Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (14 page)

The first episode, with the geese, is part of a more sophisticated kind of pantomime or tableau vivant in which players reenacted ancient mythological scenes. The theme of Theodora’s performance was derived from the legendary union of the god Zeus with Leda, the wife of Tindareus, king of Sparta. From this union came Helen, whom the ancients called the most beautiful woman on earth. To enjoy Leda’s beauty, the god transformed himself into a swan; his miraculous embrace was rendered on the stage by trained geese who picked grains of barley from Theodora’s mons veneris, the object of desire, the true “navel” of the theater world at the time. Replacing swans with geese indicates that this was a parody, maybe even a veiled critique of the myth; in any case it proves the latitude of expression permitted in the capital of the great Christian empire.

Theodora, whom we saw “frowning” or “with contracted brows,” finally appeared “proud” of her performance. To Procopius, her relaxed smile was one more sign of her shamelessness. It’s likely, though, that the smile reflected not the actress’s feelings but the requirements of the show: the smile was a dutiful reaction to the audience’s applause. Furthermore, Theodora followed the rules of the form, which called for each actor to play various roles. So she played Leda—she lay with the god, simulating the coupling of the two lovers by lifting her pelvis and trembling, and then she acted out the labor of childbirth—and afterward she became the fruit of that coupling: Helen, sweet smiling Helen, the most beautiful of all women.

This episode is more than evidence of Theodora’s successful career. The surprising and engaging aspect is the young woman unperturbed by the birds pecking at her groin. It indicates the contempt for danger that characterizes circus life but, even more important, it confirms that
Theodora had become accustomed to a remote, alien, even wild world. She had been raised, after all, in arenas and city streets, observing animals and people and statues—creatures of many different worlds—switching roles and swapping identities. This truly had been her education.

Nor were the stage geese the only danger Theodora faced. Sexual promiscuity, which went hand in hand with her success as an actress, posed drawbacks to her career, her beauty, even her health. And so, after reproaching Nature for not having endowed her with a better body, Theodora now criticized what was, after all, the law of nature. That “woman … had not only encompassed herself round about with every other rank and refinement, but had also practiced infanticide time and again by voluntary abortions,” and “though she was pregnant many times, yet practically always she was able to contrive to bring about an abortion immediately.”
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But she did not always succeed. A long passage from the
Secret History
tells the story of Theodora’s secret child:

Now she had chanced to conceive a child by one of her lovers while she was still on the stage and being late about discovering her misfortune she did everything to accomplish, in her usual way, an abortion, but she was unsuccessful, by all the means employed, in killing the untimely infant, for by now it lacked but little of its human shape. Consequently, since she met with no success, she gave up trying and was compelled to bear the child. And when the father of the new-born child saw that she was distressed and displeased, because after becoming a mother she would no longer be able to go on using her body as she had done, since he rightly suspected that she would destroy the child, he acknowledged the infant by lifting it up in his arms, and, naming it John, since it was a male, he went on his way to Arabia, whither he was bound.
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On his deathbed, the father told John, by then a grown boy, the truth about his mother. John then traveled from Arabia to Constantinople
to meet his mother, and Theodora, “fearing that the matter would become known to her husband,”
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entrusted him to one of her domestics. And that was the last that was heard of John.

Is this an outright literary invention created to heap more scorn on Theodora? (Note the fairy-tale motifs: exotic Arabia; the innocent country bumpkin in the palace.) Or is it proof of imperial wickedness? There is no historical evidence about this John. And it is unlikely that the father could so easily recognize the child as his own, if indeed Theodora was as promiscuous as was claimed. Therefore, the prevailing opinion holds that this is one more literary device.

On the other hand, the historical sources about Theodora’s daughter, mentioned earlier, are quite different. In particular, we know that this daughter had a son (Theodora’s grandson), Anastasius, who was at least sixteen years of age in around 547 or 548. So he was born around 530 or 531 to a woman who, by simple subtraction, must herself have been born around 515 or 516, in the early days of Theodora’s “scandalous” acting career. The actress thus became a mother when, according to modern law, she was still a minor; by the time she was thirty she was already a grandmother.

The bonds of family solidarity, of faction loyalty (among the Blues), and possibly even ecclesiastical charity allowed Theodora to keep in touch with her daughter without compromising her professional and social ascent. Besides, maternity did not seem to seriously affect Theodora’s career or her behavior. Herself the daughter of an unusual woman, she was not cut out to be an anxious mother. Instead of focusing on the baby’s whimpers or first words, she was concerned with expanding her horizons, leaving the confines of her social milieu and her profession. She had to quickly establish a relationship, perhaps even a respectable marriage, that would allow her, too, to become a “lady,” a
kyria.

Pregnancy’s physical and psychic effects on her lovely, petite, elastic body made it a plague to be avoided, not only for Theodora but for all women in her situation. Her need for personal growth—in today’s parlance—her need to achieve social and professional status (or to satisfy her lust, her enemies claimed), meant that she had to have contact
and even sexual encounters with the powerful and the important. On the other hand, she found it difficult, if not impossible, to formally enter their world as the full-fledged wife of an influential man. There were legal handicaps, of course, but the chief obstacles were the customs and social conventions of her time.

