The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (18 page)

(addressed to him by Porphyrius, Bishop of Gaza, and requesting the destruction of all pagan temples in his diocese) immediately after his baptism, when he was still only a few days old;
1
and from his earliest childhood he had been obliged to live in that stultifying seclusion from his fellows that was considered appropriate for God's Vice-Gerent on Earth. Despite his upbringing, however, and his hereditary defects of character, he seems to have possessed considerable charm: 'he was much loved,' writes Socrates the Church historian, 'by Senate and people alike.' And he was certainly far from stupid. Religion in the fifth century was too much a part of everyday life not to have interested him in some degree, but his tastes lay more in the direction of secular learning and culture: in the classical authors both Latin and Greek, in mathematics and the natural sciences, and above all in the art of illustrating and illuminating manuscripts, where his skill soon earned him the sobriquet of
kalligraphos,
the calligrapher. His interests, however, were not exclusively intellectual and artistic. He had a passion for hunting, and there is evidence - though not, it must be admitted, contemporary - to suggest that it was he who introduced to Constantinople the Persian game of
tsu
kan,
which we know today as polo. Immersed as he was in these pursuits, he had no objection to leaving affairs of state to his sister, long after he had reached the age when he should have taken them over himself. Only in
420,
when he was nineteen and his thoughts began to turn to other channels, did he send for Pulcheria on a matter of state importance. It was time, he told her, that she found him a wife.

Now it happened - these are admittedly the facts as given by later historians, but who are we to contradict them? - that at about this time there presented herself at the Palace a young Greek girl of startling beauty named Athenais. She was the daughter of a certain Leontius, a professor at the university of Athens, and she had come to enlist the Emperor's support against her two brothers, who had refused to share her father's estate with her after his death and had thus condemned her to penury. According to one version of the story, Leontius had deliberately cut her off with a hundred gold pieces since, as he wrote in his will, 'she will

1
The Bishop's deacon, Marcus, tells how he and his master stood outside the church and, when the baptismal procession emerged, shouted the words, 'We petition Your Piety', and held out the document. 'And he who carried the child
..
. halted, and commanded silence, and having unrolled a part he read it
..
. and placed his hand under the head of the child and cried out: "His Majesty has ordered the requests contained in the petition to be ratified."' Later, at the Palace, 'the Emperor ordered the paper to be read, and said: "The request is hard, but to refuse is harder, since it is the first mandate of our son"' (quoted by Bury (op. cit.), from the
Abhandlunge
n
of the Berlin Academy,
1879).

have her good luck, which is better than that of any other woman'. If so, he was right. Pulcheria, who saw her first, was immensely impressed -not only by her beauty but by the exquisite Greek in which she framed her appeal. She took her straight to Theodosius, who at once fell passionately in love. The potential difficulty of the girl's paganism was quickly overcome: after a few weeks' instruction by Bishop Atticus she was baptized into the Christian faith, marking the occasion by a change of name from Athenais to Eudocia. Her new sister-in-law, it need hardly be said, stood as her godmother. On
7
June
421,
she and Theodosius were married.

Into the well-nigh insufferable atmosphere of the imperial palace, Athenais
1
arrived like a fresh spring breeze. She too was genuinely religious - in the circumstances she could hardly have been anything else - but her Christianity was somehow lightened by her pagan background. Her father had steeped her from childhood in the Hellenistic tradition, and she knew the Greek poets and philosophers even better than the Bible and the patristic writings; in short, there was a whole extra dimension to her mind compared to those of the three dismal princesses, and she cheered up the court wonderfully. Her star rose still higher when, the year after her marriage, she presented her husband with a baby daughter — to whom, in a gesture towards his mother's memory as inappropriate as it was confusing, he gave the name Eudoxia. It was perhaps in gratitude for his first-born child that, in
423,
he raised his wife to the rank of Augusta.

