The Council, regaining courage, decided for fighting; armed bands were sent forth into the square; the riot was suppressed with Oriental ferocity; and the Roman Empire lasted nearly a thousand years more. “Toujours l’audace,” as Danton said nearly thirteen hundred years later, when, however, he was not in imminent peril himself.
[Photo, Alinari.
THE EMPRESS THEODORA.
From a Mosaic (Ravenna, San Vitale).
In person Theodora was small, slender, graceful, and exquisitely beautiful; her complexion was pale, her eyes singularly expressive: the mosaic at Ravenna, in stiff and formal art, gives some evidence of character and beauty. She was accused, as I have said, of barbarous cruelties, of herself applying the torture in her underground private prisons; the stories are contradictory and inconsistent, but one story appears to be historical: “If you do not obey me I swear by the living God that I will have you flayed alive,” she said with gentle grace to her attendants. It is said that her illegitimate son, whom she had disposed of by putting him with his terrified father in Arabia, gained possession of the secret of his birth, and boldly repaired to Constantinople in the belief that her maternal affection would lead her to pardon him for the offence of having been born, and that thereby he would attain to riches and greatness; but the story goes that he was never seen again after he entered the Palace. Possibly the story is of the nature of romance. She dearly longed for a legitimate son, and the faithful united in prayer to that end; but the sole fruit of her marriage was a daughter, and even this girl was said to have been conceived before the wedding.
When she was still adolescent she went for a tour in the Levant with a wealthy Tyrian named Ecebolus, who, disgusted by her violent temper or her universal charity, to use Gibbon’s sly phrase, deserted her and left her penniless at Alexandria. The men of Egypt appear to have been less erotic than the Greeks, for she remained in dire poverty, working her way back home by way of the shores of the Euxine. In Egypt she had become a Monophysite; and when she reached Constantinople it is said that she sat in a pleasant home outside the Palace and plied her spinning-wheel so virtuously that Justinian fell in love with her and ultimately married her, having first tried her charms. Passing over the obvious difficulty that a girl of the charm and immorality of Procopius’ Theodora need never have gone in poverty while men were men, the wonder naturally arises whether the girl who went away with Ecebolus was the same as she who returned poor and alone and sat so virtuously at her spinning-wheel as to bewitch Justinian. Mistaken identity, or rather loss of identity, must have been commoner in those days than these when the printing-press and rapid postal and telegraphic communication make it harder to lose one’s self. However, granting that there was no confusion of identity, one may believe—if one tries hard enough—that she was befriended by the Monophysites in Egypt, and may have “found religion” at their hands, and, by suffering poverty and oppression with them, had learned to sympathize with the under-world. Though the story may seem to be more suitable for an American picture-show than for sober history, still one must admit that it is not absolutely impossible. When she became great and famous she did not forget those who had rescued her in the days of her affliction; and her influence on Justinian is to be seen in the “feminism” which is so marked in his code. What makes it not impossible is the well-known fact that violent sexuality is in some way related to powerful religious instincts; and the theory that the passions which had led Theodora to the brothel may, when her mind was turned to religion, have led her to be a Puritan, is rather attractive. But nothing is said about Theodora which has not in some way been twisted to her infamy. The only certain fact about her is that she had enormous influence over her husband, and it is difficult to believe that a great and able man like Justinian could have entirely yielded his will to the will of a cruel and treacherous harlot. The idea certainly opens an unexpectedly wide vista of masculine weakness.
