Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (7 page)

Paul, that most Christian and highly educated of apostles, when asked who he was had replied simply that he was a “Roman citizen.”
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For Theodora and her sisters the streets and squares of the city—with their obelisks, their columns, and their statues—most likely inspired a complex sense of pride, for they were Constantinopolitans and Romans and Christians. The girls repeatedly heard about the exploits of the emperor Constantine, who had defeated the tyrant Maxentius in the name of the cross, or the tale of Saint Helena, Constantine’s mother, who had found the true Golgotha Cross. These tales celebrated an empire that had existed continuously since the famous twins were suckled by the she-wolf; a lasting empire, changed but uninterrupted; an empire that would surely last another eon, because it so pleased God.

To the three sisters, Christianity must have seemed a happy mystery, for Jesus had promised that the last would be the first, as it had been in ancient Israel when David had defeated Goliath and Judith had beheaded Holofernes. They must have loved to hear the story of the three Jewish boys thrown into the raging furnace of Babylon: the fire had not touched the boys because they were singing lovely songs in praise of God. It was a good reason to keep on singing.

While the girls were busy with the crucial formation of their identities, their fruitful activity did not protect them from the uncertainties of fate. The calm period for Acacius’s widow and daughters turned out to be
only a temporary lull. Asterius, the Greens’ chief organizer, suddenly overturned their lives: according to the
Secret History
he “removed these persons from that office.”
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It’s interesting to note that Acacius’s widow shared the official position: Asterius removed “these persons.” Asterius himself must have enjoyed great latitude if he had such power.

The widow and her partner had done their job well and were beyond reproach. And yet Asterius “removed them from that office,” perhaps for reasons that had nothing to do with [them], just as people are dismissed these days “because of corporate restructuring.” Asterius received an outside offer he could not refuse: someone else’s cash.
¹⁰
We mustn’t simply deride this as corruption; the fact is that society in late antiquity was structured so that mobility and even overnight wealth resulted from bonds that were rarely formal or merit-based, but were dictated largely by family relationships, geography, or religion—in short, by a patronage system that was arbitrary and insecure.

Clearly, someone claimed to have better patrons and a greater right to the job of bear keeper for the Green team at the Kynêgion. He could certainly offer more, not only to Asterius, the administrator and operations manager, but also—most important—to the faction’s treasury. It was natural, even advisable, for Asterius to yield, for this meant strengthening his position in a power clique, or maybe allowing one of the many cliques to solidify their strength in the Kynêgion and therefore in Constantinople’s entertainment industry, which was both ceremonial and institutional. It was an arbitrary decision, no doubt, but codified nonetheless.

One can only speculate whether this change of personnel came on orders from the highest imperial circles, or because of seditious activity taking place on the radical fringes of the factions, where the city’s tensions—fueled especially by immigration and growing demographic pressure—found a violent outlet. Perhaps “the militant group of the Greens”
¹¹
influenced Asterius, claiming the position, and paying for it, on behalf of one of the group’s members or protégés. If indeed heavy political pressures were at work, Acacius’s widow had little or no chance of redressing the wrong: she could pay, she could pray, or she could find other ways.

+ + +

Theodora’s mother was not a woman who gave up easily; she was even less likely to suffer in silence when she was wronged. And so she claimed what she believed was her due, and she did so in an unexpected way, with a spectacular act of daring. Maybe the inspiration came to her as she saw her three girls singing or acting out a scene they had glimpsed in a square or on the street. Or perhaps it was a dream that drove her to act, for at the beginning of the seventh eon, Christian Constantinople, the “Beacon of the Ecumene,” was still very close to the archaic Greece of Pythias and of the old myths.
¹²
Whatever the reason behind her decision—whether it came to her in a dream or in the long hours of a sleepless night—she did not hesitate; she put her plan together and she acted.

She summoned her daughters and told them that the time had come to stop pretending and to start doing. And so they studied rituals, funerals, and processions, and they rehearsed gestures feverishly, to learn how to suffuse their performance with the entire grammar of grief, to learn every nuance of affliction. They practiced in secret, without letting anyone know, linked by their female complicity. The mother may have gone out late in the evening, a torch in her hand, to “make the final arrangements.” She would speak with the theater ushers and guards, and the following morning the girls would question her.

Finally, the fateful day arrived. It was a holiday, with flowers strewn everywhere, partly in homage to the city’s secret name, “The Flourishing” (
anthousa
in Greek,
flora
in Latin). The girls too were adorned with flowers: in their hair were garlands similar to those worn by rulers and saints, and in their hands were flowers, held close to the breast against a white dress.

According to legend, one day the emperor Constantine the Great had gone into the arena and won a fight against a bear and a lion. Similarly, the girls were going into the arena to triumph over poverty and the abuse of power. They passed through the gates of the Kynêgion and walked along the vaulted corridors, dimly lit by torches, beneath the stands of the amphitheater. As they proceeded, the light at the far end of the corridor grew, and the roar of the audience, excited by a
venatio
,
grew louder and more distinct. The girls stopped and rehearsed their gestures. Then the roar subsided and finally stopped.

10. Mosaic of a procession of Holy Virgins, c. 560, church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna.

The family started walking again, and they moved closer to the light. The mother exchanged a signal with a man draped in a green cloak, who motioned them forward and lifted his right hand to pull open a curtain. Acacius’s widow and the little girls set foot in the Kynêgion arena, where deer, bears, and lions had just been slaughtered. Theodora didn’t know it, but she was stepping onto the very first of many public stages.