Nothing, one would have thought, could be more natural; but her sister-in-law did not take it well. Pulcheria had always seen Athenais as her creation. She had found her, introduced her to Theodosius, organized her conversion, sponsored her at her baptism and educated her in the ways of the court. The girl was her protegee, beholden to her for all she possessed and all she had become. Now, suddenly, she was of equal rank. She was more beautiful, more sought-after, better educated and infinitely better liked. She was also far closer to her husband, and exerted a far greater influence over him than his sister could ever hope to do. As Pulcheria's jealousy grew, she began to find the Empress frivolous, irreverent and - which was probably true - increasingly disrespectful of herself. And so she determined, sooner or later and in any way she could, to cut her down to size.

1
From this point on she should properly be known as Eudocia; but since both her mother-in-law and daughter were called Eudoxia - the two names seem often to have been interchangeable - the possibilities of confusion will be appreciably lessened if we allow her, for the purpose of this narrative, to keep her pagan name. It is a much prettier name anyway.

That same summer the imperial couple received at the Palace the Empire's third Augusta: Galla Placidia, daughter of Theodosius the Great - and granddaughter, through her mother, of the elder Valentinian

-
who arrived in Constantinople with her two small children. Though still only in her early thirties, Placidia could already look back on an extraordinary life. Finding her half-brother Honorius's court in Ravenna intolerable, she had taken up residence in Rome, where she had survived all three of Alaric's sieges; after the third, however, she had been taken by the Goths as a hostage and kept by them in captivity for four years until, in
414,
Honorius was finally induced to consent to her marriage with Ataulfus, Alaric's brother-in-law and successor. There had been a sumptuous wedding at Narbonne, and the two had finally established their court at Barcelona; but Ataulfus had died after little more than a year and Placidia had returned to Ravenna - where, in
417,
reluctantly but at her brother's insistence, she took his closest adviser, a dark, swarthy Illyrian named Constantius, as her second husband.

Despite his unprepossessing appearance - his expression, we are told, was permanently sulky, his eyes darting suspiciously to right and left -and his execrable horsemanship, Constantius had enjoyed a distinguished military career, culminating in the defeat of the usurper Constantinus at Aries in
411
1
and he seems to have genuinely loved Placidia, whose hand he had sought even before her first marriage. Two children, Honoria and Valentinian, were born to them in swift succession, and in
421
Constantius was raised to be co-Emperor with Honorius, Placidia herself being named Augusta. The news was received with dismay at the court of Theodosius, who refused to recognize the new elevations or to erect the traditional statues when they arrived from Ravenna; but fortunately this dissension did not last long, since Constantius - who detested his new position and had almost immediately gone into a decline
-
died in his turn, after a reign of barely six months.

So Placidia entered her second widowhood at the court of Ravenna, which soon proved even less congenial to her than before. Honorius, whose mind had never been altogether stable, was now becoming progressively more unbalanced. First he displayed embarrassing signs of falling in love with his half-sister, covering her with slobbering kisses in

1
He had guaranteed Constantinus's life in return for his surrender, and had sent him and his son Julian back under close escort to Ravenna; but at the twentieth milestone from the city the two prisoners were intercepted and executed on the Emperor's orders. The contemporary historian Olympiodorus claims that their impaled heads were subsequently exposed outside the gates of Carthage - a curious choice of city, which he does not attempt to explain.

public; then, finding that his affection was not reciprocated, he became by turns suspicious, jealous and at last openly hostile. Soon this hostility began to manifest itself not just in the Emperor personally but in his entourage as well, and even among his guards; and it was when the latter began attacking her own retainers in the streets of Ravenna that Placidia decided that she could stand no more and early in
423
sought refuge with her nephew in Constantinople, taking her children with her.

