The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (51 page)

Despite the occasional swipe at her from anti-Christian commentators such as Julian, who called her the ‘wicked stepmother’ of his father Julius Constantius (the son of Constantius’s second wife Theodora), it was Eusebius’s analogous portrait of Helena as Mary to Constantine’s Christ that won the day. Perhaps precisely because of the pliability of her image, Helena became the role model for the empresses who followed her.
⁸²
Her example of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, her associations with the True Cross, were all encouraged in the wives of the emperors who assumed control of the empire at the end of the fourth century, and whose descendants would go down with the ship of the western Roman Empire, as it sailed into its twilight years.

9

Brides of Christ, Daughters of Eve: The First Ladies of the Last Roman Dynasty

Even on the occasion of my first visit to Ravenna in 1913, the tomb of Galla Placidia seemed to me significant and unusually fascinating. The second time, twenty years later, I had the same feeling. Once more I fell into a strange mood in the tomb of Galla Placidia; once more I was deeply stirred … I had often wondered how it must have been for this highly cultivated, fastidious woman to live at the side of a barbarian prince. Her tomb seemed to me a final legacy through which I might reach her personality.

Carl Jung,
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
(1963), 265–7

The city of Ravenna in the north-east of Italy has attracted a steady stream of notorious visitors since the seventeenth century, when it formed one of the stop-off points on the Grand Tour. A place of pilgrimage for worshippers of Dante, who died there in 1321 and is entombed in the city centre, the city was also the temporary residence of Lord Byron between 1819 and 1821 whilst he conducted an affair with a married local noblewoman, and was the subject of a prize-winning poem in 1878 by the student Oscar Wilde. More importantly, the fragmentary remains of Ravenna’s sumptuous Byzantine architecture recall its glory days from the beginning of the fifth century, when it was chosen to displace Milan as the western capital of the Roman Empire.

Not all early tourists were as impressed as Wilde by Ravenna’s charms. Thomas Nugent’s definitive handbook to the Grand Tour, faithfully carried by every gentleman who undertook the trip, described the water-bound city disparagingly as ‘marshy and unwholesome’.
¹
But the guide did single out one landmark at least as a must-see. Behind the cathedral of San Vitale lies the so-called Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, a tiny cruciform chapel of soft pink brick famous for its breathtaking interior wall mosaics and domed indigo ceilings spangled with glittering stars, described by one poet as a ‘blue night sparkled with gold’. The effect is claimed to have inspired songwriter
Cole Porter, honeymooning in the city in the 1920s, to pen one of his most famous popular hits, ‘Night and Day’, and some have found parallels in the ceiling’s decoration with the description of angels in Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, part of which he composed while in exile in Ravenna.
²

If one had visited the chapel between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, one might have been directed by those in the know to spy through a hole in the front of one of the great sarcophagi there. Through it, it was reported that the embalmed body of a female could be seen, richly dressed and seated in a chair of cypress wood. The body was thought to be that of the woman for whom the building was named, Galla Placidia, one of the last empresses of the Roman Empire. But hopeful visitors today will find no such peephole. If we are to believe medieval report, this is because in 1577, some children playing near the sarcophagus were trying to get a better view of the occupant by squeezing a lighted taper through the opening, and accidentally set fire to the body, reducing it to ash.
³

The colourful life-story of Galla Placidia, daughter of one emperor, sister to another, wife to a third and finally mother to a fourth, is one tightly entangled with the tale of how the western half of the Roman Empire sank into its famous ‘decline’ over the course of the fifth century, leaving its eastern half to soldier on under the umbrella of the Byzantine emperors. She lived through an era of massive religious, political and social upheaval, defined by three central frontiers of tension – the ever-increasing pressure on Rome’s territory by invading barbarian forces; the metamorphosing face of imperial power which saw a succession of youthful and inexperienced emperors dominated by a ruthlessly competitive cabal of advisers, officials and military leaders; and the repeated clashes between rival factions within the newly dominant religion of Christianity over the orthodox definition of their faith.

