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

Syrian-Mesopotamian East, which Constantinople’s “Romans” were trying to wrest from Persia, their historical enemy. Close reading of these sources leads nowhere, so we must continue to consider that Theodora’s ancestral land, her native habitat, her ideal site, was the capital, in the spectacular shows and ceremonies of the Hippodrome and the Kynêgion, where profane spectacle mixed with religious ritual, the cult of personality with the flattery of the masses, violence with games, imperial majesty with the homage of subjects.
    It was a world indisputably linked to her family. This is the context in which her prodigious ascent was to take place.

LASSICAL CULTURE idealized rural life but it was nevertheless thoroughly urban. And even in the fifth and sixth centuries the prestige of cities lived on, in the ancient tradition, in the eastern Mediterranean. Alexandria in particular—the city of Alexander the Great and of the Ptolemies, the city of Cleopatra, Marc Antony, and Caesar, of the celebrated library and lighthouse—boasted almost a thousand years of history and a population as large as, if not larger than, Constantinople’s. Yet the capital, the center of a multiethnic, highly structured empire, was still the ultimate city. Constantinople was like Babylon or Rome, Baghdad or Beijing, like Paris, London, or New York now. Constantinople was the last great city of the late ancient world, its quintessence. Its emperors, in their celebrated munificence, regularly distributed cash and food to thousands of households in the city.
    People survived on this tangible largesse while waiting for the wonders of future eons; it made a difference, particularly in the countryside. Rural life was celebrated by poets but it was utterly dependent on the crop cycle, subject to famines and epidemics, and at the mercy of invasions such as that of a bellicose “barbarian” tribe that, in the late fourth century A.D. , had almost reached the capital, stopping only four days’ march away. In the ensuing battle the Roman emperor had been killed, despite his auspicious name of Valens (“valiant”). Everyone wasshocked to see that the borders were not totally safe, though an army of over 200,000 soldiers defended them.
    Furthermore, in this empire of most Christian rulers, taxes were wrung from the countryside as the rulers sought new revenues without consideration for differences in language and custom. Only Egypt was partly exempt, privileged because of its ancient history and its position as the breadbasket of the capital and of the whole empire. The harsh central bureaucracy and its army of tax collectors were increasingly in charge of collection in outlying regions, thus weakening the ancient (and not always efficient) town councils. 1 Part of the revenue, which increasingly consisted of payments in cash rather than in kind, flowed into the empire’s treasury, and the rest went into the Crown’s private coffers, where it was earmarked for specific uses.
    The revenue collected in the countryside, more than the taxes on urban commerce, allowed the court to rival the splendor of the court of Persia, the other great “Eye of the Ecumene” 2 or pinnacle of the civilized world; it also allowed the empire to maintain a military force on three continents, from Carthage and Cyrene in North Africa to Asian Mesopotamia and the European water frontiers of the Danube River and the Adriatic Sea. And it perpetuated the bureaucratic and managerial class, which inherited—at least formally—the ancient Roman magistracies with all their stipends and privileges.
    This second Rome, Constantinople, avoided the fate of the ancient, Italian Rome, which was humiliated by the sack of the Visigoths in A.D. 410. This terrible blow led Saint Augustine, “Roman citizen” and bishop of Hippo, to relinquish all hope in the earthly city, placing his trust solely in the City of God. But in the eastern Mediterranean, one could still have faith in the