Theodora and the Emperor E-Book

Harold Lamb

• Herausgeber: Reading Essentials
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Is it possible that a peasant and a circus girl could come to rule the Roman world? This is the strange tale of the harlot empress Theodora - the eerie beauty whose name stands in history beside Helen of Troy and Cleopatra. The daughter of a circus performer, a footloose vagabond and harlot, whose fierce ambition drove her from man to man until she finally married Justinian, a man of most humble origins who would become one of the greatest emperors of the ancient world! 

Leseprobe

Theodora and the Emperor 

by Harold Lamb

First published in 1952

This edition published by Reading Essentials

Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Theodora And The Emperor 

 by 

 Harold Lamb

To 

Edgar J. Goodspeed

“One who puts on the purple may never take it off.”

THEODORA, Empress of Byzantium

The Ten Persons

JUSTINIAN, the emperor

THEODORA, the empress

PROCOPIUS FROM PALESTINE, an historian

BELISARIUS, the soldier

ANTONINA, an actress, his wife

JOHN OF CAPPADOCIA, the economist

NARSES, the eunuch, also a general

TRIBONIAN, master of the laws

ANTIIEMIUS FROM TRALLES, an architect

ST. BENEDICT OF MONTE CASSESTO

I.The Palace by the Circus

THERE IS ONLY A GLIMPSE OF HIM AT FIRST, COMING DOWN from the mountains. Peter Sabbatius by name, he walked methodically down along the swift Vardar River, until he came to the edge of the sea.

Peter Sabbatius might have been eighteen years old, but he always appeared older than his age. A barbarian bred in a village of the higher mountains, he had amiable gray eyes, untrimmed tow hair, and an earnest way of trying to please other people. Vitality but no grace showed in his round ruddy face and long awkward body. A son of country peasants, he was on his way to the city in the hope of getting an education, with his clothes and some lawbooks and writings of the Christian Fathers carefully packed on a likable mule.

Somebody noticed that he believed everything he said himself, which was unusual in that uncertain time. Peter Sabbatius brought with him a letter from his elderly uncle Justin, who had made the journey long before to the city of Constantinople wearing a herder’s cloak and carrying toasted breadafter Attila’s Huns had looted through the upper Vardar Valley. Justin, it seemed, had made the journey for two reasons: because times were hard in their uplands after the raiding, and men from the farms were sought for the army, to take the place of hired Germans.

So much the bearer of the letter had explained to young Peter. The letter itself said very briefly in words printed carefully on a scrap of parchment: “Greeting to the son of my sister, Flavius Petrus Sabbatius in the village of Taurisium near to Scupi upon the upper Axius [Vardar] river.” It was signed simply Justin. But the bearer, a merchant taking loads of eastern cloves, camphor, and sandalwood up to the Danube forts, had told Peter the message that the ill-schooled Justin had not been able to write out.

This almost forgotten uncle had reached the age of fifty years without a son to bear his name at least without certain knowledge of such a son. Moreover Justin, after long service on the frontiers, had gained for himself a comfortable post as an officer of the excubitors, or household guards of the Emperor Favored by God. This post was profitable as well as honorable. So Justin desired to make use of his good fortune to educate Peter at the city college. Himself, he was too old a soldier to take to book learning, and he had heard from his sister that Peter manifested a zeal to study. If Peter, then, did well at college, he would be adopted by Justin and would also be in line for a government job. If not well, no harm would be done. After delivering the message the camphor merchant had presented the dun mule to Peter as a free gift of Justin.

The mule had not influenced Peter. His mother assured him that Justin, who had gone from the river at his own age, possessed as much cunning as he lacked schooling. It seemed evident to Peter that his uncle desired a younger mind, able to interpret books, to aid him in his new moneyed dignity as officer and patrician at court. His mother said that Justin would not have sent the dun mule unless he expected to get back more than the price of the pack animal. And Peter craved, more than anything else, to sit at the feet of the masters of old-time learning, to be able to quote carelessly a line of Catullus about a charming girl, or to debate Aristotle’s belief that a superior man is activated by ethics. Not that he dreamed of becoming a philosopher in the ancient sense of a lover of wisdom. He had lived too long on a farm. With the optimism of a self-taught boy he longed to draw into himself the magic of book learning in the city, in a sheltered room over a garden of fine plants, where, as a scholar and gentleman, he would be waited upon by body slaves as Master Peter ...

The milestone stood on the paved road at the end of the river trail. Peter Sabbatius read the number upon the stone with a shiver of excitement because it told him the thousands of paces that would take him by way of this highroad to the New Rome, Constantinopolis, the city built by Constantine, where all the waters of the earth came together or so his route book said. To enjoy his arrival on this coast road the more, he turned the mule with his serving boy into the wineshop and stable by the milestone. Across the road gleamed the long dark line of the sea. It stretched from horizon to horizon, with here and there a red sail moving. Standing under the arbor of the shop, Peter watched a sail coming out of the sunset toward Constantinople, Around him horses lifted their heads from water and voices argued over prices in strange dialects. A carriage drawn by white mules stopped at the arbor. It had silver rails and a shining gold initial V, and armed riders guarded it, although only a bearded barbarian captain stepped down from it to drink beer and talk with a loud voice. A German officer, it appeared, taking this carriage of the Illustrious Vitalian eastward.

