OUP (2016) h/b 277pp £20.99 (ISBN 9780199740765)
It is not easy to imagine how P. felt when asked to produce a monograph of Theodora. The key element of his source material is clearly barking, and few of the later attempts at portraying Theodora have been free of the influence of Procopius’ Secret History. P.’s subtitle ‘Actress, Empress, Saint’ gives an idea of the territory we are in, and the fact that she was long regarded in the ‘West’ of what was the Roman Empire of Late Antiquity onwards as a pope-hater, and in the East as a saint, shows up another facet of the problems facing the biographer.
P. agrees about her early life. Her family were circus entertainers (providing shows between the races in the hippodrome), and what the poor goose underwent as part of her act doesn not bear mention. P. accepts that she probably augmented her income by taking in lovers. Later she became the courtesan of Hecebolus, Governor of Cyrenaica under Anastasius, and later yet was introduced to Byzantine society, probably with the help of her existing networks, the Blue faction of the circus world, and Severus, Bishop of Antioch.
Her marriage to Justinian seems to have been a love match, in part enabled by tweaks to the law by Justin and Justinian himself. She clearly was a powerful presence in the court who never forgot her friends (nor her enemies), and championed the rights of many on the margins of society. More than once she seems to have saved the throne, first after Justinian’s gross mishandling of the Nika Riots, ending up with a massacre, and then, probably, at the time bubonic plague struck the capital and the empire as a whole. In the first case, according to Procopius, she stopped Justinian’s disappearance into exile with ‘But consider, if it will benefit you when you have been saved, or if safety would be exchanged happily for death. For me, the old saying is best, that power is a splendid shroud’. And that concocted by one who seems to have hated her! Perhaps most important was her role as guardian of religion in a theocratic state, in particular her promotion of the cult of Mary in Constantinople and her ongoing support for the anti-Chalcedonians, the non-orthodox believers in the single nature of Christ and God, denying a human element therein.
So, a mighty historical character, but how does P. overcome the problems identified at the head of this review? In his final paragraph P. writes ‘To find the real Theodora, we have to move beyond the framework imposed by Procopius and look at the world in which she lived, as well as the wealth of material that survives outside the pages of the Secret History.’ And P. does just this, with something more like a ‘Life and Times of…’ than a monograph. So we are invited to stroll with Theodora through the Constantinople she knew and share her daily routine in the palace she inhabited. But this hypothesising is both justifiable, and indeed essential, if we are to understand who she was, and what made her what she was.
Adrian Spooner