EUDOCIA MACREMBOLITISSA (c. 1021-1096), daughter of John Macrembolites, was the wife of the Byzantine emperor Constantine X., and after his death (1067) of Romanus IV. She had sworn to her first husband on his death-bed not to marry again, and had even imprisoned and exiled Romanus, who was suspected of aspiring to the throne. Perceiving, however, that she was not able unaided to avert the invasions which threatened the eastern frontier of the empire, she revoked her oath, married Romanus, and with his assistance dispelled the impending danger. She did not live very happily with her new husband, who was warlike and self-willed, and when he was taken prisoner by the Turks (1071) she was compelled to vacate the throne in favour of her son Michael and retire to a convent, where she died. The dictionary of mythology entitled Ἰωνιά (“Collection of Violets”), which formerly used to be ascribed to her, was not composed till 1543 (Constantine Palaeokappa).
See J. Flach, Die Kaiserin Eudokia Makrembolitissa (Tübingen, 1876); P. Pulch, De Eudociae quod fertur Violario (Strassburg, 1880); and in Hermes, xvii. (1882), p. 177 ff.
EUDOXIA LOPUKHINA (1669-1731), tsaritsa, first consort of Peter the Great, was the daughter of the boyarin Theodore Lopukhin. Peter, then a youth of seventeen, married her on the 27th of January 1689 at the command of his mother, who hoped to wean him from the wicked ways of the German suburb of Moscow by wedding him betimes to a lady who was as pious as she was beautiful. The marriage was in every way unfortunate. Accustomed from her infancy to the monastic seclusion of the terem, or women’s quarter, Eudoxia’s mental horizon did not extend much beyond her embroidery-frame or her illuminated service-book. From the first her society bored Peter unspeakably, and after the birth of their second, short-lived son Alexander, he practically deserted her. In 1698 she was unceremoniously sent off to the Pokrovsky monastery at Suzdal for refusing to consent to a divorce, though it was not till June 1699 that she disappeared from the world beneath the hood of sister Elena. In the monastery, however, she was held in high honour by the archimandrite; the nuns persisted in regarding her as the lawful empress; and she was permitted an extraordinary degree of latitude, unknown to Peter, who dragged her from her enforced retreat in 1718 on a charge of adultery. As the evidence was collected by Peter’s creatures, it is very doubtful whether Eudoxia was guilty, though she was compelled to make a public confession. She was then divorced and consigned to the remote monastery of Ladoga. Here she remained for ten years till the accession of her grandson, Peter II., when the reactionaries proposed to appoint her regent. She was escorted with great ceremony to Moscow in 1728 and exhibited to the people attired in the splendid, old-fashioned robes of a tsaritsa; but years of rigid seclusion had dulled her wits, and her best friends soon convinced themselves that a convent was a much more suitable place for her than a throne. An allowance of 60,000 roubles a year was accordingly assigned to her, and she disappeared again in a monastery at Moscow, where she died in 1731.
See Robert Nisbet Bain, Pupils of Peter the Great (London, 1895), chaps. ii. and iv.; and The First Romanovs (London, 1905), chaps. viii. and xii.
(R. N. B.)
EUDOXUS, of Cnidus, Greek savant, flourished about the middle of the 4th century B.C. It is chiefly as an astronomer that his name has come down to us (see [Astronomy] and [Zodiac]). From a life by Diogenes Laërtius, we learn that he studied at Athens under Plato, but, being dismissed, passed over into Egypt, where he remained for sixteen months with the priests of Heliopolis. He then taught physics in Cyzicus and the Propontis, and subsequently, accompanied by a number of pupils, went to Athens. Towards the end of his life he returned to his native place, where he died. Strabo states that he discovered that the solar year is longer than 365 days by 6 hours; Vitruvius that he invented a sun-dial. The Phaenomena of Aratus is a poetical account of the astronomical observations of Eudoxus. Several works have been attributed to him, but they are all lost; some fragments are preserved in the extant Τῶν Ἀράτου καὶ Εὐδόξου φαινομένων ἐξηγήσεωμ βιβλία τρία of the astronomer Hipparchus (ed. C. Manitius, 1894). According to Aristotle (Ethics x. 2), Eudoxus held that pleasure was the chief good, because (1) all beings sought it and endeavoured to escape its contrary, pain; (2) it is an end in itself, not a relative good. Aristotle, who speaks highly of the sincerity of Eudoxus’s convictions, while giving a qualified approval to his arguments, considers him wrong in not distinguishing the different kinds of pleasure and in making pleasure the summum bonum.
See J.A. Letronne, Sur les écrites et les travaux d’Eudoxe de Cnide, d’après L. Ideler (1841); G.V. Schiaparelli, Le Sfere omocentriche di Eudosso (Milan, 1876); T.H. Martin in Académie des inscriptions, 3rd of October, 1879; article in Ersch and Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyklopädie.