Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (11 page)

Later on she was associated with the actors in all the work of the theater, and she shared their performances with them, playing up to their buffoonish acts intended to raise a laugh. For she was unusually clever and full of gibes, and she immediately became admired for this sort of thing. For the girl had not a particle of modesty, nor did any man ever see her embarrassed, but she undertook shameless services without the least hesitation, and she was the sort of a person who, for instance, when being flogged or beaten over the head, would crack a joke over it and burst into a loud laugh; and she would undress and exhibit to any who chanced along both her front and her rear naked, parts which rightly should be unseen by men and hidden from them.
⁴

The mimes were allowed to stage this type of show, and the productions were financially lucrative, so clearly the public did not spend all its time fretting over political issues and theological disputes, as gloomy official histories, chronicles, and scholarly tracts would have us
believe. People were interested in things other than culture, solemnity, and virtue.

The low esteem in which theater actors were held in the Roman era and in late antiquity, banished as they were to the margins of cultural life and to the bottom of the social ladder, is reflected in the lack of historical sources about this light entertainment. Except for Sophron, Eronda, and Theocritus (who all preceded Theodora by eight to ten centuries), mime theater pieces were not elaborately collected, transcribed, and studied, as were classical works. Therefore, the scripts were written only for the internal use of the acting crews, who, like Theodora, did know how to read.

Those who claimed to defend proper “values” had a further reason to denigrate the mime. According to these moralists, the mime drew his expressivity not from the strength of a fine voice reverberating behind a stage mask, but from the deforming of a face exposed to the public, in imitation of everyday attitudes and behavior. (The root of
imitate, mimêsis,
is linked to
mime
.) Instead of the stock, draped costumes used for the mythical characters of ancient theater, the mimes used everyday clothes, and the actresses (the mime was the first theater genre open to women) were scantily clad in particularly see-through attire—when they wore anything at all. For in the show’s grand finale the actresses stripped off their clothes and paraded around.

The stage where Theodora was now a protagonist did not require speeches. When picturing what the theater was like then, one should imagine neither Theodora’s voice nor anyone else’s, but only noises. Instead of noble poses, there was a flurry of frenetic gestures. Laughter alternated with crying, and there were chases and running, shuffling about, loud slaps on cheeks, the dull thump of a punch, someone being tripped, the perfect arc of a somersault. The actors bugged out their eyes and rolled them wildly; they clapped their hands over their ears to block out the ruckus on stage; they crossed their arms or rested them on their hips to signify authority or demand respect; they raised a finger to point or scold. And all the movements were underscored by the jingle of
sistra
and cymbals.

Sometimes, the scripts expanded the duets that young Theodora
had performed with Comito. For these plays, more actors and richer settings were required. In those years, mimes were referred to as “biological,” meaning that they mimed
bios
, “daily life.” Caricatures and sketches were not unlike those of our silent movies: there was the quarrel between the scrooge and the spendthrift; the inheritance being swindled from an old uncle or a senile grandfather; the contrast between city sophisticate and country bumpkin; the soldier returning home to discover his wife in someone else’s arms. This “lowbrow” repertory proved popular, and it has endured: it is comparable to our genre comedies or romance magazines, or the publications that made Eva Perón famous
⁵
with the proviso that these days, we don’t infer an actor’s tastes from the characters that he or she plays from a script. Today, playing the role of a wife who is caught in the act means only playing a role, but in Theodora’s time, it wasn’t seen that way.

The young actress attracted an audience: she was a source of income, both for herself and for her acting company. Dressed in seethrough clothes when she wasn’t practically undressed, Theodora generously put her young body on display, but she was never totally naked: she always wore at least a loincloth. She had a talent for humor, for she was as “clever and full of gibes” as she was beautiful, something that even her detractors admitted. And although mimes were not the embodiment of highbrow culture, no one could deny their sense of rhythm. Perfect timing was essential for creating the befuddled excitement that marks good mimework even today, and guarantees its continued popularity. The young Theodora, in addition to a strong will and great ambition, deserves recognition for her personal and professional gifts such as irony, memory, and a sense of timing. Without these, she could not have achieved success in her field. Maybe these gifts were inborn, but undoubtedly she refined and practiced them daily on the stage. These were qualities that she strengthened in later years, together with a sort of joker’s farcical attitude that never failed her, even on the greatest of stages, the imperial throne.

Was Theodora’s talent similar to that of a modern, popular comic actress? Yes. Her specialty was defusing dramatic situations and violent conflicts, reversing them with ironic ruses (“when being flogged or
beaten over the head, [she] would crack a joke over it”). They are unexpected traits for the solemn female figure depicted in the mosaics of San Vitale, but they’re not surprising: in her childhood in the Kynêgion arena, Theodora had learned that her prayers could be answered only if she knew how to turn the whole situation on its head.

Had Theodora revealed her brilliant miming talents early on, and had she then vaulted directly to the throne of the greatest empire of her age, hers would still be an extraordinary, unique story: a Cinderella-like fairy tale. The German Romantics or an Anatole France would have turned her life into a rosy myth. Instead, the European literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries re-created a Theodora painted in dark, sexy, violent colors, from Victorien Sardou’s
Théodora
(1884), interpreted by Sarah Bernhardt [
fig. 13
] to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s
La nave
(The Ship; 1908), in which Basiliola, a character inspired by Theodora,

knew all forms

Of incest and beastly couplings,

All sorts of animal-sounding lust.
⁶

So it was not her skill or her persona as an actress that cemented her in modern mythology as the most celebrated of Constantinople’s empresses, but rather her verve and her lust as a lover. She even inspired colorful biographies written for the vast public that is presumably drawn to books with subtitles like
The Empress with a Shady Past.
This shadiness and these contradictions are all traceable to Procopius’s
Secret History
, the work that so powerfully marked her legend, always identifying the actress with the courtesan and emphasizing over and over again the parallel between her career as a theater actress, her social ascent, and her sexual life.

