A more probable explanation of her continued ill-health might be that she became septic at her confinement, when the unwanted girl was born. When the Byzantines spoke of a child as being “born in the purple,” they spoke literally, for the Roman Empress was always sent to a “porphyry palace” on the Bosphorus for her confinement; and once there she had access to less good treatment than is available for any sempstress to-day. It is impossible to suppose that the porphyry palace—the “purple house”—ever became infected with puerperal sepsis because there was never more than one confinement going on at a time within its walls, and that only at long intervals. Still, there must have been a great many septic confinements and unrecorded female misery from their results among the women of that early world; and that must be remembered when we consider the extraordinarily small birth-rate of the Imperial families during so many centuries. Had the Roman Emperors been able to point to strong sons to inherit their glories, possibly the history of the Empire would have been less turbulent. A Greek or Roman Lister might have altered the history of the world by giving security of succession to the Imperial despot.
After all, it is idle to speculate on Theodora’s illness, and it does not much matter. She has long gone to her account, poor fascinating creature; all her beauty and wit and eager vivacity are as though they had never been save for their influence upon her husband’s laws. Theodora is the standing example of woman’s fate to achieve results through the agency of some man.
She died of cancer, and died young. There is no record of the original site of the cancer; the ecclesiastic who records the glad tidings merely relates joyfully that it was diffused throughout her body, as was only right and proper in one who differed from him in religious opinions. It is generally thought that it started in the breast. No doubt this is a modern guess, though of course cancer of the breast is notorious for the way in which its secondary growths spread through liver, lungs, bones, neck, spine, and so forth; and there is little reason to suppose that the guess is incorrect. After trying all the usual remedies for “lumps,” her physicians determined to send her to the baths of Brusa, famous in miraculous cure. There were two large iron and two large sulphur springs, besides smaller ones; and people generally went there in spring and early summer when the earth was gaily carpeted with the myriad flowers that spring up and fade before the heat of the Mediterranean July. May we infer from the choice of a sulphur bath that the cancer had already invaded the skin? Possibly. Such a horror may have been the determining factor which induced the Empress and her physicians to travel afield. But if so, surely the recording priest missed a chance of rejoicing; for he does not tell us the glad news. All over Bithynia and the Troad there were, and are, hot mineral springs; Homer relates how one hot spring and a cold gushed from beneath the walls of Troy itself. The girls of Troy used to wash their clothes in the hot spring whenever Agamemnon would let them.
When Theodora went to Brusa she was accompanied by a retinue of four thousand, and Heaven resounded with the prayers of the Monophysites; but the Orthodox refused to pray for the recovery of so infamous a heretic, just as they had refused to join in her prayers for a son. Theodora met with little loving-kindness on this earth after she had left Egypt; possibly the world repaid her with what it received from her.
The sanctuaries of Asklepios were the great centres of Greek and Roman healing, and the treatment there was both mental and physical. The temples were generally built in charming localities, where everything was peace and loveliness; the patients lay in beds in beautiful colonnades, and to them, last thing at night, priests delivered restful and touching services; when sleep came upon them they dreamt, and the dreams were looked upon as the voice of God; they followed His instructions and were cured. They were not cured, however, if they had cancer. One Ælius Aristides has left us a vivid—and unconsciously amusing—account of his adventures in search of health; he seems to have been a neurotic man who ultimately developed into a first-class neurasthenic. To him his beloved god was indeed a trial, as no doubt Aristides himself was to his more earthly physicians. He would sit surrounded by his friends, to whom he would pour out his woes in true neurasthenic style. Aristides seems never to have been truly happy unless he was talking about his ailments, and he loyally followed any suggestion for treatment if only he could persuade himself that it came from the beloved Asklepios. The god would send him a vision, that ordered him to bathe three times in icy water when fevered, and afterwards to run a mile in the teeth of a north-east wind—and the north-easters in the Troad can be bitter indeed; very different from the urbane and gentle breath that spreads so delicious a languor over the summer of Sydney! This behest the much-tried man of faith would dutifully perform, accompanied by a running bodyguard of doctors and nurses marvelling at his endurance and the inscrutable wisdom of the god, though they expected, and no doubt in their inmost hearts hoped, that their long-suffering patient would drop dead from exhaustion. There were real doctors at these shrines besides priests. The doctors seem to have been much the same kind of inquisitive and benevolent persons as we are to-day; some of them were paid to attend the poor without fee. The nurses were both male and female, and appear to have been most immoral people. Aristides was the wonder of his age; his fame spread from land to land, and it is marvellous that he neither succumbed to his heroic treatment nor lost his faith in the divine being that subjected him to such torment. Both facts are perhaps characteristic of mankind. The manner of his end I do not know.
