The First Ladies of Rome

by Annelise Freisenbruch

  The removal of Flavius Constantius’s protection, however fractious their personal relationship might have been, left Placidia and her son Valentinian III exposed. She was not without allies, among the most loyal of whom were a circle of Gothic retainers who had remained with her since her restoration to Ravenna, and the recently appointed comes (‘Count’) of North Africa, Boniface. Honorius was another obvious source of support and for a time, brother and sister banded together. Yet that old political slander – incest – soon polluted the relationship. Familiar-sounding rumours germinated that there was more than sibling affection in all of Honorius’s and Placidia’s constant kissing. Eventually a rift developed between brother and sister, reportedly causing their respective entourages to come to blows in the streets of Ravenna. Finally, the cord of family unity was permanently snapped, and in the spring of 423, little more than a year after Constantius’s death, Placidia was cut off from her home and family for the second time in her life, forced to withdraw to the eastern court in Constantinople.58

  It was thus that Placidia found herself on a boat heading out to sea, presumably pondering what her reception would be in the court of her eastern relatives and contemplating the tumultuous past decade of her life. She had buried two husbands, lost one child and now faced a lonely and uncertain future, which seemed even more uncertain when a tempest blew up during her sea-crossing, threatening her vessel. A miniature illustration preserved on a dark blue background in a fourteenth-century manuscript in Ravenna’s Biblioteca Classense, imagines the scene as the crowned Augusta and her children Honoria and Valentinian III clung to their little boat as it was buffeted on the waves against a menacing sky.59 In despair, she later claimed, she uttered a prayer to St John the Evangelist, promising to build him a church if he would save her and her children from the storm. Her prayer was heard, and her ship made land safely.

  It was the first time Placidia had set foot in Constantinople since she was a child in the court of her father Theodosius I, and as far as the imperial family set-up was concerned, she found it changed in several ways, from the strict daily routine of prayer observed by her nephew and nieces to the prominent way in which Pulcheria and her sisters were represented in imperial iconography. A vast column erected in the city’s parade ground in honour of Theodosius II’s recent victory over the Persians contained an acknowledgement of the role played by ‘the vows of his sisters’ in the triumph, while gold coins minted since the beginning of that decade showed images of Pulcheria backed by a personification of Victory, holding a long cross.60

  That Pulcheria was credited by contemporaries with great influence in the court of her brother is not in doubt. But in a repeat of judgements passed on Livia, Julia Domna and other imperial women, opinions in late antiquity were sharply divided over the benefits of that influence. Some wrote approvingly of her management of her brother’s affairs. Others were critical that ‘in the time of Pulcheria’, corruption was rife, with political offices being sold to the highest bidder. One firm conclusion at least can be drawn. Pulcheria’s decision to withdraw herself from the marriage market and devote herself to God, was a hugely profitable stratagem politically and personally, even if driven by genuine religious conviction. It gave her access to a rich seam of praise and kudos for her pious conduct both from contemporaries and later commentators that could potentially even survive the disgrace or downfall of a husband or brother, a luxury that many of Pulcheria’s female predecessors would have been grateful for.61

  She had chosen moreover to ally herself to the cult of the Virgin Mary – known as Theotokos (‘Mother of God’) – a red rag to those religious leaders who believed that to say that God had been born of a human womb amounted to sacrilege, but winning her great popularity among a growing number of fellow ‘Mariologists’. Their number included Atticus, the serving bishop of Constantinople, and a popular local preacher and protégé of Atticus named Proclus, whose sermons often evoked the image of Mary weaving at her loom – a religious paragon practising Rome’s favourite domestic female pastime, an ideal mental picture for Pulcheria to identify herself with. Those who voiced criticism of Pulcheria would have to do so in the knowledge that they risked being seen as attacking not just the sister of the emperor, but the Virgin Mary herself.62

