Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (34 page)

But perhaps it was more than “nature”; perhaps the Augusta was swayed by ceremony and by the protocol that required philanthropy, charity, and imperial mercy impregnated with the Christian ideals of late antiquity. Nor should we dismiss the importance of personal experience: Theodora, a child of the arenas, of the stage, and of the street, had a peculiarly feminine and ancient intimacy with sorrow; like Virgil’s Dido, she could say, “An expert in grief, I learned to give succor to the wretched.”
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Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that Theodora was active on behalf of women. More than a philanthropist, we might say she was a “philogynist.” Whereas she might have battled the other actresses, years before, when she was struggling to become a theatrical star, now that she was firmly seated on the throne, she was a resource for all the female subjects who needed her help.

The beginning of her relationship with Justinian had occasioned a legal provision regarding women, the law “On Marriage,” which permitted a high-ranking man to wed a former actress if she was a “repentant”
Christian. Once she became the Augusta, Theodora developed her own political program for women, based particularly on her own youthful experience when she had traveled through the Levant from Pentapolis to the capital of the empire. She had learned then that women needed as much financial autonomy as possible. Her history justifies her social and political awareness of economic factors, which were not common in an empress of Constantinople.

Theodora had forgotten neither her widowed mother nor her own fatherless childhood; the provisions for inheritance in Justinian’s laws were not random. Formerly only sons could inherit, but now the right was extended to daughters. Furthermore, the new laws allowed a widow to take possession of the dowry she had brought to the marriage. And the dowry now returned to the wife’s family if she died (or if the marriage was dissolved).

Even beyond issues of dowry and inheritance, women’s status was enhanced in these years. A woman became an autonomous economic entity, in charge of her own
parapherna
, the property (jewelry, garments, real estate, furnishing, and other items) outside of the dowry that she had got as a gift or an inheritance. A woman could buy and sell, lend and borrow—even to or from her own husband.

Justinian and Theodora sought to create a deeply Christian society based on marriage and the nuclear family. This meant that the new laws identified a woman as a wife, and marriage was endowed with deep meaning: Justinian’s laws noted, “Marriage does not consist in sexual relations, but in conjugal affection.”
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This general intention underlay each legislative act on the topic; and the same intention is seen in the emperor’s laws that expressed the love he felt for his wife, Theodora.

Theodora’s sense of female solidarity was expressed spectacularly in 535, her great year. Theodora must have been about thirty-five, the age of perfect maturity for men in the classical tradition. She most certainly inspired the empire’s decision that year to protect prostitutes, a group of women at risk. The “On Pimps” (
De lenonibus
) law (
Novel
No. 14) is known as an invitation to practice chastity. More specifically, it is a detailed analysis of the phenomenon of prostitution in the capital, whose
population (as Theodora knew well) didn’t slake all its appetites by simply worshipping Christian relics.

The law described the situation in the countryside, which was picked clean by official tax collectors and by pimps supplying Constantinople’s brothels. Farmers impoverished by the tax collectors often delivered their daughters to the pimps, thus reducing the number of mouths they had to feed and also getting cash to pay their taxes. The illiterate young girls were taken to the city, where they signed contracts (inking a small Christian cross in place of a signature) in which they turned themselves over to brothel owners. And the owners would dispose of them when they were no longer useful.

Theodora found the situation unacceptable (even as an outside observer—even if she never worked as a prostitute, as some sources claim). And so the law forbade pimping and banished “pleasure houses” not only from the capital but also from the major cities of the empire.

It is common knowledge that many laws promulgated under Justinian and Theodora were not faithfully applied, and one of them was
Novel
No. 14. It never really took effect: it remained primarily an indicator of the emperor and empress’s attention to this issue. It is meaningful that Theodora—who had climbed so high by means of the inhuman system of traditional sexism geared to the satisfaction of the male—would inspire laws opposed to that very system.

