Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (9 page)

A bronze statue in the Hippodrome represented Scylla, the Homeric twelve-footed monster with six faces and six mouths, each with three rows of teeth. Other children must have been terrorized by it, but not Theodora, familiar with animals since the time of her father, Acacius. Nor must she have felt any particular tenderness for Ulysses’ comrades “of the strong, vigorous arms”
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who were seized by the monster when they dared disobey their leader, Ulysses. The story of the hero who survived by his cunning through so many trials, who had defeated the Cyclops and the Suitors, probably revealed to her the potential of a world rich in transformations, metamorphoses, even miracles.

Cities, too, were undergoing miraculous transformations: Rome, the first and greatest, had lost its primacy after the foundation of Constantine’s city and was now relegated to a minor, secondary role. The name of the king of Italy and of Rome, Theodoric, was often mentioned in the capital-on-the-Bosphorus. Theodora might have asked if his name was the Latin version of her own name, if he also was a “gift from God.” It might have been explained to her that such was not the case, for Theodoric was a barbarian prince who could coin money carrying his profile in Italy only for as long as the great “Augustus,” the emperor of the Romans with his seat in Constantinople, allowed it. One day, Italy and the first Rome would be brought back into the fold of the empire. It was widely believed that this also would come to pass in the seventh eon. No one could imagine that it would happen under Theodora.

Just like Ulysses, who pretended to be a beggar in order to regain his kingdom of Ithaca, or like a snake that sheds its skin, Theodora was changing: she was different now, she was becoming what she had not been before. No longer a child, she was not yet a woman. Even those who disparaged her acknowledged that she was “fair to look upon.”
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It was both her personal vocation and her family’s fate that she was not to live life in the shadow, that she would see and be seen and admired.

Once more, the mother arranged events. She was benefiting from the new acquaintances she had made among the enthusiasts of the Blue team. If the three young girls showed some talent for acting,
music, and dance, it was certainly because the mother had guided them firmly in that direction. Possibly, therefore, Theodora’s mother was the first of many women with a direct experience of the theater who would meaningfully shape her destiny.

When Acacius’s orphan girls reached adolescence, it was their mother who directed them to the stage, using their beauty and possibly also the tradition of inherited careers that was typical of ancient guilds. The girls’ debuts must have taken place at different times, “as each one seemed to her to be ripe for this calling.”
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And of course only the mother knew best how to determine if each girl was mature enough for the task. Certain stages in a woman’s growth and development had to be respected; in a society where custom required that a woman marry and become a mother around the age of fifteen or sixteen, a girl’s introduction to the stage had to occur at about the same time.

The eldest daughter, Comito, was the first of the sisters to appear on the stage. She became quite successful in a short time. It was around the year 512, and Theodora was about twelve years old, not yet “mature” enough to embark on a life in the theater with all that it implied. And yet she already frequented the theater. As a matter of fact, she was part of Comito’s crew, “clothed in a little sleeved frock suitable to a slave boy. … [Theodora] would follow her about, performing various services and in particular always carrying on her shoulders the stool on which her sister was accustomed to sit.”
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Here we have a portrait of Comito, a rising star on the city’s stages, a very young, beautiful actress (or courtesan, according to the terminology of the
Secret History
), accompanied by her younger sister, the not-quite-mature Theodora, who was just as beautiful, dressed and perhaps coiffed as a boy. It’s a scene that recalls seventeenth-century genre paintings, both French and Italian, depicting the multicolored world of the commedia dell’arte. But it also recalls how theater was destiny for Theodora, much more than simply a family-imposed duty. It was a natural propensity, an individual drive that went hand in hand with her determination to be second to no one. Not even to her older sister.

On the other hand, theater—where Theodora and her family ended up—met with solid disapproval from official society, because of Christian
moral principles, or because of ancient standards inherited from a class aristocracy, or from a melding of these two elements into a new morality.

Religious fundamentalism distrusted any collective activity that was somehow connected with the ancient traditions of city life, and thus it looked askance at the baths and the Hippodrome, but mostly at the theater, where it detected the seeds of vice and temptation. Any generous use of the body, or any generous act toward the body, seemed to conflict with the kind of love that is given to God and received from Him. The ancient morality founded on pagan beliefs, as we already noted, placed entertainers on the lowest rung of social life, regarding them as necessary only insofar as they represented the expression of an intrinsic pathos of collective life, its release valve. Apart from that function, actors were indefensible individuals, marked with “infamy.” The grave and serious Roman Empire did not allow actors to enlist in the military, deeming them unworthy to serve the state. Given this context, it is not surprising that actresses were identified with prostitutes.

There were exceptions, of course. It was merely a private issue when more or less austere champions of Roman virtue or power took a fancy to an actor or an actress. But when the entertainment sector was defended and even celebrated in writing, the issue took on a different meaning. This was precisely the situation in late antiquity.

Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus (485–580), author, statesman, and nearly centenarian monk of the noblest rank who had a resplendent career, wrote a beautiful text in Latin with an amazed and admiring description of the seductions of pantomime, praising it precisely because the performance is allusive: “it is spoken without speaking, and said without saying, and the fingers are the tongue.”
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And in Greek, Coricius of Gaza, a rhetorician also active in the sixth century, offered the theater much more than praise, seeing it as an opportunity for social redemption. For example, he did not accept the belief that the mimes were tainted with the same “vices” that they performed on stage: “The more common the suspicion that they lead a dissolute life, the more I feel duty-bound to come to their defense.”
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In everyday life, young intellectuals who flocked to Constantinople
from the provinces of the empire, armed with ambition and supported financially by their parents, often neglected their studies in law or philosophy in favor of the chariot races, fights, and pantomime of the Hippodrome and the variety shows of the theaters. Some would later write poetry and thus regale future readers with what they had experienced as a simple distraction from the regular routine of daily life.

In the
Greek Anthology
of epigrams (also known as the
Palatine Anthology
because of the manuscript copy discovered in the Palatine Library of Heidelberg) we find sixth-century Constantinopolitan poets praising the physical beauty of their actresses, courtesans, and other women with choice terms and noble verses, claiming that no words could describe their beauty and no music could reproduce the spell of their voices. The svelte dancers they sang about had “feet as swift as wind”; singing and playing sweetly, they touched the kithara “with skilled fingers.”
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Some images are indelible, such as the face of a beloved Lais, flooded with tears as she fears that her lover has broken the oath of love;
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or a poet lingering affectionately over a wrinkle on the face of his beloved, because

Your autumn excels another’s spring,

And your winter is warmer than another’s summer.
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These texts restore a world of delights, of sensuality, of caring, that was still widespread. It was inseparable from the world of the stage and theater and was nourished by it, even as it was scorned by the dour Procopius and earlier by Saint John Chrysostom, patriarch of Constantinople from 398 to 403 and a father of the Eastern Church, who in a most unchristian spirit censured theater and racetrack performances, even blaming the actors for their humble origins: their “fathers are ropemakers, fishmongers, and slaves.”
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An unexpected criticism indeed from someone who valued and preached a Christian approach to life. It was a strong sign of the anti-theater mind-set of late antiquity when disparate, if not incompatible, attitudes combined to form an elite culture that was grounded in an ancient ideal of literary learning reduced, for the most part, to mere technique.

In the face of all this, the actress who became empress was not so much a paradox as a scandal in the perfect, evangelical sense of “a stone one stumbles over.”

Procopius, the leading historian of the time, could not attend the first performances of Comito and Theodora, her boyish “little slave,” in the city’s theaters. Around 512 and 513 he was still in the Levant, busying himself with legal and literary studies. Thus the information and images that he supplies are valuable not so much for their historical reliability as for being part of the narrative process of his work. Procopius had framed his first close-up snapshot of Theodora in the grand setting of the Kynêgion, in the midst of her family and in the act of pleading; but now her character comes more sharply into focus. Her relationship with the older sister is stressed; he specifies that there is a hierarchy in which Theodora is subordinated to Comito for “various services” that she performed, and he specifies her “professional” role in her career in theatrical entertainment, which immediately gets a negative connotation, branded as prostitution.

Procopius’s rhetoric of blame offers many unexpected, concrete details for a historical reconstruction of the period. Theodora’s boyish “little slave” tunic is a precious clue for identifying the roles that she regularly played on the stage with her sister: maybe our Theodora was the boy servant to Comito, who played the mistress. We have examples of this type of play both in Attic comedy (from Aristophanes to Menander) and in the mime tradition that had seduced even the stern philosopher Plato.
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It is doubtful, however, that the two sisters performed artistic plays. More likely, they acted in variety sketches with very little dialogue and much physical posturing and gesturing, similar to modern vaudevillestyle shows designed to please and entertain an undemanding audience. The sketches were chock-full of “intrigues, betrayals, poisonings, fisticuffs, magic spells, serenades, and forsaken women.”
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The mistress would accuse the servant of some wrongdoing and would try to slap him. The servant would flee, or would try to convince her that she was wrong—that it wasn’t his fault. Or maybe the mistress unfurled lofty monologues about life, destiny, and fate, while the servant went about
his domestic chores and, in a “parallel” dialogue, exaggerated his daily tasks in gestures and words. “How tiring are the nights, how tiring,”
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as Aristophanes had written a thousand years earlier.

From a historical and biographical point of view, Comito’s professional advancement, with the pay she brought in from her acting and any occasional supplemental income (as alluded to by Procopius), must have been financially important for a family that had lived through difficult times both just after Acacius’s death and later during the emergency that had caused them to plead in the Kynêgion. We do not know whether Comito continued to live at home or whether her professional career required an impresario or a protector. In any case, the mother most likely continued to supervise her daughter’s career to some degree. But what about Theodora? In an unexpected, brusque passage, the
Secret History
reports the following:

Now for a time Theodora, being immature, was quite unable to sleep with a man or to have a woman’s kind of intercourse with one, yet she did engage in intercourse of a masculine type of lewdness with the wretches, slaves though they were, who, following their masters to the theater, incidentally took advantage of the opportunity afforded to them to carry on this monstrous business, and she spent much time in the brothel in this unnatural traffic of the body.
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Theodora was still immature sexually (and therefore professionally), but Procopius does not hesitate to separate her from the family and follow her alone, in her relationships and behavior. He ascribes to her practices that were defined as “unnatural” and links her sexually to slaves, and therefore to men on social rungs below even hers. It’s a scathing criticism, especially if we consider that during Theodora’s years as empress (when she was at the apex of society) very strict laws were enacted against homosexuality and in particular against sodomy, an act that the
Secret History
claims was a professional specialty of the young girl, as if it were her personal inclination, her personal passion.

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As we follow the gradual unveiling of the character of Theodora in the successive scenes of the
Secret History
, we find that the unveiling and the baring are more than just etymological. We also encounter the author’s eye, his intentions, his sophisticated rhetorical technique, his skill in setting up his materials. By studying the logic of that authorial gaze and the technique of that rhetoric and comparing it with other information pertinent to those years, we can reconstruct Theodora’s story (and somehow sketch her body, which, as even Procopius acknowledges, was “most fair”): We see Theodora, wounded by that gaze and “victimized” by that rhetoric.
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