  Pulcheria, who had of course held the title of Augusta since the age of fifteen, had been joined recently on her pedestal by a newcomer to the imperial family. By the summer of 421, two years before Placidia’s arrival in Constantinople, Theodosius II had reached the age of twenty and was ready for a wife. Sixth-century Byzantine chronicler John Malalas tells the story of how Pulcheria embarked on the task of finding her brother a bride. Living in Constantinople at the time, so Malalas wrote, was a girl named Athenais, a native of Athens and the orphaned daughter of a prominent Greek sophist named Leontius, who had once held the chair of rhetoric at Athens. Thanks to her father, she had been educated to an unusually high level for a female, tutored in astronomy and geometry, as well as Greek and Latin literature and philosophy. However, after the death of Leontius, Athenais’s brothers had refused to increase the meagre portion she had been allocated in her father’s will, and so, driven from her home, she was accompanied by her two aunts to Constantinople in order to ask Pulcheria to intervene and compel the brothers to pay up.63

  When Pulcheria saw Athenais, who combined extraordinary beauty with wit and intelligence, it immediately struck her that here was the perfect wife for her brother, who had specified good looks as an essential quality in his prospective bride. Theodosius II came to steal a viewing of the girl for himself and was instantly smitten – a seventh-century adaptation of Malalas’s version of the tale added the details that she was ‘a pure young thing, with slim and graceful figure, a delicate nose, skin as white as snow, large eyes, charming features, blonde curly tresses and dancing feet’.64 The only argument against her was her paganism, but that obstacle was removed when Athenais agreed to be baptised a Christian under a new name – Eudocia. Thus, the story of how an obscure girl from Athens was catapaulted into the role of wife to the Roman emperor crept into legend.

  Modern scholarship has understandably sought to water down some of the more florid details of this rags-to-riches tale, suggesting that Eudocia was not as obscure as she seemed and that she was in fact the choice of Pulcheria’s enemies at court, who included Eudocia’s uncle Asclepiodotus, praetorian prefect of the east that year. These conspirators, so one theory goes, were bent upon prising young Theodosius II away from the controlling grip of his sister. Nevertheless, Eudocia’s original name and parentage, and her baptism into the Christian faith by Bishop Atticus, do chime with the testimony of other ancient commentators – though they omit Pulcheria’s role in fostering the marriage. The intellectual pretensions of Theodosius II’s bride come through strongly as well, with the survival of several compositions attributed to her authorship or editorship, including the Homeric Centos, a 2,400-line adaptation of the poetry of Homer to fit a biblical theme which was later read by poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others.65

  The marriage between Theodosius II and Eudocia took place on 7 June 421, and the bride was made Augusta in January 423, by which time the first of three children to be born of the union had arrived – a daughter, Licinia Eudoxia. Shortly afterwards, Galla Placidia turned up on the eastern court’s doorstep with her two children in tow. Precious few glimpses survive of Placidia’s brief sojourn in Constantinople. Given the hostility with which Theodosius II had greeted the news that she and Flavius Constantius had been made Augusta and Augustus earlier that year without his say-so, she could not have been certain of a warm reception at his court.

  Barely had Placidia arrived and reacquainted herself with her surroundings, however, than fate took a hand once more. On 27 August 423, only months after she had left Ravenna, the death was announced of her brother Honorius, a victim of dropsy at the age of thirty-nine, his legacy as an ineffectual puppet-emperor assured. On 20 November, a senior civil
servant named John secured the backing of enough of the western top brass – with the notable exception of Placidia’s old friend Boniface – to declare himself Augustus. Emissaries from John arrived at the court in Constantinople seeking an accommodation with Theodosius II. After some deliberation, though, the eastern emperor decided to restore the dynastic status quo, perhaps daunted by Boniface’s refusal to recognise John and permit the departure of the critical grain supply shipments which serviced Rome from North Africa or else moved by a sense of familial duty. He therefore appointed two generals, the father-and-son team of Ardaburius and Aspar, to head up a military taskforce charged with the mission of ousting John and installing Galla Placidia’s five-year-old son Valentinian III as the rightful heir to Honorius’s throne. Placidia and Valentinian III were given an escort to Thessalonica, where on 23 October 424, Valentinian III was declared Caesar in preparation for his planned inauguration.

