To-day in the city of London you may see the memorial church
reared to her memory--the Church of Great St. Helena, in
Bishopgate. A loving, noble, wonderful, and zealous woman, she is
a type of the brave young girlhood of the long ago, and, however
much of fiction there may be mingled with the fact of her
life-story, she was, we may feel assured, all that the
chroniclers have claimed for her--"one of the grandest women of
the earlier centuries."
PULCHERIA of CONSTANTINOPLE:
THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN HORN
[Afterward known as "Pulcheria Augusta, Empress of the East."]
A.D. 413.
There was trouble and confusion in the imperial palace of
Theodosius the Little, Emperor of the East. Now, this Theodosius
was called "the Little" because, though he bore the name of his
mighty grandfather, Theodosius the Great, emperor of both the
East and West, he had as yet done nothing worthy any other title
than that of "the Little," or "the Child." For Theodosius emperor
though he was called, was only a boy of twelve, and not a very
bright boy at that.
His father, Arcadius the emperor, and his mother, Eudoxia the
empress, were dead; and in the great palace at Constantinople, in
this year of grace, 413, Theodosius, the boy emperor, and his
three sisters, Pulcheria, Marina, and Arcadia, alone were left to
uphold the tottering dignity and the empty name of the once
mighty Empire of the East, which their great ancestors,
Constantine and Theodosius, had established and strengthened.
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