The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (56 page)

By publicly linking her gesture of thanks to St John with a reminder of the roll-call of distinguished emperors through whom her family could trace its lineage right back to the great Constantine himself, Placidia was issuing a strong message to anyone who might challenge the right to rule of her newly enthroned son Valentinian III. And it needed to be strong. The summary elevation of a six-year-old to the most powerful job in the west did not draw a line in the sand as far as those who had recently backed John were concerned. Placidia was to have an important and testing role to play in protecting her son from attempts both to influence him and oust him from power. There was no such thing in Roman law as a ‘regent’, but Theodosius II nevertheless saw fit to entrust Placidia with a mandate to look after the administration of her son’s affairs.
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Her first crisis in this role followed on almost immediately from the usurper John’s defeat, when the latter’s aide Flavius Aetius returned
from his embassy to the Huns with 60,000 of them at his back. The Huns, though not yet under the leadership of their famous figurehead Attila, possessed formidable military talents. This rendered them useful soldiers of fortune to do business with, but also dangerous enemies to cross. When Aetius returned with an expectant army of them in 425, they had to be bribed to avert the prospect of attack. For his part in persuading the Huns to accept the deal and in return for not causing trouble, Aetius was bought off with a senior command post in Gaul.

Over the next decade, three principal rivals emerged seeking to exert influence over the young emperor – the increasingly formidable Aetius, Placidia’s old protector Boniface, and
magister militum praesentalis
(senior field-army general) Flavius Felix. It fell to Placidia to try and prevent one from upsetting the equilibrium of power between them and thus threaten her son. In the meantime, she busied herself in publicising the names of herself and her children in connection with the legacy of Helena, as part of the same stratagem that sought to reinforce Valentinian III’s inarguable right to the throne. During the late 420s, church-building began in the name of the empress and her children, including the refurbishment of Helena’s own chapel of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. New mosaics were added to the chapel interior, with an inscription recording that by this donation, ‘Valentinian, Placidia and Honoria,
Augusti
, have paid their vow to the Holy Church Hierusalem’.
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By the early 430s, though, Placidia could not any longer restrain the different egos competing to control her son in Ravenna. In May 430, Felix and his wife Padusia, a one-time confidante of Placidia, were executed on the order of Aetius, who had earned back enough credit since his support of John’s bid for power to have been promoted to the rank of
magister militum
. Placidia recalled Boniface from North Africa and promoted him above Aetius in a bid to check the latter’s momentum. Soon afterwards, Boniface and Aetius clashed in battle near Rimini in late 432 and although Boniface came off the better of these two titans, he died soon afterwards of his injuries. Thus by 433, Aetius had established an unassailable foothold by the canny courting of support from poachers-turned-gamekeepers the Huns, and succeeded in establishing an iron grip on the western court which Placidia and Valentinian were powerless to loosen.
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Aetius’s peremptory assumption of the reins of power in the west met with no objection from Constantinople, which even sent him the
benefit of military expertise in the person of Aspar, who had led the army that forced John to make way for Valentinian III. They were well used to a model of government where a young emperor ceded all but symbolic authority to more experienced advisers around him. Among those jostling for position in this pack at the eastern court during the 430s and early 440s were
magister officiorum
Paulinus (the head of palace administration), praetorian prefect Cyrus and the eunuch Chrysaphius, all three of whom were agents in an emerging rivalry between the emperor’s wife and sister.

Pulcheria might have been expected to take more of a back-seat role in the imperial set-up since the marriage of her brother to Eudocia in 421. She was certainly spending more time in the imperial family’s secondary palaces in the suburbs of Constantinople, such as the palace of Rufinianae on the shore of the Sea of Marmara. This was one of numerous accommodation choices available to her, she and her sisters being the owners of a string of impressive private properties within the city, so many in fact that districts of Constantinople were named after them – the ‘Pulcherianiai’ quarter, for example. Yet Pulcheria did not fade into the background completely after her brother’s marriage, a fact that is underlined by his allocation to her of a
praepositus augustae
– a counterpart to the eunuch major-domo who served as his own chief of staff – and her own armed escort for trips out into the city streets.
