The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (54 page)

Arcadius never remarried and when his own death came in 408, he left his throne to their seven-year-old son Theodosius II, who would rule for forty-two years, nose-led by a series of powerful court insiders. Internal, rather than external, quarrels continued to be the chief source of strife at court, typically between rival civil servants vying with each other for greatest authority over the pre-pubescent emperor. Between 405 and 414, praetorian prefect Anthemius assumed guidance of eastern imperial strategy, while the day-to-day supervision of the boy-emperor and his sisters Pulcheria, Marina and Arcadia was delegated to a plump eunuch named Antiochus, who arranged tutors for the children, found them playfellows and so forth.
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Their religious education meanwhile was attended to by John Chrysostom’s replacement as the bishop of
Constantinople, Atticus, who affected a paternalistic concern for the young princesses, for whom he composed a pamphlet, ‘On Faith and Virginity’.

Theodosius II’s senior by two years, Pulcheria was just nine when she and her siblings were orphaned by Arcadius’s death in 408. It was not long, however, before she assumed the role of bear-leader to her sisters and brother, and from an early age exhibited all the signs of an intractable and imperious force of will. A quarrel between her and the eunuch Antiochus led to the latter’s dismissal from his post in 412. Two years later, at the age of fifteen, Pulcheria was proclaimed
Augusta
. On 30 December of the same year, a bust of her was reportedly dedicated in the Senate House alongside those of the male
Augusti
.
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Yet it is not so much her precocious assumption of the rank of
Augusta
that conveys the image of her as a young woman of unusual single-mindedness, but her decision the same year, 414, to pledge herself to the ascetic Christian ideal of lifelong celibacy and insist that her sisters do the same.
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By taking such a vow, Pulcheria was gouging a deep line in the sand between herself and her female predecessors, though at the same time establishing an ideological link to that paragon of recent empresses, Helena. In a dynastic ruling culture where a woman’s principal usefulness to her male relatives was still as a symbol of wifely or maternal virtue, for a woman to opt out of that equation completely just as she reached her fertile years, and moreover publicly proclaim her intention of doing so, was unheard of. Pulcheria’s choice reflected the radically changing nature of the options open to fifth-century women seeking to live a virtuous life, and how deeply these rebellious new Christian values had seeped into elite Roman culture. John Chrysostom’s close friend Olympias and the famous Melania the Younger, for example, had both been forced into early wedlock but stubbornly rejected their families’ choices of second husbands, instead using their inherited wealth to build monasteries in Constantinople and Jerusalem and therefore giving a strong religious legitimacy to their independent status. For Pulcheria, a member of the ruling dynasty, to join their number without ever marrying and co-opt her sisters as well was a remarkable victory for the ascetic wing of Christianity.
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Daily life in the palace of Theodosius II reflected the family’s new religious sympathies, assuming an appearance similar to a monastery. The boy-emperor and his sisters were said to have risen at the crack of dawn and chanted antiphonal hymns together, learning holy
scriptures by heart. Theodosius II barely moved without his sister’s say-so. Pulcheria made all her brother’s decisions for him, trusting to others to teach him the art of horsemanship, fighting and letter-writing, but assuming personal control of his education in princely etiquette, instructing him how to carry his robes, how to sit down elegantly and how to walk. She made him refine his over-raucous laugh, taught him to school his expression into seriousness as befitting the occasion, and showed him how to affect a polished manner in audiences with his petitioners. Above all, she insisted that he pray and attend church regularly.
