THE ROMANCE OF EUDOXIA AND EUDOCIA
With the Imperial ladies of the courts of Arcadius and Honorius we
enter upon the final act in the tragedy of the fall of Rome. The sun is
sinking rapidly to the Western horizon; the long shadows trail across
the record of events; the chill of evening contracts the life of the
historic Empire. The only aspect of that tragedy that concerns us is a
consideration of the part that women played in the gradual enfeeblement
of the Roman Empire. While taking full account of the various causes
assigned by historians, it may be said that the fall of Rome was due to
a coincidence. The invasion of Europe by the fierce Huns had pressed
the Germanic tribes against the Roman frontier just at the time when
the Empire was particularly feeble. That it was inwardly outworn and
doomed--that the organization of a State has an appointed term of
decay, like the frame of an individual--may be confidently challenged.
Egypt maintained its vigour for close on 8,000 years; Babylon for
nearly 6,000.
The only question we may touch here is whether the personality of the
later Empresses counted for anything, either for good or evil, in this
enfeeblement of the Empire; and the answer is clear that, with one or
two exceptions, they counted for neither. They had no deep or large
influence on the life of the Empire, even through their husbands. The
Roman ideal of womanhood was changing once more. As in the early days,
they were diverted from interest in public affairs, except in so far
as the cause of the Church called for their interference. We must not
conceive them as powerless witnesses of the gradual dissolution of
the Empire. No one, man or woman, saw that the Empire was dissolving,
or dreamed of its fall, until it lay in ruins under the feet of the
northern tribes. None reflected that, since Constantine had assumed
the purple, thirteen Emperors out of twenty had been either executed
or murdered; that the blood of able officers or servants had generally
been mingled with that of the fallen ruler; and that hundreds of
thousands of soldiers had been wasted in civil war. None reflected
that, while they were distracted with religious quarrels, a formidable
avalanche was gathering on the hills; or that, while the courts
absorbed enormous sums in Oriental display, the fiscal machinery of
the State was running down. In any case, it was no longer the place of
women to notice these things. Their duties were to rear the Imperial
family, wear pretty robes of cloth of gold, and build churches. The age
of Livia, Agrippina, or Plotina, was over.
These reflections will be enforced by the lives of the interesting
Empresses whom we have next to consider. The new Emperors were
unmarried youths at the time when their father died. Arcadius, a
little, dark, unpleasant-looking youth, whose laziness appeared in his
dull, lustre-less eyes, was in his eighteenth year. Honorius was a boy
of eleven, and as, during a reign of twenty-eight years, he never rose
above the character or intelligence of a boy, and his two Empresses
were timid young girls, we must dismiss them in a page; though that
page must contain an event that sent a thrill of excitement through
civilization--the fall of the city of Rome. So little had our Imperial
characters to do with it that a later age amused itself by saying that,
when Honorius was told that “Rome was taken,” he wept for the supposed
loss of his favourite fowl, which bore that name.
The real master of the Western world, over which young Honorius had
nominal sway, was a powerful and gifted commander, Stilicho, of Vandal
extraction. He had married Serena, the beautiful niece of Theodosius,
and he led the armies and governed the Western Empire until his death.
In 398, in his thirteenth year, Honorius was directed to wed Maria, the
elder daughter of Stilicho. It was said that Theodosius had desired the
union. Serena, at all events, desired it, and, although her daughter
was yet immature, the wedding took place at Milan in 398. All that
we have to say of her is that she died some time within the next ten
years--probably, as Tillemont calculates, in the year 404. Her body
was embalmed and buried in a Christian church at Rome, where the poor
crumbling frame, laden with gold, was discovered in 1544.
In the year 408 Honorius married his deceased wife’s sister,
Thermantia. Tillemont very properly laments that he finds no record of
any protest on the part of the Bishop of Rome--who probably celebrated
it--against this irregular marriage, but the modern reader will be more
seriously concerned to hear the argument with which Serena urged it
upon her reluctant husband. Maria, she said, had died a virgin. Before
entrusting her immature child to the bed of Honorius, she had had some
obscure operation performed on her, which would guard her virginity.
Certainly, Maria had had no children. Thermantia was equally unprepared
for marriage, Zosimus says, and the operation was repeated. It was
a superfluous sacrifice to the ambition of Serena, because Stilicho
fell, in a palace intrigue, a few months later, and the little maid was
restored to her mother.
