Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (3 page)

Procopius claimed he was telling about the “nurture and education” of Theodora. In reality, he denigrates her by writing reductively about the sexual history of Theodora the woman. And yet by so doing, he confers substance and seductiveness on the stately apparition that gazes down at us from the mosaics of San Vitale in Ravenna, casting a spell on hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

This paradox, this unique quality, is the key to the
Secret History
’s fame and that of its protagonist; that fame spread in 1623, when the first printed edition was published. Merely because a biased account of their private sexual life has survived, the characters of the
Secret History
, Theodora above all, have been ambiguously perceived as being “more modern” or “more interesting” than other characters from late antiquity or the Middle Ages.

Many controversial, mythical versions of Theodora’s character have appeared in modern times. There have been sentimental, lascivious, and cruel Theodoras created in turn by Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade (1740–1814), Victorien Sardou (1831–1908), Charles Diehl (1859–1944), Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), and even Robert Graves (1895–1985). Whether ancient or modern, the literary fables spring to life when they are read in their historical context, especially the history of the political, legislative, military, social, religious, and cultural issues so important to Theodora and her contemporaries. For while they prayed for eternal Christian bliss, they also trusted that their accomplishments in those earthly fields would guarantee them future fame.

In order to present the life of Theodora against the background of her time and her world, therefore, we must analyze and interpret many
often contradictory historical and literary sources (primarily the writings of Procopius), supplementing them with knowledge about monuments and physical sites studied by archaeologists and historians of art, architecture, and epigraphy. But the biographer’s task is not simply to reconstruct a documentary file on Theodora (the reader will find a synopsis of such documents in the appendix to this volume); he must push forward, he must try to ask questions of Theodora herself, the source of all sources, as he glimpses her through the fabric of the events in her life.

Those events, with all their reversals, reveal a basic unity in Theodora’s very own “culture,”
⁹
remote from the official canons of the time, a culture that she built all by herself and that marked her soul. She coined her unique, precious identity during her unusual, proud education, and in less than a decade (from about 518 to 527) it enabled her to embark on one of the most admired and controversial ascents in European history, in a career path that rose to the splendor of the imperial throne of “the second Rome.”

And it was no fairy tale. Theodora knew how to draw strength from her cultural and moral roots, to
resist
in impossible situations, when “men no longer knew where to turn.”
¹⁰
She found the model for her resistance in the archaic, mythical Hellas, the culture whose emotional depths had remained hidden for centuries beneath classical and Christian virtues, only to resurface in her, the daughter of a bear tamer. (Perhaps they still linger about, waiting to be evoked anew in the future.)

This book aims to evoke Theodora’s character on the historical stage where she lived, searching as necessary in the gaps between documents and trying to provide a voice where the sources are silent.

Because of its author’s fears (there was no way for him “if detected to escape a most cruel death”), the
Secret History
was not widely circulated in the Byzantine era and was largely unknown until the Renaissance. Thus the extraordinary Theodora did not join the roster of famous ancient women that men of letters suggested to painters seeking iconographic material. Thus Pietro Aretino never discussed Theodora, and Titian never painted her.

And there is some irony in the fact that the
Secret History
was
published in 1663 as part of the collection of Byzantine historians promoted by Louis XIV for the Louvre library, the first systematic presentation of the history of the empire of Constantinople in the modern West. In that same year, the painter who would have been the ideal modern portraitist of Theodora died at the court of Vienna. He was born in Sant’Archangelo di Romagna, not far from Ravenna, in 1601, and his name was Guido Cagnacci [fig. 3]. Cagnacci was and remains the portraitist of the most unforgettable Cleopatras, Lucretias, Judiths, and other famous ancient women. Discarding all superfluous decoration, he lovingly portrayed them in an intense light that delightfully exalts their bodies and their beautiful, delicate faces caught in unique emotional moments. He explored their bodies not in order to belittle their looks or character, as Procopius did in his
Secret History
, but to restore them to artistic memory, and thus to life.

3.
Death of Cleopatra,
Guido Cagnacci, oil on canvas, 1657(?), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

ROM THE VERY FIRST
, life for Theodora was a public event, a ceremony. She had no father to introduce her to life or to protect her. Her father was no more.