  The campaign to depose John began, with Placidia and Valentinian III as anxious spectators. While John dispatched his palace curator Flavius Aetius to try and enlist the auxiliary assistance of the Huns as mercenaries against the formidable force marching against him, Ardaburius and Aspar captured the port of Salona, near modern Split, and from there led their troops into Italy. The prospective emperor and his mother were left in Aquileia while the armies of the east clashed with their opposite numbers from the west. Despite setbacks, by the summer of 425, John had been captured and brought before Placidia and Valentinian III at Aquileia, where he had his hand cut off – the traditional punishment for a thief – and was subjected to degrading treatment before a crowd in the town’s hippodrome, before finally being decapitated. From Aquileia, the imperial party proceeded triumphantly to Rome, where on 23 October 425, Placidia witnessed the investiture of her now six-year-old son as Augustus without equal in the west.66

  From sister to one Roman emperor, to wife of another, Galla Placidia was now mother to a third, all within the space of little more than a decade. From that year on, and for the first time since the reign of Constantine almost a century previously, the mints of the western empire again recognised an Augusta on their coinage, and despite his earlier objections, Theodosius II now acknowledged Placidia in that role too. Indeed it was the coins of Aelia Flaccilla, Eudoxia and Pulcheria to whom western die-cutters looked for inspiration, depicting a bejewelled Placidia with a diadem set over her wavy hair, her paludamentum cloak secured by a fibula brooch and the sleeve adorned by the Christian chi-rho monogram. A ‘hand of God’ hovered, ready to crown her, while the reverses featured the same profile of the goddess Victory holding a tall Christian cross as seen on the eastern empresses’ coins. The eastern mints too paid tribute to Valentinian III’s mother with their own issues, though referring to her as AEL[IA] PLACIDIA in the tradition of Aelia Flaccilla’s descendants, rather than GALLA PLACIDIA as she was known in the west.67

  Her fortunes had come full circle, and she did not forget her debt to St John the Evangelist for answering her prayers during the stormy crossing to Constantinople three years before. Not long after her son had been crowned emperor, she commissioned a basilica dedicated to St John in Ravenna. The original church, which has undergone many reconstructions during its lifetime, was obliterated in 1944 by air-raid bombs aiming for Ravenna’s nearby railway station, but thanks to the observations of ninth-century historian Andrea Agnello, we know that its commemorative inscription once read: ‘To the holy and most blessed apostle John the evangelist, Galla Placidia Augusta, with her son Placidus Valentinianus Augustus and her daughter Justa Grata Honoria Augusta, fulfil a vow for their deliverance from the danger of the sea’.68

  Our only visual clue of what the inside of the church once looked like comes from the tiny aforementioned medieval manuscript illustration of Placidia’s boat being tossed over stormy seas, whose illustrator had access to the famous mosaics that lined the church walls.69 Further help, however, is at hand from a visitor of the sixteenth century, Girolamo Rossi, who described the mosaics in detail. His account proves that as well as commemorating her sea rescue, the brief for Placidia’s church was to celebrate and legitimate the restoration of her family to the Roman throne. Around the apse of the church were placed portraits of all the key members of the Constantinian and Valentinian houses, all with a firm or plausible blood connection to Placidia. On the right was her father Theodosius, her half-brothers Arcadius and Honorius, her dead son Theodosius from her marriage to Athaulf, and the emperor Constantine himself, to whom she could claim a distant connection through her half-uncle Gratian’s first marriage to Constantine’s granddaughter Constantia. On the left face were Gratian himself, Placidia’s grandfather Valentinian I, images of two of her little brothers – Gratian and John – who had died in infancy, and finally one ‘Divus Constantinus’, whose name is assumed to be a misspelling by Rossi denoting Placidia’s second husband Flavius Constantius. Rossi also noticed inscriptions near a choir bench acknowledging Placidia’s Constantinople-based relatives, her nephew Theodosius II and his wife Eudocia, and their children Arcadius and Licinia Eudoxia.70 It is interesting to note that no mention of Pulcheria appears. This may just be because Rossi could not find one. Or it may be a delicately pointed message that as far as Placidia and the western court was concerned, an Augusta without a husband or chance of providing an heir did not count.

