Flavius is handy for Traina, for no sooner was he back from this tough job than he had another delegate task, to escort the Syrian cleric Nestorius from his monastery to Constantinople, a journey that also allows the author to explore the tensions and developments of the church of the time. Simeon was an outstanding, in more ways than one (his column, from which he never descended, was 9 metres high when Flavius visited – it eventually went to 16), but he represented an extreme of religious ascetism that, Traina says, helped to cement the identity of Syria, which had been an uncertain border province, while shocking the more established regions.
That brings our journey to the heart of the eastern empire, Constantinople, and Traina visits the royal palace, where interestingly, two women were at the heart of politics. One was Pulcheria, the sister of Emperor Theodosius II, and his spiritual guide. The other was his empress, Eudocia, who was from a family of pagan intellectuals and only converted upon marriage, and had a reputation as a protector of heretics. (They had a parallel in the Western empire, the 40-year-old Aelia Galla Placidia, mother of the child emperor, a woman of uncommon political experience, who had briefly been empress in the West, was exiled to Constantinople, taken hostage after the sack of Rome and taken by the Visigoths back to Gaul, where she ended up marrying King Ataulf, who was shortly after murdered, when she returned to Ravenna.)
As is typical, in any historical court where women have importance, historiography has tended to slander Theodosius as weak: Traina doesn’t agree. He says that the emperor and his advisors clearly took a decision to create a different idea of sovereignty: “a profoundly religious sovereign who bordered on becoming an ascetic…Prophyrogenite represented a pure state of royalty, which had been conferred upon him by his untarnished childhood… removing all temptations from courtly circles and doing so with the gentleness and purity that typified him”.
It was, not, however, simple. Traina explains the new direction of government – increasingly absolutist and centred on the emperor, trials lost their previous public connotation and “started to be held in the secretaria, secluded rooms that were hidden by gates and curtains, and were open to the public only at specified stages of the trial”. Control extended throughout society:
The social implications of the developments are illustrated by a law passed on 21 April, 428, which intended to curb the exploitation of prostitutes and made provision for the expropriation of procurers and the loss of their powers over the young women. In the most serious cases, they could be punished with exile or forced labor in the mines. At first site, the law would appear to be a simple measure to protect public morality against procurement in accordance with Christian values. In reality, the situation was more complex: the law was no so much directed against professional pimps as against citizens who, driven by poverty, sold their daughters’ bodies.” The law of 428 was part of a wider project to control social order and aimed to repress all forms of ‘barbaric promiscuity’, often on the margins of society, with the intention of safeguarding the kosmos, the imperial order, against its enemies.
This is primarily a journey in its time, but Traina does draw out some really important developments for the future, notably in the Balkans. He notes that with Theodosius II having three years before placed his nine-year-old nephew Valentinian III on the throne after defeating the usurper John, the project of moving toward reunification was proceeding, and one part of that was, paradoxically, drawing the line between the two empires, which could prevent future conflict. Traina explains that the Illyria sector, what we would today call the Balkans, which had been considered a single geographic and strategic unit, was split in two along the river Drina, which “now led to a cultural separation even in political terms — and that ongoing separation was between the Latin-speaking regions and the Green-speaking ones”.
Article comments