Fig. 267.--The Holy Brothers, Cosmas and Damianus (end of the Third Century), visiting a sick man and relieving him.--Picture on wood, by Francesco Peselli, in the Louvre (Fifteenth Century).]