  By publicly linking her gesture of thanks to St John with a reminder of the roll-call of distinguished emperors through whom her family could trace its lineage right back to the great Constantine himself, Placidia was issuing a strong message to anyone who might challenge the right to rule of her newly enthroned son Valentinian III. And it needed to be strong. The summary elevation of a six-year-old to the most powerful job in the west did not draw a line in the sand as far as those who had recently backed John were concerned. Placidia was to have an important and testing role to play in protecting her son from attempts both to influence him and oust him from power. There was no such thing in Roman law as a ‘regent’, but Theodosius II nevertheless saw fit to entrust Placidia with a mandate to look after the administration of her son’s affairs.71

  Her first crisis in this role followed on almost immediately from the usurper John’s defeat, when the latter’s aide Flavius Aetius returned from his embassy to the Huns with 60,000 of them at his back. The Huns, though not yet under the leadership of their famous figurehead Attila, possessed formidable military talents. This rendered them useful soldiers of fortune to do business with, but also dangerous enemies to cross. When Aetius returned with an expectant army of them in 425, they had to be bribed to avert the prospect of attack. For his part in persuading the Huns to accept the deal and in return for not causing trouble, Aetius was bought off with a senior command post in Gaul.

  Over the next decade, three principal rivals emerged seeking to exert influence over the young emperor – the increasingly formidable Aetius, Placidia’s old protector Boniface, and magister militum praesentalis (senior field-army general) Flavius Felix. It fell to Placidia to try and prevent one from upsetting the equilibrium of power between them and thus threaten her son. In the meantime, she busied herself in publicising the names of herself and her children in connection with the legacy of Helena, as part of the same stratagem that sought to reinforce Valentinian III’s inarguable right to the throne. During the late 420s, church-building began in the name of the empress and her children, including the refurbishment of Helena’s own chapel of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. New mosaics were added to the chapel interior, with an inscription recording that by this donation, ‘Valentinian, Placidia and Honoria, Augusti, have paid their vow to the Holy Church Hierusalem’.72

  By the early 430s, though, Placidia could not any longer restrain the different egos competing to control her son in Ravenna. In May 430, Felix and his wife Padusia, a one-time confidante of Placidia, were executed on the order of Aetius, who had earned back enough credit since his support of John’s bid for power to have been promoted to the rank
of magister militum. Placidia recalled Boniface from North Africa and promoted him above Aetius in a bid to check the latter’s momentum. Soon afterwards, Boniface and Aetius clashed in battle near Rimini in late 432 and although Boniface came off the better of these two titans, he died soon afterwards of his injuries. Thus by 433, Aetius had established an unassailable foothold by the canny courting of support from poachers-turned-gamekeepers the Huns, and succeeded in establishing an iron grip on the western court which Placidia and Valentinian were powerless to loosen.73

  Aetius’s peremptory assumption of the reins of power in the west met with no objection from Constantinople, which even sent him the benefit of military expertise in the person of Aspar, who had led the army that forced John to make way for Valentinian III. They were well used to a model of government where a young emperor ceded all but symbolic authority to more experienced advisers around him. Among those jostling for position in this pack at the eastern court during the 430s and early 440s were magister officiorum Paulinus (the head of palace administration), praetorian prefect Cyrus and the eunuch Chrysaphius, all three of whom were agents in an emerging rivalry between the emperor’s wife and sister.