Because of the law, many former prostitutes were left to fend for themselves without the income they had once earned from their “profession.” The well-meaning philanthropy may have unintentionally proved inhumane: Theodora may paradoxically have brought hardship to her protégées. To resolve this problem, the empress created a solution “among her other charities” and—possibly drawing from her private coffers (for perhaps John the Cappadocian objected to the use of public money for this purpose)—distributed one golden solidus to all prostitutes, allowing them some economic protection as they started new lives. But ten to twenty solidi a year was the bare minimum needed for survival at the time. And each pimp apparently received five solidi for every girl “that was returned to virtue.”
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So the measures proved insufficient, and the ancient “vice of the
flesh” continued to thrive. Theodora’s next move was to house former prostitutes in a building on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus. It was called the Metanoia convent, the convent of Conversion or Repentance. Physicians, nuns, and devout women (especially widows) attended to the new arrivals there—maybe five hundred girls in all—and tried to reintegrate them into society with different jobs.
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The cloistered prostitutes clearly had less brilliant prospects than the “liberated” actresses of the law “On Marriage.” The actresses had to make only a simple, individual choice, while the prostitutes were treated institutionally. In the Metanoia convent they spent their time in confession, prayer, and repentance, and at lessons in sewing, spinning, cooking, and nursing. These activities were all considered suitable for women freed from the old bondage and released into the “renewed” Christian society of the seventh eon.

Theodora’s critics leapt at the opportunity to attack her for this initiative, and not simply because these measures proved ineffective in uprooting vice. Rumor had it that the Augusta wanted to force the prostitutes into a life they didn’t want or understand. It was said that some girls hung ropes out their high windows and climbed down to escape their new destiny, and that others had even committed suicide, overwhelmed by the attention focused on them. Of course, it is possible that more than one “beneficiary” suffered attacks of depression in the Metanoia; even today, patients reject rehabilitation in therapeutic communities.

Again, Theodora’s critics did not grasp the pressure or the outright compulsory element of the “profession.” They were quick to reduce it to a personal inclination and even to ridicule it.

The redefinition of a woman’s role in these and other legislative provisions was part of a general blueprint for a new society drawn along Christian principles, which Justinian and Theodora were developing for the entire Ecumene. The basic unit of this new society, the mononu-clear family, answered to the complementary, all-encompassing power of the emperor and the Church. And the family had to be stable: a law in 542 abolished divorce on the grounds of “mutual consent,” which
had been acceptable in the Christian Roman empire for almost two centuries. As the mononuclear family was ratified, other social bonds were losing their centrality, including the centuries-old customs that had survived through Theodora’s youth and had facilitated her miraculous imperial career. These were the associations centered around theaters, racetracks, and baths; after the Nika uprising, the factions were transformed and their roles redefined.

The redefinition of marriage was the most revolutionary aspect of this new perspective. It’s no coincidence that the bride and groom from the most controversial marriage of late antiquity, Justinian and Theodora, insisted on the centrality of that institution. Marriage stood as the regulator and organizer of a Christianized society precisely because it introduced an individual and moral dimension, conjugal affection. It also leveled political, personal, or social expectations that the Augusti might have found unwelcome.

From the very start, Justinian and Theodora analyzed the marriages around them. The enemies who accused them of arranging marriages based on calculation failed to notice that before then, love had never been the only reason for getting married. Great aristocratic families had always ensured the continuity of their social position by shrewdly arranging unions with other excellent families carrying ancient, illustrious names. The very love that just a few years before had been criticized in Justinian as a personal “flaw” was now nostalgically considered to be something that the rulers had done away with, to society’s loss.

The new Augusti from the lower ranks of society preferred to have an easy-to-govern mingling of the classes, in the shadow of their own power, which, in turn, they felt interpreted and reflected God’s will.

In 535 and 536, all of Constantinople was gossiping about a famous marriage that had been “piloted” by the throne. The spouses were the son of a high-ranking dignitary and minister, and the daughter of Chrysomallo, the former actress and courtesan who had come to the palace under Theodora’s protection. The young bridegroom, Saturninus, had been promised in marriage to a high-ranking girl, but Theodora tricked him into marrying her protégeé. Saturninus soon complained to his relatives that the bride Theodora had “forced on
him” was not “untouched.”
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The rumor reached the empress, who took immediate action: she ordered some of her men to arrest Saturninus. As soon as they grabbed him, they threw him up in the air—a mocking, not a celebratory gesture at that time. Then they started to whip him, to teach him never to complain again.

