Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (16 page)

In the meantime, they were going to enjoy their privileges.

But events took a different turn. Reductionist readers of Theodora’s life have theorized that in Pentapolis she suffered from sexual boredom or frustration. Her exclusive relationship with Hecebolus might have had unexpected or unpleasant consequences for her. But maybe the problem wasn’t sexual. She had attached herself to him like one of the
suppliants or refugees who, clinging to church altars, had the right to asylum and could be removed neither by canon nor by civil law. But she discovered that in Pentapolis the powerful Hecebolus alone had rights. He had rights over property, over time, over people—even over her. And as time went by, it was becoming more and more difficult to get him to make good on his promises.

Soon, Theodora found her confinement in Apollonia weighing on her. She had not forgotten what she had left behind in the city. Hecebolus demanded that she be isolated as “proper” women were, and she had neither the rich cultural resources nor a network of acquaintances with which she might transform her semiexile into a scintillating extended vacation filled with reading or with intense epistolary exchanges. She missed the world of the theater. She would have endured all of this, however, if only Hecebolus had respected the commitment he had made to her. But he was delaying and finding various pretexts for postponing.

She must have found the idea and the reality of being totally dependent on this man unacceptable. She, like the cranes in her peristyle, was in a cage. She probably used her body to sway him, alternately seducing and rebuffing him. Then she may have started to think and speak more frankly, first with gibes and then with increasingly blunt and harsh judgments. Most likely, she finally began to mock him openly. She reproached him for being indecisive about taking the one step that he owed to her alone, though he did not hesitate to abuse an entire population in the collection of taxes or the settlement of trials. Maybe she derided him in the privacy of their frescoed room, simulating the type of farces that she used to play before city audiences, the same shows that Hecebolus had enjoyed so much in the early days of their affair. Perhaps she threatened to perform them before their friends and the powerful people he cared about so much, or in front of priests, from whom he kept her hidden in the seclusion of their home.

An actress without a stage in Apollonia, she claimed the daring “freedom of speech before the powerful” that the ancient Greeks had granted to philosophers alone,
⁷
(men such as Diogenes the Cynic, who asked the great Alexander of Macedonia to move aside because he was
shading him). Christianity had extended the same right to monks, who had recently evolved from philosophers, but not to a woman, and never—of course—to an actress. And yet this infamous woman took liberties with a powerful man, a high magistrate—liberties that not even a lady was allowed.

It was easy for Hecebolus, once “offended,” to put his dignity as a mighty official before the body, the face, the lips of Theodora. He summoned up his full honor as Roman citizen against his defenseless concubine, and he drove her away. Soon the name Theodora would elicit no more curiosity in Apollonia: Theodora who?

It was, for Theodora, the most unexpected of situations, the most impossible of developments. And yet the archaic logic of reversal would reward her courage, just as it had rewarded her suppliant mother in the Kynêgion. From her failure in Pentapolis, from the failure of a relationship in which she had placed so much faith—just as her mother had placed her hopes in the Green faction—she set off on the path that would lead her to a metamorphosis even more momentous than the one she had originally set out to achieve. In effect, this was the beginning of the unpredictable chain of events that in less than a decade would bring her to the throne.

The young woman was cast out on the northern shores of an unfamiliar continent that was not her home. And yet her unlikely destiny stretched invisibly before her: a return home to an imperial future.

Theodora and Hecebolus would probably not appear in the annals of history had their relationship continued, had she been willing to accept the situation, had Eros prevailed over Hecebolus’s smugness about his office and his career. After a few years of farsighted decisions in distant Pentapolis, the couple would have returned as husband and wife—laden with gold, older and heavier, maybe even with children—and taken up residence in an attractive mansion in Constantinople, ready for new imperial appointments. They would have enjoyed their wealth and, by their success, confirmed that imperial functionaries in the provinces deserved the poor reputation that they had. They would have merited a footnote, perhaps, or maybe nothing at all.

Africa. Pentapolis. Apollonia. The governor’s palace. Theodora is cast out. The
Secret History
reports that Hecebolus left her “at a loss for the necessities of life,” though in another passage of the same text is an apparent contradiction: Theodora, returning from Africa, “was very distressed and vexed … because she had lost some money on that journey.”
⁸
Hecebolus probably offered no financial help when he banished Theodora, so as she set off she could count only on her own strength and on that part of her assets that she had brought with her.

Theodora’s financial autonomy was stronger than her legal standing. She did own property, and she controlled the money, clothes, and jewels that had not already been sold or transferred to maintain the child left behind in the city. She never expected that she would need that money in Pentapolis, but money was not what she was most sure of in this unexpected new beginning. The one thing she must have known beyond any doubt was that she had to return to the city. Her mother, too, after Acacius’s death, had not thought of retiring, but had plodded on. She would do the same. Back to Constantinople. Back, alone.

