The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (57 page)

With Eudocia’s old ties to the imperial court severed, she was able to establish a new, second life for herself in Jerusalem, with her own
household rules and an identity separate to that of her husband and the imperial court. She thus joined an elite roll-call of Roman empresses such as Livia and Domitia Longina who had also contrived to forge relatively independent lives in retirement. Eudocia’s example proved an inspiration for her own granddaughter by Licina and Valentinian III, who was named after her. This younger Eudocia would endure several unhappy betrothals and dynastic marriages, before fleeing her Vandal husband Huneric in 471, and trekking to Jerusalem, where she is said to have fallen on her knees before the resting place of her grandmother and embraced her tomb, which had lain in the empress’s beloved shrine of St Stephen since her death in 460. One hundred years later, an anonymous Italian traveller known simply to historians as the Piacenza Pilgrim, who was undertaking a religious tour of the holiest eastern sites, wrote of visiting the tomb of Eudocia and remarked on the way in which the memory of both she and Helena still lived on in the Holy Land, Helena as a charitable guardian of the poor, and Eudocia as a friend of Jerusalem, the construction of whose city walls she had helped to fund. To be compared with Helena was the best epitaph Eudocia could have asked for.
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While Eudocia forged a new life for herself in Jerusalem, Pulcheria was plotting to get her old one back. In 450, her chance came, thanks to a fatal horse-riding accident suffered by Theodosius II on 28 July, and the execution that same year of the powerful Chrysaphius. Into her brother’s shoes stepped a grey-haired junior staff officer named Marcian, whose candidacy was heavily backed by military bigwigs Aspar and Zeno, both hoping to secure powerful positions of influence for themselves by parachuting Marcian on to the throne. The other key player in Marcian’s elevation was Pulcheria herself, who apparently realised that with Theodosius II having failed to provide a male heir, there was only one way to keep imperial power in the family. Having spent the past thirty-six years of her life carving an identity for herself on the back of her public vow of virginity at the age of fifteen, Pulcheria now bowed to the inevitable and married for the first time at the age of fifty-one. On 25 August 450, she and Marcian appeared at the Hebdomon parade ground on the coast outside of Constantinople, and in view of the troops, Pulcheria personally bestowed the diadem and the purple military
paludamentum
upon her new husband, effectively crowning him the new
Augustus
. Not since Agrippina Minor was immortalised in marble at Aphrodisias, placing
the laurel crown on her son Nero’s head, had a woman been seen directing the coronation of an emperor.
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Pulcheria had compromised her vow of chastity but not broken it. Marcian agreed to her condition that the union would not be consummated, and to silence the cynics, gossipmongers and critics who surely spotted comedic and political ammunition in Pulcheria’s U-turn, gold coins were commissioned showing Marcian’s and Pulcheria’s union being blessed by Christ himself, who stood like a father-figure between them. It was a striking departure from previous imperial coin iconography. A near identical format was used again some forty years later to commemorate the marriage of a Byzantine emperor and empress – Anastasios and Ariadne – where once again, it was the empress who legitimised the imperial succession of the emperor in question. But for at least another 400 years after that, no such portrait appeared again in imperial art.
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Marcian’s leadership was tested almost immediately by the pressing diplomatic and military problem presented by the Huns. Under the leadership of their new leader Attila, the Huns had been bent on terrorising both the eastern and western courts for the past decade. Uninterested, as the Goths had been, in acquiring a permanent settlement within the empire, and with their services as mercenaries no longer required by Aetius in the west, the Huns’ principal demand was money, and Attila adopted a policy of effectively blackmailing the Romans to give him enough gold in return for not attacking their fortresses and pillaging their territories. Attila adopted a highly aggressive strategy towards Theodosius II’s court in particular, and after a bungled Roman assassination attempt against the Hunnic king, in 450 the Constantinople court adopted a more conciliatory tack, and enough gold was stumped up to persuade Attila to go away.

