Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (8 page)

The scene in the Kynêgion did not involve the expert, diplomatic, Byzantine art of mediation. It was also far from “all or nothing” radicalism. What it did display is an ancient, strong, clear familiarity with conflict, with the experience of an explosive conclusion that redefines and reorganizes everything. It was a lesson that Theodora was never to forget; nor would she forget how deeply humiliating a public display of silence could be, the silence used by Asterius to show that he despised her and her family.

As in all great stories, the story of Theodora begins with a loss, her father’s death. As on the day of Acacius’s funeral, the Kynêgion supplication brought her face-to-face with an experience of life as ceremony. Except that now life appeared to her—to the “metal of her heart,” as Proust termed it in another context
¹⁸
—as conflict, clash, struggle. A hand-to-hand combat to be fought in public, without delay or mediation.

Procopius was not an eyewitness to this event, and he wrote about it in the
Secret History
some fifty years after it happened, but his account is rich in concrete details. In this scene, we catch a glimpse of Theodora for the first time. She is beginning to reveal herself. She is not seated on a triumphant throne amid gold and purple. Nor is she in the rarified environment of the Imperial Palace, as in the San Vitale mosaics in Ravenna. She is not surrounded by elements that bespeak her erudition, such as the great Lady Juliana Anicia (c. 461/3–527/9), who was depicted about the same time as the Kynêgion plea [
fig. 11
] seated amid triumphant virtues on the opening page of the marvelous Dioscorides manuscript that she commissioned at the turn of the sixth century
A.D.
Procopius’s first presentation of Theodora in this light—kneeling, debased, dependent on others—is not the work of an objective chronicler (especially because he did not witness the scene): his presentation of her was a literary choice dictated by his rhetoric of blame. Similarly, other works (including texts by Procopius) were encomiums, with different rhetorical dictates.

In Procopius’s narrative plot, which was meant to reproach
Theodora for “her nurture and education,” her first appearance is in a public setting, and a promiscuous, indiscriminate one at that, with an undifferentiated mass audience in the background. More to the point, in that undifferentiated mass Theodora appears as part of a smaller subset, her family, where she counts as a number, not as a voice or an individual. According to the
Secret History
, the first scene of Theodora’s story is one in which she kneels in supplication in an arena. But the last scene in the
Secret History
describes all the dignitaries, senators included, kneeling before her in homage, ready to declare themselves her “slaves.” They would have been punished if they referred to her as less than “Mistress.”
¹⁹
Thus, the most extraordinary and unexpected of reversals had occurred.

11. Portrait of Juliana Anicia, miniature on the introductory page of the Dioscorides manuscript, c. 512. Ms. Vindob. Med. Graec. 1, Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

It is fair to say that Theodora won in the arena of history. But that day, in the Kynêgion arena, it was her mother especially who deserved the victor’s laurels. Her behavior matched the grand gestures of the great angry women of classical mythology, from Medea to Dido. Unlike them, however, she had not been born a queen. And unlike her daughter Theodora and her granddaughter Sophia, she did not become
the
“
Augusta” and mistress of the Christian Roman Empire. She did, however, inspire those two descendants.

Compared to the historical data available for the family of Flavius Petrus Sabbatius—Emperor Justinian—there are no traces that might allow us to reconstruct the life of Theodora’s mother. But if the emperor succeeded in keeping his power in impossible circumstances, and in strongly influencing the history of three continents at the watershed between two great historical epochs, it was partly because Theodora never forgot her mother’s response to a dire situation and her ability to suddenly reverse it in public. The courage, the dignity, the astuteness of Acacius’s widow have been sufficiently illustrated. It is only a historical irony that she is anonymous rather than famous.

ROUND THE YEAR
500 of the Christian era, a transformation had already occurred in ancient culture—that exquisite intimacy with the loftiest thoughts and written words, from epic poetry to tragedy, from the philosopher’s prose to the orator’s speeches. Flowery speeches were still being produced, of course, but one tradition was long lost: the tradition of lively eloquence from the citizens during debates, in the forums and in the town councils, about the betterment of public life.
¹

The right of earthly citizenship that sanctioned status and property, and for which so much blood had been shed throughout the Ecumene, had been replaced by the promise of an otherworldly citizenship, perhaps in the City of God, as evoked in the title of Saint Augustine’s masterpiece, written in 413–26 when he was bishop of Hippo in North Africa, a region of the western Roman Empire reeling from the barbarian invasions. In the eastern Mediterranean of Byzantium, however, the structure of the Roman Empire was still vigorous. But the very basis of its strength—its copious bureaucratic and administrative apparatus—had led to a progressive emptying of public places for meeting and debating: both the Forum, where individual claims and wrongs were settled, and the town councils that for centuries had been in charge of local government, including tax collection.

