The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01
Page 17
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 Theodo
sius's grandson and namesake, it assumed
1 An idea that had occurred to several delegates to the Council of Nicaea.
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 was consequently a convinced Nestorian, 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.
The Council met on 22 June 431 in the Church of the Theotokos — a significant dedication - at Ephesus; and Cyril, who had beggared his own diocese to find sufficient funds for the bribing of civil servants and ecclesiastics as necessary, carried all before him. With no apparent difficulty he assumed the presidency of the Council, and then summoned Nestorius to appear before it to answer the charges of heresy levelled against him. Not surprisingly, Nestorius demurred. He had travelled to Ephesus, he pointed out, as a delegate, not as a defendant; he would present himself at the church only when all the bishops who had signified that they would attend the Council had in fact arrived. But Cyril was not disposed to wait. He read out the correspondence that had passed between them - suitably edited, one suspects - after which the entire assembly cried anathema on the unfortunate Nestorius, who was thereupon dismissed from his episcopate and from all priestly communion. The number of delegates present by that time was 198; but when Nestorius later commented that 'the Council was Cyril', he was surely not so very far wrong. He retired into private life; his troubles, however, were not yet over. In 435 the Emperor - who had by this time totally renounced Nestorianism - banished him, first to Petra in Arabia and later to a distant oasis in Libya or Upper Egypt, where he died.1
Many years before - perhaps even while Galla Placidia and her children were still at Constantinople - Athenais had vowed that, if her daughter did in fact marry Valentinian and become Empress of the West, she herself would make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in thanksgiving. The marriage duly took place in the summer of 437; and in the following year she set out for the Holy Land. Her journey, however, first took her to Antioch, where her pagan upbringing stood her in better stead than her more recently adopted faith. Though the population of Antioch was by now predominantly Christian the city remained, more than any other in Asia Minor, infused with the old Hellenistic spirit; and the Empress's familiarity with the literary and cultural traditions of antiquity, combined with the purity and perfection of her Greek, made a far deeper impression than ever it had in Constantinople. The climax came with a magnificent ceremony in the local Senate House, in the course of which she delivered a brilliant extempore speech in praise of the city and its history, ending with a quotation from the Odyssey:
1 Despite his disgrace, Nestorius was to have a more lasting influence than he knew. Some of his followers wandered eastward to Persia and Mesopotamia, where they later founded a separate Nestorian Church. After periods of considerable prosperity, they eventually fled from Mongol oppression under Tamburlaine and sought refuge in the mountains of Kurdistan, where a small number of them survived into modern times.
I claim proud kinship with your race and blood.1
Jerusalem, Roman but never Greek, was very different. There may well have been a few old men and women still alive whose fathers had remembered the visit of the Empress Helena, 111 years before; and Athenais clearly modelled herself on her predecessor. She remained in the city a whole year, visiting all the Holy Places as a humble pilgrim, attending the consecrations of churches, instituting new charities, opening convents and hospices. When at last she returned to Constantinople she brought with her the usual profusion of relics - in which, we are told, the Bishop of Jerusalem plied a profitable trade - including the bones of St Stephen and the chains with which St Peter had been fettered when imprisoned by King Herod.2 Her husband welcomed her warmly, and for a time all went on as before. But not, alas, for long.
What precisely it was that caused Athenais's downfall we shall never know for sure; but the sixth-century historian John Malalas tells a story which, improbable as it sounds, is curious enough to be worth repeating here. One day, he relates, as the Emperor was on his way to church, a poor man handed him a Phrygian apple of prodigious size. So huge was this apple, and so impressed was Theodosius at the sight of it, that he ordered the man to be given 150 nomismata and immediately sent it to Athenais. She, however, did not eat it herself but had it taken instead to Paulinus, Master of the Offices, who was confined by an injured foot to his house; and Paulinus, not knowing how the Empress had obtained it, dispatched it to the Palace as a gift from himself to Theodosius. The Emperor received it with some surprise. At last, thoroughly mystified and not a little suspicious, he summoned his wife and, concealing the apple, asked her what she had done with it.
Poor Athenais - had she only given a truthful answer, all might yet have been well; but at this critical moment she lost her head. 'I ate it,' she replied. White with rage, her husband produced the fatal fruit. By lying, he told her, she had revealed the truth of her relations with Paulinus, who would be executed at once. But now Athenais struck
1 Such a claim seldom fails to touch the hearts of its audience. We may compare General Eisenhower, addressing the crowd after receiving the Freedom of the City of London in 1945: 'I've got just as much right to be down there hollering as you have - I'm a Londoner too'; or President Kennedy's 'Ich bin ten Berliner in 1963.
2 One of these she sent on to her daughter Eudoxia, who immediately built the Roman church now known as S. Pietro in Vincoli to receive them. There they were subsequently joined by similar chains said to have tethered the saint during his later captivity in Rome.
back. To execute him, she claimed, would be tantamount to an open accusation of adultery, which she absolutely denied. After such an insult she could in any case no longer remain under her husband's roof; she accordingly sought his permission to return to Jerusalem, where she proposed to end her days.
It has been suggested, by Professor Bury among others,1 that the apple was in ancient times a symbol
of chastity, and that this strange story may consequently be allegorical, signifying that Athenais had indeed surrendered her virtue to Paulinus. It may be so, and perhaps she had; but such an interpretation certainly does not accord with her character as we know it. The Master of the Offices was by all accounts a highly honourable man, the closest friend of her husband since the two had played together as children. Athenais, too, he had known since before her marriage, which he had actively encouraged and at which he acted as paranymphos or best man. On her deathbed, some twenty years later, the Empress swore once again that she was innocent; and if there is still any doubt, she must surely be given the benefit of it. A final point in her favour is that Paulinus was executed in 440, whereas she does not seem to have left for Jerusalem till some three years later - a long time to remain in a city in which she believed herself dishonoured.
It looks, therefore, as if we shall have to consign the story of the Phrygian apple to legend and conclude that, in all probability, the fate of Paulinus - who was in fact first exiled to Caesarea in Cappadocia, being assassinated on the Emperor's orders a short while later - had no connection with the Empress's resolve to leave the capital for ever. A far likelier explanation is to be found in the relentless machinations of Pulcheria, who must have been infuriated by the vastly increased reputation for holiness acquired by her sister-in-law as a result of her visit to Jerusalem and who doubtless intrigued against her with still greater determination than before. But, whatever the reason, it seems clear that Athenais did somehow fall from her husband's favour - she could never otherwise have left him as she did - and that even her departure did not altogether save her from his vindictiveness; for within a few months of her arrival in Jerusalem a certain Saturninus, Count of the Imperial Bodyguard, followed her there and killed the two leading members of her entourage, one a priest and the other a deacon, whom she had brought with her from Constantinople. She took her revenge by having Saturninus murdered in his turn and (perhaps subconsciously) by her enthusiastic adoption of the monophysite heresy2 - until, in her last