Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (25 page)

HEODORA TOOK UP RESIDENCE
in the imperial apartments of the sacred palace of the second Rome and filled it with her spirit. It was a triumph marking the complete reversal of her fortunes: how far she had come since Governor Hecebolus cast her out of
his
palace in Pentapolis!

Here at the farthest tip of Europe, the peninsula of Constantinople where her imperial palace once stood and where the sultans of Istanbul later built the Topkapi palace, the chief ritual today is the procession of tourists. But in Theodora’s time there were other gatherings, other festivities. Every ecclesiastical feast, every secular holiday, every audience—meetings with imperial dignitaries or with legates from remote, “barbarian” populations—was codified according to a sophisticated system.

It would be a mistake to imagine that this was just formal etiquette or an antiquated, conservative set of customs, for the system at the palace did not look backward: it looked ahead and upward. Its purpose was to abolish time and space and to create a direct relationship with the unchanging eternal. As the emperor was an intermediary between Christendom and the higher power above, his palace was invested with all sorts of symbolism. Weren’t the chariot races in the Hippodrome a perfect microcosm? All the more reason, then, that the well-ordered workings of the palace and of the imperial ceremonies took on a symbolic, metaphysical, even religious nature.

It was not what we would recognize as modern efficiency, or
national “order” enforced by repressive police or judicial mechanisms, or by technical or technological innovations. In Constantinople, it was believed that “imperial sovereignty, exercised in an orderly and measured fashion, reproduced the harmonious movement conferred by the Creator on the entire Universe”
¹
for the greater majesty, pleasure, and glory of the empire itself. The palace held a mirror up to the harmony of the world for the glory of the empire and the happiness of its subjects, and for their hopes for the afterlife.

In the view of some contemporaries of Justinian who looked longingly to the past, Justinian’s survival and his victory—even more than Theodora’s arrival—had destroyed the balance of that order: “For everything was thrown into confusion in every part and nothing thereafter remained fixed, but both the laws and the orderly form of the government were completely overturned by the confusion that ensued.”
²

Only a few months had passed since the decisive Easter of 527, but one notable already confided to his intimate friends that he had had a disturbing dream:

it seemed to him that he was standing somewhere in Byzantium on the shore of the sea which is opposite Chalcedon, and that he saw this man [Justinian] standing in the middle of the strait there. And first he drank up all the water of the sea; so that he had the impression thereafter that the man was standing on dry land, since the water no longer filled the strait at this point, but afterwards other water appeared there that was saturated with much filth and rubbish and welled up from the sewer outlets which are on either side of the strait, and the man immediately drank even this too and again laid the tract of the strait bare.
³

Was this a false vision, or a foreshadowing of future events? The dream seems to allude to Justinian’s economic policy and its costs. The pure water could be the revenues accumulated in the state treasury by “frugal” Anastasius, and the wastewater the monies siphoned off—
arbitrarily?—in the years of Justin and Justinian’s joint rule, from 518 to 527. The strait was dry: evidently it was perceived that the new regime lacked the financial and moral resources needed to bring off its ambitious political program.

This was a radical criticism; more nuanced opinions came from officials who planned and conceived new programs or actually organized their implementation. For example, the author of the
Dialogue on Political Science
(a work whose authorship and exact date during Justinian’s reign are still in dispute) painted a picture of the sovereign and an idea of power as an “imitation of God,” identifying God-given imperial authority with political philosophy. The divine imitation described in the
Dialogue
included generous gifts to one’s subjects, a sure sign of an emperor’s superior munificence and liberality. So this text seemed indirectly to approve of Justinian’s characteristic spending; and yet it declared that an ideal emperor would be chosen from the nobility—whereas our emperor was merely a provincial who had been educated thanks to his uncle, the illiterate emperor before him. Was this author perhaps contesting the
person
in power?

Agapetus, an author and deacon in the early years of Justinian’s reign, took a different tack. He wrote history’s most famous mirror of princes (a late-Roman type of moral and political treatise that continued to be produced in the Byzantine and then the Slavic cultures) that may have been commissioned by Justinian. The seventy-two chapters of Agapetus’s
Exposition
specifically addressed to Justinian did not stress the body politic as such—that is, the benefits subjects got from imperial imitation of the divine—but focused on the sovereign’s moral figure as the bearer of absolute, unequivocal values, the channel for a divine philanthropy. It was not very different from a theocracy.

The Justinian restoration project has often been interpreted in a primarily geopolitical, legislative, and administrative sense. But no expansion could take place without roots, and Justinian found those roots in Christianity. Particularly in a united Christendom, which he considered the highest good, within the Catholic Church and the Holy Orthodox
faith, under the protection of an emperor who was “equal to the Apostles.” He perceived any discord within that faith as a threat to the unity of the empire.

Was this Catholic orthodoxy simply a tool for power, based on what has been called Justinian’s “Caesaro-papism?”
⁴
To define it that way underestimates Justinian’s real theological passion, his concrete, personal, almost existential commitment to the search for an ideal formulation of faith that might resolve the problems—so typical of late antiquity—caused by applying ancient philosophical categories to the Christian Gospel.