The rise of the Huns had meanwhile created problems of a different kind for Galla Placidia, now aged in her early sixties. The past seventeen years since Aetius had exploited Hunnic military might to assume authority over her son’s affairs, seem to have been spent quietly by comparison to the domestic turbulence affecting Pulcheria and Eudocia in the east. Ever since the death of Flavius Constantius in 421, Placidia had remained unmarried, and though there is no evidence that she adopted the monastic way of life favoured by her nieces in Constantinople, she had nevertheless proved herself a committed servant of the Christian God. She exchanged letters with Pulcheria and Theodosius II on the controversy over miaphysitism – the ongoing debate over the true nature of Christ.
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She was also a regular correspondent of Pope
Leo I, and during the 440s had teamed up with the pontiff to assist with repairs of the church now known as the Basilica of St Paul-outside-the Walls, built by her father on the site of St Paul’s tomb in Rome. A heavily restored inscription on the triumphal arch pays tribute to her efforts.
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Most of her time was now spent in Ravenna, but in February of 450, Placidia came again to Rome with other members of her family to take part in celebrations in honour of St Peter and also preside over the reburial of the remains of her infant son with Athaulf, little Theodosius, whose silver coffin had been exhumed from its resting place in Barcelona and brought to Rome for reinterment in the family mausoleum next to St Peter’s.
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Around the same time, a scandal involving her daughter Honoria was brewing. Thirty-two-year-old Honoria had grown up into a recalcitrant imperial princess, causing enormous embarrassment to her mother in 434 by getting pregnant by her estate manager, Eugenius, at the age of sixteen. Eugenius was executed, and Honoria packed off in disgrace to Constantinople to live in the conventlike surroundings of her cousin Pulcheria’s palace, where she gave birth to the baby who would be heard of no more. On being allowed to return to Ravenna, now demoted from the imperial rank of
Augusta
, a respectable but dull husband was found for her, Herculanus Bassus, who would not object to her tainted past and could be trusted not to use the marriage as a stepping stone to power. But rebelling furiously against her relatives’ marriage plans for her, Honoria took the drastic and melodramatic step of writing to Attila and offering him money to intervene in her predicament. She enclosed her ring with the letter and sent it via her eunuch Hyacinthus, whom Valentinian later tortured and beheaded on discovering his sister’s treachery.
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Attila’s emotions on receiving Honoria’s letter must have been something to behold. Having recently come to a peace deal with Constantinople, his eyes were already swivelling greedily to the riches potentially on offer from Ravenna, and Honoria’s letter unwittingly showed him how to play his ace. Interpreting the message and the enclosure of the ring as a de-facto offer of marriage, he pledged, mock-heroically, to avenge his bride, and provocatively dispatched several Hun embassies to Ravenna between 450 and 451, insisting that Honoria and her share of imperial power – what he called the ‘sceptre of empire’ – should be delivered to him forthwith. A curt response was issued by Valentinian III, who pointed out that it was not within Honoria’s power to receive the so-called sceptre, since the rule of the Roman Empire
belonged not to females but to males. Attila of course had no expectation of his demand being met, but planned to use it in any case as an excuse to declare war on the west. Honoria herself meanwhile had been handed over to her mother for punishment, but instead of imposing a sentence of death as Antonia once had on her wayward daughter Livilla, Galla Placidia contented herself with insisting that Honoria marry Herculanus, whereupon presumably she retired to a quiet life on one of his estates, and was heard of no more.
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Attila continued to press his claim to Honoria, even after he suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of Aetius in the French region of Champagne in 451. It was not the end of Attila’s ambitions in the west. He managed to milk Valentinian’s territories of at least another year’s worth of plunder after the setback of 451. But he found in Marcian, the new husband of Pulcheria, a much more tight-fisted proposition than his predecessor Theodosius II, and once Attila had committed himself to a western campaign, all pay-outs from Constantinople were stopped completely. Attila lived only another two years before dying ignominiously in 453 of a nosebleed which choked him while he lay in a drunken sleep on his wedding night.
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The scandal caused by her daughter’s folly was also to bring down the final curtain on Galla Placidia’s life. While Pulcheria went on to be acclaimed publicly as a ‘New Helena’ for her part at the seminal, faith-defining meeting of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and died at the age of fifty-four in July 453 to an outpouring of grief from the faithful in Constantinople, Galla Placidia’s own passing seems to have passed almost unnoticed in the reportage of the tense disintegration of her son’s government. She died a few months after her daughter Honoria’s disgrace and hasty marriage to Herculanus Bassus, on 27 November 450 at the age of around sixty-two. No details of her last days survive, nor the cause of her death, nor the place of her burial.
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Almost exactly 1,000 years later, on 25 June 1458, gravediggers were toiling on the Vatican hill in Rome at the chapel of St Petronilla – a female martyr said to have been converted to Christianity by St Peter during the first century and whose remains had been housed in this chapel, next door to the Church of St Peter’s, since the sixth century. They found a marble sarcophagus containing two silver-coated cypress caskets, one large, one small. Inside the two caskets, the bodies of an adult and a child were found. Gold cloth, weighing a total of 16 pounds (7.25 kg) shrouded the pair. Otherwise, nothing to denote their identity was preserved, save an inscribed cross.