Such was the short and melancholy story of the Empresses Maria and
Æmilia Materna Thermantia, as an inscription calls the younger. Their
monument was terrible. Within a few months the avalanche of the Gothic
army descended from the Alps and devastated Italy; and Serena was, with
the consent of her cousin Placidia, the Emperor’s sister, strangled by
the Senate on the light, and probably false, charge of communicating
with the enemy. Zosimus, at least, says that she was innocent; but
he is not surprised at her fate, as she had one day appropriated a
jewelled ornament from the statue of one of his goddesses. Within two
years Rome was sacked by the Goths, and Placidia was carried off by
them.
We turn to the East, to follow the less tragic, but hardly less
interesting, fortunes of Eudoxia and Eudocia. In the East, as in the
West, Theodosius had left a powerful minister to guide the hands of his
young and unpromising son. But the eastern minister, Rufinus, had not
the manly qualities of Stilicho. He had entered the palace by craft,
not by military exploits, and had easily dissembled his vices from the
too indulgent eye of Theodosius. When that Emperor died, he cast aside
the cloak, and pursued his native avarice, and exercised his cruelty,
without restraint. By fines, taxes, despoilments, and the unscrupulous
ruin of his opponents, the hated Gaul amassed wealth and power, and
ruled like an autocrat. He had a daughter of marriageable age, and
Arcadius seemed to listen in compliant mood when he proposed that she
should become his Empress. The task of destroying an opponent took him
for a time to Antioch, and he returned to hear that the Emperor was
preparing for marriage. He awaited the appointed day with eagerness. At
length the hymeneal procession set out from the palace, and the people
gathered to witness its passage to the house of Rufinus, a superb villa
in one of the suburbs. To the intense surprise of all, it stopped at
a house in the city, and the blushing and beautiful daughter of a
Frankish chief was announced to be the choice of the Emperor.
While Rufinus was pursuing his vengeance at Antioch, the eunuchs of the
palace had conspired to defeat his plan and undermine his power. The
chief of them was Eutropius, a slave by birth, castrated immediately
after birth that he might bring a bigger price, and rising in time from
the occupation of hair-dresser to the daughter of General Arintheus to
the position of high chamberlain at the palace. Such were the rulers
of Emperors in the fourth century. Eutropius knew that Arcadius had no
attraction to the daughter of Rufinus, and chafed under the authority
of her burly father. He cast about for a prettier companion, and soon
had the affection of Arcadius safely engaged. The temporary absence
of Rufinus gave them an opportunity, and Constantinople was enlivened
by the rare spectacle of an Imperial marriage, and the still rarer
spectacle of the defeat of Rufinus.
Eudoxia--such is the Greek name under which the new Empress is
presented to us--was the beautiful daughter of Bauto, chief of
the Franks. Historians, politely accepting the assurance of some
of the writers of the time, say that she was being “educated” at
Constantinople, her father having died in the service of the Eastern
army. It is, perhaps, a pity to disturb the plausible phrase, but the
duty of a biographer is stern. The house in the city from which she
was taken to wed the Emperor was occupied by two young men of wealth.
They were the sons of the commander Promotus, who had been one of the
first victims of Rufinus. One of these young men, Zosimus says, “had
a beautiful maid” in the house. We will not inquire too closely. The
stern ideals of the Germanic tribes had relaxed as they came into
closer contact with civilization, and it became common for them to lend
or sell their daughters to the Romans. We remember the adventure of
Pipera a century before. Eutropius submitted an adequate picture of the
girl to Arcadius, whose pulse was quickened, and the son of Promotus
easily parted with his tender pupil when he learned that it was for the
purpose of discomfiting the destroyer of his father.
Eudoxia had no less spirit than beauty of person, and she would watch
with interest the duel between the wily eunuch and the powerful Gaul.
Arcadius, “whose feeble and stupid goodness,” says Tillemont candidly,
“brought frightful evils on Church and State,” was a pawn in the game.
But the big, wealthy, powerful Gaul now found a sterner opponent in
Stilicho, of the Western Empire, and within a year his head was
separated from his body, and his wife and daughter were permitted to
remain alive at Jerusalem. Eutropius and Eudoxia now “led Arcadius like
a dumb beast,” in the words of Zosimus, and sucked the resources of the
Empire. The people of Constantinople gained nothing by the revolution.
