Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (20 page)

Did Theodora really have such a dream? If so, her dejection seems unjustified. What’s more, her spontaneous revelation of the dream is uncharacteristic of her: she rarely made psychological confessions. And finally, when we consider that the source of this conversation was a rumor (according to the
Secret History
), we must conclude that this episode is merely literary embroidery on a real event: what happened
was that Theodora received concrete support in Antioch from Macedonia and the Blues, and that they referred her to Justinian. Therefore, while “Theodora talks” once again in Procopius, what she says is mostly literary fantasy, heavy on the visions, the oneiric elements, and the nocturnal. Theodora may really have had a revelation in Alexandria that gave her new reverence for religious figures, but the
Secret History
did all it could to erase it or debase it.

It is likely that Macedonia recommended Theodora to Justinian; possibly the message was written on a papyrus roll.
¹⁶
Sealed with wax bearing the imprint of Macedonia’s ring, the roll addressed to the Illustrious Consul Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Justinianus was most probably given to the actress herself, not entrusted to the imperial mail service. Macedonia’s words must have given Theodora hope that she could be introduced directly to the addressee; the Antioch dancer must have praised him for his attentiveness, his calm, and his receptivity to petitioners, which he followed up with quick action on their behalf. Such qualities were rare in people in prestigious posts such as Justinian’s: he was a consul and an advisor to Emperor Justin, his blood uncle, who had gone so far as to adopt him. She probably avoided drawing any sort of comparison between this powerful man and Hecebolus.

Macedonia’s letter was the magical key that was to let our heroine into the heart of the palace. This was one more reversal … and all the less predictable because it brought Theodora before the man who was making life hard for the Monophysites, the only persons she had genuinely admired up to that point. Yet the letter opened the door to a new relationship with a potentate, and her affair with Hecebolus had left her wiser and more skillful in presenting herself.

Theodora hurried now. She played the minimum number of theater performances that the Blues might have offered her along the way from Antioch to Constantinople. She hastened through the ancient cities of Asia Minor—Tarsus, Seleucia, Attalia, Miletus, Ephesus, and Smyrna—that had once represented ancient Hellenic culture and later become vital centers of Christendom. We do not know whether, before reaching Antioch, she visited Palestine, the preferred destination for Christian travelers at the time. She may have done so: sources allude to some
sort of aid that she might have received from a “Samaritan” native of Palestine by the name of Arsenius.
¹⁷

Finally she saw the Bosphorus again, lapping at its Asian and European shores. After years away, she watched a boat approach to ferry her to the city. It was the most ordinary and yet the freshest of sights, and it conjured up promising scenarios.

Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Justinianus was a very busy man, perhaps the busiest of men. It was said that he did not even have time to sleep. He ate only raw vegetables, lightly dressed, and drank only fresh water, to conserve all the energy of his robust frame for intellectual labor. Even his harshest enemies acknowledged that he always had “a ruddy complexion.”
¹⁸
If the porphyry sculpture of a head now in Saint Mark’s basilica in Venice [
fig. 18
] does indeed portray him in his early maturity, he was a handsome man with a lively expression. A reassuring figure.

18. Porphyry portrait head of an emperor (“Justinian”), c. 520, Saint Mark’s basilica, Venice.

With his very busy schedule, Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Justinianus was clearly not waiting for a “gift of god,” a
theou dôron,
a “Theodora,” to fall from the sky. Now about forty years old, he was still unmarried, and the best aristocratic families of the empire competed to draw his attention to the charms of their accomplished virgin daughters equipped with fabulous dowries of gold and land. There were no rumors of women visiting him regularly in his legendary home overlooking the water of the Propontis. (It was called the palace of Hormisdas, after a Persian prince who had been exiled to Constantinople in the fourth century
A.D.
A short, invigorating stroll amid enchanting gardens and buildings brought him from home to the imperial palace.)

Justinian was born in a town called Tauresium near Naissus (now Nis, Serbia); his uncle Justin was his connection to Constantinople. Like so many others, uncle Justin had left the extreme poverty of his native hamlet, Vederiana (near today’s Skopje, Macedonia), and trudged hundreds of miles, sleeping under the stars, to seek his fortune in the capital. A man of great vigor, strong “like an oak,” he had enrolled as a palace guard
¹⁹
around the year 470, when he was twenty years old. Decade after decade, promotion after promotion, he had advanced in the military until in 515 he became commander of the palace guard.

A semiliterate man, Justin was serious about his duties. Sometimes he was derided, for example on account of his woman companion, Lupicina, whose name recalled the Roman term for brothel,
lupanare.
But he kept to his own path. Around the year 500 he summoned his nephew, Flavius Petrus Sabbatius, born around 482, so that he could provide the boy with an adequate education (the eternal dream of the underprivileged). His plan succeeded, and his nephew became a man of deep learning. In the end, Justin adopted him, and the nephew took the name of “he who comes from Justin”: Justinian.

Only once did the faithful Justin disobey orders, while he served in a military campaign in Asia Minor. He was condemned to die, but General John the Hunchback, who was in charge of the execution, could not follow through with it. Three times the general dreamed of an immense figure, each time more threatening than the last, who commanded him to release Justin. The vision declared that in the future it
would “have need of this man and of his family.”
²⁰
The apparition was nocturnal, oneiric, even demonic, because this is Procopius’s version of the story, and anyone related to Justinian was obliged to conform to the stereotype.

