Her next step was to get rid of the sisters of Romanus. Helena and her five daughters still lived in the palace, or in one out of the great cluster of palaces. There were now at least eight palaces, connected by superb colonnades or separated by choice gardens and terraces, in the vast imperial domain between the Hippodrome and the Sea of Marmora; there were, in addition, several palaces on the Asiatic coast; and the palace at Blachernæ, in the cool, hilly district to the north, had in turn become a vast cluster of palaces, chapels, colonnades and terraced gardens. The mother and sisters of Romanus could therefore find ample hospitality without being compelled to witness the daily dissipation of the Emperor, his drunken banquets and his troops of lascivious actors and women, but they frowned on the kind of Court over which Theophano presided, and she persuaded her husband to remove them. He bade his five sisters adopt the monastic life. Theophano now had two sons and a daughter, and would feel safer if their royal aunts were prevented from making aristocratic marriages. The young women were, however, not at all disposed to embrace a religious life and there were furious scenes in the palace. They were removed to the monastery into which the palace of Theodora’s minister, Theoclistus, had been converted, near the Hippodrome, but they seem still to have intrigued, and were separated and transferred to other monasteries.[21] Romanus was not cruel or malignant. His temper was to live and let live, provided that no check was placed on his imperial pleasures. He merely smiled, therefore, when he heard that, in their convents, his sisters refused to exchange their silks for the hated black robe, or abstain from the delicate meats to which they had been accustomed. We shall later find one of them coming out, in spite of her vows, to marry an Emperor, to the intense mortification of Theophano, who had murdered her husband to marry him herself. Helena was the chief sufferer. She sank into melancholy and illness after the departure of her daughters, and died in September 961.