Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (29 page)

Some complained that a simple reshuffling of the government was not enough. This was especially true in conservative circles that were hostile to Justinian and his group and had criticized him in the past. Rumors circulated about a possible new political solution to the riots. People were looking especially to Anastasius’s family: people said the family descended from Pompey the Great and thus represented the true glory of Rome. They were neither rough soldiers nor Illyrian shepherds, as Justin and Justinian were. (Besides, even Theodora had
recently looked to Anastasius’s family when seeking a safe marital haven for the daughter she had born during her performing days.)

Emperor Anastasius had left no children: his only heirs were his sisters’ sons and daughters. Two of them, Pompeius and Hypatius, were out of reach, under siege at the palace along with the emperor and other notables. The rebels hoped that a third nephew, Probus, was in the city. They walked to his mansion, but found it empty; he had already left the capital. Perhaps he had been forewarned (maybe because of his tie to Theodora’s daughter); perhaps he was following the Epicurean advice to “live in hiding”;
¹³
perhaps he was avoiding trouble, giving an early example ideal of meek fidelity to power that became a rule in the Byzantine age. The rebels destroyed his house, making Probus the first victim of the rebellion he had almost been selected to lead. This signal could be interpreted in many different ways, and by Thursday, January 15, a debate about how to react was raging in the palace and across the whole city.

In such situations, the established power customarily resorts to the army, and Justinian was no exception; it helped that two excellent generals, Belisarius and Mundus, were at the palace, each with troops devoted to their leaders and their paychecks. Perhaps two thousand strong, the soldiers tried making a sortie outside, assuming that with their training they would easily prevail over the more numerous but less disciplined rebels. But once again some churchmen intervened unexpectedly, just as the Sykae monks had the past Saturday. Some ecclesiastics from the basilica of the Holy Wisdom appeared in the street: they were carrying the relics they had saved from the recent fire. They wanted to separate the crowd from the soldiers and save some lives, but Belisarius’s troops saw them as an impediment, and trampled them on the pretext that they were obstructing military action.

Now the emperor looked really bad: he seemed to be heathen and inhuman, pitting his soldiers against devout and defenseless priests, against “benevolent,” albeit incendiary, factions. The incident made such a powerful impression that even the women of Constantinople left their quarters and poured into the streets to exhort the men to fight.

+ + +

In January 532, Constantinople was the very image of a world turned upside down. The emperor, lord of the Ecumene, was holed up in his palace like a prisoner. Former prisoners walked the streets freely. Women were also in the streets, which was uncommon and exciting. Disorder and anarchy reigned in the city just as it was trying to codify new laws that were to stand gloriously through the centuries. The night sky was lit up by fires. Hospitals and churches were destroyed, and those with wounded bodies and spirits were left homeless. Even the house of the rebels’ favorite candidate had been set on fire. In a perverse switch, the city once considered the center of triumphant civilization was suddenly home to every possible barbarity.

There were signs of disturbance even within the palace, which was believed to reflect the harmonious movement of the stars. Standing at the heart of the whole ceremonial system, the emperor detected anomalies in the movement of his planets: he suspected the dignitaries and functionaries around him of disloyalty and secret conspiracies. He ordered everyone to leave the palace. Only his closest council of advisors remained: John the Cappadocian, Narses, Belisarius, Mundus, Tribonian, and a few others. Anastasius’s two nephews—Pompeius and Hypatius—asked to stay; perhaps they had heard that Probus’s house had been set on fire. But their request only increased the ruler’s suspicion. He ordered them, too, out of the palace. In essence, he provided candidates for the rebels who were seeking a leader. It was the evening of Saturday, January 17, 532.

“I know whom I have to face. But I will be the first one to speak.” Justinian wanted to reassert his authority, and Theodora was listening. She still had not taken a position.

