nearly lost his throne in the Circus faction Nika Riots of 532. The Blues tended to represent wealthy businessmen and landowners, while the Greens drew support from traders and artisans, many of Syrian origin. The Blues’ ‘Establishment’ credentials were further strengthened when they were backed by Justinian, whose patronage enabled them to terrorise the streets of the capital with impunity. Known as ‘Partisans’, their leaders, dressed in Hunnish fashion, were engaged in perpetual gang warfare with their rivals, the Greens: a situation with striking parallels to the urban gang culture in many cities today.
The soubriquet has nothing to do with Anastasius’ stature, but was a popular endearment conferred on many Eastern emperors from Marcian on, whose generally benign regimes helped to create an image of the emperor as the loving Protector of his people. (In contrast to the policy of appeasement towards Attila of the feeble Theodosius II, his successor Marcian’s resolute stand against the Hun leader gave him popular hero status.)
To forestall any possibility of his becoming a future focus for disaffection, a defeated rival for the purple was invariably either executed or — as a ‘humane’ alternative — mutilated by blinding or amputation of the nose. Disfigurement constituted an automatic bar to becoming emperor.
The powers of the Master of Offices were very great. He was in effect the head of the Empire’s central administration. In modern terms, his position would combine the roles of most senior cabinet ministers, excluding that of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
At the Council of Chalcedon, near Constantinople, in 451, the belief, put forward by Pope Leo, that Christ had two natures — both human and divine — was established as orthodoxy for the Church in the Western and Eastern Roman Empires. Chalcedonism was violently opposed by the Monophysites (mainly in Syria and Egypt) who believed that Christ had only one, divine, nature. As the Monophysites were now officially heretical, the effect of Chalcedon was to create religious strains within the Empire, which could threaten to degenerate into schism unless handled with tact and diplomacy. Thus, in Egypt (the source of the Eastern Empire’s vital grain supply), a blind eye had perforce to be turned to Monophysitism. After the fall of the Western Empire in 476, relations between Italy (ultra- Chalcedonian, although her German rulers were Arian) and the Eastern Empire cooled (in what became known as the Acacian Schism), because of the pro-Monophysite sympathies of Emperors Zeno and Anastasius. However, the accession of the strongly Chalcedonian Justin ended the schism, and this paved the way for Italy to become reintegrated into the Empire under Justinian.
Chapter 4
In the Ancient Greek theatre, the stage (a long narrow platform upon which the actors performed) was fronted at a lower level by a semi-circular space called the
By observing the difference between the angles of the sun at two places a measured distance apart (north- south), Eratosthenes was able to calculate the angle subtended by that distance. The number of times the angle would divide into 360 degrees multiplied by the distance, gave him the answer — which was amazingly close to our own measurement of 24,000 miles. Pure geometry, pure genius!
Beyond the fact that he was appointed governor of the Pentapolis, and that Theodora accompanied him there as his mistress, we know nothing about Hecebolus or why he should have turned her out of his house, piling insults on her as he did so (thus causing me to resort to invention). Procopius, of course, exploits poor Theodora’s predicament with prurient relish. In the
Chapter 5
The imperial post was one of the glories of Roman administration, with staging-posts every eight miles on the main highways where horses or vehicles could be hired, operating on a relay system. In the West, it functioned (unevenly post c. 400) almost to the end. In the East, it was discontinued early in Justinian’s reign as a cost-cutting exercise — barring, for military reasons, the road from the capital to the Persian frontier. From the time of Constantine, clerical dignitaries were accorded special travel privileges on the post.
I’ve had to invent scenarios introducing Theodora to Timothy and later to Severus, as we don’t know how they met. But meet them she did (which seems almost incredible considering her background, and which speaks volumes for her determination and power of personality). Not only that, she formed a deep and fruitful friendship with both men — two of the finest minds in the Roman world, from which she gained a grounding in rhetoric, a taste for intellectual conversation, and a lasting respect for the Monophysites. Altogether, her experiences in Alexandria amount to something like a Damascene conversion.
The passionate concern displayed by people of late antiquity about the nature of Christ may seem to us today to be both incomprehensible and pointless — mere sterile Christological hair-splitting. But less so perhaps, if we view this obsession as stemming from the Graeco-Roman cast of mind that sought to discover the truth via reason and logic, the two great fruits of which are (as I’ve had Timothy point out) Greek philosophy and Roman law. And lest we become too dismissive of such concerns, we should perhaps remind ourselves that our own times have witnessed preoccupations no less abstruse. Forests have died to produce endless tracts devoted to dialectical materialism, Marxist-Leninism, existentialism, etc.; while the quest to arrive at a satisfactory definition of the Trinity continues to exercise and baffle the minds of bishops at successive Lambeth Conferences. Impatience with ambiguity is what drove these late Roman theologians. The true heirs of Athanasius and Augustine may be Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins (by way of Peter Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke and David Hume) rather than Cardinal Newman or Ronald Knox.
Once married to Justinian, Theodora — as a result of the kindness shown her in Alexandria by Timothy and Severus — persuaded her husband (who could deny her nothing) to call off the persecution of the Monophysites. Not only did this happen with immediate effect (making Theodora enormously popular with the sect) but the Monophysites actually became a favoured minority at the imperial court, with Severus himself being invited to a conference between the leaders of both the Orthodox party and the Monophysites, intended to settle their differences.
Chapter 6
History has many examples of strong-willed, intelligent women who, loving their own sex as well as, or in preference to, men, have had sufficient force of character to ignore the strictures of society and live according to their nature. Examples are: Sappho, Aphra Behn (that amazing polymath and early champion of women’s rights and racial equality), perhaps Queen Anne and Catherine the Great, Anne Lister — Regency landowner, diarist and proud lesbian, Colette, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Violet Keppel (Trefusis), Frida Kahlo and many individuals associated with the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. With her intellectual interests, sturdy independence of mind, and passionate proto-feminism,* Theodora comes over to me as being very much cast in the same sort of mould as the above women. Which is not to say of course that she necessarily shared their sexual proclivities. Still, when you can tick three out of four boxes indicating traits in common, there’s a temptation also to tick the fourth, even when the answer is ‘unknown’. There’s a tantalizingly vague phrase in Gibbon which may or may not shed some light on the matter: ‘Her secret apartments were occupied by the favourite women. . whose. . passions she indulged’. It’s hard to know what to make of this. Gibbon doesn’t name his source; it’s certainly not Procopius, who would have had a field day in his