They had carried in triumph the grisly, extortionate hand of Rufinus
through the streets of the city, but the supple hand of the eunuch
proved as formidable. He surrounded himself with spies and informers,
filled the prisons with men whose property he desired for himself or
his friends, scattered statues of himself through the city, and assumed
every title of honour short of that of Augustus. He would press his
deformed person and painted face into the armour of a man, to review
the troops, and would harangue the Senate with a feeble imitation of
the authority of a statesman. While his exactions and the luxury of the
court enfeebled the Empire of the East, he alienated the power of the
West, and had Stilicho branded as a public enemy. And the Goths and
Huns crept nearer.
Arcadius, lazily riding in his gold-plated chariot, studded with large
gems, in robes of silk embroidered with golden dragons, or playing the
monarch on a throne of solid gold, with a crowd of adoring eunuchs
before him, had no more appreciation than a peasant of a Cappadocian
village of the true situation of the Empire. Eudoxia, beautiful,
haughty, spoiled, revelling in the luxury of the palace, generous to
the Church and the poor, floated soothingly with the stream. She lived
the languid life of an Oriental princess, within the confines of the
palace, and was rarely seen even by the greater part of the palace
servants. The only occasion when the populace saw her quit the marble
city, which the palace of Constantine had become, was when, in 398, she
walked humbly, with downcast eyes, but clothed in purple silk, with a
glittering diadem on her head, by the side of St. Chrysostom, as he
transferred certain relics of the saints. Chrysostom would find her in
a different temper in a few years.
The arrogance of Eutropius at last passed all bounds, and he ventured
in the year 400 to threaten to expel Eudoxia from the palace. Whether
she knew it or no, the time was ripe for the destruction of the
repulsive minister. The people groaned under his terrible exactions,
his infamous legislation, and his bloody tyranny; the leaders of the
troops were prepared to sacrifice him. Eudoxia took her baby girls,
Pulcheria and Arcadia, in her arms, and fled in tears to the Emperor.
Arcadius, “becoming an Emperor for a moment,” says Philostorgius,
signed the sentence of his favourite, and the eunuch soon found people
and soldiers pressing, like wolves, for his destruction. He took refuge
in a church, where Chrysostom protected him from the fiery crowd, but
quitted it after a time, apparently on the oath of either Eudoxia or
Arcadius that his life would be spared. He was exiled, recalled, tried,
and--oath or no oath--put to death by the public executioner.
Eudoxia’s title of _nobilissima_ (“most noble”) had been elevated to
that of _Augusta_ at the beginning of the year 400, and her second
daughter was born in April of the same year.[33] She was now complete
mistress of Arcadius and the Empire, and she published her dignity
with such extravagance that the Western court sent an angry protest
that, in causing her statues to be borne through the provinces, she had
exceeded the privileges of her sex. In the following year she completed
her ascendancy by giving birth to a boy, Theodosius II, and seemed to
have a prospect of a long and luxurious, if useless, reign. But she
had meantime quarrelled with Chrysostom, and she was to pass through a
period of humiliation to a premature grave.
In 398 Eutropius had transferred the austere and eloquent Chrysostom
from his presbytery in Antioch to the archiepiscopal palace at
Constantinople. The stern monk--as John of the Golden Mouth always
remained at heart--was horrified from the first at the vice and luxury
of the Christians of the Imperial city, and even of their clergy, but
he allowed two years to elapse before he began his fiery campaign
against the sins of the laity.[34] He applied himself first to the
reform of the priests and the control of the monks. With that we have
no concern.[35] It is enough to say that the clergy bitterly resented
his reforms, and were ready to co-operate with Eudoxia in an effort to
get rid of him. In 400 he began to attack the easy ways of the laity
more sternly, and it is probable that some feeling was created between
him and the Empress over the massacre of the Gothic Arian soldiers,
which took place in that year. Their commander Gainas had rebelled, and
Arcadius had virtually surrendered to him. He marched his troops to the
city, obtained the use of a church for them, and allowed them to roam
about, to the irritation of the people; until at last the people rose
and slew seven thousand of the heretics.