On Sunday, January 18, the emperor made an appearance in the imperial box at the Hippodrome. In his hands he reportedly carried the Gospel, and in his mind must have been two political, personal precedents. The first was from the time of the civilian uprising against Anastasius. In response to his critics, Anastasius had provocatively appeared in public without the imperial crown and invited the arena to choose a new monarch. Taken by surprise, the crowd did nothing but
reconfirm his position and their trust in him. The second precedent was from Easter 527, when for the first time Justinian had blessed the crowd as the Augustus.

As he had done on that occasion, he now assumed a priestly role. Then he made himself into a sacrificial lamb, saying, “I forgive you the offense you have committed against me. I shall order no arrests as long as calm returns. You are not to blame for what happened. I am, for my sins.” With this, Justinian drew attention to both his personal and his official selves, as he had done in the ivory diptych of 521. But in 521 it looked like arrogant self-confidence before a selected audience; now it was a pathetic plea before the crowd in the Hippodrome. And the Christian reference to his sins backfired, for the crowd grasped his weakness. They began to shout, blaming him for his lies, starting with the long-ago (and presumably long-forgotten) betrayal of Vitalian. Making a play on words between the assonance of the Greek Ioustini
anos
(“Justinian”) and
onos
(“donkey”), someone even accused him of dense stubbornness. The jeering grew, and the emperor began descending the stairs of the Kathisma. The doors closed behind him, hiding him again in the protective shell of his palace. Instead of a possible arbiter and moderator in the dispute between ministers and factions, he had become an enemy, the greatest enemy.

In the burning city, the crowd found the leaders they were seeking: the two nephews of Anastasius who had been dismissed from the palace. The crowd was joined by groups of anti-Justinian potentates, but their union was quite ephemeral—it was never a political program. Still, they joined forces and chose Hypatius as their leader. He had once been an important, though not invincible, general. Now he was primarily a husband. His wife, Maria, wracked with dark omens, wept and reached out to him, trying to prevent him from accepting a fake imperial coronation. But the scene was not quite as moving as the ancient scene of the mythical, prophetic Andromache, who tried to hold back her Hector, her stolen hero, her noble, losing warrior. Hypatius was not the type of man who “wanted to do great deeds, leave something of himself to men yet to be born.”
¹⁴
He was trembling, weakly saying “no, no.”

Finally, the rebels succeeded in decorating him with a symbolic
torques, the sovereign’s neckchain. He knew many of the illustrious aristocrats among those cheering him as emperor, shouting “Long live Hypatius.” And so Hypatius took heart. They reached the Hippodrome, and he was raised to the imperial loge, the Kathisma, the same box where Justinian had appeared shortly before—but he came directly from the arena, not through the palace. Behind him, palace guards stood watch at the single door separating him from the center of power. It was a modest physical barrier, but an enormous mental one.

Inside the palace, it seemed sacrilegious that Hypatius was so close. Belisarius wanted to do away with the usurper, and he tried to force the guards blocking access to the loge to carry out his command. But they resisted, because they were not sure whose side God was on. They were waiting for events to unfold before deciding whether Hypatius was a meteor that would disappear in a flash, or a true Augustus worthy of their support. One sign would suffice; it was still an era of revelations.

The right gesture might be taken as a sign, so Justinian’s secret council considered all kinds of possible actions. A “true Roman male” in ancient times—even someone as abominable as Nero—would have killed himself to save his honor, but suicide was an unsuitable choice for a Christian. Flight seemed to be the only option left. The southern coast of the Black Sea (or Pontos Euxeinos) offered a safe haven, with lands and palaces still faithful to the crown. This would be a good temporary solution, a fine place from which to later recapture the city. But Justinian knew his ancient history, and he knew that such a solution was rarely successful.

Like a great ship, the
restitutio
seemed to have run aground even before setting sail; the restoration seemed to be sunk, and it looked as if the Augusti would never reach their glorious destination. But a real boat was at the palace quay, waiting to take the sovereigns on a far shorter crossing, to safety.

