Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (30 page)

While the legitimate ruler pondered the prospect of fleeing from the purple, Hypatius the usurper trembled at the possibility of wearing it. Things really were completely backward: suddenly the women were the only people in the city talking in a tough, “manly” way. A multitude of unknown women came out from their gynoecia and poured through the city streets, urging their men to fight, and on the other side, in the palace, the famous empress was challenging the emperor and his circle to resist.

Though she was a woman, she spoke like a man, like an emperor. She gazed at the
res severa
(the “solemn matter”) of life and power with clear eyes, focusing on holding on to and perpetuating her power. She did not mention Christianity in her speech. The solemn, haughty spirit of ancient Rome spoke for the last time in history, through her. That spirit had one final metamorphosis—as a woman, as a former actress—and then it died like the prophetic voice of a vanishing sybil.

After this time, the concept of the true Roman man would be subsumed into the idea of the faithful Christian. Man would evolve just as the laws were evolving: whatever was
Roman
about a man (or a law) would survive only insofar as it was also
Christian.

Even in those times of change, the old sayings still held, such as the adage that “royalty is a good burial-shroud”: these words come from Isocrates, an orator who lived a thousand years before Theodora in the “democratic” Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries
B.C.
¹⁷
Theodora had not necessarily read his writings; she might have read excerpts in some collection of famous quotations, or heard the words from the erudite Peter, for example, or even from Justinian—in which case she was throwing them back in his face during the crisis. It’s not important for us to know her sources right now; what matters is how Theodora used them in her speech, her marvelous
coup-de-scène
, her reversal, her spectacle.

The reversal is particularly clear when we compare the measured beginning of the speech with its stinging conclusion. The ending, in ancient style, wraps up the whole argument just like a shroud wraps a lifeless body. A masterpiece of expositive progression, it is one of the gifts that Procopius, with his classical writing skills, gives the empress. Earlier, Procopius’s reworking of his first controversial “quote” from Theodora (her lament about the “four openings”) reaches back to an ancient tradition of literary disapproval; similarly, his version of the defiant Nika speech skillfully uses rhetorical progression to embrace references to the present, declarations about absolute values, citations and allusions that clearly reveal Procopius’s literary intent. They are particularly inspired. The Nika speech was written by a man who clearly—at least as far as this episode is concerned—admired his empress.

(Again, Theodora probably did not utter these very words; but she did speak before the emperor’s privy council, proof of her increased political and public role. And her speech certainly had an extraordinary effect on her audience: it became the stuff of legend. When the first book of Procopius’s
Wars
was published, probably around 551, readers were already expecting a written confirmation of that oral legend, and they were not disappointed.)

The tangled developments that followed the speech were also necessarily theatrical. Backstage, none of the men in the imperial council dared look Theodora in the eye, for this woman with her “bold” advice seemed
to be the only manly presence left. But the idea of fleeing had been discarded, and the men debated strategies for intervention and resistance.

Meanwhile, “onstage” at the Hippodrome, Hypatius seemed afraid of his audience; the tens of thousands of cheering people must have suddenly seemed to him like alien apparitions. He had an unexpected change of heart, and he scribbled a message to Justinian saying that he was pretending—just playing a role. For him, too, the rebellion was theater. Although he was wearing an imperial chain and sitting in the Kathisma, Hypatius swore his loyalty to the legitimate ruler. He wrote that he was keeping the crowd inside the Hippodrome so that it might more easily be routed by the imperial troops. He sent the message with one of his men; the messenger was admitted to the palace, met a dignitary, and requested an audience with the emperor. Impossible, came the reply: the rulers have already fled. Was this just misinformation, or had the dignitary been told to lie deliberately? We do not know. But when the rebels heard of Justinian’s “flight,” Hypatius and the others changed their minds again and began to feel more confident. They were beginning to believe that God was with them—but it was too late.