The mistaken assumption at the time was that the bodies were of Constantine and one of his sons. This was despite there being nothing even to indicate whether the individuals found in this instance were male or female, and historical tradition having long since established Constantine’s burial in Constantinople. But there was another reason to be excited by the gravediggers’ discovery. For before its redesignation as the resting place for the remains of the saint, the chapel of St Petronilla was formerly the imperial mausoleum of Honorius. During the sixteenth century, when the building was knocked down to make room for the reconstruction of St Peter’s, more sarcophagi were discovered in the foundations, including, on 3 February 1544, that of Honorius’s wife Maria – daughter of Serena and Stilicho – whose marble coffin was filled with almost 200 precious objects, including gold, agate and crystal vessels, and precious jewellery including an emerald engraved with a bust of the empress’s husband. A pendant inscribed with a cross-shaped inscription listing the names of Honorius, Maria, Stilicho, Serena, Thermantia and Eucherius – all that remains now of the treasure – assisted with the identification of the casket’s occupant. But whose were the bodies found by the gravediggers?

The clue lies in the smaller of the two caskets. Only one child is known from our literary sources to have been buried in the mausoleum – Galla Placidia’s and Athaulf’s infant son Theodosius, whose reinterment here by his mother in a silver coffin is recorded and dated to the year 450. In spite of the sixteenth-century legend of the children playing in the mausoleum of Galla Placidia and setting fire to the woman’s corpse, the body lying next to little Theodosius in the mausoleum beneath St Peter’s – which has never since been excavated – must be that of Galla Placidia herself.
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It is both a thrilling and poignant realisation. For all the elusiveness of their characters, the gloss and gossip of their public personae, Galla Placidia and the entire female imperial cohort were flesh-and-blood women who once lived, breathed and felt. A discovery such as the one below St Peter’s can only make us feel the loss of their voices from history all the more keenly.

Epilogue

Galla Placidia and Pulcheria were the last women to make a significant impact on the annals of Roman history before the respective murders of Aetius and Placidia’s son Valentinian III, in 454 and 455, precipitated the spasmodic breakup of the western empire. Under pressure from barbarian groups such as the Vandals, the Franks and the reinvigorated Goths, emperor after emperor was sworn in at Ravenna, and then almost immediately eliminated, until the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed and replaced in 476 by the German Odoacer, son of one of Attila’s followers. In the interim, women continued to be deployed as marital bargaining chips, lending a seal of legitimacy to the ambitions of the western empire’s new political order. Valentinian III’s widow, Licinia Eudoxia, and daughters, Eudocia and Placidia – the daughter-in-law and granddaughters of Galla Placidia – were given a taste of their immediate forebear’s fate when they were abducted from Rome in 455 by Geiseric, leader of the Vandals, after he had subjected the city to its second sack in recent memory. On reaching their destination of Carthage, the Vandals’ stronghold on the North African coast, Eudocia was married off to Geiseric’s son Huneric, to whom she bore a son who would later become king of the Vandals. Licinia Eudoxia’s and the young Placidia’s release was eventually negotiated by eastern emperor Leo I in 462, and through the children of Placidia, who married Olybrius, the very short-lived western emperor of 472, the blood of Galla Placidia continued to flow through the veins of the nobility in the eastern empire.
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