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

trace of his name), rose to his feet. Since his faction happened to need a bear keeper, he could afford to make a humane, generous, charitable gesture, just as the emperor alone usually did. In this ceremonial role-playing, before opponents who scorned defenseless little girls, he saw that for one day he could be king of the Kynêgion. So he acted quickly.
    Like Asterius, he extended his right arm, requesting silence. Unlike Asterius, he spoke. He noted that there were three supplicants, three like the trinity worshipped by the orthodox Blues; and that the white oftheir garments signified a welcome purity of heart. Therefore, the most glorious Blues were acceding to their request. The mother signaled the little girls, who stood up, and the Blues erupted in cheers and applause.
    And so the companion of Acacius’s widow was given a position, although it was not necessarily
his
position. (“They conferred this position … upon them,” wrote Procopius. 15 ) “Knock and the door will be opened to you,” the Gospels exhort. 16 But the door that opens is not necessarily the one you knocked on.
    The plea in the Kynêgion is one of the major events in Theodora’s childhood, and it is recalled often by her modern biographers. Her relationship with the Blues before and after her ascent to power, and her bitter hostility to the Greens as empress, have been read as a lifelong revenge for the humiliation she and her sisters suffered in the Kynêgion. It is undoubtedly an important episode in her life, and it sheds light on some traits of Theodora’s personality that go beyond her future choice of sides.
    As at the time of her father’s funeral, Theodora had been thrust onto a public stage in a highly ritualized, theatrical context. But this new experience was not one of loneliness or loss. Her kneeling and pleading before the Greens was her first experience of confrontation between the weak and the strong, between the last against the first, following in the example of the Biblical David and Judith. It was also the struggle of the few against the masses and of woman—women—against a man, against men. Here the mother was teaching the girl and her sisters the virtue of resistance, of self-defense, of using all possible tools in the most adverse situations.
    Theodora’s experience continued and deepened with her sudden shift of allegiance to the Blues, and it is easy to infer that it was precisely here that Theodora learned from her mother how to turn an impossible situation to her advantage, in public. Perhaps the arena of the Kynêgion in late-ancient Constantinople had witnessed the revival of what the scholars of another form of public spectacle—the ancient Attic tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles—call reversal, 17 such as when, for example, Oedipus, once the happiest of men, is suddenlytransformed into the unhappiest. But also when the raging Furies become the pious Eumenides.
    The scene in the Kynêgion did not involve the expert, diplomatic, Byzantine art of mediation. It was also far from “all or nothing” radicalism. What it did display is an ancient, strong, clear familiarity with conflict, with the experience of an explosive conclusion that redefines and reorganizes everything. It was a lesson that Theodora was never to forget; nor would she forget how deeply humiliating a public display of silence could be, the silence used by Asterius to show that he despised her and her family.
    As in all great stories, the story of Theodora begins with a loss, her father’s death. As on the day of Acacius’s funeral, the Kynêgion supplication brought her face-to-face with an experience of life as ceremony. Except that now life appeared to her—to the “metal of her heart,” as Proust termed it in another context 18 —as conflict, clash, struggle. A hand-to-hand combat to be fought in public, without delay or mediation.
    Procopius was not an eyewitness to this event, and he wrote about it in the
Secret History
some