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The image of Pulcheria clucking around her little brother trying to groom him into acting the part of emperor is not incompatible with a traditional imperial woman’s job description – part of any Roman woman’s duty had of course always been the supervision of the upbringing and education of her son. But such duties fell less commonly to a sister. What is truly remarkable, however, is that the description of Pulcheria’s activities does not stop there – by contemporary church historian Sozomen’s reckoning, Pulcheria was the effective ruler of the Roman Empire, a state of affairs with which he apparently saw nothing amiss:

The Divine Power which is the guardian of the universe, foresaw that the emperor would be distinguished by his piety, and therefore determined that Pulcheria, his sister, should be the protector of him and his government. This princess was not yet fifteen years of age, but had received a mind most wise and divine above her years. She first devoted her virginity to God … after quietly resuming the care of the state, she governed the Roman Empire excellently and with great orderliness …
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Had Tacitus been writing Pulcheria’s obituary, he would not have been so complacent. As it was, there were those who were less inclined to be complimentary. Writing in the seventh century, John of Nikiu lambasted Pulcheria for publicly chastising her brother and for usurping the responsibilities of a man – directly echoing the criticisms of ‘unwomanly’ imperial women like Agrippina Minor, almost five centuries earlier.
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The rules had nevertheless changed for the imperial woman of late antiquity. No longer was it only the successes and follies of one’s husband that determined the kind of reputation she received in later
centuries. Now, her religious beliefs could make or break her in the eyes of her critics. By linking her status to a vow of virginity, Pulcheria was able to forge a powerful identity for herself independent of a husband, one that the Virgin Queen Elizabeth I herself adopted centuries later. Over the next forty years of her life, it was a pose that the young Theodosian princess perfected.
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While Pulcheria was being credited for reforming her family’s way of life in Constantinople, over 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) away, her half-aunt Galla Placidia was taking a vow of her own. The Goths were under new management. Alaric had died of fever in Italy not long after the Goths’ sack of Rome, and his place was taken by his deputy Athaulf. In his ongoing bid to secure the elusive land deal for his people, Athaulf first attempted to ransom Galla Placidia back to the court in Ravenna, which was itself under the influence of a new strongman – Stilicho’s replacement Flavius Constantius. But with Honorius still dragging his feet and Flavius Constantius unable to bring the two camps to the negotiating table, Athaulf decided on a different tack. In January 414, he married his Roman prisoner in the town of Narbonne in southern Gaul, an area well known to Roman epicures for its production of rosemary-flower honey.
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A description of the wedding between Athaulf and Placidia survives in a history written by a contemporaneous eastern diplomat named Olympiodorus. He relates that the ceremony took place at the townhouse of a leading local citizen of Narbonne named Ingenuus, and was attended by a mixture of both barbarian and Roman guests, including the senator Priscus Attalus who had been taken hostage by the Goths at the same time as Placidia although released early in a plea bargain. The bride was dressed in ‘royal raiment’ and sat in a hall ‘decorated in the Roman manner’ to receive her guests. The groom had also cast aside his barbarian garb and instead had donned ‘a Roman general’s cloak’ and other Roman clothing. Among the wedding gifts was Athaulf’s personal offering to Placidia, a line-up of fifty handsome young men, clothed in silk and each carrying two vast dishes piled high with gold and precious stones, glittering souvenirs of the Goths’ sack of Rome. This last detail is the only discomfiting flicker in this eye-witness account – otherwise it seems that this wedding was nothing more unusual than the contented union of two well-heeled subjects of the Roman Empire. Not a hint of coercion or reluctance on the part of the bride spoils the picture.
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The romantic possibilities of the union between a Roman princess and a Gothic king acknowledged by a witness to be handsome and well built are almost too good to be true.
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But even if we give in to the temptation of believing that Placidia had fallen in love with her barbarian captor as they wandered across western Europe – and there are ancient witnesses willing to confirm that the partnership was a harmonious one, and that Athaulf was attracted by Placidia’s ‘nobility, beauty and chaste purity’ – Olympiodorus’s description of their wedding alludes to more prosaic motives as well.