There was little decorum or privacy. The coffin was open. Everything took place under the open sky. The body of Acacius, Theodora’s father, had been laid out in his garment as “keeper of the animals.”
¹
His face was exposed to the curious stares or merciful gazes of strangers; arms folded, he seemed lost in reverent slumber. The arms of other men carried his lifeless body to the cemetery near the city walls. The coffin was overflowing with cut flowers; next to the body, someone had placed Acacius’s favorite tools, leather and metal objects fit for strong hands such as his had been: the whip he cracked to keep the wild animals at bay and the pitchfork he used to goad them into their cages.

Standing on their doorsteps, shopkeepers bowed their heads; passersby made the sign of the cross in answer to the gestures of the priests who escorted Acacius to his last Christian abode, blessing his soul’s release from the body and its return to the Ancient Maker “in the high heavens.” The chants of the priests were serene, as serene as the figurative art of the time: idyllic scenes of flocks of animals, doves, peacocks, and symbolic monograms.

Other individuals harboring different feelings also attended the funeral of Acacius the bear keeper. A choir of mourning women—plaintive reminders of an ancient Mediterranean custom, surely an irritant for the Christian priests—gave melodic form to the empty feelings of
the survivors, Acacius’s widow and his daughters in particular. From their repertory of funeral lamentations, the mourners sang dirges dedicated to young bridegrooms, not unlike those that still survive to this day in the Salento region of southern Italy:

I had in my garden a fair pomegranate tree,

But the wind came and uprooted it,

Taking it with him.

I had in my garden a carnation,

Red and sweet-smelling.

Come women neighbors, see how it’s torn.

My young groom, my darling,

I call but you don’t speak.

The sun has set but your fair eyes

No longer see the moon.

Yesterday, today and every day I call you,

And speak to you.

A fire rages in my heart:

For your fair eyes no longer see.
²

As the funeral procession wound its way through orchards, gardens, and untilled overgrown land, leaving behind the network of city streets, it seemed even thinner. From time to time, isolated figures appeared on the horizon: women drawing water from wells, or wandering creatures chasing a dream, perhaps, of a life free of earthly obligations, “like the angels” of Paradise. Finally, the procession reached the grand complex of walls, towers, and moats protecting the city that was considered “impregnable” [
fig. 4
]. They could hear the blare of trumpets that signaled the changing of the guard. And so the majesty of the empire was projected onto the very first ceremony and the first grief of a little orphan girl of about three named Theodora. But no one in the procession that day could have felt very close to the immense power of the imperial throne.

On that particular day, at the funeral, public authority came in the guise of a man named Asterius. Acacius’s widow—the mother of Theodora and her sisters—was careful not to stray too far from him.
She tried to smooth her hair, worn loose on her shoulders in mourning. They exchanged only a few words,
sotto voce.
Asterius seemed to nod his head in assent. Then the smell of incense grew more intense. The priests were escorting the corpse as it dropped into Mother Earth by drawing large crosses in the air with their censers, singing increasingly higher-pitched melodies as the grave diggers dug deeper. The soul of Acacius had left the body. The women had become separated from their Acacius. There was a widow. There were three orphan girls. Someone was needed to protect them.

4. “Theodosian” walls of Constantinople, 5th century.

But for now they protected themselves.

These events took place in Constantinople, present-day Istanbul in Turkey, which was at the time the European and Asiatic capital of an empire that still called itself Roman. It was shortly after the five hundredth year of the Christian era, perhaps around 503, though at the time the calendar ran differently. Based on holy scripture, it was generally agreed that God had begun the creation of the world on a Sunday
in March. It was a matter of dispute, however, whether that day was March 19 or 25, and whether it happened in the year 5494, 5500, 5501, or 5508 before Jesus Christ’s birth to the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem.

Whatever the correct year, that first Sunday in March marked the beginning of the “eons,” immense time-measuring units. Each eon was to last one thousand years, and as there were seven days to Creation, so the “fair race of the millennia”
³
would be seven laps long. At the close of the seventh eon, therefore—seven thousand years after the world’s creation—God would raise a tremendous spirit on the earth. The bones of the dead would be gathered in the Biblical valley of Jehoshaphat to reassemble themselves into bodies; the bones would be clothed in nerves and flesh; the dead would be resurrected for the Last Judgment. This is what seers and ascetics preached under the porticos and in the taverns of the city.