Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) Read Online Free PDF

depend on historical sources regarding the Green and Blue factions, although these do present problems of historical interpretation. For a long time, historians believed that belonging to one faction or the other implied an identification with ethnic, religious, or political groups, but recent research has shown otherwise, and indeed the two factions had important similarities. They were simply associations, partially financed by the empire and by private patrons, that attracted an enthusiastic following at the Hippodrome races, where each team sported a different color. Because of the institutional and ceremonial nature of all the spectacles, the factions had been directly entrusted with management of the shows. This was true not only in the capital but in other cities of the empire as well, where both the Greens and the Blues had built solidarity networks to assist their own; these were the opportunities that Theodora’s mother grasped. There were especially active organizations in leading metropolises such as Antioch, Alexandria, and—of course—the capital.
    No information has survived about the man who took on the role of stepfather to the three orphan girls. He was less an individual than a function on the stage of history, his role being that of a replica, a “double,” as if his only task was to maintain Acacius’s position and income. So one could float many theories about his authority and status in a female household dominated by Acacius’s widow, especially with regard to the education of daughters who were hers alone.
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    Females were encouraged to stay within the sheltering walls of the women’s quarters—the ancient gynoecium. The rare women seen on the street and in public had humble jobs such as innkeeper, washerwoman, or fryer, and were often the subject of unsavory rumors. But because of their age and, most of all, their low social level, little girls such as Acacius’s daughters probably played outdoors and in the street. In particular, Comito and Theodora, who were older, were probably allowed to leave their home (most likely an apartment in a multistory building where lower-class families lived, sometimes in promiscuous arrangements) and walk to the Kynêgion, where first their father and then their stepfather would show them the animals and invite them to offer morsels though the bars of the cages.
    Although it was too early for Comito and Theodora to learn the proper conjugation of Greek verbs according to the rules of grammar (it was a costly education and, anyway, it would have been premature before the age of about ten), they could learn some forms of nonverbal communication from the man who knew the art of taming ferocious and frightening beasts before large crowds. The children could discover what kind of voice was best to soothe animals; not just bears but also horses, dogs, and colorful parrots imported from the East. Possibly, the words were short, one- or two-syllable interjections, sometimes with onomatopoeic sounds, sometimes articulated clearly, sometimes repeated like a lullaby. We know Greek interjections such as
my, ppy, gry
: childish phonetics that might become a secret language for animals. Undoubtedly, their visits to the Kynêgion could be useful for Comito’s and Theodora’s lives in the theater, for there they probably learned about using a peremptory voice, a proper posture, a controlling gesture.
    Historical sources agree that once she became empress, Theodora preferred to wield power in secret, remote, inaccessible places, a preference born perhaps in the caves of the Kynêgion, where she would visit the cages containing the bears sent to Constantinople from Italy, Thrace, or Illyria.
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    Some sources and popular folklore maintain that Theodora and her family were not originally from Constantinople but from Paphlagonia, at the farthest southeastern corner of the Black Sea or Pontos Euxeinos, or from the island of Cyprus, or even from the vast