Download PDF | Download PDF | Theodora Actress, Empress, Saint (Women in Antiquity) , By David Potter , Oxford University Press 2015.
289 Pages
Acknowledgments
I owe many debts in the composition of this book, first to the series editors and Stefan Vranka for suggesting this topic, and again to Stefan for his help in actually finishing the book. Lester Monts, as Senior Vice Provost for Academic A ffairs, offered invaluable support for the research at its inception.
I also received crucial assistance from scholars who shared with me work that was either forthcoming or difficult to access through Michigan’s library, including Geoffrey Greatrex, Henning Bohm, John Scarborough, John Matthews, and Manna Vestrinen—who sent me her unpublished doctoral dissertation on actresses, a splendid work that enabled me to understand Theodora’s initial profession.
As this book was in its final stages Professor Maria Wyke enabled me to see scenes from Carlucci’s Theodora, while teaching me, and others, about film’s emergence as a medium of expression in her splendid series of Jerome Lectures. I owe an especially great debt to Oxford University Press’s anonymous referee, whose generosity has saved me from many errors and caused me to rethink a variety of issues.
I could not have undertaken the book without Jason Zurawski, who, with great patience, enabled me to appreciate the wonders of Coakley’s Syriac grammar. Matt Newman was an extremely helpful reader of the manuscript at an early stage, as was Laura McCullagh; Kevin Lubrano and Parrish Wright provided important help at a later stage. Pete Oas listened to this story unfold over coffee at the locus amoenus provided by the Expresso Royale on Plymouth Road in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Sue Philpott proved again that she is the best copy editor anyone could hope to work with.
Claire, Natalie, and Ellen tolerated the persistent home invasion by yet another ancient person. It is with this in mind that the book is dedicated to the women in my life.
Introduction
On Monday the eleventh of August, ap 559, Emperor Justinian entered Constantinople. Many dignitaries greeted him as he rode through the Charisios Gate on the city’s northwest side. Before going any farther, before traversing avenues so crowded that there was barely room for his horse to pass, Justinian stopped. He turned in to the great Church of the Holy Apostles, close by the city gate.
There he lit candles in memory of his empress, who had died eleven years earlier. They had had no children together, nor would he have any in the future, nor even remarry. She had been his “gift from God,” the great love of his life.
The story of Justinian and his empress Theodora is one of the most remarkable in the long history of the Mediterranean world. She had been an actress—not a respectable profession in sixth-century Constantinople. He was born into a south-central European family of peasants. She had sustained him through two great crises when it seemed that their rule might end. She was tough; she was smart, very smart—even those who hated her would grant her that. She was passionate. She was extremely beautiful. Beauty and passion were two of her qualities that even those who hated her would acknowledge. She championed the downtrodden and protected the weak; she was steadfastly loyal to her friends. Her enemies feared her, and with good reason.
We may still see her in all her splendor in the astonishing mosaics that decorate the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna. We can feel the intensity of her being as we gaze into her eyes. She dominates the scene, far outstripping her husband, who faces her. Outside the church the same is true, even in the twenty-first century: “Ah, Teodora,” said the
woman running the shop where I stopped to pick up some souvenirs, as if speaking of a dear friend. Theodora’s image was everywhere.
Theodora—her name does indeed mean “gift from God”—is today a saint of the Syrian Orthodox Church. To some she was the “beloved queen.” To others she was a demon incarnate.
Theodora lived at a time when people felt the hand of God guiding their lives. They believed in a God who would take note of their sins, a God who would protect them in their faith or punish them terribly for their impieties. She lived at a time when people believed it was possible for the lucky or pious to see the angels who gathered around the altar when the priest prepared the communion offering. These same people believed, too, that it was entirely possible to encounter a menacing demon while walking down the street.
They knew that some people were closer to God than others, and that such individuals would often voluntarily subject themselves to great privations. Most people hoped that one of these special persons might help with his or her problems, channelling divine force to protect them. One might glimpse the preternaturally pious “Stylites” standing on pillars that reached towards heaven, perhaps dressed in rags; the pious might gather about these pillars, inspecting the feces and observing the exercises of the saintly.
Everyone knew that raids from across the imperial frontier might shatter their lives at any moment; that their empire was not what it once was. They knew that God’s vengeance could be even more terrible than the pain caused by their human enemies. Contemporary chroniclers refer to natural disaster as the “wrath of God,” and the Roman Empire in the sixth century had more than its share of disasters, in the form of violent earthquakes and all-enveloping tsunamis. It was also a time of war and riot; Constantinople would be wrecked once in Justinian’s time by its own citizens, and again by “the wrath of God.” And it was in Justinian’s and Theodora’s time, too, that the bubonic plague first came to Europe and the Mediterranean lands.
Theodora was the product of an age of rapid transition; she was the agent of change. Everyone agreed on these things, even those who disliked her intensely. Of such people there were quite a few in her day, and their spokesman for us today is a man named Procopius.
Procopius was a secretary and advisor to Belisarius, a great general of the period, who wrote about the wars of his and Theodora’s lifetime, and about the great building projects of her husband. He also wrote the Secret History, a denunciation of Justinian, Theodora, and all their works, unpublished in his own lifetime.
