instead of giving you your money, and if you want a bath, the bath-keeper assures you that the Son surely proceeds from nothing.’ Poor Gregory was made unwilling patriarch of the city by old Emperor Theodosius, but he lasted only a year before he fled back to his native village and became a hermit.
In the streets between the crowded red-tiled houses, arguing about theology you would hear a Babel of different voices: Greek and Syrian, Latin and Hebrew, Persian and Armenian. There were even a few Goths serving in the imperial armies by this time; but with their long ungainly limbs and horrid ruddy faces, their coarse blond hair and cold blue eyes, they were widely despised as racial inferiors.
The rich rode in carriages under fringed canopies, drawn by pairs of milk-white mules. Camel caravans crowded the marketplaces, having come from Persia, India, or along the silk route from China. (Although in time this trade would drop off markedly when an enterprising merchant smuggled some silkworm eggs out of Soghdiana, and Byzantine silk production began.) Grain came via Alexandria from the plentiful granaries of Egypt, while timber, furs and barbaric amber jewellery came south out of the steppes of Scythia and the forests of Germany.
In the city’s Forum stood a gigantic statue of Apollo topped with the head of Constantine, on a column of red porphyry. Out of the Forum led the high street of Constantinople, the Mese, running a full three miles to the Golden Gate in the great wall of the city. The Mese was where the noble lords and ladies of Byzantium came to do their shopping, at the most lavish jewellers and perfumers, in cool marble arcades piled high with fabulously expensive bolts of coloured silk, or at the little stalls of artisan leatherworkers, where they liked to buy the softest belts and the most delicate purses made from the hides of aborted kid-goats. For it is well known that the rich always have exquisite taste in such things.
Everywhere there was bustle and wealth and plenty.
Unless, of course, you were poor.
The most wretched and destitute inhabitants of the city survived in foul-smelling alleys where kites picked over the piles of rubbish and rats bit their children at night. The true nature of the Son mattered little to them, and jewellery and silks were very far from them.
Galla arrived on a day when the city was still in a warm hubbub of self-congratulatory triumph, after the defeat of the ever-threatening Persian armies to the east, and the subsequent marriage of young Emperor Theodosius II to his beautiful bride.
Theodosius was Galla’s nephew, and she was fond of him. He was at this time in his early twenties: gentle, scholarly, a good horseman, and in other fields no more than mildly incompetent. But he had some capable generals, and the mighty Sassanid dynasty of Persia had only recently found that the Eastern Roman legions were still more than a match for them.
It was Theodosius’ fearsome, pious, grimly virginal older sister, Pulcheria, who exerted the most influence in the Byzantine court.
Rumour flourishes in courts and palaces as nowhere else. It was said that, despite her loudly advertised virginity, Pulcheria seemed to spend rather a lot of time closeted with her favourite saints and holy men in her private chambers. But most of these rumours arose among the Nestorian faction – her theological enemies, for reasons too tiresome to go into – and can be dismissed like the rumours of Galla’s incest with her brother.
It was in the winter of 414 that the twelve-year old Theodosius had succeeded to the throne of the Eastern Empire. Pulcheria, then barely fifteen years of age, was declared official guardian of her brother and invested with the title of ‘Augusta’, an empty honour, so it was thought. But from that moment the adolescent girl began to rule, and she effectively held the reins of power over the teeming, hugely wealthy Eastern Empire for the next thirty-six years.
Her brother, as he grew in years and wisdom, was no fool, as I have said: no Honorius. Scholarly, gentle and humane, he had a love of handwriting in a variety of beautiful and elaborate scripts, so that he became nicknamed ‘Theodosius Kalligraphos’. All the Eastern emperors had nicknames in this way. Another had had the misfortune to be nicknamed ‘Constantine Copronymos’, on account of his having unfortuitously shat in the font when he was being baptised as an infant.
Under Pulcheria’s unsmiling influence, the Imperial Palace had grown into a virtual nunnery. All males were scrupulously excluded from the female quarters; and in an elaborate and lengthy ritual in the Church of the Holy Wisdom, amid much chanting and incense, she and her sisters, Arcadia and Marina, dedicated their virginity to God. Inscribed tablets of gold and gems were offered up before the altar, as kind of celestial promissory notes. Within hours the vulgar streetraders and hucksters in the Agora were chuckling at the news, saying that this was not much of an offering, since none but God would want their virginity. It was sad but true: the emperor’s sisters, with their long, cold faces, and their flat fronts apparently uninterrupted by anything resembling breasts, were not exactly the adornments of their age.
Disapproving of all indulgences of the flesh as she did, Pulcheria could hardly be filled with joy when a certain new girl came dancing and laughing into this gloomy, curtained court: the adornment of her age, beyond a doubt. She who was to be empress. Even her name was beautiful: Athenais. Her laughter, her brilliant eyes, her wit and smiles, her glossy black hair tumbling in waves about her shoulders. The arch of her brows, the curve of her slender neck, those eyes like black honey, meeting yours beneath those raven lashes. The sway of her hips as she sashayed away from you, having just silenced you with some teasing barb, murmured from those full carmine lips.
Athenais: the most beautiful girl I ever saw.
9
More than beautiful, though. It takes more than mere beauty not only to capture a man’s heart, but to hold it. And Athenais was much more than merely beautiful.
She first came to the imperial court in the conduct of a lawsuit: ardent, passionately indignant at a miscarriage of justice, brilliantly articulate, magnificently scornful of those she felt trying to cheat her of her due inheritance. And still a girl of eighteen.
She was born the daughter of a prominent and brilliant philosophy professor in Athens, by the name of Leontius. In him, it was said, there burned brightly something of the pure, clear light that had illuminated Athens so many centuries ago, in the days when the Lyceum and the Academy still hummed with life and excitement. On the death of Leontius, a will was discovered which left everything to his two older sons and not a penny to his daughter, whom he loved above all else in this world. At first Athenais tried to reason with her brothers, but they laughed her to scorn. They had always resented the greater love that their father had had for her. And so she came to the highest court in the Eastern Empire: the Court of the Imperial Justice itself, in Constantinople, and presented herself before it, unaccompanied by a single advocate or lawyer.
‘I could not afford one,’ she said with simple dignity, standing before the open-mouthed court lawyers in her simple white stola gathered round the waist by a slim leather belt. ‘So I shall argue my case myself.’
It was true. Her aunt, Leontius’ aged sister, had scraped together a small purseful of silver coins: just enough to buy her passage from the Piraeus to the Golden Horn, and no more.
The will was read out again before the court. After dividing all his estate equally between his two sons, Leontius left only a laconic coda to his daughter: ‘To Athenais, I leave not a penny. She will have good luck enough elsewhere.’
Athenais flinched when she heard her father’s cruel words read out. Then, composing herself, she began to argue her case.
After a short while, someone was sent to fetch Theodosius himself. The scholarly-minded emperor would enjoy a strange spectacle such as this.
To the astonishment of the assembled legates and priests, counsellors and praetors, this young slip of a girl supported her case with the fluency of the most experienced, smooth-tongued old law-hound in the basilica. She understood precisely the venerable four divisions of Roman law: lex, ius, mos and fas. She quoted freely and word- perfectly from the ancient authorities: from the most obscure imperial decretals, from the entire canon of the ius civile, which she appeared to have at her fingertips; from the Orations of Cicero, and the Institutes of Quintilian; from the Digesta of Ulpian, and the Quaestiones of Papinian; from dusty and half-forgotten pandects, from shadowy
