One man who had no choice but to rush in 428 was Flavius Dionysius, with whom we start our journey. He is starting out from Antioch, HQ of the Roman army in the east, leading an important and complex diplomatic mission to meet a Persian delegation. But he’s suffering facial paralysis. (Traina suggests this might have been stress-related, since he had a difficult task, for a military man – to accept a fait accompli – the loss of independence of Armenia to Persian rule – it had been an important buffer between the two eastern giants.) As Traina explains we only know about his mission because of this, for it is recorded in the life of Simeon Stylites – the famous pole-sitting monk (the stump of his final pole still survives outside Aleppo). The modern author has had to put together the details, for no other western source records the mission, and none pay attention to the fall of Armenia, which Traina suggests reflects embarrassment that a Christian land had been abandoned to its fate.
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.)
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