Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (10 page)

According to Procopius, as we saw, Theodora was already sexually active at an extremely young age, and she engaged in perverted sex. The perversion was chiefly social, for while Comito, the actress-courtesan, shone among the powerful and could maybe take her stool to the notables and sit with them, Theodora stayed behind the scenes and mingled with the dregs of society, with “wretches and slaves.” The masters liked Comito; perhaps she pleased them and satisfied them. Meanwhile, there was mingling between their respective slaves, both on the stage and in life (Theodora and the “wretched”). The criticism is even more scathing and cunning considering that as the imperial couple Justinian and Theodora later reinforced certain ceremonial aspects of their position, endowing imperial power with sacredness, to the point of reducing even the highest state offices to positions of “slavery” beholden to the emperor and empress.

Procopius’s social reproach is pregnant with moral reproach, because Theodora’s sexual activity was sodomitic. The writer claims that she engaged in these acts not only in theater basements but also in “brothels,” though it is not clear if he meant the “immature” girl or, later, the woman who had reached full personal and sexual development. He did not consider that Theodora might have been in financial trouble. To him, it was simply a question of personal inclination, of her indulging in “a masculine type of lewdness … this monstrous business … this unnatural traffic of the body.”

The link to Christian moral standards is extremely weak, since the
Church condemned all sexual practices not aimed at procreation, even if they were done within a church marriage. On the other hand, Christianity had introduced a different view of prostitutes, declaring that even loathsome harlots could precede proper Pharisees into the Kingdom of Heaven. As a matter of fact, the controversial Mary Magdalene had been the first to be certain of the Resurrection. Later, the Byzantine eastern Mediterranean was enthralled by the adventures of reformed women “sinners” such as Saint Aphra, Saint Pelagia, Saint Margaret-Marina, and even Saint Mary the Egyptian, whose biography was written in the seventh century, although the core narrative of her life occurs earlier. According to Christian doctrine, the gates of Heaven stood open and ready to welcome any whores who repented of their sins. In the meantime, late antiquity viewed the daily practice of their trade as an evil that was somehow necessary and tolerable. In effect, in the words of an early father of the Church, it kept lust away from the undefiled world and restricted it within the boundaries of institutionalized prostitution.
¹⁹

Ancient pagan morality was much stricter, since its discriminating point was not divine grace or the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus Christ the Galilean had opened to everyone—slaves included—but the primacy of the male. Roman cultural influence, in particular, determined that a woman, no matter what her social condition, ought not to get pleasure from sex, whether it was practiced “according to” or “against” nature. She merely had to give pleasure. And to give it especially and solely to free Roman men. Prostitution was acceptable so long as a prostitute was simply a sexual thing, the recipient of irrepressible male virility, men being the only part of the sexual equation that ought to be valued and satisfied.

When an adulterous relationship resulted in a lawsuit, it was the woman who suffered most. Still, there was no worse fate than that reserved for the
pathicus
, the passive partner in a male-to-male relationship, the one who was subjected to
pedicatio
(anal penetration) instead of imposing it, as a “true Roman male” should.
²⁰
The Roman world had no concept of the subtleties of the ancient Athenian custom of homophile relationship between an adult male lover or pedagogue and
a beloved boy who was to be initiated to sexual rituals, rituals that were understood chiefly as a necessary stage in a boy’s growth into manhood.

In the Christian era, the compilers of the body of laws known as the
Codex Theodosianus
(Theodosian Code) of 438 did not extend any brotherly love to the
pathici
: they confirmed the strict ancient penalties for it, including burning at the stake. Thus writers such as Procopius could not have detected a worse infamy in Theodora. For not only had she, from a very young age, dared to seek pleasure for herself rather than for her sexual partners, but she had also distinguished herself in the loathsome specialty of the
pathici
, and then had dared to sit on the imperial throne. To the historian from Caesarea, she was indeed a living abomination.

The mind-set of the ancient historian or the Christian homilist (as we saw in Saint John Chrysostom’s attitude about actors’ low social extraction) is quite distant from our modern sensitivity. Such a writer could not conceive of the question that springs immediately to the mind of a modern scholar: Were the sexual practices attributed to young Theodora “other-directed,” dictated primarily by external situations and outside forces, by financial or social constraints?
²¹
When these factors are denied or omitted from consideration, it is easy to present sexual promiscuity as an avocation, deeply rooted, practiced early on, in vaguely identified brothels or even in the vaulted basements below a stage (the
fornices
, root of the word
fornication
). Our modern sensitivity has a different interpretation of perversion: it considers contemptible not the child or minor who might himself need protection and care, but the knowing adult who lays hands on the child’s body.