Theodora had to stubbornly seek out the relationship that she needed. Her mother’s experience with Acacius first and with her stepfather later, the memory of their supplication in the Kynêgion, her marginal position with respect to the world of the “ladies”—all of this reminded her that she was in a precarious position, which only deteriorated with the passing of time. In Constantinople in the second decade of the sixth century
A.D.
, a twenty-year-old girl was no longer young: she was not simply on the threshold of life, but already at midlife. It was so uncommon for an eighteen-year-old girl to be unmarried that people would comment: “She is still unwed.”
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One hagiography stressed the anomaly of a woman saint who was still unmarried at the age of twenty-four.
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Theodora could not wait that long. Hence, she was obliged to go on stage and to have sexual relations. This might lead to undesired pregnancies, but it was the only avenue leading out of her state of slavery.

Consequently, Theodora was well versed in the contraceptive and abortive practices of her age (“she practiced infanticide time and again by voluntary abortions”). After the third month of pregnancy, when the fetus took on a human shape, abortion was no longer viable. It was censured by Procopius, a layman, as “repeated infanticide”; the Church treated it as a full-fledged homicide; and it was punished by both civil and canon law. The guilty woman was subject to exile, whipping, or excommunication. Even her accomplices were liable to be punished: the wizards and witches at the Hippodrome, for example, who might give Theodora and her coworkers not only generic astrological advice (she was curious about it) but also herb potions or other concoctions. Some women brought on abortions by placing a stone or heavy weight on their abdomens; others resorted to gory and horribly infectious archaic surgery.

Abortion was the dramatic, risky finale of a defense strategy
wrapped up in superstition and witchcraft; it was common practice for women to consult the stars and horoscopes for contraceptive purposes. There were amulets to be worn on the left ankle in a tiny ivory tube, consisting, for example, of strips of a female cat’s liver or fragments of a lioness’s uterus. (One scholar notes dryly that, whether or not it was effective, the latter material was so scarce that it was surely the most difficult contraceptive.
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) Among the popular contrivances that were thought to effectively block the sperm’s journey toward the egg were herbs, pomades, suppositories, and, in particular, vaginal pessaries made of wool soaked in honey, olive oil, resin, alum, white lead, or other substances. Unlike modern contraceptives, so synthetic and aseptic, the contraceptives of Theodora’s time had a primal, almost feral relationship with the elements.

We should not take Procopius’s words literally when he writes that she was often pregnant and underwent repeated abortions; and we need not resort to modern sociology or demographics to recognize that Theodora was subjected to psychological and physical dangers. While not a prostitute in the technical sense of the word, she was exposed to all the risks of prostitution, and if she died before reaching fifty there may have been a link between her difficult early life and her untimely death. (She died early in comparison to the other women who preceded or followed her on the Roman throne of Constantinople: Ariadne, wife of Zeno and later of Anastasius, who died at the age of sixty-five; Lupicina-Euphemia, the wife of Justin I, who died at a ripe old age; and Sophia, Theodora’s niece, who lived past seventy.)

Theodora’s iron will, which allowed her to reach impossible goals, was housed in a body that needed fastidious care. So there must have been days when, if she blamed Mother Nature at all, it was certainly not because she wasn’t endowed with larger breasts, but because she wasn’t born a man.

This is the period of life in which such moments of which I have spoken are likely to come. What moments? Why, the moments of boredom, of weariness, of dissatisfaction. Rash moments. I mean moments when the still young are inclined to commit rash actions, such as getting married suddenly.

HESE WORDS
are not Procopius’s: they are the words of Joseph Conrad (1857–1924).
¹
The sailor without a ship in his novel
The Shadow Line
(1902) is a very different character from our brilliant and resolute mime actress of the second decade of the sixth century
A.D.
And yet young Theodora also was aware that it was time to transform herself again, leaving behind a place that weighed on her, even though she lived in the greatest metropolis of late antiquity.

At the age of eighteen, life was no longer just a blank, like a tidy ivory tablet ready to be engraved. Especially not for a mime actress.

Theodora’s future depended on her talent, but it was not a question of sheer survival. In this way she saw that her life was quite different from that of her father, Acacius, or her mother. But just as her mother had succeeded in overturning events with the Kynêgion supplication, so too Theodora’s lifeboat needed a firm hand to guide it into a safe haven, a secure spot like the ones that respectable families had already negotiated for their daughters of Theodora’s age, for the virginal creatures beloved by conservatives. Where was her haven?

At this point, one figure emerged from the amorphous crowd of
lovers and admirers. Until then, Procopius had described them generically, passing judgment on their morals (they were either perverted or “licentious”), their physique (“they were of exceptional bodily vigour”), or their number (they were “many,” “all,” “so many,” they were all “who chanced to come along”), but now he moves on from these generic descriptions to an identification of the first—actually the only one—of Theodora’s lovers of whom we have proof. In a passage invaluable for its concreteness, the
Secret History
reports: “Later she was following in the train of Hecebolus, a Tyrian, who had taken over the administration of Pentapolis, serving him in the most shameful capacity; but she gave some offense to the man and was driven thence with all speed; consequently it came about that she was at a loss for the necessities of life.”
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