The interpretation of the Secret History, the answer to the question of whether it should be seen as a profound work of criticism or a nasty partisan pamphlet, is a central problem in trying to understand Theodora’s life. We will be returning to the issue again and again in the course of this book, for even if we agree to view Procopius’ book as a collection of scandalous misrepresentations (the correct approach in my view), we will see that not all scandalous stories are created equal. Some may be simple inventions, but others may conceal important truths within themselves.
Of those who loved Theodora, their most vociferous spokesman today is John, once bishop in the countryside around Ephesus, the great city of western Turkey (the modern Efes). John of Ephesus was born near Amida (modern Diyarbakir) in eastern Turkey; his parents placed him in a religious community when he was six years old.
He rose to greatness through his passionate advocacy of the religious beliefs of his people; his portraits of Theodora come to us through his Lives of the Eastern Saints, in which he records the deeds of men and women who, like him, devoted themselves to asserting the correctness of the brand of Christianity that countered the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon of AD 451 and was dominant in the Eastern empire.
The council of Chalcedon had imposed a definition of the relationship between the human and divine aspects of Jesus Christ—the crucial question for understanding the significance of his life and crucifixion—in a way that many regarded as unacceptable, allowing as it did that Jesus had a human as well as a divine nature.
It was his human aspect that had suffered on the cross and died. Furthermore, the split between supporters and opponents of Chalcedon’s definition of the relationship between the members of the Holy Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—was partly theological and partly political, bound up with differing notions of community within the empire. Ultimately, the most serious of these splits proved to be between majorities within groups whose first languages were Greek and Latin as opposed to those within groups who spoke the Coptic tongue of Egypt or the Syriac of Rome’s eastern frontier.
The schism at Chalcedon was not the only big split that shaped the world in which Theodora lived. The breakdown of the relationship between the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire, which took place about forty years before Theodora’s birth, fundamentally altered ancient power relationships. Even before the final collapse of the Western empire, a couple of decades before she was born, there had ceased to be a recognizably traditional governing class. Generals born outside the empire vied with officials from rural Anatolia and Thrace.
Eunuchs from beyond the frontier played crucial roles in the politics of the new age, and bishops whose command of Latin and Greek—the traditional languages of government—was decidedly secondary to their abilities in Coptic or Syriac vied for power with bishops whose first tongue was Greek or Latin. A peasant raised in a monastery outside Amida, when elevated to the rank of bishop, would be more influential than well-educated urban Greeks who occupied lesser places in the imperial bureaucracy.
The question of what gave any person the right to govern, of what qualities might open the path to power and influence, was far more open now than at any time in the earlier Roman Empire. It is quite possible that merit actually mattered more in the sixth century than in the previous eight hundred years of Roman dominance.
The sixth century was not only a time of extraordinary ferment and crisis; it was also an era of extraordinary accomplishment. Every day, we live with the achievements of these years. On a mundane level, we can instance as deriving from this time the belief that Jesus of Nazareth was born during the year Romans knew as the consulship of Gaius Caesar and Lucius Aemilius Paullus, in the 754th year after the foundation of the city of Rome.
This is our AD i—Anno Domini 1. It is also to this era, and to the direction of Justinian, that we owe the codification of Roman law that established the foundation of the European tradition of civil law, and it is to the genius of the emperor’s architect, Anthemius, that we owe the glory of the great church of Hagia Sophia, which even today dominates Istanbul’s skyline. We may even owe to forces with which Justinian and Theodora had to deal in the Arabian peninsula, the passions that fueled the visions of the prophet Mohammed.
Theodora’s story is not easy to tell. We cannot be certain we have a single word she spoke; both her friends and her enemies were prone to put words into her mouth, and the letters attributed to her in the surviving tradition have no great claims to authenticity. Hers is a life known through others. It is, in a sense, a palimpsest, a document that has been erased so that its writing surface can be reused.
Often we can uncover what was originally there, since few erasures are ever complete. Thus, as with old written-over manuscripts, or Istanbul itself, we can glean a knowledge of Theodora indirectly, reading sometimes quite literally between the lines, by setting older accounts of what things looked like alongside what we now see before us.
We can walk the streets of old Istanbul, feel the air, and, in “Aya Sofya,” Theodora’s Hagia Sophia, we can stand where she stood overlooking the great church from the “empress’s spot,” watching the devotions of her husband and of the other men who were allowed to enter the church proper. Or we can stand in the much more intimate space of the Church of Sergius and Bacchus, which survives today as the Kiigik Ayasofya Camii, or “Little Hagia Sophia Mosque,” down below the Blue Mosque, which stands where the imperial palace once stood.
Most importantly, we can still hear how people spoke to each other, reading their words in their own languages so as to begin to understand what motivated them, what they saw, loved, and feared. We probe the shadows of tradition and interview the phantoms of history, both hostile and friendly, for the truth, which we find in silences as often as in assertions. As we do so, we may find that the questions she faced were questions that we still face. Can a woman do the same job as a man in the same way—or, indeed, should she even attempt to? Are expectations different? Do gendered stereotypes prevent women from holding the same positions as men? Could Theodora be a woman and a ruler?
In the end, we may find Theodora by first understanding the contexts within which she acted. Through invective and through adulation, we will discover some patterns that will help us detect some truths, at least; and we must admit that there are very basic things about her life that we can never know. The things that we can know reveal to us a person who was in life every bit as remarkable as the image we have of her in San Vitale.
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