It seems that Eudoxia was alienated from Chrysostom, who had resented
the grant of a church, from that time. When, in the following year,
St. Porphyry of Gaza came to the capital to obtain an Imperial order
to destroy the pagan temples of his town, Chrysostom declined to
introduce him at court, and referred him to the eunuch Amantius. The
sequel is not without interest in a study of the Empress. The holy man
was presented to Eudoxia, and promised that she should bear a boy if
she would secure the destruction of paganism in Gaza. She promised to
do so, but Arcadius, who seems to have resented religious wrangles,
refused to grant permission. Then the boy was born, and Eudoxia felt an
obligation to secure Porphyry’s request. She instructed him to draw up
a formal petition, and present it to the baby-Cæsar as he was carried
from the baptismal font. The noble who carried the baby was then
instructed how he was to behave, and a little comedy was arranged.
Porphyry presented his paper to the infant Cæsar. The noble read a
little of it to the baby in a low voice, so that Arcadius should not
hear, and then bobbed the child’s head as a sign of assent. Arcadius
wearily overlooked the trick, eight beautiful temples were burned
at Gaza, and Eudoxia supplied the funds for building a large church
on their ruins. Tillemont, whose admiring course through the fourth
century is much tempered by groans, complains that “this kind of piety
favours only the demons.”
Chrysostom then went on to denounce, in unmeasured language, the
vicious and luxurious ways of the wealthy women, especially widows, of
his church. He had diverted the coins of the laity from the army of
monks, deprived the clergy of their mistresses, and declared that the
great majority of the bishops of his province were hopelessly corrupt.
With the aid of his rival, the Bishop of Alexandria, they conspired
against him, and they reached the ear of the Empress through the
courtly and comfortable bishop, Severian. The other ear of the Empress
was now assailed by the wealthy widows who smarted under the preacher’s
fierce lash. Such fine ladies as Marsa and Castricia would not be
likely to sit under the Socialistic oratory of the archbishop, but
shorthand (_notatio_) was as commonly used in those days as in our own,
and he could thus irritate the eye of the rich as well as gladden the
ear of the poor. They brooded darkly over his impersonal strictures,
and no doubt detected occasional references to the luxurious Empress in
them. In fine, Archbishop Theophilus was summoned from Alexandria; the
bishops of the province eagerly drew up and passed a lengthy indictment
of their superior; and, before the orthodox population could gather
what was happening, their orator was on the way to exile.
[Illustration: EUDOXIA
PULCHERIA
ENLARGED FROM COINS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM]
But the triumph of Eudoxia was as brief as that of Justina. The
people rose in fury, and, after the slaughter of seven thousand
trained soldiers, made a light matter of the monks and sailors of
Theophilus. When, in addition, an earthquake shook the province,
Eudoxia prudently yielded to the human pressure, under the decent
pretext of obeying the divine will. Chrysostom returned to his church,
and the sight of the gay fleet that set out to meet him, the flaring
illumination of the shores, the frenzied rejoicing of the returning
procession, must have filled the palace on the heights with bitterness.
Such a truce could be observed with cold discretion by neither party,
and it was not long before the struggle was renewed.
In honour of the birth of the third daughter of the Empress, Marina,
a silver statue of her was erected, on a column of porphyry, at the
door of the Senate. The Prefect of the city commemorated the event
with games or other rejoicings in the square before the statue, and
they were naturally accompanied by profane, if not licentious, gaiety.
Straight opposite, across the square, was the door of Chrysostom’s
church, and the devout regarded this demonstration as an outrage on
religion. Chrysostom’s sermons become more explicit. In a later age
a sermon was published under his name, in which the people--or the
readers--were reminded of the infamous Herodias clamouring for the head
of John. The sermon is generally regarded as spurious, but we have the
weighty authority of Socrates for the fact that the extempore preacher
did utter the fatal name of Herodias. The conflict ended with the exile
of the archbishop (June 404), but on the following night his church was
found to be in flames, and the fire spread to, and almost destroyed,
the Senate-house, a building adorned with the most exquisite marbles
and works of art.
The condition of Constantinople, the anxiety of Eudoxia, during the
following months, may be imagined. It is enough to know that Eudoxia
met a painful death, through miscarriage, in the month of September
of the same year (404). I will not reproduce the horrible details
that a more orthodox age discovered in connexion with her death.[36]
If Chrysostom spoke from “a bitter disillusion,” as Dr. Puech holds,
Eudoxia had not less cause to be embittered. Even her religious zeal
had led her into the most painful experiences. For the State, in which
she had high power, she did nothing. The vultures gathered on the
hills, while the court absorbed its little soul in voluptuous pomp, and
the people fought each other over creeds. We may dissent from the hard
verdict of Gibbon, that Eudoxia indulged her passions while the Empire
decayed, and we must regard as too frivolous for consideration the
suspicion of unchastity which he reproduces; but we must grant that,
where Eudoxia’s action was not selfish, it was generally useless, and
frequently mischievous.