She used this influence in helping to frame the great Code of Justinian, which has remained the standard of law in many countries ever since. A remarkable feature about this code is that, while it is severe on the keepers of brothels, it is mild to leniency on the unhappy women who prostituted themselves for these keepers’ benefit. The idea that a prostitute is a woman, with rights and feelings like any other woman, appears to have been unknown until Theodora had it introduced into the code of laws which perpetuates her husband’s memory. One night she collected all the prostitutes in Constantinople, five hundred in all—were there only five hundred in that vast Oriental city?—shut them up in a palace on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus, and expected them to reform as she had reformed, but with less success; as our modern experience would lead us to expect. The girls grew morbidly unhappy, and many threw themselves into the sea. Even in a lock hospital we know how difficult it is to reclaim girls to whom sexual intercourse has become a matter of daily habit, and if Theodora’s well-meant attempt failed we must at least give her credit for an attempt at an idealistic impossibility. These girls did not have the prospect of marrying an Emperor; no pearl-stringed crown was dangled before their fingers for the grasping. Poor human nature is not so easily kept on the strait and narrow path as Theodora thought. Throughout her life she seems to have had great sympathy for the poor and the oppressed, and one feels with Edward Foord that one can forgive her a great deal. We must not forget that her husband called her his “honoured wife,” his “gift from God,” and his “sweet delight”; and spoke most gratefully of her interest and assistance in framing his great code of laws. Was her humanitarianism, her sympathy with down-trodden women, the result of her own sad past experience? To think so would be to turn her pity towards vice into an argument against her own virtue, and I shrink from doing so. Let us rather believe that she really did perceive how terribly the Fates have loaded the dice against women, and that she did what she could to make their paths easier through this earth on which we have no continuing city.
Her health gave her a great deal of trouble, and she spent many months of every year in her beautiful villas on the shores of the Sea of Marmora and the Bosphorus. She remained in bed most of every day, rising late, and retiring early. To Procopius and the Synodists these habits were naturally signs of Oriental weakness and luxury; but may not the poor lady have been really ill? She visited several famous baths in search of health, and we have a vivid account of her journey through Bithynia on her way to the hot springs of the Pythian Apollo near Brusa.
We have no evidence as to the nature of her illness. Her early life, of course, suggests some venereal trouble, and it is interesting to inquire into the position of the various venereal diseases at that time. Syphilis I think we may rule out of court; for it is now generally believed that that disease was not known in Europe until after the return of Columbus’ men from the West Indian islands. Some of the bones of Egypt were thought to show signs of syphilitic invasion until it was shown by Elliott Smith that similar markings are caused by insects; and no indubitable syphilitic lesion has ever been found in any of the mummies. If syphilis did really occur in European antiquity, it must have been exceedingly rare and have differed widely in its pathological effects from the disease which is so common and destructive to-day; that is to say, in spite of certain German enthusiasts, it could not have been syphilis.
But gonorrhœa is a very old story, and was undoubtedly prevalent in the ancient world. Luys indeed says that gonorrhœa is as old as mankind, and was named by Galen himself, though regular physicians and surgeons scorned to treat it. It is strange that there is so little reference to this disease in the vast amount of pornographic literature which has come down to us. Martial, for instance, or Ovid; nothing would seem too obscene to have passed by their salacious minds; yet neither of them so much as hint that such a thing as gonorrhœa existed. But it is possible that such a disease might have been among the things unlucky or “tabu.” All nations and all ages have been more or less under the influence of tabu, which ranges from influence on the most trivial matters to settlement of the gravest. Thus, many men would almost rather die than walk abroad in a frock coat and tan boots, or, still more dreadful, in a frock coat and Homburg hat, though that freakish costume appears to be common enough in America. In this matter we are under the influence of tabu—the thing which prevents us, or should prevent us, from eating peas with our knife, or making unseemly noises when we eat soup, or playing a funeral march at a cheerful social gathering. In all these things the idea of nefas—unlucky—seems more or less to enter; similarly we do not like to walk under a ladder lest a paint-pot should fall upon us. Many people hate to mention the dread word “death,” lest that should untimely be their portion. Just so possibly a licentious man like Ovid may have been swayed by some such fear, and he may have refrained from writing about the horrid disease which he must have known was ever waiting for him.
But though it may seem to have been impossible that any prostitute should have escaped gonorrhœa in Byzantium, just as it is impossible in modern London or Sydney, yet there is no evidence that Theodora so suffered; what hints we have, if they weigh on either side at all, seem to make it unlikely. She had a child after her marriage with Justinian, though women who have had untreated gonorrhœa are very frequently or generally sterile. Nor is there any evidence that Justinian ever had any serious illness except the bubonic plague, from which he suffered, and recovered, during the great epidemic of 546. I assume that the buboes from which he doubtless suffered at that time were not venereal but were the ordinary buboes of plague. He had been Theodora’s husband for many years before that terrible year in which the plague swept away about a third of the population of the Roman Empire, where it had been simmering ever since the time of Marcus Aurelius. If Theodora really had gonorrhœa, Justinian must have caught it, and it is unlikely that he would have called her his “honoured wife.”