Against this precarious backdrop, a new generation of Roman first ladies attempted to establish themselves as the true inheritors of their role model Helena, the first Christian
Augusta
. Galla Placidia and her niece Pulcheria – the leading lady of the eastern Roman court of Constantinople for much of the first half of the fifth century – were the most successful imitators. But the ways in which these women approached that goal were quite different. Pulcheria, enabled by the religious and political transformation of empire brought about by Christianity’s rise, forged a path unlike that of any previous Roman
empress, paving the way for the Byzantine empresses and early medieval queens who would follow in her wake. Galla Placidia’s journey, on the other hand, from coveted matrimonial prize to emperor’s wife, mother and widow, was in many ways a pastiche of her predecessors’, stretching all the way back to Livia. As such, their stories are an apt conclusion to this history of Rome’s first ladies.
⁴

To reach the heyday of Placidia and Pulcheria, our final port on this odyssey through the lives of the imperial women of Rome’s empire, we must first navigate the choppy waters of the second half of the fourth century, during which the first shoots of their family tree took root. The years following Helena’s death at the end of the 320s had seen her son Constantine grappling with many religious and military disputes across his uneasily unified empire. Having finally dedicated his new capital of Constantinople on the site of the old city of Byzantium in 330, he spent much of his last seven years in power there before dying in an imperial villa in Nicomedia on 22 May 337, shortly after being officially baptised into the Christian faith he had championed to such powerful effect.

Following his demise, a power-sharing arrangement was agreed between his three sons – Constantius II, Constantine II and Constans – all children of his marriage to Fausta. But fraternal infighting and an attempted coup by a usurper named Magnus Magnentius left only the eldest son Constantius II still
in situ
by 350. Magnus Magnentius, who was of Frankish descent, was one of a new generation of barbarian-born Roman officials whose families had been allowed to settle within the empire and who had swiftly risen to high command in the service of its army. This development was symptomatic not just of the manpower problems faced by the overstretched Roman military machine, but of an increasing dilemma faced by fourth-century emperors – namely, how to reach accommodation with the vast numbers of migrant barbarian tribe peoples, such as the Franks, the Alamanni and the Goths, who were now seeking a foothold within the empire’s borders.

Although Constantius II had once been given the blame for an order to the Roman army in the wake of his father Constantine’s death, to execute the male descendants of his grandfather Constantius Chlorus’s marriage to Theodora, ensuring they could pose no threat to the succession of Helena’s grandsons, he nonetheless enlisted one of the survivors of that purge, his cousin Gallus, to serve as his imperial
representative in the east while he personally avenged the usurpation by Magnentius and brought the empire under his control once more in 351. Gallus, who was named Caesar and given his senior partner’s sister Constantina as a bride, was soon accused of exceeding his mandate in the east, and executed on Constantius II’s orders in October 354. But in another conciliatory gesture towards the descendants of Theodora, Gallus’s half-brother Julian was named as his replacement, and it was twenty-nine-year-old Julian who succeeded Constantius II when the latter died of fever on 3 November 361.

Julian’s two-year reign is best known for his attempts to turn the Roman Empire back towards paganism, which earned him the epithet Julian the Apostate. He was, however, to be Rome’s last non-Christian emperor, and also the last emperor to try to govern the empire single-handed. His death in June 363 was followed up by six months of caretaker rule by the obscure Jovian. Then, following Jovian’s death from suspected asphyxiation in 364, a Pannonian officer named Valentinian took up the baton, installing his court at Trier, and appointing his brother Valens to head up operations in the east from Constantinople. On 24 August 367, Valentinian publicly hailed his son Gratian – by his first wife Marina Severa – as his successor, dubbing him
Augustus
at the tender age of eight and thus setting a precedent for the inauguration of a generation of child-emperors which would have an enormous impact on the way government was run in the late fourth and fifth centuries.