We have carried the slender story of the Empresses in the West as far
as the year 410, and we shall find no other Empress there until 421.
We may, therefore, continue the record of the East, and consider the
romantic story of Eudocia, before we proceed to the last scene in the
Empire of the West.
After an ignoble reign of thirteen years the elder son of Theodosius
died in his bed in the year 408. His only son, Theodosius II, was
clothed with the purple, in his sixth year, and a prudent and
experienced minister controlled the State for the next seven years. In
415 Pulcheria, the elder sister of Theodosius, was named Augusta, and
gradually assumed the guardianship of her brother and the control of
the State. She was as yet only in her sixteenth year, and Theodosius
was only two years younger, but her cold, decisive temper compensated
in some measure for the strength which Theodosius wholly lacked, and
she held the reins of the Empire. Deeply religious, she took herself,
and induced her younger sisters to take, a vow of chastity, which was
written in gold and diamonds on the wall of the public church. The
palace offered the singular spectacle of a nunnery within a luxurious
court. Only pious eunuchs and women were allowed to approach the
Imperial virgins, in whose sober apartments no music was ever heard
save that of the psalm and sacred song; while the weakly youth was
educated in the pomp that befits a king, as well as the propriety that
adorns a Christian. He learned both lessons with success; but we cannot
avoid a suspicion that less earnest and assiduous efforts were made to
fit him for the task of taking in his own hands the levers of the heavy
machinery of the State. It is proper to add, however, that, partly from
circumstances, partly from the prudence and care of Pulcheria, that
machinery ran with unaccustomed ease, and the Empire enjoyed a span of
peace and prosperity.
At length the anxious question of the Imperial marriage arose, and the
virginal Pulcheria confronted it with her usual coolness and decision.
The task was simplified, in a sense, by Theodosius. He declared that
he would marry only a young lady of exceptional bodily charm, and
would pay no attention to wealth or dignity. It may have occurred to
Pulcheria that an Empress thus elevated would be less likely to dispute
her power than some woman who had been born into the world of large
action. She began her search, with the aid of Paulinus, a youth who had
been educated with Theodosius and was his intimate friend.
One day, at this period, a young Athenian girl was brought into her
presence with a petition. She was of the fairest Athenian type; a
supple and graceful young woman, with skin of a snowy complexion,
large intelligent eyes, and a beautiful head of golden hair. Further,
she pleaded her cause, in perfect Greek, with a surprising restraint,
eloquence, and art. She was Athenais, the daughter of an Athenian
teacher. He had cultivated her mind and her beauty with all the
resources of his art, and had, at his death, left her only a hundred
pieces of gold, on the pretext that she was wealthy enough in her
advantages. She begged her brothers to share the inheritance more
justly, but they refused. She had therefore come with a relative to the
house of an aunt at Constantinople, and asked for a just distribution
of her father’s money. Pulcheria’s interest was, not in the case, but
in the girl. She took the aunt aside, and prudently inquired if the
girl was a maid and a Christian. Athenais was declared to be a virgin,
though a pagan; but the defect was one that could easily be removed.
Pulcheria joyfully told her brother that she had found the beauty
he desired, and described her. They arranged a second visit, during
which Theodosius and Paulinus should inspect the maiden from behind
a curtain. In a short time Athenais had changed her name into Ælia
Eudocia, changed her religion into that of Christ, and changed her
condition into that of wife of the Emperor. She was married on June
7th, 421, in, it is believed, the twentieth year of her age. There was
consternation in the home she had quitted at Athens, and her brothers
hid themselves in the provinces. Eudocia had them sought and conducted
to Constantinople. There they learned to their surprise that she
thought herself indebted to their conduct for her fortune, and they
were richly rewarded.