The times of the pagan emperors were long past: no wild beast would pounce on the women and tear them to pieces (as beasts once massacred the martyr Perpetua and her maid Felicita). In the empire’s capital, the mother and daughters could walk into the arena safely, toward the section reserved for the Greens, their longtime patrons and
interlocutors. With garlands in their hair and flowers in their arms, dressed in white, they might have recalled a sacred procession, like the one we can still admire in the mosaics of the church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna [
fig. 10
] showing the holy virgins of Jewish and Christian history—the history of the elect—rejoicing in the reward “prepared for them by the Father”
¹³
in Heaven.

Not a reward but rather a right was what Theodora and her sisters sought that day. They stopped in front of the Greens. They threw flowers and garlands toward the seats, and the audience fell silent. The rules of communication of the time demanded that private issues be settled publicly, that appeals be turned into theater, that supplications be turned into verse: the vast audience sensed that it was going to witness the ceremonial expression of some sort of passionate claim. Now the voice of the supplicants’ spokesman was heard in the arena, intoning a plea along these lines:

Long life to you,

Most Christian and glorious Greens!

Life and victory to you!

O glorious Greens

We are oppressed

And we ask for relief.

Here we are, daughters of Acacius

Who in this Kynêgion

Was a fine keeper of wild beasts

And whom we have lost too soon!

Then the supplicants knelt in a gesture of submission. The audience turned to look at Asterius, who stood up and extended his right arm in the usual gesture of the ancient orators rising to speak in the Forum: signaling respect for authority and requesting silence. And the audience did quiet down. Asterius turned slowly, running his eyes over the audience; then he looked down at the arena without uttering a word. His look sufficed: his wide eyes and his raised eyebrows signified scorn for supplicants engaging in such a shameless show of female insolence
and childish delirium, so far beneath his dignity and everyone else’s. (In retrospect, his judgment seems shortsighted.)

The supplicants on their knees, mute, Asterius standing and mute: their opposition created a theatrical scene in the arena of the Kynêgion. There was no explicit violence, but this did not make Asterius’s behavior any less hostile. By refusing to speak, he indicated that the plea did not deserve a reply. However imprudent the little girls’ gesture might have appeared, he was being deeply arrogant.
¹⁴
His behavior was the extreme opposite of that gentle kindness recommended to the powerful by the dialectics and politics of ancient culture. The Blue faction, opponents of the Greens, watched the contrast between the kneeling supplicants and the powerful, standing man as he punished them for their daring supplication by his similarly daring silence. When it became clear that Asterius was not going to reply—when he exhibited behavior unworthy of a potentate, behavior typical of an abusive tyrant—the Blues might have spoken thus:

O evil, loathsome Greens,

Oppressors of little girls!

O Greens, who cannot even speak

May you lose forever the power of speech!

If the inspiration had come to Acacius’s widow in a dream, she now saw that the dream had been prescient. She instructed her daughters to get up, she arranged their garments and garlands, and they quickly walked to the other side of the arena, where they knelt. The organizer of the Blues, Asterius’s counterpart (there’s no trace of his name), rose to his feet. Since his faction happened to need a bear keeper, he could afford to make a humane, generous, charitable gesture, just as the emperor alone usually did. In this ceremonial role-playing, before opponents who scorned defenseless little girls, he saw that for one day he could be king of the Kynêgion. So he acted quickly.

Like Asterius, he extended his right arm, requesting silence. Unlike Asterius, he spoke. He noted that there were three supplicants, three like the trinity worshipped by the orthodox Blues; and that the white of
their garments signified a welcome purity of heart. Therefore, the most glorious Blues were acceding to their request. The mother signaled the little girls, who stood up, and the Blues erupted in cheers and applause.

And so the companion of Acacius’s widow was given a position, although it was not necessarily
his
position. (“They conferred this position … upon them,” wrote Procopius.
¹⁵
) “Knock and the door will be opened to you,” the Gospels exhort.
¹⁶
But the door that opens is not necessarily the one you knocked on.

The plea in the Kynêgion is one of the major events in Theodora’s childhood, and it is recalled often by her modern biographers. Her relationship with the Blues before and after her ascent to power, and her bitter hostility to the Greens as empress, have been read as a lifelong revenge for the humiliation she and her sisters suffered in the Kynêgion. It is undoubtedly an important episode in her life, and it sheds light on some traits of Theodora’s personality that go beyond her future choice of sides.

As at the time of her father’s funeral, Theodora had been thrust onto a public stage in a highly ritualized, theatrical context. But this new experience was not one of loneliness or loss. Her kneeling and pleading before the Greens was her first experience of confrontation between the weak and the strong, between the last against the first, following in the example of the Biblical David and Judith. It was also the struggle of the few against the masses and of woman—women—against a man, against men. Here the mother was teaching the girl and her sisters the virtue of resistance, of self-defense, of using all possible tools in the most adverse situations.

Theodora’s experience continued and deepened with her sudden shift of allegiance to the Blues, and it is easy to infer that it was precisely here that Theodora learned from her mother how to turn an impossible situation to her advantage, in public. Perhaps the arena of the Kynêgion in late-ancient Constantinople had witnessed the revival of what the scholars of another form of public spectacle—the ancient Attic tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles—call reversal,
¹⁷
such as when, for example, Oedipus, once the happiest of men, is suddenly
transformed into the unhappiest. But also when the raging Furies become the pious Eumenides.