In Theodora’s time Asklepios and the other Olympian divinities had long been gathered to their fathers before the advancing tides of Christianity and Earth-Mother worship; but though the old gods were gone the human body and human spirit remained the same, and there is no doubt that she was expected to dream and bathe and drink mineral waters just as Aristides had done centuries before; and no doubt a crowd of sympathizing friends sat round her on the marble seats which are still there and tried to console her—a difficult task when the sufferer has cancer of the breast. She sat there, her beauty faded, her once-rounded cheeks ashy with cachexia and lined with misery, brooding over the real nature of the Christ she was so soon to meet, wondering whether she or her implacable enemies were in the right as to His soul—whether He had in truth two souls or one. She had made her choice, and it was too late now to alter; in any case she was too gallant a little Empress to quail in the face of death, come he never so horribly. Let us hope that she had discovered before she died that Christ the All-merciful would forgive even so atrocious a sin as attributing to Him a single soul! All her piety, all the prayers of her friends, and all the medical skill of Brusa proved in vain, and she died in A.D. 548, being then forty years of age. So we take leave of this woman, whom many consider the most remarkable in history. Let us envisage her to ourselves—this graceful, exquisite, little cameo-faced lady, passionate in her loves and her hates, with some of the languor of the East in her blood, much of the tigress; brave in danger and resourceful in time of trouble; loyal and faithful to her learned husband as he was loyal to her; yet perhaps a little despising him. Except Medea, as seen by Euripides, Theodora was probably the first feminist, and as such has made her mark upon the world. On the whole her influence upon the Roman Empire seems to have been for good, and the merciful and juster trend of the laws she inspired must be noted in her favour.
Theodora dead, the glory of Justinian departed. He seemed to be stunned by the calamity, and for many critical months took no part in the world’s affairs; even after he recovered he seemed but the shadow of his old self. Faithful to her in life, he remained faithful after her death, and sought no other woman; that is another reason for thinking that Procopius lied. He lived, a lonely and friendless old man, for eighteen more years, hated by his subjects for his extortionate taxation—which they attributed to the extravagance of the crowned prostitute, though more likely it was due to the enormous campaigns of Belisarius and Narses the eunuch, as a result of which Italy and Africa once more came under the sway of the East. Justinian was lonely on his death-bed, and the world breathed a sigh of relief when he was gone. He had long outlived his glory.
The Emperor Charles V
THAT extraordinary phenomenon which, being neither Holy, nor Roman, nor yet strictly speaking an Empire, was yet called the Holy Roman Empire, began when Charlemagne crossed the Alps to rescue the reigning Pope from the Lombards in A.D. 800. The Pope crowned him Roman Emperor of the West, a title which had been extinct since the time of Odoacer more than three hundred years before. The revival of the resplendent title caused the unhappy people of the Dark Ages to think for a moment in their misery that the mighty days of Augustus and Marcus Aurelius had returned; it seemed to add the power of God to the romance of ages and the brute power of kings. During the next two centuries the peoples of France and Germany gradually evolved into two separate nations, but it was impossible for men to forget the great brooding power which had given the Pax Romana to the world, and its hallowed memory survived more beneficent than possibly it really was; it appeared to their imaginations that if it were possible to unite the sanctity of the Pope with the organizing power of Rome the blessed times might again return when a man might reap in peace what he had sown in peace, and the long agony of the Dark Ages might be lifted from mankind. When Henry the Fowler had welded the Germans into a people with a powerful king the time appeared to have arisen, and his son Otto was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. He was not Emperor of Germany, nor German Emperor; he was Holy Roman Emperor of the German people, wielding power, partly derived from the religious power of the Pope, and partly from the military resources of whatever fiefs he might hold; and this enormous and loosely knit organization persisted until 1806—nearly seven hundred years from the time of Otto, and more than 1,000 years after the time of Charlemagne.
This mediæval Roman Empire was founded on sentiment; it took its power from blessed—and probably distorted—memories of a golden age, when one mighty Imperator really did rule the civilized world with a strong and autocratic hand. It was a pathetic attempt to put back the hands of the clock. It bespoke the misery through which mankind was passing in the attempt to combine feudalism with justice. When the mediæval Emperor was not fighting with the Pope he was generally fighting with his presumed subjects; occasionally he tried to defend Europe from the Turks. He might have justified his existence by defending Constantinople in 1453, by which he would have averted the greatest disaster that has ever befallen Europe. He missed that opportunity, and the mediæval Empire, though it survived that extraordinary calamity, yet continued ramshackle, feeble, and mediævally glorious until long past the Protestant Reformation. Being Roman, of course it was anti-Lutheran, and devoted its lumbering energies to the destruction of the Protestants. No Holy Roman Emperor ever rivalled the greatness of Charles V, in whose frame shone all the romance and glamour of centuries. How vast was his power is shown when we consider that he ruled over the Netherlands, Burgundy, Spain, Austria, much of what is now Germany, and Italy; and he was not a man to be contented with a nominal rule.