She probably did not reproach herself for the free spirit and the free words that had caused her banishment. Her unwise calculation had come at the beginning of the affair. Her plan had been reckless because there was no legal parity between her status and his, and because she was in a foreign land. She would not let this happen again.

Therefore, it was imperative that she return to her own land, to her friendly city. She knew that she was not a Homeric hero returning home with the honors of a victorious war.
⁹
And yet her journey back to Constantinople was just as slow as Ulysses’: it might have taken her about three years, with major pauses and setbacks. Theodora traveled thousands of miles, crossing all of the eastern Mediterranean: Africa, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, the whole of Anatolia. She finally reached the capital after having seen much, like Ulysses, and heard much in Greek and Latin and in Coptic and Aramaic, the dialects of Egypt and the Levant.

The sophisticated Greek language of the people considered cultivated and well bred must have seemed to her delightful but fragile and
superficial. It was a language eminently suited to the ancient, illustrious cities, connected as they were by a network of imperial roads, with their marble palaces lining wide boulevards, while under shadowed porticoes merchants displayed wares that came from territories both civilized and barbaric. But around the cities was a vast, archaic world where everyday life was not refined, a world that appeared to her naked and defenseless. These were the villages of the imperial Levant, built of stone or clay, unprotected by city walls (the result of people’s worldly experience and skill). Their only protection was a church promising Christian redemption in the next world. In this arid world below, the only tangible blessing was a stream, a pond, or a well. So she saw more of the empire than any other woman of her time, even more than most eminent men. She saw its people, their homes and their workplaces, their pastimes, their daily lives, their hopes for immortality. Hundreds of years had elapsed since those unforgettable emperors who were famous partly for their talent as travelers. Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius visited the cities of their empire and were welcomed joyfully with elaborate processions and ceremonies. But for more than a century now the emperors of Constantinople had lived like recluses in the palace, their city within the city, a sacred enclosure of almost twenty-five acres running down a gentle slope on the city’s European shore. From that faraway seat, like a modern command center, they followed the events of their empire.

Proud and perhaps dismayed by the difference between her current life and the path traced by most other men and women, the repudiated actress headed back to her roots. She was open to what she saw: she was not trying to confirm any preconceptions, unlike the merchant Cosmas, a contemporary traveler who was celebrated in literature.
¹⁰
He traveled by ship, perhaps even as far as the Indies, and wrote about his interpretation of the world as an image of the Biblical Ark of the Covenant between God and Israel. In his remarkable imaginary geography, the Earth was a perfect rectangle with enormous winches on each side. Cosmas believed that the winches were used to support the double heaven that arched over the Earth, like the chest (or perhaps the cosmic roof) of the Holy Ark.

Theodora was less like her contemporary, Cosmas, and closer to the founder of Greek historical thought, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, even though he had lived a thousand years before her and she most probably did not know his name. Theodora was a traveler in the great ancient Mediterranean tradition of
autopsia
, the “seeing for oneself” that Herodotus had first identified.
¹¹
(This was supplanted by the medieval tradition of
auctoritas
, where instead of actually seeing for yourself, you surrendered your judgment to an established “higher” voice.) Both now and later, on her throne, Theodora needed to see something only once with her intent gaze: seeing was knowing.
¹²

How
did
Theodora complete her journey and get back to Constantinople? There is something miraculous in the fact that she returned at all, instead of vanishing. It was a journey of thousands of miles that required substantial assets and extremely good health. In Procopius’s contemptuous view, it was simple:

she proceeded to provide in her usual way, putting her body to work at its unlawful traffic. She first went to Alexandria; later, after making the round of the whole East, she made her way back to Byzantium, plying her trade in each city (a trade which men could not call by name, I think, without forfeiting forever the compassion of God), as if the devil could not bear that any spot should be unacquainted with the wantonness of Theodora.
¹³

The reference to God, and especially to the devil, is a rhetorical intensifier, a repetition of the “demonic” element that, according to Procopius, Justinian shared with Theodora. But although the corrosive historian made short work of her journey, here at the end of his section on Theodora’s “nurture and education” he leaves historians with many unanswered questions, because the journey back to the capital thoroughly transformed her.

TUNNED BY THEODORA’S
epic return to Constantinople, most biographers reach for simplistic stereotypes. Her miraculous journey drove historians toward outlandish fantasies that seem to be influenced by modern fairy tales. What these biographers have neglected, however, is the context: the actual chronology, to start with, and even the evidence of written sources. The “sources” are plural now, for at this point in Theodora’s life Procopius’s critical
Secret History
no longer stands alone: now it is complemented by other reports, some with a different orientation, in texts that have a different origin and purpose from the
Secret History
and that were written in languages other than Greek.

These texts are chronicles and religious histories written by authors who, although they shared some of Procopius’s classical cultural heritage, and although they were subjects of the same Roman and Christian empire, chose to write in Syriac rather than in the Greek used in the
Secret History
and other choice literary works of the period. More often than not, Syriac translations were the only surviving versions of many texts originally written in Greek and later lost.