Certainly since the beginning of Uncle Justin’s rule the throne had been reconciling itself to the authority of the Roman Catholic see. Moreover, starting from that fateful Easter of the year 527, Justinian was rigorous with heretics and Christian schismatics both, starting with those who denied the centrality of the Resurrection in the great design of universal history: the Manicheans, the Samaritans, the Jews, the pagan “Hellenes.” These groups were targeted in the first legislative provision ascribed to the new emperor, which was launched in the months between his coronation and Justin’s death (between early April and the end of July 527).
⁵
It was both an affirmation of orthodoxy and a return to older imperial traditions—for the most
anti-
Christian of all emperors, Diocletian, had (more than two centuries earlier) issued a directive against Manichaeism.
⁶
The Manichean devaluation of earthly life was intolerable to the empire even then, and the movement—actually a philosophy rather than a religion—remained a crime against the polity, subject to capital punishment, right into Justinian’s reign.

Worshippers of other kinds were barred from holding office, from the army, and from the liberal professions. Their meetings were forbidden, their places of worship shut down, their property confiscated. They were even denied civil rights: they were unable to sue orthodox Christians for private or public debts, and could not testify against them in a lawsuit. By this time, full Roman citizenship was being equated with Christian orthodoxy; those who did not profess it survived only by the grace of the emperor, in the expectation that they would change their ways.

These basic elements of any fundamentalist government crop up in different forms in different times and places depending on the government’s targets, but the result is always the same: “many were being destroyed by the soldiers and many even made away with themselves, thinking in their folly that they were doing a most righteous thing, and … the majority of them, leaving their homelands, went into exile.”
⁷
Many fled to the Persian empire—traditional enemy of the “Romans.” This violent outcome was quite the opposite of the unity that Justinian sought. Even the last remaining followers of Montanus, a rigorous second-century apocalyptic, were persecuted. They were awaiting the imminent end of the world, when Heavenly Jerusalem would suddenly descend from above. To escape the persecution, they shut “themselves up in their own sanctuaries, [and they] immediately set their churches on fire, so that they were destroyed with the buildings.”
⁸
The Arians were treated less harshly: they were able to maintain a following in the “barbarian” enemy kingdoms of the Mediterranean West (the “persecutors of souls and bodies”
⁹
) and especially amid the rank and file of the “Roman” army that was so necessary to the emperor.

The Jews’ worship was restricted, as was the worship of the Samaritans, who in 529–30 rebelled violently in the countryside of Palestine. The subsequent repression was so harsh that, according to Procopius, “it is said that 100,000 men perished in this struggle, and the land, which is the finest in the world, became in consequence destitute of farmers”
¹⁰
with serious repercussions on the local economy and the population count.

Paganism was another religious option, but it was limited to a fringe of nostalgic intellectuals and backward native populations. The two groups shared a proclivity for irrationality, witchcraft, and prophecy; the dialectical refinements of Socratic origin had been lost, and paganism was no longer linked to ideas of glorious virtue, either Hellenic or early-Republican Roman.

Over time, the imperial troops stamped out the worship of Ammon in Pentapolis and destroyed the temples from the age of Diocletian that had been erected at Philae on the Nile in the hinterland near Nubia. The deities of the Greek Olympus had been worshipped there,
as were Isis, Osiris, and Priapus, and human sacrifices were still performed.

The year 529 has long been seen as the death date of ancient paganism: in that year Justinian ordered an end to the nearly thousand-year-old Academy of Plato in Athens. But although Justinian forbade pagans from holding teaching positions, and although those who refused baptism lost their property and were exiled, recent studies show that the wealthy academy’s property was not completely confiscated even as late as 560, thirty years after Justinian’s order.

So the imperial hand often wore a velvet glove when dealing with thinkers. Justinian knew that he ran the risk of glorifying his opponents. The result was that the last students of Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus turned their attention to the measured, modest words of Epictetus (A.D. 55–135), whom they appreciated as a model of moral philosophy suited to their period of tyranny and crisis. And even Olympiodorus, a totally pagan author, worked undisturbed in Alexandria beyond 565—well after the death of the Most Christian Justinian.
¹¹

The laws of 527 refrained from targeting the Monophysites, who had been persecuted in 518–19. Certainly the empress had direct influence on her husband here. She probably reminded Justinian that despite their virulent written polemics and the rise of nationalism in Syria and Egypt, the Monophysites were still the Christians closest to Catholic doctrine and—at least for figures such as the theologian Severus and Timothy the Patriarch—the most sensitive to the great idea of unity among Christians.

It did not escape Theodora, or Justinian, that Monophysite Alexandria and Egypt were very valuable economically, or that Monophysite Syria was very valuable strategically and politically in the face of Persia’s military threat. Whatever the two decided, they had to avoid turning those places into opponents; they had to gather deeper knowledge of the situation, to verify, and to mediate—and in the meantime the Monophysite situation was stalled. Under the protection of the empress, some Monophysite monks and preachers discreetly came to Constantinople.

Ten years after the death of Anastasius and the new union with
Rome, a dialogue started up again, thanks solely to Theodora. The dialogue was particularly necessary from a historical point of view insofar as—as some historical sources have noted—it ultimately and ironically revolved around a single consonant of the Greek language,
en
or
ek
.
¹²
The Word incarnated “in” (
en
) two natures, or the Word incarnated “from” (
ek
) two natures: never before had the mystery of God seemed to come down to such a tiny detail.

In pursuit of unity, Justinian forged some new policies but gave priority to reformulating the existing body of laws, aiming to make them as clear and uniform as possible. Under the guidance of his trusted jurist Tribonian, a great legislative opus was launched. The
Corpus Juris Civilis
(Body of Civil Law) named the emperor alone as the source of
all
laws; this was the most important work of Justinian’s absolutist ideology, and lasted as a monument for centuries to come.