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Pulcheria also continued to be a staunch advocate for Marianism, and in 431, had scored a sweet triumph over the new bishop of Constantinople, Nestorius, with whom she had a relationship as antagonistic as her mother Eudoxia’s with John Chrysostom. Nestorius had been appointed in 428, two and a half years after the death of Pulcheria’s old mentor Atticus, and was outraged when he discovered only five days into his new post that Pulcheria had been allowed regularly to enter the sanctuary of the Great Church to receive communion along with the priests and her brother Theodosius II. Wading boldly into the increasingly fractious relationship between church and state in late antiquity, Nestorius apparently ordered Pulcheria to be turned away at the gate in future, and from that day on, it was open warfare between the empress and the bishop, who vehemently objected to the practice of calling Mary the ‘Mother of God’, rather than the ‘Mother of Christ’. Urged on by his sister, Theodosius II reluctantly convened an ecumenical council at Ephesus in June 431, to settle the matter, and Nestorius’s arguments were defeated by a close ally of Pulcheria’s,
Bishop Cyril of Alexandria. Four years later, Nestorius was banished to an Egyptian monastery on Theodosius’s order. Nestorius himself, though, was in no doubt who was really behind his defeat, nor were the empress’s supporters, who had crowded into the Great Church after the triumph at Ephesus, chanting support for her championing of the Mariologists’ view:

Long live Pulcheria! It is she who has strengthened the faith! … Long live the orthodox one!
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Pulcheria’s sister-in-law Eudocia was perhaps a less enthusiastic endorser of the latter sentiment. Court tittle-tattle about the frosty relationship between the two women was so widespread that a story of how Pulcheria, in a black humour, had once tricked her gullible brother into signing his wife into slavery was still doing the rounds in the Byzantine court centuries later.
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Such tales did the imperial mantra of
concordia
no favours, so the arrival in Constantinople of Galla Placidia’s eighteen-year-old son Valentinian III in October 437 for his wedding to Eudocia’s fifteen-year-old daughter Licinia Eudoxia was an opportunity for the Theodosian dynasty to put on a display of family loyalty. To celebrate the union between the western and eastern imperial houses, the father of the bride appeared next to his daughter and new son-in-law on a special gold wedding coin, inscribed
feliciter nuptiis
(‘happy nuptials’). Theodosius II and Valentinian III were depicted holding an orb, to promote the image of an empire united, and after being joined in marriage, the young couple headed off on a honeymoon tour equally divided between their home territories, wintering in Thessalonica and then arriving the next spring in Ravenna, where they were greeted by the groom’s sister Honoria and Galla Placidia, who had remained there to deter any attempt by Aetius to take advantage of her son’s absence.
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While Valentinian III and Licinia Eudoxia were receiving the congratulations of their western subjects in 438, the bride’s mother, Eudocia, set off on a trip of her own. A new friendship was the catalyst behind her sudden departure, though if things were as bad between her and Pulcheria as sources indicate, she surely welcomed the opportunity to put some distance between herself and her sister-in-law. The previous year, Eudocia had made the acquaintance of Melania the Younger, the famous ascetic heiress who, thirty years previously, had sought the help of Stilicho’s wife Serena in an inheritance dispute, triggering a
slight altercation over Melania’s refusal to remove her veil in Serena’s presence.
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Driven from Rome after the Goths sacked the city, Melania had eventually wound up in Jerusalem, where she founded a women’s monastery on the Mount of Olives, and another one for men near the Church of the Ascension. In 436, she went to visit her uncle, who was in Constantinople in anticipation of Valentinian’s and Licinia’s wedding, and during her stay she was permitted audiences with the emperor and empress. The connection between the two women was so auspicious that Melania urged Eudocia to come and stay with her in Jerusalem.