After Theodora’s speech, the discussion in the palace must have shifted to the subject of colors. The word
purple
was repeated and, as usual, the color purple went with Blue and Green: the council considered how to approach the factions. In an attempt to regain the Blues’s goodwill, Narses’s eunuchs were sent into the Hippodrome crowd with cash from the palace coffers. They handed out the coins with ambiguous words: “Careful—you’re allied with the Greens now, but Hypatius will favor them over you. … Remember what your situation was like before Justinian.”

Meanwhile, another sortie was launched with another kind of metal: swords instead of coins. Belisarius and Mundus took their troops (Goths and German Herulians), and they slipped out; they were quiet and disciplined, and no one noticed them. Luckily for them, they did not meet any ecclesiastics from the Holy Wisdom church this time. It was an ironic twist of destiny: they were heading for a rout in the Hippodrome, just as Hypatius had suggested in the message that never reached Justinian.

Belisarius entered the Hippodrome from the western gate, which had direct access to the Blues’s section; Mundus and his men used the entrance ominously called the “Deadman’s Gate.” The large crowd assembled in the huge arena was armed with only primitive weapons, and it could not resist the two select corps of military professionals. A ferocious slaughter ensued; this was perhaps the bloodiest Sunday of the first Christian millennium.

The palace guard, which had been hesitating between the rebels and the legitimate ruler, opened the doors of the imperial gallery and easily captured the frightened Hypatius and his followers, including his brother Pompeius. There was no resistance.

The uprising was defined as a crime of high treason, which was punished by beheading. The rebels were immediately led before the emperor. Hypatius told Justinian that he had given him proof in writing of his fealty.

“Your message never reached us,” was the answer.

He added that he had been forced to act under duress.

“But you did not have to wait such a long time to show your loyalty to the emperor.”

At this point Hypatius began begging for his life.

Since the two men knew each other well, the emperor was inclined to spare Hypatius in a generous act of clemency. Justinian may have thought about all the Christian blood had already been shed that day; he may have considered the lofty concept of “benevolence” that the rebels had wanted to grab away from the emperor. And, of course, he may have recalled the recent blame over his treatment of Vitalian. He was not eager to hear the same accusations again in the future.

Just as in the previous council, when debating between resistance and flight, the emperor’s thinking was worlds away from the blunt realism of the daughter of the Hippodrome. She knew the arena habitat all too well. Theodora knew that a wounded beast has to be killed immediately.

Letting the two brothers live would be seen as proof of weakness, she argued; it would undermine the continuity of power, dim the splendor of the emperor’s majesty, and rekindle the conspiracies. A few
hours earlier, the emperor had appeared before the rebels with the Gospels in his hand—and what had been the result? Theodora insisted that the law be applied. She disregarded her family ties to Hypatius and Pompeius (through her daughter, who had married into the house of Anastasius). Theodora put aside her private life and reacted to public events. And in one stroke she implicitly shifted Justinian’s personal, private position: from that moment on, he had to acknowledge that
he
owed his purple to
her.

Monday, January 19, 532, the new character in town—the rebel fire—was joined onstage by one of the city’s familiar old characters: the water of the strait. The water would be needed not to carry the emperor’s ships away to a safe exile, but to put out the last of the smoldering fires. A mute witness, the water reflected the execution of Hypatius and Pompeius (which took place on the shore), and then—since they were denied a cemetery burial—the water received their lifeless bodies.

The two brothers’ property was confiscated, as was the property of other notables who had joined the rebellion and then been exiled. After a suitable period—perhaps on the first anniversary of the riots—Justinian considered the lofty moral role ascribed to the emperor and pardoned the conspirators. The children of Hypatius and Pompeius reacquired their parents’ titles. Other notables got back their property, their titles, and their wealth, or at least the share that Justinian “had not [already] happened to bestow upon his friends”:
¹⁸
those who had lifted their swords for him (Belisarius, Mundus, Narses), and especially the woman who with her words had “destroyed the ranks of the enemy.”