Having policed the empire against barbarian incursions on its north-western frontier for just over a decade, Valentinian died of a stroke on 17 November 375, leaving sixteen-year-old Gratian as joint ruler with his uncle Valens. A rival claimant to power immediately emerged, however, in the person of Gratian’s half-brother Valentinian II, the four-year-old-son of Valentinian’s second wife Justina. Valentinian II’s elevation was masterminded by two ambitious generals who held the threat of an army backlash over Gratian’s and Valens’s heads if they did not allow the boy to become a member of their imperial college. A deal was thus reached whereby the half-brothers and their uncle would share power, testimony to the clout of the generalissimos who would come to dominate Roman politics in the fifth century. A catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Goths for Valens and his army at the battle of Adrianople on 9 August 378 then created a job opening for a new
Augustus
in the east, which was duly filled on 19 January 379 by recently appointed
magister militum
(field-army general) Theodosius,
the Spanish-born founder of the Theodosian dynasty which presided over the twilight period of the Roman Empire.

During the unsettled transition between the house of Constantine and the house of Valentinian, few empresses had the time or the opportunity to make more than a cursory impact on the annals of history. Gallus’s wife Constantina, one of two daughters born to Constantine and Fausta, died in Bithynia on her way to try and seek clemency for her husband with her brother Constantius II. The pubescent Gratian forged a useful family connection by marrying Constantius II’s daughter Constantia, but she died just after her twenty-first birthday and makes only fleeting appearances in the literary and material record, though her Valentinian in-laws did not neglect to exploit the link she provided them to Constantine and Helena.
⁵
Eusebia, the second wife of Constantius II, also deserves mention for her role in acting as advocate for the young Julian in the mid-350s, persuading her husband to invite his teenaged relative to the imperial court in Milan and to agree to his attending university in Athens. She was said to have nurtured the young man’s intellectual passions by giving him a collection of books, and to have encouraged his promotion to Caesar on 6 November 355. In recognition of his debt, Julian himself wrote a ‘Speech of Thanks’ to her, praising her virtue and noble deeds, a remarkable document given that it is the earliest example of an official speech of praise directed exclusively at an imperial woman.
⁶

In a familiar paradox, the Eusebia who emerges from Julian’s speech and other sources as a pious, kindly benefactress was painted elsewhere as a schemer with an eye to her own interests, whose kindly attitude towards Julian masked an icy determination to eliminate more effective rivals to her husband. She was accused of secretly poisoning Julian’s wife Helena – the other daughter of Constantine and Fausta – to induce repeated miscarriages, ensuring that her own childlessness would not put her at a disadvantage. However, such deviousness, reminiscent of Livia’s and Agrippina Minor’s combined reputations for poisoning inconvenient rivals, was nothing compared to the portrait painted of Valentinian’s second wife, Justina. The well-connected daughter of a provincial governor, Justina had been the widow of the usurper Magnus Magnentius before she married Valentinian. One account had it that the latter’s first wife, Marina Severa, had befriended Justina and used to bathe with her, and that Valentinian was so smitten by his wife’s description of Justina’s naked form that in his determination to wed her, he connived at a change in the law to permit him
to have two wives – a law, incidentally, of which there is no mention in ancient legal sources, clearly demonstrating that the story has little basis in fact.
⁷
Justina bore Valentinian four children before the emperor’s death in 375 – a son, the boy-emperor Valentinian II, and three daughters, one of whom, Galla, would go on to marry emperor Theodosius and give birth to Galla Placidia. When her stepson Gratian became emperor, it was Justina who was summoned to the Danube frontier by the ambitious generals who wanted to put four-year-old Valentinian II on the throne, and as of then, she stopped at nothing to secure the interests of her own son.

Justina epitomises a certain abiding image of the empresses of this period – ambitious women who acted as de facto regents for their child-emperor sons and who created as many enemies as they did allies. But unlike previous ‘queen mothers’ such as Agrippina Minor or even the Severan empresses Julia Maesa and Julia Mamaea – all women who supervised the reigns of their very young offspring – Justina’s and her cohort’s historical reputations pivot largely on their religious behaviour. Christian asceticism continued to strengthen its challenge to traditional Roman social structures in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, creating an alternative template for ideal female conduct which some women of the fifth-century imperial court, as we shall see, took to heart.
⁸
But while this might have earned these women plaudits from some Christian moralists, other chroniclers of late antiquity and the medieval period, who did not subscribe to such newfangled doctrines, used their conduct as grounds for criticism and suspicion.