It might seem that, by punishing Saturninus, Theodora was justifying sexual license for women. But she actually suppressed it, as proven by her continued opposition to Antonina’s long affair with Theodosius and her treatment of two aristocratic sisters who were both young widows. The empress reproached the sisters in vain about their active sex lives; then she forced them to marry two men of modest social extraction. The two women even sought sanctuary in the Holy Wisdom church before the weddings, but the Augusta could not be swayed. Finally, the sisters relented. The sources say that after the weddings, the two men received all kinds of honors, and thus the sisters regained their dignity. Rather than “instigating adultery,”
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Theodora seemed to want to mix the classes. She herself had inaugurated the mixing when, as a former actress who had lived outside the law, she married Justinian, who himself had become powerful and illustrious.

Theodora’s attention to women has made some observers call her a feminist, although modern feminism has ideological elements that would have been quite foreign to the empress’s spiritual concepts. Certainly Theodora was a feminist insofar as she focused on women and altered women’s position in society. But she worked to strengthen women within the context of the mononuclear family—the basic cell of what was at the time an innovative blueprint for Christian society—whereas the explosive feminism of the twentieth century aimed to separate or “liberate” women from that nucleus.

It’s off the mark to claim Theodora’s accomplishments as protofeminist; if they must fit a modern standard, they can more justifiably be called historically progressive or even Marxist. But Marxist historical studies have so far overlooked the innovative aspects of Theodora’s actions, blinded probably by a rigid interpretation of ancient societies. Marxism has never had much concern for women, especially women in
what was considered the decadent period of late antiquity. In addition, Marxist ideology could not stretch to a historical and dialectical reevaluation of an empress who rose from the lowest lumpenproletariat dregs, from the Hippodrome. So Marxist historiography—which could have been more sympathetic—has only perpetuated Procopius’s attitude.
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The fact remains that Theodora’s conjugal relationship with Justinian, shaped by the Christian ideal of marriage, was different from the existing social arrangements, even among the ruling classes. And the two Augusti did not preach in vain: their example was followed by the couple who next sat on the throne of Constantinople, Justin II (Justinian’s nephew) and Sophia (Theodora’s niece)—particularly Sophia, who picked up where Theodora left off, and expanded the “feminist” part of her work.

But women’s issues were not the emperor and empress’s exclusive focus in the great year of 535. They also redefined the duties of provincial functionaries, rebalancing and “correcting” (to use a term that often appears in Justinian’s laws) a situation that in Theodora’s mind was doubtless personified by Hecebolus in Pentapolis. With her usual attention to economic implications, she must have exhorted Justinian to raise the officials’ compensation and thus suppress their temptation to make money illicitly, especially their tendency to squeeze the most defenseless populations. If the officials got more satisfaction from serving the empire, they would be more efficient: the provision of law would thus reinforce the emperor’s power, fulfilling Theodora’s usual objective.

Raises in pay went hand in hand with a tighter bond of personal dependency on the Augusti. Anyone who served the emperor and the empress now had to take a solemn, demanding oath:

I swear on the All-Powerful God, his only begotten son Jesus Christ our God, on the Holy Spirit, on Mary, the holy and glorious ever-virgin Mother of God, on the four Gospels I hold in my hands, on the holy archangels Michael and Gabriel, that I shall keep a pure conscience toward our most divine and pious rulers, Justinian and Theodora his consort in power; that I shall loyally
serve them in carrying out the office that their mercy has entrusted to me; and that I shall willingly bear any burden and trouble deriving from the office that they have entrusted to me on behalf of their suzerain Empire. I am in the communion of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of God. In no way shall I at any time go against it, nor shall I allow anyone to do so, to the full extent of my powers.