From these pleasant girlish traits we pass to the inevitable struggle
with Pulcheria. Theodosius remained an Imperial nonentity. He could
hunt, paint, and carve, but public business so bored him that he signed
documents without reading them. One day Pulcheria put a parchment
before him, and he, as usual, blindly appended his name. Shortly
afterwards he summoned Eudocia, and was told that she was now the
slave of Pulcheria, and awaited _her_ orders. The document he had
signed was a deed of sale of his wife, but it does not appear that the
little stratagem made much impression on him. Pulcheria still held the
reins. Eudocia had her first child at the end of 422, and was, in the
following January, entitled Augusta. The court had a visit, too, from
the Empress of the West, Galla Placidia, and her daughter, and large
matters were discussed. In 433 we may, perhaps, trace some influence
of Eudocia on legislation. An edict imposing the death-sentence on the
remaining pagans may be confidently ascribed to Pulcheria; but an edict
reforming and enlarging the higher schools of Constantinople seems
rather to remind us of the Athenian scholar’s daughter. She occupied
much of her leisure in writing historical and religious poetry, and the
little that survives of it has been recently edited by Ludwich. It is
correct in form and devoid of inspiration.
The years passed tranquilly until 437, when we begin to suspect that
there is friction with Pulcheria. Few things had happened, beyond the
echo of the stormy movements of the West, and the disquieting advance
of the Huns, to disturb the life of the court. One year (434) had,
indeed, brought a strange thrill into the Imperial nunnery. A princess
of the Western Empire, Honoria, came to Constantinople, _enceinte_
by her own steward. But the hard lot of Honoria, and the romantic
devices by which she sought to enliven it, will occupy us later.
Pulcheria promptly enclosed the fiery young princess in a convent, and
the scandal would be mentioned only in whispers. Three years later
(437) the Western Emperor, Valentinian III, came to Constantinople,
and led away Eudocia’s beautiful daughter, Licinia Eudoxia, to share
his trembling throne. The next detail is that, in 439, Eudocia made a
lengthy pilgrimage to Palestine, and there can be little doubt that her
absence from the palace for a year--which is unconvincingly connected
by Gibbon with the marriage of her daughter, two years before--was
due, in part or entirely, to some quarrel with either Theodosius or
Pulcheria, most probably the latter.
At Antioch, on the journey, Eudocia enjoyed the prestige of her
solitary and independent dignity. From a golden throne she delivered a
studied oration to the Senate, and the tumultuous applause and voting
of statues to her must have greatly increased her self-consciousness.
The shower of gold she rained upon the churches and monasteries
of Palestine, and indeed all along her route, elicited a no less
stimulating demonstration. She returned to Constantinople, apparently
about the end of 439, with a larger sense of her importance, and with
such priceless relics as the arm of St. Stephen and the authentic
picture of Mary which Luke the Physician had painted. It is only at a
much later date that Greek writers add to her luggage a phial of the
Virgin’s milk, some underclothing of the infant Christ, and similar
treasures.
The pilgrimage was the turning-point in the career of Eudocia. So
far her life had been one of splendid and powerless prestige; it
now rapidly darkens with intrigue, is overshadowed by tragedy and
suspicion, and soon ends in a virtual exile. We are sufficiently
acquainted with the writers of the time to expect that they will throw
very little light on this fresh Imperial tragedy, but, using the later
and less weighty Greek writers with discretion, we may obtain a fairly
confident idea of its main features. Two facts are related by writers
of the time, and are beyond question. In the year following Eudocia’s
return, her friend, and the intimate friend of the Emperor, the
charming and accomplished Paulinus, was exiled and put to death without
public trial. The second fact is that, a few years later, Eudocia left
the palace for ever, to spend the remainder of her life at Jerusalem.
The later Byzantine writers give a rounded story of these events, and,
on the whole, one is disposed to think that in this case they are
revealing the suppressed truth. Theophanes (in his “Chronographia”)
says that a eunuch named Chrysaphius rose into favour, and urged
Eudocia to secure the dismissal of Pulcheria. They persuade Theodosius
that, since Pulcheria has taken a vow of virginity, her proper place
is among the deaconesses of the Church, and Archbishop Flavian is
instructed to take her away. Flavian, however, prefers to have her in
the palace, and he directs her simply to live apart for a time and
wait. Then, in 440, occurs the execution--one may almost say murder--of
Paulinus. These later Greek writers all give a romantic story in
connexion with it. As Theodosius and Eudocia go to church on Epiphany
morning, a peasant presents the Emperor with a remarkably large apple.
