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rotated extrusion mesh surfaces, model.
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laws [of silence] "made"
2002.07.31 13:19
This week 1676 years ago Rome witnessed the funeral of Helena Augusta. Constantine was in Rome to finish the celebration of his 20th jubilee as Roman emperor on 25 July 326, and Helena was late in arriving from Palestine with a piece of the Cross. Reenactionary indications point to 28 July being the date of Helena's death (very possibly at Naples), and to August 1 being the date of the funeral (a web search of mausoleo elena will show where Helena was buried). Constantine left Rome for the last time on 3 August 326--this is more or less precisely when Rome as capital of the Roman Empire ceased to be, and when Constantinople as capital of the Roman Empire began. And, it is at this time that the law of silence regarding Helena and her finding of the Cross at Golgotha was instituted and immediately enforced. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan during the reign of emperor Theodosius, officially broke the silence on 25 February 395 during his obituary of Theodosius at Milan.
All this may not seem important, but this is first time in modern history for the exact date of Helena's death to be established, thus rendering a rewriting of Constantinian necessary. Ironically, it was Eusebius, the first biographer of Constantine (c. 337) that cleverly recorded the events of Constantine's Vicennalia year in sequence, but modern historiography was led astray because it did not consider the possibility of a law of silence, even though modern historians do nothing but argue over Eusebius' silence.
Unlike damnatio memoriae, which really only more deeply establishes memories via the scars of erasure, the uncanny genius of laws of silence is that the more successful they are, the less history will ever know about them.
If nothing else, it is at least nice to remember the death of the woman who became nothing less than the first real master planner of Christianity and its architectural spread throughout the Middle East and Europe. St. Helena is also the patron saint of miners--Eusebius tells us how Helena freed slave-labor miners as she journeyed from the Middle East on her way back to Rome.
[In 2004, more severe reenactionary implications led to Helena's death having had occurred 25 July 326.]
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