Myth Monday Part II - Constantine's Flora

I haven't chased down the following interesting aside on Flora, hoping that some of you would already know more about it and would be willing to elaborate in the comments. In "The Palladium and the Pentateuch: Towards a Sacred Topography of the Later Roman Empire" Phoenix, Vol. 55, No. 3/4 (Autumn - Winter, 2001), pp. 369-410, Clifford Ando writes that Emperor Constantine the Great brought Flora's cult statue to Constantinople and that the name Flora stands for Rome:

"Constantinopolitans agreed that Constantine established a temple for the Tyche of his city and that he named her Anthousa, which was clearly intended to be a translation of Flora .... [A]lmost everyone ... believed that Constantine had taken ... [the cult statue] from Rome.... The cult and temple of the city's Tyche was certainly well-established in the fourth-century, since we are told that Julian sacrificed to her in the basilica where she lived.... [Theodorus, prefect of the city] is celebrated by an epigram in the Palatine anthology, which insists that his action honored Tyche and, by extension, "Rome of the golden shield."' It is very tempting to connect this name to the precious information provided by Servius on the Genius of Rome:

Lydus continued: The sacred name is Flora, in Greek Anthousa, whence comes the festival Anthesteria. The political name is Rome. The ritual name was known to all and used openly, but the sacred one was entrusted only to the pontfices for the completion of sacred rites.

The fifth-century appropriation of the Palladium and Genius of Rome was masterful, on several levels, for even as Pallas and Flora endowed their new home with a sacred identity and mythological past, their departure deprived Rome of those same things."