But no visions ever came to Emperor Anastasius, who died when he was nearly ninety without appointing a successor. The Great Electors of the empire were arguing over the succession when Justin suddenly became the most popular candidate. It seemed like a spell or a miracle: crowds in the Hippodrome began cheering him with
Tu vincas
(Victory to you!). One day his human wreath—the guards he commanded—parted to reveal him standing tall in the imperial robe and the purple mantle. It seemed clear that God was with him: the succession was decided, and the patriarch of Constantinople crowned him with the imperial diadem.

Justin spoke and his words were taken down. His appeal to divine Providence and his emphasis on the emperor’s love for his subjects were not original. But the people appreciated and remembered his promise of immediate, generous gifts of money.
²¹

Justinian, who was thirty-six in 518, was the one who had secretly paved the way for his uncle’s coronation. He was immediately rewarded with an appointment in the new government: he joined the daily meetings of the Ruler’s Council, where public affairs were discussed and laws and policies were made. He was the engine of the entire imperial machine, in charge of day-to-day situations and future planning. His life was not ruled by the ancient rhythms that alternated business with leisure, work with play. Because of this, his schedule seemed chaotic to his detractors: they failed to grasp his working rhythm or his larger plan.

Justinian was already developing the agenda for his own future government. Using all kinds of means (including Antioch’s female dancers), he scrutinized men who might be suited to work for him; he studied and commissioned research on every single public office and magistracy to determine which ones were outdated and which might still be useful; he read theological tracts about the mysteries of God, and bureaucratic reports about the customs of the peoples at the farthest reaches of the empire.

His education was intense and demanding (and he was largely self-taught). Although both his uncle and his demanding career forced him to spend some time in positions of military command, he was still “the least military of men.”
²²
He liked the military life less than he liked books, in Greek or particularly in Latin, about the glories of ancient Rome, which was geographically, linguistically, and religiously so close to his native Illyria. He wanted to resurrect Rome in the city of Constantinople, which would soon—he thought—be his.

In the meantime he stretched and strengthened his mind with historical texts, collections of imperial writings, and the immense legislative and judicial library of centuries of Roman power. He was perhaps the last man of his time for whom scholarship was a vehicle for arriving at a mature sense of authority, not the authority of one citizen talking to another, as in antiquity, but the authority of an autocrat speaking to his subjects. Absolute devotion and absolute power. He was absolutely devoted to absolute power.

Soon Justinian became “the most dreaded man in the world.”
²³
He and his uncle were quick to eliminate the notables who had been especially close to Anastasius. Then, beginning in the second half of 520, uncle and nephew put to death even those who had been enemies of the old power establishment. They started with Vitalian, the general who had rebelled against Anastasius, whose orthodox, pro-papal position should have brought him close to the new emperor and his nephew. In the name of their identical religious views, Justinian “[had] previously given him a pledge for his safety by sharing with him the Christian sacraments. But a little later, when he was suspected of having given him offence, he executed him in the palace together with his followers for no just cause, by no means consenting to honor his pledges, terrible as they were.”
²⁴
Justinian had detected or suspected Vitalian of the crime of high treason against him or his uncle. Whether or not his suspicion was well founded, Justinian broke his pledge and showed his propensity for murder—in the words of Procopius, “he used to proceed with the lightest of hearts to the unjust murder of men.”
²⁵
Just like a “Lord of Demons.”

+ + +

The energy Justinian poured into his studies had allowed him to devise a plan so vast and precisely detailed that he was far ahead of any other hypothetical competitor for the throne. The fundamental concept of his vision was clear, and it could be summed up in a single word,
restitutio,
which means something like “restoration.”

Justinian’s analysis of the problems of the empire led him to conclusions different from—even contrary to—those of the earlier great reformers. Diocletian, emperor from
A.D.
284 to 305, had transformed the institutional structure of the Roman polity by subdividing it into eastern and western empires, each with its own Augustus and its own Caesar, and reorganizing each unit into administrative, territorial, and fiscal structures. Constantine, emperor from 306 to 337, discerned that Christianity, formerly a source of discord, could build community among the various peoples of an empire whose center of gravity had shifted, by then, to the Orient. Constantine considered even Theodoric, the Goth king of Italy (and thus formally a subject of the emperor of Constantinople), a reformer because he had aimed to synthesize Roman and Germanic elements under the aegis of “reconciliation.”

Such an idea seemed vague, relativistic, and utterly unacceptable to Justinian. He demanded standardization and unification because his policy was based on the ancient philosophical concept that the highest good lay in the
One
. So he sought to stretch his empire across all the Mediterranean lands that had once been Roman, “from one to the other boundary of the ocean.”
²⁶
He did this by waging war on the many recent “barbaric” kingdoms (the Vandals in Africa, the Visigoths in Spain, the Ostrogoths in Italy) ruling the traditionally Latin countries that he felt closest to because of his own upbringing. Besides, the invaders were Arian heretics who had strayed from the one true faith.

He felt it was his duty to improve the lives of his subjects on Earth, so that living in the empire would be a sure passport to Paradise; but this could only happen if the empire was in a state of serene religious unity. This was another reason why Monophysites such as Severus had been deposed, and why a long period of discord ended, in March 519,
in a harmonic rapprochement between the empire and the papacy. Support from the bishop of Rome was crucial to Justinian’s renewed conquest of the West.

The early Roman rulers of Christian faith were already legendary, and their empire was the model for the “restoration” that the new strongman from Illyricum yearned for. While his religious absolutism followed the policies of Theodosius I (r. 379–395), who had demoted non-Orthodox Catholics to second-class subjects, his plan for territorial restoration meant expanding the empire to the size it was when Constantine the Great was the sole emperor (324–337).