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The very Roman-ness of the wedding, from Athaulf’s choosing to array himself in the uniform of a Roman general to the presence of several important Roman dignitaries who even took part in singing traditional Roman wedding songs, testifies to Athaulf’s political ambitions. Marriage to Placidia made him the Roman emperor’s brother-in-law, an emperor whose own childlessness gave Athaulf another trump card. For Placidia then fell pregnant, after the Goths had temporarily established themselves in Barcelona, and she was there delivered of a son, provocatively named Theodosius after the bride’s father. For all the pomp, woman had once again served her most important and basic use in the eyes of every dynasty. The king of the Goths was now father to the potential heir of the western Roman Empire. Now, Athaulf must have thought, he had Honorius and Flavius Constantius over a barrel.
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The death of his baby son, however, weakened Athaulf’s hand, and the western court proved intransigent. Rather than breaking bread with Athaulf, they blockaded him, squeezing the life out of the Goths’ supply line. The atmosphere inside the Gothic camp turned ugly, and in the summer of 415, little more than a year after the festivities in Narbonne, Athaulf was assassinated by a Goth in his employ, and Placidia left a widow at the age of twenty-six. Her husband’s successor Segeric showed a humiliating lack of regard for the Roman emperor’s sister, forcing her to walk in front of his horse in convoy with the Goths’ less exalted prisoners. But Segeric’s regime lasted only a week before he himself was killed, and the Goths’ new leader, Vallia, had little stomach for renewed bartering with Flavius Constantius and the Romans over this troublesome hostage. He agreed to trade her back to the Romans in return for grain and a corner of Gaul to cultivate, between Toulouse and Bordeaux. In 416, six years after she had been abducted from Rome, Galla Placidia was home again.
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She returned to a more confident political set-up than the one she had left. Flavius Constantius was a formidable politician who had
stamped his authority on the western court over the decade since Stilicho’s death, not only securing the return of Placidia from the Goths but using the latter’s military assistance to decimate barbarian intruders in Spain and finally bringing the head of troublesome British usurper Constantine III back to Ravenna on a pole. He could be forgiven for fancying himself a good catch for any prospective bride. Placidia, however, did not apparently see it that way. When it was suggested to her that Constantius should become her second husband, she dug her heels in, causing great annoyance to her suitor, and it took her brother’s intervention to force her unwillingly into matrimony.
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Galla Placidia’s second marriage took place on 1 January 417, and was celebrated with great fanfare. But the marital harmony that characterised her union with Athaulf is markedly absent from accounts of her life with Constantius. Why she should have been so reluctant to marry again is a tantalising question. Some have suggested lingering affection for Athaulf, whose dashing reputation formed an awkward contrast with a description of Constantius as ‘downcast and sullen, a man with bulging eyes, a long neck and a broad head, who always slumped over the neck of the horse he was riding, darting glances here and there out of the corners of his eyes’. While Athaulf and Placidia had presented a united front, weeping together for their baby son when they buried him in a silver coffin in a chapel outside of Barcelona, Placidia’s and Constantius’s relationship was described as cold and distant. He was portrayed as an increasingly sour and penny-pinching tyrant as a result of his wife’s influence, and Placidia as a controlling nag who threatened to divorce him on one occasion if he did not execute a cocksure travelling conjurer named Libanius, who claimed he could magic away the barbarians, a boast Placidia stonily regarded as blasphemous.
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The marriage met at least one of the criteria by which Roman dynasties assessed marital unions. It produced two children – a daughter, Justa Grata Honoria, born in 419, and the all-important son and heir, Valentinian III, born in 421. The latter’s birth in the face of Honorius’s own continued childlessless left Honorius with little option but to share the title of
Augustus
with Flavius Constantius on 8 February 421. At the same time, he extended the title of
Augusta
to his sister which gave Placidia the honour of being the first woman of the western empire since Constantine’s wife Fausta to receive Livia’s old sobriquet.
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But the promotions were greeted with displeasure by the court of Theodosius II in Constantinople, whose leading officials
resented not being consulted and refused to acknowledge the new
Augustus
and his family.
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Before Flavius Constantius could square up to his eastern critics in Constantinople, however, he died unexpectedly on 2 September that year, leaving Ravenna without an effective strong-man and precipitating a bun-fight for political supremacy in the west.