The two families seem to have got on cordially enough together, even agreeing on the marriage of little Valentinian - he was then four - with the baby Eudoxia when the two children should be of somewhat riper years; and there is no telling how long Placidia and her family might have remained on the Bosphorus had she not, towards the end of that summer, received news that must have caused both her and her hosts considerable relief: on
26
August Honorius had died of dropsy, in his fortieth year. Unfortunately this report was immediately followed by another: the empty throne had been seized by a certain Johannes, erstwhile holder of the not very illustrious office of
primicerius notariorum,
Chief of the Notaries.

Theodosius - urged on, we may be sure, by Pulcheria and perhaps even by Athenais - acted swiftly. He had no intention of seeing the Empire of the West, ailing as it might be, snatched away by a relatively unimportant member of the Civil Service. There and then he confirmed Placidia in the rank of Augusta, invested Valentinian with the title of Caesar and gave orders for the immediate preparation of an army to escort them back to Italy and restore them to their rightful thrones.

The expedition set forth the following year - the Emperor himself accompanying it as far as Thessalonica - and proved triumphantly successful. In those times, the surroundings of Ravenna were very different from what they are today. Over the past
1,500
years the sea has receded several miles; where we now see low-lying meadows and grassland there was once an island-studded lagoon on the Venetian pattern. Ravenna consequently enjoyed the reputation of being virtually impregnable - which was precisely why the terrified Honorius had established his court there after the battle of Pollentia nearly a quarter of a century before, but which had not prevented him from setting up additional defences along the numerous dikes and causeways that led to the city. These the Byzantines wisely ignored; instead, they somehow contrived to ford part of the lagoon itself - Socrates claims that they were guided by an angel disguised as a shepherd - thereby taking the defenders by surprise and capturing Ravenna, early in
425,
with scarcely a casualty.

Johannes, after just eighteen months on the throne, was taken prisoner and brought in chains to Aquileia, where Placidia and her children were waiting. There in the Hippodrome his right hand was cut off, after which he was led around the city on a donkey, the people mocking him as he passed, and finally put to death. Meanwhile the victorious soldiery were allowed a three-day sack of Ravenna - to punish the inhabitants, so it was said, for having supported a usurper - and Valentinian, now six, was carried off to Rome for his coronation.

In Constantinople, Athenais's Hellenism was now making itself felt far beyond the confines of the imperial palace. For many years already the Latin element in the capital had been gradually giving way to the Greek, but its progress had been considerably faster under her influence - and under that of her protege Cyrus of Panopolis, who served for many years as Praetorian Prefect of the city. A poet, philosopher and art-lover, and a Greek through and through - he was the first Prefect to publish his decrees in the Greek language - Cyrus added immeasurably to the architectural splendour of Constantinople, erecting more public buildings than anyone since the Founder himself. He was also instrumental, together with the Emperor and Empress, in transforming the relatively modest educational establishment instituted by Constantine into a large and distinguished university. The idea behind the latter enterprise was to provide a Christian counterpart to the essentially pagan university of Athens, which had so far successfully resisted various attempts to close it down; but the constitution of the new foundation made it clear that, if a pagan university was Greek, a Christian one did not necessarily have to be Latin: though both the Greek and Latin schools were allotted a staff of ten grammarians, the Greek school could boast five rhetors while the Latin school had to make do with only three.

A by-product, as it were, of the university was the compilation of what was known as the Theodosian Codex. Begun in
429,
it was entrusted to a commission of nine scholars and was in essence a collection of all the legislation enacted in both East and West since the days of Constantine. Many of the laws had been annulled, others amended and not a few were found to be mutually contradictory; such indeed was the confusion that the first commission found itself unable to continue, and it was nine years before a second, reconstituted group managed to complete the task. The Codex was finally to be promulgated on
15
February
438,
jointly by the Eastern and Western Emperors in what was obviously intended to emphasize the unity of the Empire, following as it did only a few months after the long-planned marriage of Valentinian and the fifteen-year-old Eudoxia.

