Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) by Paolo Cesaretti Read Free Book Online Page A

cloak, who motioned them forward and lifted his right hand to pull open a curtain. Acacius’s widow and the little girls set foot in the Kynêgion arena, where deer, bears, and lions had just been slaughtered. Theodora didn’t know it, but she was stepping onto the very first of many public stages.
    The times of the pagan emperors were long past: no wild beast would pounce on the women and tear them to pieces (as beasts once massacred the martyr Perpetua and her maid Felicita). In the empire’s capital, the mother and daughters could walk into the arena safely, toward the section reserved for the Greens, their longtime patrons andinterlocutors. With garlands in their hair and flowers in their arms, dressed in white, they might have recalled a sacred procession, like the one we can still admire in the mosaics of the church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna [ fig. 10 ] showing the holy virgins of Jewish and Christian history—the history of the elect—rejoicing in the reward “prepared for them by the Father” 13 in Heaven.
    Not a reward but rather a right was what Theodora and her sisters sought that day. They stopped in front of the Greens. They threw flowers and garlands toward the seats, and the audience fell silent. The rules of communication of the time demanded that private issues be settled publicly, that appeals be turned into theater, that supplications be turned into verse: the vast audience sensed that it was going to witness the ceremonial expression of some sort of passionate claim. Now the voice of the supplicants’ spokesman was heard in the arena, intoning a plea along these lines:
    Long life to you,
    Most Christian and glorious Greens!
    Life and victory to you!
    O glorious Greens
    We are oppressed
    And we ask for relief.
    Here we are, daughters of Acacius
    Who in this Kynêgion
    Was a fine keeper of wild beasts
    And whom we have lost too soon!
    Then the supplicants knelt in a gesture of submission. The audience turned to look at Asterius, who stood up and extended his right arm in the usual gesture of the ancient orators rising to speak in the Forum: signaling respect for authority and requesting silence. And the audience did quiet down. Asterius turned slowly, running his eyes over the audience; then he looked down at the arena without uttering a word. His look sufficed: his wide eyes and his raised eyebrows signified scorn for supplicants engaging in such a shameless show of female insolenceand childish delirium, so far beneath his dignity and everyone else’s. (In retrospect, his judgment seems shortsighted.)
    The supplicants on their knees, mute, Asterius standing and mute: their opposition created a theatrical scene in the arena of the Kynêgion. There was no explicit violence, but this did not make Asterius’s behavior any less hostile. By refusing to speak, he indicated that the plea did not deserve a reply. However imprudent the little girls’ gesture might have appeared, he was being deeply arrogant. 14 His behavior was the extreme opposite of that gentle kindness recommended to the powerful by the dialectics and politics of ancient culture. The Blue faction, opponents of the Greens, watched the contrast between the kneeling supplicants and the powerful, standing man as he punished them for their daring supplication by his similarly daring silence. When it became clear that Asterius was not going to reply—when he exhibited behavior unworthy of a potentate, behavior typical of an abusive tyrant—the Blues might have spoken thus:
    O evil, loathsome Greens,
    Oppressors of little girls!
    O Greens, who cannot even speak
    May you lose forever the power of speech!
    If the inspiration had come to Acacius’s widow in a dream, she now saw that the dream had been prescient. She instructed her daughters to get up, she arranged their garments and garlands, and they quickly walked to the other side of the arena, where they knelt. The organizer of the Blues, Asterius’s counterpart (there’s no