Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (6 page)

LASSICAL CULTURE
idealized rural life but it was nevertheless thoroughly urban. And even in the fifth and sixth centuries the prestige of cities lived on, in the ancient tradition, in the eastern Mediterranean. Alexandria in particular—the city of Alexander the Great and of the Ptolemies, the city of Cleopatra, Marc Antony, and Caesar, of the celebrated library and lighthouse—boasted almost a thousand years of history and a population as large as, if not larger than, Constantinople’s. Yet the capital, the center of a multiethnic, highly structured empire, was still the ultimate city. Constantinople was like Babylon or Rome, Baghdad or Beijing, like Paris, London, or New York now. Constantinople was the last great city of the late ancient world, its quintessence. Its emperors, in their celebrated munificence, regularly distributed cash and food to thousands of households in the city.

People survived on this tangible largesse while waiting for the wonders of future eons; it made a difference, particularly in the countryside. Rural life was celebrated by poets but it was utterly dependent on the crop cycle, subject to famines and epidemics, and at the mercy of invasions such as that of a bellicose “barbarian” tribe that, in the late fourth century
A.D.
, had almost reached the capital, stopping only four days’ march away. In the ensuing battle the Roman emperor had been killed, despite his auspicious name of Valens (“valiant”). Everyone was
shocked to see that the borders were not totally safe, though an army of over 200,000 soldiers defended them.

Furthermore, in this empire of most Christian rulers, taxes were wrung from the countryside as the rulers sought new revenues without consideration for differences in language and custom. Only Egypt was partly exempt, privileged because of its ancient history and its position as the breadbasket of the capital and of the whole empire. The harsh central bureaucracy and its army of tax collectors were increasingly in charge of collection in outlying regions, thus weakening the ancient (and not always efficient) town councils.
¹
Part of the revenue, which increasingly consisted of payments in cash rather than in kind, flowed into the empire’s treasury, and the rest went into the Crown’s private coffers, where it was earmarked for specific uses.

The revenue collected in the countryside, more than the taxes on urban commerce, allowed the court to rival the splendor of the court of Persia, the other great “Eye of the Ecumene”
²
or pinnacle of the civilized world; it also allowed the empire to maintain a military force on three continents, from Carthage and Cyrene in North Africa to Asian Mesopotamia and the European water frontiers of the Danube River and the Adriatic Sea. And it perpetuated the bureaucratic and managerial class, which inherited—at least formally—the ancient Roman magistracies with all their stipends and privileges.

This second Rome, Constantinople, avoided the fate of the ancient, Italian Rome, which was humiliated by the sack of the Visigoths in
A.D.
410. This terrible blow led Saint Augustine, “Roman citizen” and bishop of Hippo, to relinquish all hope in the earthly city, placing his trust solely in the City of God. But in the eastern Mediterranean, one could still have faith in the emperor’s city, protected as it was by the thaumaturgic body of Constantine (the city’s founder), by the venerated robe of the Mother of God, and by other sacred Christian relics; by walls, ramparts, and armies; and by cunning diplomacy that skillfully exacted peace from the “barbarians,” even at the cost of paying for it in gold.

So chronicles of the time are full of stories of young men and even boys who left the fields and villages and set out with only a cloak on
their shoulders and a few crackers in their sack. They would march for weeks down the ancient roads of the empire, drinking from wells, sleeping in caves or under the open sky, willing to face all kinds of danger on their way to the city. Nor were they the only itinerants in those remote rural landscapes. Other men scoured the land instead of heading for the city, but they were neither imperial tax inspectors nor land-register surveyors: these men sought only the poorest of young girls. To the girls and their barefoot families dressed in sackcloth, they offered garments and footwear, though not out of charity. They were interested in taking the girls to the city on the basis of vague contracts in which nothing was clearly defined except the services that the girls would be required to perform.

Infants and children needing more food than a family could expect to supply were often cast off in the hope that they might be found and delivered to a church or a convent; or that they might die quickly in the peace of the Lord. This was the fate of girl babies especially, just as it is today in some parts of Asia.

Immigrants descended upon the city from the West, from Thrace and Illyria in particular. They spoke their native dialects but little standard Latin and no Greek. Greek was the language not only of Theodora’s family, but of the whole loquacious capital (an early father of the Church had written that “the populace argued furiously about impenetrable issues, and even the baker, when you asked him for the price of bread, replied that in the Trinity the Father is greater than the Son”).
³

Other immigrants came from the Asiatic East, which had been better protected from the fourth- and fifth-century “barbarian” migrations, and was more strongly woven into the ancient web of cities and commercial networks of the classical and Hellenistic tradition. They hailed from Anatolia, Cappadocia, Armenia, and Paphlagonia, but also from Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine. In addition to their native dialects they knew some rudimentary Greek—which they had heard in the more prestigious of the ancient cities, the
poleis
, but they also knew that the official establishment tongue was still Latin, and they were intimidated by it.

All these strands made up the urban mass of Constantinople. These newcomers didn’t come for the ancient artistic wonders that the emperors had selectively pilfered to beautify the city’s squares—the ancient Egyptian obelisks, or Leysippus’s celebrated team of four bronze horses now crowning Saint Mark’s basilica in Venice (the seafaring capital that owes so much to Constantinople). Nor were they interested in the city’s precious manuscripts, their pages saturated with purple dye and embellished with decorative initials, miniatures of allegorical figures, and representations of exquisite classical and Christian virtues.

What they sought was a promise of future salvation granted by the Christian relics that abounded in the city. And, first and foremost, they sought work, because the young imperial capital needed hard manual labor: men to unload the goods in the wholesale markets that supplied the butchers and greengrocers and fishmongers, and workers for the iron smithies and the silversmith shops located in the Bosphorus and Golden Horn districts. It needed smelters for the imperial mint that manufactured the most famous of all coins, the pure gold imperial solidus. (The root of this term has survived in many European languages, from the Italian
soldo
to the French
sou
, the Castilian
sueldo
, and even the Welsh
swllt.
) Laborers and bricklayers were needed for the construction of public works, for building the roads that were the pride of the city and that celebrated imperial power, and the walls, basilicas, and churches. There were always openings among the policemen, firemen, nurses, and soldiers. Bodyguards were needed for the emperor,
⁴
who was both the leader of the Christian “new Israel”
⁵
and the “Augustus” ceremoniously applauded in the Hippodrome by “senate, army, and people”—the interpreter of the ancient Roman imperial role. His subjects loved him most when he handed out the wheat that came from Egypt, the “happy cargo” of the ships that sailed from Alexandria.

Bread and circuses were provided, but not kindergartens or public schools. Education was a private, domestic matter, especially when it came to girls. Wealthy and respectable families took good care of their little girls, who were considered “the apple of their eyes,”
⁶
and kept
them at home, away from indiscreet eyes. The girls spent their days spinning thread and taking alphabet and grammar lessons in which Attic tragedies and Homeric epics were increasingly replaced with edifying passages from the holy scriptures (the
Psalms
in particular), which were often learned by heart.

The little girl left the family residence (the Latin
domus
) only briefly, always chaperoned by female servants. She went out only for hygienic purposes: to clean her body at the public baths or, even better, to edify her soul at places of worship or by visiting monks of exemplary holiness. No form of public entertainment was allowed. Frequenting the theater was unbecoming, let alone going to the Hippodrome. Even the most influential of adult matrons, curious about a successful show, had to arrange for a private performance. Her majordomo, a eunuch, would arrange for the programs and for the compensation of actors, dancers, and musicians.

This segregation of women was codified, reinforced, even exalted in late ancient and in later Byzantine texts. It did, however, allow for exceptions, especially at the bottom rung of the social ladder. Theodora and her sisters probably did not learn the basics of arithmetic or Greek reading and writing from private tutors. More likely, they attended group classes in one of the city’s charitable institutions.

According to the literary account of a dramatic event that took place during Theodora’s imperial tenure, her speech as an adult was full of erudite allusions; but that ancient source—with its rhetorical implications—probably over-refined Theodora’s actual words. Theodora was not, nor could she have been, a refined exponent of late ancient cultural literacy, though she knew how to use words well. And it’s likely that her skill was due to her mother’s ambition.

In any case, the childhood years of Theodora and her sisters must have been spent mostly outdoors playing in the city’s streets, squares, and orchards. We can easily imagine Comito, Theodora, and Anastasia absorbed in tag and other running games including the Four Doors game: then as now, it consisted of the children running from one door to another, with a penalty for the last child to reach the goal. Girls, and probably boys too, played the Devil in Chains game, where one player
was tied down for each turn, as we can plainly see in a marble fragment conserved at the Berlin Museums [
fig. 9
]. Or they played the Kingdoms Game,
⁷
in which the children drew lots for a deep red strip of fabric symbolizing the purple robe permitted only to the emperor. The child with the strip was the emperor, and his playmates would gather around him as ministers, servants, and maids. The emperor would threaten war, issue commands, demand homage. Maybe Theodora wished the game would never end; maybe she preferred to keep the red badge of power tucked inside her sleeve.

9. Marble fragment showing children playing the Devil in Chains game, c. 500. Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

(During those same years, a man named Flavius Petrus Sabbatius—later known as Justinian—had left his native Roman province of Illyricum in the Balkans and moved to Constantinople at the invitation of his uncle, Justin, a military man. He was about twenty at the time, and he wasn’t playing any street games: he needed to continue studying politics and administration. He was to become the most knowledgeable expert on the power machine in the entire empire, and someday he would share his imperial power with Theodora.)

The three sisters probably challenged one another in singing contests, as song was the primary pastime of ancient man, a constant in all premodern societies. They might have learned the melodies of the various trade guilds (necessary channels for the barter economy of the reigning city): the shoemakers’ songs, or the songs of incense vendors, butchers, and the like. Separately or as a trio, perhaps, they went into shops to sing these songs, or to ask to learn others. Sometimes they might have gotten material items in exchange, such as pieces of string and fabric with which to make a doll’s dress, or oil to keep their lamp lit at night as they shared the stories and legends that were then, as they are now, gymnasiums of the mind and the psyche, building blocks of what we call “identity.”