The life of St Sylvester of Rome
He did not travel to the Council of Nicaea in 325, sending legates in his place, though it seems the formula the council settled on for describing the Son's relation to the Father, one in essence with the Father, had already been discussed with him beforehand. Constantine's gift of the Lateran palace in Rome during these years gave the bishops of Rome their seat for centuries afterward. A far more elaborate legend grew up around Sylvester some four centuries after his death: an eighth century document, the so-called Donation of Constantine, claimed that he had cured the emperor of leprosy and baptized him, receiving in gratitude vast grants of land and authority. Historians have long shown this account to be invented, noting among other things that the historian Eusebius, a contemporary, records Constantine's baptism as having been performed near the end of his life, in 337, by a different bishop entirely. Sylvester reposed in Rome in 335, remembered by the Church less for the legend that later surrounded him than for guiding it through Christianity's uncertain first years of legal peace.