At this point—according to Procopius, who probably got an eyewitness account from Belisarius—Theodora stepped in. Her speech to the emperor’s secret council is the longest one of hers ever recorded, and while her biographer may have polished it and added erudite allusions
to suit his rhetorical purpose, it remains unique. It may not reflect the actual form of her speech, but it testifies to Theodora’s intentions and her logical argument. She took the floor before the highest dignitaries of the empire and said:

As to the belief that a woman ought not to be daring among men or to assert herself boldly among those who are holding back from fear, I consider that the present crisis most certainly does not permit us to discuss whether the matter should be regarded in this or in some other way.

For in the case of those whose interests have come into the greatest danger nothing else seems best except to settle the issue immediately before them in the best possible way.

My opinion then is that the present time, above all others, is inopportune for flight, even though it bring safety.

For while it is impossible for a man who has seen the light not also to die, for one who has been an emperor it is unendurable to be a fugitive. May I never be separated from this purple, and may I not live that day on which those who meet me shall not address me as mistress.

If, now, it is your wish to save yourself, O Emperor, there is no difficulty. For we have much money, and there is the sea, here the boats. However, consider whether it will not come about after you have been saved that you would gladly exchange that safety for death.

For as for myself, I approve a certain ancient saying that royalty is a good burial-shroud.
¹⁵

At that point, a hush fell over the council. (There was nothing ceremonial about this gesture of respect, even though the technical name for those meetings—
silentia
, “silences”—reflected the rule that only the emperor had the right to speak.) After Theodora spoke, the council thought it best to remain silent.

She gave no justification for her actions in her opening remarks, until she reached the words “assert herself boldly.” Her perspective was practical, focused on action. She acknowledged that they faced a
dangerous situation: they had reached the ultimate evil (“settle the issue … in the best possible way”). Courtly euphemisms or circumlocutions were totally foreign to her.

After analyzing the situation, she offered her conclusion: the impending danger was absolute and extreme, and she absolutely rejected the idea of fleeing. The empress continued with a logical syllogism: death inevitably accompanies life, but exile has no place alongside imperial dignity.

The pendulum swung from the absolute to the individual (“I consider,” “my opinion,” “may I never,” “as for myself”) and it swung again in the next passage: life is not life (the absolute)—or, better:
my
life (the individual) is not a life unless I can wear the purple, unless I am addressed as “mistress.” (From this we can guess that the palace had already started to use the new ceremonial appellation and veneration of the rulers, the innovations that so irritated Procopius and other conservatives.)

Theodora’s speech could have ended here, with the idea that life wasn’t worth living if she wasn’t wearing the purple. Some in Justinian’s inner circle might have smirked, thinking it was certainly true that Theodora would be nobody without the purple, that she would once again be the woman—
that kind
of woman—that Constantinople knew so well. But right here her irrepressible actress’s spirit flared up. After all her unexpected reversals—after venerated old laws were altered for her, after she took the throne against all expectations—her new scenario, impossible as it seemed, was the most unexpected reversal of all.

She was not speaking in abstractions, in general statements for the whole group; she spoke to Justinian, her preferred interlocutor. She looked only into the eyes of God’s “Chosen One.” The other characters had suddenly fallen to the back of the stage; they were mere extras, and the close-up was now on the two rulers.

They were separated from the group, and Theodora—in a move worthy of an Attic tragedy—separated her destiny from that of the emperor. The emperor could save himself if he chose: there was no dearth of money, the sea was open, the ships were ready to welcome whoever wanted to flee. But Theodora saw flight not as salvation but as
a “second death,” in the words of the Gospel
¹⁶
—a fate even worse than death.

She
was accustomed to defying the world’s customs and conventions: she would not run. Should Justinian choose to retreat, she would not share his fate; he would prove himself unworthy of the throne. In spite of his ego, his studies of antiquity, even his concept of messianic power, he might choose to flee, doing something that no Roman emperor had ever considered suitable or possible.
She
would remain faithful to her purple. She would carry on the traditions of antiquity, in the present, in her deeds—not just in words, not just in plans for the future. She would do so by resisting, even dying, because there was no life without the purple cloak of power. To avoid being separated from her purple, Theodora was saying, she was even willing to lose Justinian and marry death instead, to choose the purple over the man who had granted it to her.