Soon, according to the
Secret History
, Theodora’s sexual life ceased to be passive and she began to interact with her men, moving from sexual acts “against” nature to a more mature phase of sex “according to” nature, a transition that paralleled the rise in her social rank. But here too there was a reversal of sexual behavior: she took not a traditionally passive (female) role but an active, even sinister one.

ithin the macrocosm of Constantinople’s Christian Roman Empire, the chronicles of 513 to 515 dealt primarily with a political, religious, and military struggle. Emperor Anastasius, a supporter of Monophysitism (the belief that Jesus Christ’s divine nature prevailed over his human nature), was pitted against Vitalian, the military man who crusaded for the pro-papacy religious orthodoxy that Christ, the Incarnate Word, partook of two natures, divine and human. At the time, nothing was further from Theodora’s microcosm than any sort of imperial destiny. During these years of adolescence she matured enough to establish her theatrical career. And so, writes Procopius, “she joined the women of the stage and straightway became a courtesan, of the sort whom men of ancient times used to call ‘infantry.’ For she was neither a flute-player nor a harpist, nay, she had not even acquired skill in the dance, but she sold her youthful beauty to those who chanced to come along, plying her trade with practically her whole body.”
¹

Far from being not yet “ripe,” Theodora had now matured; from an apprentice in the service of her sister Comito, she had become a full-fledged actress. Possibly she joined a women’s professional association similar to the guilds of the male mime actors; her mother might have recommended her to the director of one of these guilds.

At first glance, Theodora’s career seemed to follow a different path from Comito’s. She seemed to have poor acting skills. While her sister
“had already scored a brilliant success among the harlots of her age,”
²
Theodora was described as a failed actress. The
Secret History
blamed her because she could neither play a musical instrument nor dance, an implicit comparison with perfect courtesans such as the famous Aspasia must have been: Aspasia was Pericles’ mistress in fifth-century
B.C.
Athens, more than a thousand years before Theodora’s time. But this temporal gap was of no consequence in the millennial Greek literary discourse, and Procopius’s readers might have caught a refined echo of distant days in his disparaging labeling of Theodora as an “infantry” or “troop” courtesan, the antithesis of the courtesan known as a “knight”—a highly prized, high-level courtesan (these terms were already used in ancient Attic comedy).
³

Theodora seemed limited to being a group dancer, just another body in the corps de ballet. Of course she was on the stage now, no longer in the wings. But the stage merely revealed—even highlighted—her weakness as an artist. Instead of redefining her through her talent, it underscored Theodora’s identity as a pure sexual object, on account of her great physical beauty. And now she offered her entire body, as she had not done before. She now belonged to everyone, to “those who chanced to come along.” While Theodora the person seemed to conquer the stage, she was in fact losing it, passing it on, as it were, to her body. To her beauty.

Like a skilled director in the theater that he so detested, Procopius—the only source we have on Theodora’s youth—turns off all the stage lights, leaving only one spotlight focused on the young girl. She appears in all her physical splendor, but it’s a short-lived effect. When called upon to sing and dance she reveals her inadequacy, he reports, and this serves the purpose of the
Secret History
though there is no concrete evidence to support Procopius’s claim of acting mediocrity. In fact, Theodora’s theater background that he condemns must have at least given her some experience with ruses, with the art of deception. Possibly Theodora was too young to land leading roles in which she could display whatever skills she had. And so she built up her experience in secondary roles, in the background. Procopius reproaches her for failing to do what in any case she
could not
do.

We must assume that in her early acting days Theodora, like Comito, had her mother’s protection, fueled as it might have been by self-interest. In choosing and scheduling her daughters’ progressive appearances on the stage, she must have also filtered the progressive stages of Theodora’s sexual and artistic coming of age. In all likelihood, she discreetly paraded her daughter’s beauty on the stage before offering her young, beautiful body. And not, clearly, to “those who chanced to come along” but to reliable, financially stable men of high rank. Possibly the connection with the Blue team helped here too. Probably Comito and her mother prepared Theodora for her first encounter and those that followed.

In her sexual training there may have been someone who, with a delicacy uncommon for the times, taught her both how to pleasure a man and how to find pleasure herself; but more probably, she had to figure out on her own how to live with the “service” that was being requested of her.

Emma Hamilton (1761–1815), last great love of the heroic Admiral Nelson, had a life not unlike Theodora’s, at least in the early years. She leaped up the ladder of society in London and in Naples (the liveliest Mediterranean city of her time, as Constantinople had once been) with the support of the mother who had introduced her to artistic circles and to a courtesan’s career, even though Emma had never displayed any specific penchant or desire for this. And yet, the two women tactfully compared their satisfying erotic experiences, without envying or begrudging each other; and these experiences in turn did not weaken their faith in a just and providential God.

While Theodora might have appeared artistically weak in the early part of her stage career—her “infantry” period—the reason might be that her mother, in particular, needed to protect her at the outset. Combining the career of actress with that of courtesan meant not only being sexually available, but being subject to the primitive remedies against the possible effects of an active sexual life. It was risky for young Theodora, and not only for her; life at the time was harsh for all women. Most girls at her age, sixteen, were already married or close to it. Many had already given birth to their first child. Theodora was no
exception: she became a mother around 515 or 516. We do not know the name of her daughter, but the girl was to play a significant role in history.

It is difficult to connect Theodora’s motherhood to other events in her life. What we do know is that at some point Theodora suddenly reappeared in public, with the self-assurance and inevitability that always marks the young and talented. Around 517 or 518, when she must have been seventeen or eighteen years old, Theodora joined a mime troupe possibly connected with the Blue team. At that point, she was able to land roles in which “she immediately became admired” in the theaters of Constantinople’s suburbs, far from the monumental and intellectual center of the great Christian Roman capital. Perhaps one of the theaters was in Sykae (today’s Galata), beyond the Golden Horn, and another in the northern district of the city outside the walls, in Blachernae. Now Theodora’s qualities were recognized even by the first of her detractors, Procopius, who writes: