The second child of Constantine and Fausta was born soon JL after they moved from Arles to Treves. It was a girl and though he assured Fausta that its sex made no difference to him, Constantine could see that she was depressed by her inability, so far, to bear him a son. Nor did the presence of the Empress Theodora so near Treves with her three sons and three daughters do anything to soothe Fausta’s rather mercurial temper. When Theodora came to pay a courtesy call upon Constantine and Fausta and have a look at the new baby, her stepsister gave her a frosty reception. Afterwards, Constantine took his young wife to task for her coolness.
“Why does she have to stay here at Treves?” Fausta retorted. “It was her home long before it was ours.”
Germans and shell be shoving
“But now it’s ours. Isn’t it enough that you let her keep the title of Augusta, without her always reminding us that your father’s children are older than ours? Let something happen to you in one of those battles you’re always fighting with the Germans and shell be shoving that pale son of hers forward as your successor.”
“I already have a son older than my stepbrother Constantine,” he reminded her.
“And I suppose you plan for him to succeed you.”
“Why not? Crispus is my firstborn.”
“By a peasant girl! And a Christian!”
“Minervina was a merchant’s daughter of Drepanum.”
“As your mother was a barmaid!”
For the first time in his life Constantine felt like striking a woman, and that woman his own wife. “My mother’s family oper
ated an accommodation on the Imperial Post in Bithynia,” he said coldly. “They were not assassins and liars like yours.”
His tone told Fausta she had gone too far and, as mercurial as one of the lizards he’d seen in the East that could change its color with the locale in which it found itself, she was suddenly all sweetness and affection.
“Of course I want you to love your firstborn, darling,” she assured him. “It’s just that I’m jealous of any other woman who has borne you a child, especially a boy.”
The quarrel ended on that note, but it started a train of thought in Constantine’s mind. He’d been too preoccupied with matters of state lately to think much about Crispus, but he remembered now that the boy was almost as old as he had been when he’d begun his military training at Nicomedia. And with that memory he came to a decision.
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