Hypatius’s end and the tragic outcome of the Nika rebellion were Theodora’s triumph, the universal “song of her might”; they have sparked a number of interpretations, some of them controversial.

That mercenary “technicians” in the service of money defeated the “virtuous” populace when it rose up may be disappointing to some advocates of civic virtues, or to the scholars of the “decline” and “decadence” of civilizations who follow in the footsteps of Machiavelli, Gibbon, or Montesquieu.

People who love symbolism may want to compare the cruel, victorious
Theodora—a woman who could be so virile and royally commanding in emergencies—to the strong, royal, androgynous warrior-queens of so many myths, Eastern and Western, from ancient India on.

Scholars of cultural anthropology may try to read the Nika events as a late ancient version of the archaic, widespread “King for a Day” tale. (In this tale, the fictitious ruler is crowned, then becomes a scapegoat, is expelled from the community, and suffers ritual revenge: instead of being buried, his body is torn to pieces and the community is reborn, practically from the scattered fragments of his body.)

Undeniably, after the Nika uprising, the empire found the impetus and the energy it needed to achieve the restoration it had postponed for so long. So maybe the Nika slaughter was a propitiatory rite—and perhaps Theodora was its idol, or its high priestess.

Some time after that bloody Sunday in January 532, a body washed up from the Bosphorus and finally received a proper burial: it was believed to be the body of Pompeius. Hypatius did not reappear, but he was not forgotten. He had had a cultural bond with Julian, prefect of Egypt, a high imperial dignitary and functionary and the author of several epigrams collected in the
Greek Anthology.
Julian, who had perhaps been active in the Nika events, remembers his friend by writing about an empty tomb and a commemorative cenotaph:

I am the tomb of Hypatius and I do not say that I contain

in this little space the remains of the great Roman general.

For the earth, ashamed of burying so great a man in so small a tomb,

preferred to give him to the sea to keep.
¹⁹

He even suggests that Justinian might have commissioned the building of the monument.

The emperor himself was wrath with the roaring sea

for covering the body of Hypatius; for now he was dead

he wished the last honours to be paid to him,

and the sea hid him from the favour of his magnanimity.

Hence, a great proof of the mildness of his heart, he honoured

the distinguished dead with this cenotaph.
²⁰

In a masterpiece of courtly reticence, the “ruler” described as kind and generous seems to have nothing to do with Hypatius’s death. One wonders whether Justinian commissioned the epigrams—as he may have commissioned the poem to Theodora (“Nature … ever sings thy might”). Or maybe Julian offered the epigrams to the emperor in his anxiety to erase his support for the rebellion, and to remind the ruler of their earlier bond: Julian had also been praetorian prefect.

The speech that Theodora gave on January 18 was certainly a major moment in the history of
parrhêsia
,
²¹
that “freedom of speech” that she had used with Hecebolus long before, in Libya. Radical ascetics had also used it against her. But even though her speech had led to the death of tens of thousands of Christians on a “Holy Sunday,” no strong criticism was voiced.

This was quite diffferent from the response to Theodosius I—the most wrathful of all Christian emperors—who in the year 390 had ordered the slaughter of seven thousand people in the Hippodrome of Thessalonika (present-day Salonika). He wanted to show an “exemplary punishment” to a city guilty of murdering the highest military officer of Illyricum, the German Botheric, the province’s master of soldiers.
²²
The revered Saint Ambrose, then bishop of Milan, dared to exclude Theodosius from the Sacraments and vowed not to readmit him until he had repented, which Theodosius eventually did. But Theodora suffered nothing like that in the second Rome; the temporal, imperial power in Constantinople didn’t submit to the power of the Church as did the western rulers.

Theodora’s great, bloodstained power did not attract any adverse reactions; as a matter of fact it was celebrated as “a light … kindled … for prudent men.” The writer does not specify whether their prudence was born of moral virtue or mere opportunism.