In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Theodora, Actress, Empress, Saint by David Potter
  • James Allan Evans
Theodora, Actress, Empress, Saint
David Potter
New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp, ix + 277. ISBN 978–0-190974076–5

Presses are encouraged to submit books dealing with Late Antiquity for consideration for review to any of JLA’s three Book Review Editors: Michael Kulikowski (mek31@psu.edu); Hagith Sivan (helenasivan@yahoo.com); and Dennis Trout (troutd@missouri.edu).

It was inevitable that Theodora should be selected for inclusion in OU P’s “Women in Antiquity” series, and the title says it all. Theodora began as a mime actress, which led to a career first as Justinian’s secret agent, and then his wife and empress. The sainthood came after her death, and never reached the Roman Catholic church. To Cardinal Baronius, she was another Delilah, who betrayed Samson to the Philistines; without her at his side, Justinian might have emerged as a Chalcedonian strongman. The publication in 1623 of Procopius’ Secret History filled out the caricature: Justinian’s seducer had begun her career as a burlesque queen! In the 1884 stage production of Victorien Sardou’s Théodora, she became a romantic heroine. Théodora was more fiction than history, but it was a vehicle for the great Sarah Bernhardt’s talent, and inspired Charles Diehl to write his Théodora, impératrice de Byzance (Paris, 1904), which was a chivalrous effort to vindicate her place in history. Yet she remained in the realm of historical fiction until the present generation, keeping step with the reputation of her detractor, Procopius of Caesarea who also received scant attention, until the present. My own Procopius (New York, 1972) was the first book-length study to appear in English. Procopian studies have now become a crowded field.

Potter’s first two chapters are an illuminating overview of the Constantinople that Theodora knew. It was where Theodora was born. Potter dismisses the traditions of the Miaphysite churches of a birthplace in Syria by pointing out that her father, who died while she was still a toddler, was bear keeper for the Green faction in Constantinople, which required him to be a permanent resident. She could read and—probably—write, in an age when most women could do neither, and she evidently commanded Syriac as well as Greek, and, very likely, her husband’s native language, Latin, as well. Actresses were below the bottom rung of the social ladder, and practiced the sex trade, but Theodora was herself no run-of-the-mill prostitute. As empress she tried to end prostitution, and she understood the lives of the peasant girls whose impoverished fathers sold them to whoremongers. She tried to rid Constantinople of these pimps by paying them off, and established a hospice for reformed prostitutes. She could become the concubine—but never the wife—of Hecebolus, the dux of Pentapolis, where she must have lived comfortably enough until Hecebolus dismissed her. At some point she gave birth to a daughter by an unknown father, and she married her into the noble house of the emperor Anastasius. From Pentapolis, she made her way to Antioch,supporting herself somehow [End Page 542] or other—Potter does not accept Procopius’s “nasty story” that she resorted to the oldest profession—and there she met Macedonia, a Blue faction danseuse, and one of Justinian’s network of informants. Theodora was herself a Blue, and the Blues looked after their own. She was probably already known for her anti-Chalcedonian religious views. Potter points out that the prevalent doctrine in Pentapolis was anti-Chalcedonian, but we have no evidence of a conversion during her stay there.

Potter makes some sense of the chronology of the years between Vitalian’s murder and Justinian’s appointment as Caesar. Justin’s law clearing the way for Theodora’s marriage to Justinian must date to 522 or more probably 523, after the empress Euphemia’s death. 523 was also when street violence in Constantinople peaked, and Potter believes that Justinian’s succession was in doubt. But it was also the year of the Christian massacre in Najran, where Potter sees the influence of Theodora and Justinian behind...

pdf

Share