He gives it to Eudocia, who privately sends it to Paulinus. Unluckily,
Paulinus in turn presents it to the Emperor, who sternly asks Eudocia
what she has done with it. She declares, and repeats with a most
solemn oath, that she has eaten it. Paulinus is at once sent away, and
decapitated. A much nearer and more weighty authority, John Malala,
confirms, in substance, this story of the apple, and says that Paulinus
was suspected of intimacy with the Empress. There is no serious reason
to doubt it, nor is any other reason suggested for the murder of
Paulinus; but whether Eudocia was guilty, or the suspicion was inspired
by the servants of Pulcheria, we are unable to determine.
The eunuch then, says Theophanes, presses Eudocia to attack Flavian and
Pulcheria. He reminds her of “all the bitter things she had endured
from Pulcheria,” and covers the human motive with a pretence of
religious zeal. We know, at least, that Eudocia embraced the Eutychian
heresy, which Chrysaphius had adopted, and that a Church-council was
summoned in 441 that put an end to Flavian. The intrigue, however,
runs on in obscurity until Eudocia suddenly asks permission to retire
to Jerusalem. Theodosius could not divorce her, but we can easily
believe that, as these writers say, he treated her with such severity,
repeatedly reminding her of Paulinus, that she was driven into exile.
Pulcheria returned to the palace, and resumed her control of the
Emperor and the Empire.
Gibbon scouts these “Greek fictions,” but, not only has he not taken
sufficient account of John Malala, whose authority he recognizes,
but a detail he adds from the still more authoritative Chronicle
of Marcellinus (which is almost contemporary) gives a very serious
confirmation. In the suite of Eudocia, when she set out for Palestine,
were a priest named Severus and a deacon named John, favourites of
hers. They had not long left Constantinople when an officer named
Saturninus, of the faction opposed to Eudocia, came upon them with
an order to put Severus and John to death. It appears that they too
were executed for supposed intimacy with the Empress. Eudocia lost her
self-control at this brutal outrage, and bade her servants make an
end of Saturninus. When Theodosius heard, he stripped Eudocia of her
Imperial prerogatives, and left her in the position of an ordinary
citizen. These authentic statements of Marcellinus strongly confirm the
story, and it is clear that the Byzantine court was stained by a sordid
quarrel and several brutal murders.
The romance of Eudocia’s career was not yet over. Marcellinus sends her
to Jerusalem in 444: the later writers in 442. However that may be, in
the year 445 we find her again embarking on an unhappy adventure. The
monks of Palestine were infected with the Eutychian heresy, and they
welcomed so powerful a patroness. With the aid of her servants they
ousted the orthodox bishop of Jerusalem, and a vigorous monk was put
in his place. The monk-bishop, with his militant army of ten thousand
monkish followers, held Jerusalem for twenty months, in spite of the
Imperial troops, drove all the orthodox bishops out of Palestine,
and slew and cast to the dogs a number of their followers. In this
quaint company the delicate Greek Empress continued to build churches
and monasteries for three years, but when she hears at length of the
misfortunes of her daughter, which the Bishop of Rome, as well as the
courts of Ravenna and Constantinople, ascribe to her heresy, she sends
to consult the famous hermit of the pillar, Simeon Stylites. Simeon
recommends her to confer with a certain saintly monk of the desert.
The monk will neither leave his desert for her, nor permit a woman to
enter it. She therefore builds a tower on the hill some miles away, and
in that safe and public elevation the monk enlightens her out of her
heresy.
Eudocia brought her adventurous career to a close in 460, protesting
with her last breath that she was innocent of the charge of unchastity.
Pulcheria continued to rule the Eastern Empire in the name of
Theodosius until he died, in the year 450, inglorious and unhonoured.
It was now seen that the prosperity of the Empire in her earlier years
was a hollow truce of circumstances. When the fierce and rapacious
Huns approached it, in 446 and 447, the Eastern Empire tremblingly
purchased peace by the most ignominious concessions. When Theodosius
died, she assumed sole control of the Empire, and the head of the
eunuch Chrysaphius was at once removed from his shoulders. But the
pressure of her people forced her to marry, and an aged Senator,
Marcian, engaged to share her throne without sharing her virginal
bed. To his more vigorous hands the affairs of State now passed, and
Pulcheria maintained her virtue and piety to the end. But we must now
leave the Oriental pomp, the emasculated frame, and the splendid piety
of the Byzantine court, to conclude our story in the West.