A _stabulum_ was, in the language of the time, one of the meaner inns in the towns through which the Roman roads ran. A _stabularia_--the epithet used by St. Ambrose--was a woman or girl connected with the inn; and those temporary resting-places for soldiers or merchants on their journeys were so easy in their ways that the word was sometimes used in an unpleasant sense. We may follow the early tradition that Helena was the daughter of a man who kept one of these inns, possibly a quite respectable establishment, at Drepanum, on the way to the city of Nicomedia, which Diocletian had made his capital. Here, in or about the year 273, the young Roman officer Constantius--later, for some obscure reason, called Constantius the Pale (Chlorus)--saw and fell in love with Helena. The road that ran through Drepanum was much used by the troops, and the encounter is placed at the time when Aurelian was conducting his campaign against Zenobia. Constantius, an excellent officer and the son of a provincial noble of some distinction, would then (273) be in his twenty-third year. Helena, who was over eighty at her death in 328, must have been two or three years older. Historians have left us a lengthy and learned debate on the question whether she was the wife or the concubine of Constantius, and the grouping of the combatants is singular. In the Migne edition of the works of the Fathers we find a note appended to the passage of St. Ambrose, which I have quoted, in which the Benedictine commentators observe that “all the writers on Roman affairs declare that Helena was the concubine, not the wife, of Constantius,” and they adopt that view. Yet the critical Gibbon defends “the legality of her marriage” with a rare and edifying chivalry, and Mr. Firth, in his recent biography of Constantine, asserts that it is “beyond question.” With such weighty encouragement ecclesiastical writers have confidently deserted the Benedictines and followed Gibbon. Let us first hear the authorities, and we may not find the problem insoluble. Bishop Eusebius, the chaplain of the Imperial family, as one may term him, would not mention such a circumstance in his “Life of Constantine,” even if he knew it to be true; but it is not quite accurate to say peremptorily that the bishop _never_ mentions it. In the second book of his “Chronicle” (_ad annum_ 310) we read that Constantine was “the son of Constantius by his concubine Helena.” We have no means of determining if these words were written by Eusebius or added by St. Jerome.[22] Even in the latter case it is a weighty testimony.