That unity, however, was a good deal more apparent than real. The imperial law, as it had evolved up to that moment in both East and West, was now at last on a firm foundation; but almost immediately the two halves of the Empire began to diverge once again, the new edicts and enactments of the one being seldom if ever passed on to the other. Constantinople and Ravenna might remain friendly, but their separate ways were in fact leading them further and further apart.

By now, too, another rift had appeared within the framework of Byzantine life - a rift whose significance can be fully realized only if we first understand the extraordinary intensity with which religious thought permeated every level of Eastern Christian society. Already at the end of the preceding century, St Gregory of Nyssa had written the words quoted at the head of this chapter; and that essentially Greek passion for theological speculation that he describes had been, if anything, intensified since his day by such charismatic figures as St John Chrysostom and Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria - whose quarrels, as we have already seen, could easily stir up sufficient public feeling to cause demonstrations, riots and even fighting in the streets. And of all the issues most likely to cause serious dissent and to inflame tempers to flash-point and beyond, the most contentious concerned the relation of Jesus Christ to God the Father.

This impossible and - to most of us - obviously unanswerable question had lain at the root of the Arian heresy, which had bedevilled both Eastern and Western Christendom for a hundred years and more; it had been condemned in
325
at Nicaea, but had smouldered on in one form or another throughout the fourth century, sometimes affecting even the Emperors themselves. Constantius, for example, had favoured a compromise, according to which the Son was not of the same
(homoousion
)
but of like
(homoiousion
)
substance with the Father;
1
Valens, on the other hand, had been an out-and-out Arian. At the Council of Constantinople in
381,
the impeccably orthodox Theodosius the Great had confirmed the findings of Nicaea and had promulgated several subsequent edicts designed to enforce what he called Catholicism on his subjects; but they had failed. The issue, though it should have been settled time and time again, had obstinately refused to lie down.

Now, in the reign of Theodosius's grandson and namesake, it assumed

1
An idea that had occurred to several
delegates to the Council of Nicae
a.

a new form - a polarization this time, with two opposing schools of thought, one on each side of Nicaean orthodoxy. The first of these schools to cause concern was that of a certain Nestorius, who in
427
had been appointed Bishop of Constantinople and was consequently in a particularly strong position to advance his theories. An impassioned fanatic who, after only five days on the episcopal throne, had burnt down a neighbouring church on hearing that it had been used for clandestine services by Arians, Nestorius preached that Christ was not, as the Nicaeans believed, a single person - both God and Man - but that he possessed two distinct persons, one human and the other divine. 'I cannot speak of God,' he wrote, 'as being two or three months old'; in other words, he refused to attribute the frailties inseparable from human life to a member of the Trinity. It followed - and this corollary soon assumed overriding importance in the popular mind - that the Virgin Mary could not be described as the
Tbeotokos,
the Mother of God, since such a description would suggest that the divine nature was born of woman. She was, Nestorius claimed, the Mother of Christ, and no more.

Thanks in large measure to the power of the bishop's oratory, his teachings rapidly gained ground in the capital and in the major cities of the East. They found a worthy opponent, however, in Cyril, nephew of Bishop Theophilus and his successor in the see of Alexandria, who was determined to carry on the quarrel which had begun with his uncle and St John Chrysostom - less, probably, for doctrinal reasons than because of personal jealousy and his own long-cherished ambition to establish the primacy of the ancient Alexandrian see over that of upstart Constantinople. As the dispute between the two protagonists and their followers grew ever more bitter the Emperor, who always tended to believe those who were nearest him and w
as consequently a convinced Nes
torian, decided in
430
to summon another Council of the Church that would pronounce unequivocally in favour of his bishop. In doing so, however, he seriously underestimated the Alexandrians. Cyril fought with every weapon he possessed — including his knowledge of the rivalry that existed between the two Augustae. Athenais, he was well aware, was a Nestorian like her husband; it would be so much the easier to attract Pulcheria to his own side. Before long Theodosius got wind of his machinations and taxed him with them, but it was of no avail; the damage had been done.