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The opportunity to emulate Helena in making a journey to the Holy Land was an obvious priority for Eudocia in accepting Melania’s invitation. As with Helena’s own pilgrimage, it was the ancient equivalent of a good photo-opportunity for the ruling dynasty, the chance to court popularity with a display of religious devotion and generous munificence on the part of the empress. So Eudocia set off, armed with gifts and donations for the churches in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the region, and after being met by Melania at Sidon, was duly installed as a guest in the Mount of Olives monastery. From here, she sallied forth to embark on an itinerary of carefully chosen public appearances, no doubt distributing money and taking an interest in the construction of various church-building programmes, following the example of Helena, whose Church of the Ascension was just up the hill from her monastery accommodation.
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Many ancient tourists to the Holy Land brought back mementoes of their travels. When Eudocia made a triumphant return to Constantinople in the summer of 439, she brought with her a particularly impressive souvenir. During her visit, she had specially requested to attend the dedication of a vast church, built to house the relics of St Stephen, the first martyr, whose bones had been identified on the say-so of a Palestinian priest in 415. Melania’s loyal biographer presented her as the mastermind behind the shrine, but that Eudocia had some stake in the shrine’s construction is strongly suggested by reports that Eudocia brought Stephen’s relics back to Constantinople with her. To be the guardian of holy relics conferred a powerful distinction in antiquity. It was a satisfying coup for Eudocia to return to Constantinople with her own, admittedly more modest, version of Helena’s True Cross, and perhaps she permitted herself a smug satisfaction in being their courier rather than Pulcheria, though it was Pulcheria who was the one to actually deposit the relics in the church of St Lawrence
in Constantinople. An ivory panel of uncertain date and subject matter preserved in Trier may well be a representation of the actual moment of the relics’ arrival at their destination, greeted by an elaborately dressed Pulcheria, who stands at the centre of the scene, holding a cross as though the master of ceremonies.
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Eudocia did not long bask in the glow of her achievement. Within a year, her relationship with her husband had deteriorated drastically. A new supremo was calling the shots in Theodosius’s court, the eunuch chamberlain Chrysaphius, who, thanks to his closeted access to the emperor’s inner sanctum, was said to have usurped even Pulcheria in her brother’s confidence. He set about exploiting that influence to the full. Not long after Eudocia returned from Jerusalem, Chrysaphius reputedly began aggravating the problematic relationship between the two empresses, fanning the flames of Eudocia’s jealousy of her sister-in-law, slyly reminding her that Pulcheria had her own
praepositus
, while she, the emperor’s wife, did not. That Pulcheria soon stopped appearing in public in Constantinople, confining herself to one of the imperial palaces, seems to confirm that Chrysaphius’s baiting had the desired effect. Within two years, Eudocia too had fallen victim to the poisonous palace atmosphere, accused of having committed adultery with the
magister officiorum
, Paulinus. Theodosius was outraged and ordered Paulinus’s execution. Eudocia fled back to Jerusalem, where she would live out the last eighteen years of her life.
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Writing from exile in 451, the embittered bishop Nestorius put the whole affair down as divine punishment on Theodosius and Eudocia for their heretical behaviour.
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Christian authors of the sixth and seventh centuries, however, remembered Eudocia more warmly and dismissed the charges against her as the fabrication of heretical historians, asserting that Eudocia was ‘wise and chaste, spotless and perfect in all her conduct’. Describing Eudocia’s retirement years in Jerusalem, one sixth-century historian wrote that he was sceptical of the rumours that surrounded her flight, and pointed out that she continued to endow churches and monasteries just as she had while staying with Melania. Theodosius’s anger over the supposed affair did not fade, though, and he dispatched his domestic equerry Saturninus to execute two clerics in his ex-wife’s service. Eudocia retaliated by ordering the death, tit for tat, of Saturninus, a piece of impertinence for which Theodosius deprived her of the services of an imperial staff.
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