And as she wantoned with her lovers, she always kept bantering them, and by toying with new devices in intercourse, she always succeeded in winning the hearts of the licentious to her; for she did not even expect that the approach should be made by the
man she was with, but on the contrary she herself, with wanton jests and with clownish posturing with her hips, would tempt all who came along, especially if they were beardless youths. Indeed there was never anyone such a slave to pleasure in all forms; for many a time she would go to a community dinner with ten youths or even more, all of exceptional bodily vigour who had made a business of fornication, and she would lie with all her banquet companions the whole night long, and when they all were too exhausted to go on, she would go to their attendants, thirty perhaps in number, and pair off with each one of them; yet even so she could not get enough of this wantonness.
⁷

This scathing portrayal of Theodora, not necessarily true as to fact but consistent with his literary strategy, displays Procopius’s rhetorical bent and emphasizes several elements. First of all, “time”:
always
new sexual techniques; she
always
won the men’s hearts; sex
all
night long. Then “number”: she provoked
all
who came along, a slave to pleasure in
all
forms;
ten
youths or
even more
; they
all
were too exhausted to go on;
thirty
attendants; she would pair off with
each one
of them. Finally, “social context”: in addition to adult men, Theodora also enticed boys and
passed
from free men to servants.

Oddly, there are no allusions here to Theodora’s voracity for food being equal to her sexual gluttony (it was, after all, a “dinner” in the spirit of Casanova, lover and gourmand), but the
Secret History
implied that in a typical night Theodora “exhausted” at least ten dinner companions of proven sexual strength. Such potent men might be expected to rise for at least four or five unions in the course of the night (for example, infamous Renaissance murderer and lover Cesare Borgia claimed six couplings on his wedding night
⁸
), which adds up to a minimum total of approximately forty couplings, plus another thirty for the servants. So the report is that Theodora engaged in about seventy couplings
per night.

These are the sort of impressive numbers found in literature (comparable to the boasted debauchery of the Marquis de Sade’s libertine
Madame de Saint-Ange), but they are not consistent with objective data gathered by authoritative organizations at the turn of the twenty-first century: sociological statistics about prostitution rates, and clinical statistics collected by organizations that treat fashion and show-business stars and others afflicted with “sexual disorders.”

13. Sarah Bernhardt performing Victorien Sardou’s
Théodora
(publ. 1884).

Aside from quantity, another constant theme of Procopius’s
account of Theodora’s sexuality is a literary emphasis on perverted or degrading sex. Now it is no longer just a question of couplings “according to” or “against” nature. The issue is more subtle, since Theodora’s dinners and nights, according to Procopius, inverted the traditional relationship between men and women in classical antiquity. In them, the woman is no longer subjected to the pleasure and the power of the man; on the contrary, it is the man in the fullness of his strength who kneels before her, enslaved by her sexual charge. From being the prey of male pleasure, woman has become the huntress. But there is more: the huntress is enslaved in turn, subjected as she is to “pleasure in all forms.” Her lust is never sated, no matter how frequent the couplings or how varied the positions. The woman, traditionally submitted to male pleasure, is now self-directed and dominates men, all men. At the same time, she is enslaved by a superior, outside force.

In anthropological terms, her status is no longer human but “demonic.” With her autonomous sexual charge, Theodora’s demonic elements are not of the Christian kind. She has nothing in common with the whores who, instigated by what was believed to be a diabolical force, appeared to the hermits of the Syrian and Egyptian deserts, disturbing their spiritual exercises and offering the pleasures of sexual gratification. Theodora is different. She shows the signs of what the ancient Greeks called hubris—that is, arrogance, almost a subversion of natural and social values and laws.

Her social background had situated her below what was considered proper to human society. Her career then began to move her elsewhere, outside society. While at first she was notorious or unworthy, now she became an alien. Nor was she her own mistress: she was pulled around by irrational, uncontrollable drives beyond any intelligible logic, following her “demon”
⁹
into the abyss of degradation. And so she was destined to meet, in the depths of vice and at the apex of power, the man whom Procopius’s
Secret History
literally presents as “the Lord of Demons,”
¹⁰
Justinian.

It would be simplistic and incorrect to reduce the life of young Theodora to what is defined as prostitution. She was the one who
chose, who requested, who demanded. The young star of Constantinople’s mime theater “forever” won the affection of the inevitable influential protectors, not by collecting fees but by accepting gifts of clothing, jewels, servants, apartments. It is difficult to believe that at this point she still lived at home with her mother and her younger sister, Anastasia; but she likely often asked the advice of her older sister, Comito. They must have regularly exchanged information about acting companies, performances, or scripts. Maybe they reciprocally introduced one another to their worthiest admirers, or naughtily stole them from each other. The men probably insisted on coming around to prove the intensity of their attraction, reinforcing their words with gifts and actions that might encourage the girls to grant favors of a different kind, to the extent that it might please them—that it might please Theodora in particular.