No longer the measure of a citizen’s duty, eloquence was now a marker of social prestige. And so it served only to educate and burnish the self-importance of the upper echelons of the public bureaucracy;
beyond that it served as a field for technicians (for professional teachers in particular), or it dissolved into a purely private pleasure. As a matter of fact, it was in those years that reading, after centuries of being a public act performed out loud, became an individual, silent act. Even the word
philosopher
had lost its ancient meaning. It no longer referred to the men who debated and theorized in the public gardens or porticoes.
¹
Now it referred to monks (literally, the “isolated ones”) who lived outside the ancient city walls in solitary, almost wild dialogue with the mystery of the cosmos—perched atop columns, or on tree branches, surviving on plants, or even walled up in cells or in caves.

Culture had undergone a particularly severe transformation in Constantinople, the beacon of the Ecumene, a miracle in time and space, suspended as it was between antiquity and the Middle Ages and between the European continent and Asia. The last nostalgic followers of Hellenic learning took issue with the Christian monks, accusing them of neglecting philosophical thought with the “flower of their minds”
²
; they saw these Christians as regressing into violent brutes. These Hellenists had their own lay martyr in Hypatia, a rare example of a woman philosopher, who had been stoned and burned at the stake in Alexandria in 415 by Christian fanatics who were protected by highly placed clerics.

But the calmest and most clear-eyed among the followers of Christ despised all forms of degeneracy and revered exemplary figures such as Basil (c. 330–379), bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, now the Turkish city of Kayseri. He had encouraged his flock to collect and store every passage from pagan antiquity that benefited the soul, every precept of virtue, every example of expressive precision.

Meanwhile, several authors belonging to the final chapters of the history of Greek literature, but whose education ensured them illustrious careers in the ranks of the Christian Roman Empire, rediscovered the magic spell of ancient, pre-Christian mythological creatures in actresses, dancers, and lyre and flute players—women such as Rhodoclea, Helladia, and Libania—who performed in the baths and theaters and in the celebrations that enlivened everyday life in the Sovereign City. These were new muses who deserved to join the original nine muses;
they were sweet new companions to the Three Graces
³
—an earthly trinity easier to define than the heavenly one.

Theodora was destined for a different career, with different events and transformations, in a different empire, and by a different path. Antiquity—the mythical, miraculous antiquity—would be revealed to her not in papyrus rolls or parchment volumes but through tales, images, and visions. She was attentive and curious enough to grasp all of this. She developed her own, unique education, more visual than verbal, through what she saw even before what she heard, on the stages of the Hippodrome, the Kynêgion, and the theaters: her open, outdoor libraries. It was an unusual education because it happened in spaces that were meant for mass entertainment of plebians, not for the sensitivity of scholars or the power elite. It was atypical also because it was a woman’s education, and thus it was free of any presumption that it had to serve a public function.

12. Bronze serpent’s head from the Serpentine Column, 5th century
B.C.
(?), Archeological Museum, Istanbul.

Under the protection of the Blue team, Theodora most probably had access to the Hippodrome, both during the performances and when the great urban entertainment machine was readying itself to receive its audience. Walking along the barrier of the
spina
that separated the two straight tracks of the arena, Theodora must have admired the ancient statues rising up toward the sky and reflected on their stories [
fig. 5
], maybe stopping before the Serpentine Column meant to support Apollo’s tripod, which the Greeks had dedicated to Apollo when they defeated the Persians at Platea in 471
B.C.
While the little girl may not have absorbed the historical details, she must have admired the bronze highlights of the tall column shining under the sun, its coiled, intertwined snakes ending in three heads, three sets of fangs open in a ferocious, challenging grimace [
fig. 12
]. In it she may have detected a message for herself and her sisters, who were also three heads but one single being: anyone
who dared attack or offend one of them would have faced their poison.