Noticing Peter’s pack mule, the yellow-maned captain stepped over to him, bowl in hand, and questioned him amiably about his name, rank, and destination. Learning that Peter fared alone from the northern mountains, the big captain laughed and said that only peasants made journeys on their legs, and there was plenty of room on the seat of the carriage for him, Peter laughed himself because the German spoke in dog Latin without proper verb endings. “Youngling,” quoth the good-natured man, “tie that pack beast behind. So, you sit, and we talk and go easy. You like that, my master?”

Petei said yes, he might, but the laden mule could not keep up with the patrician’s carriage. It always pleased him to talk with whomever he met, even a Gothic warrior with a heavy sword who quite evidently meant to strip him of his belongings after dark on the road. “So, we unburden the pack beast, and it goes well,” decided the armed man, over his bowl. When Peter thanked him and started to refuse his offer, he drained his bowl of beer and shouted to his outriders. They finished their drinks and ran to the dim mule, throwing off the loads,

“Tell me no thanks,” roared the Goth. “Only watch how well it goes.”

So quickly did the trained men take to horseback and to the carriage that Peter could only watch. The jovial Goth climbed into his seat with a shout of farewell, and the equipage started off with Peter’s dun mule tied behind. The escort did not even trouble to look back when they rounded a turn in the road.

Impulsively he started to run after them. Anger stirred him physically. Then, sensing the eyes of all those in the wineshop on him, he stopped and went back to his packs. Not knowing how to catch up with the armed riders, or how to claim his animal if he did so, he accepted the fac t t of the robbery and sold his bulkier belongings for a small price in silver. But he kept his books, and he took to the highroad with his boy, carrying packs.

It would be, he reflected coolly, many thousand hard paces now before he sighted the walls of Constantinople. Peter Sabbatius journeyed in this fashion along the sea in that year 500 of our salvation. By the older Roman calendar it was the year 1254 from the founding of Rome on the palace hill above the marshes of the river Tiber, But m the last centuries that other, western Rome had relinquished the rule of the world and was in reality held by Theodoric and his Goths. During this same time New Rome had endured in the east, a citadel of culture besieged by incoming barbarian peoples, preserving within it the civilization of the buried Caesars.

His mother had pointed out that this very year was the midpoint between the birth of their Savior and the thousandth year when the rule of human beings would end, and the graves give up their dead s and the Devil return to claim his own.

Theodora was born about that same mid-millenium year 500. Her birth from an eastern circus woman attracted no attention at all. But at five years of age, more or less, she came before the eyes of the assembled men of Constantinople. Just before the start of a day’s races in the Hippodrome, when masculine crowds edged into seats to gossip and lay bets, an unscheduled event took place in the arena that had been swept and watered for the chariots. Thiee small girls paraded across the dirt. They had wreaths of flowers on their joined hands and on their heads, and they plumped down on their knees before the crowd at one side of the vast sunlit space. No one there gave them a second glance.

Then out stepped the official annnouncer. His sharp voice cut through the buzz of talk. These children, he proclaimed, knelt as suppliants to the Green faction. Their father, Keeper of the Bears, Acacius by name, employed by the Greens, had died. Their mother had married again to support these, her offspring. But the new husband had been refused the post of Keeper ,of the Bears. Now the children begged their Green faction to grant him the post.

No answer came from the throng on the Green benches. Those who listened were more intent upon the condition of favorite horses and the all-important selection of Green drivers. The races were the solace of their troubled lives Besides, somebody else had bribed the Green dancing master to give him the job of grooming the bears. “It is to keep these children from starving,” rasped the announcer.

“No, no!” shouts answered. “What is all this about bears? Take them off!”

If the Green faction took no interest in its children, the dignified announcer had no mind to waste his breath in charity, and he strode off. The three girls, having been coached how to behave only up to this point, did not know what to do next.

Then they heard fainter shouts from across the arena. “What is this? ... Does the Green deme cast out their own children? Ah, they would cast out their mothers, if they knew them .... Come over, little girls come over here.” The invitation roared from the tiers under the portico, by the vacant imperial gallery. It came from the Blues, the antagonists of the Greens. The Blue faction of the city mixed no more with the Green than the blue sea mingled with the green land; at the race track or political rally as well as in street rioting the factions opposed each other, and as soon as the Green spectators refused the petition of the small girls the Blues took an interest in them.

Frightened, the children knelt helplessly among their wreaths. “Your father can groom our bears. This way, girls.” Whereupon the three got up and hurried across the track to the shade of the portico. A troupe of acrobats came out then to form a moving human pyramid, and the incident was forgotten, except that the three girls, Comito, Theodora, and Anastasia, became the public charge of the Blue political faction.

Because she had come from the friendly Syrian coast where the sharing of bread is not an act of charity, the mother of the growing girls never seemed to be able to make ends meet in the greatest of cities. It is clear that she tried hard to do so. Whatever happened to her latest husband, the Syrian vanished after a while from the animal cages of the Hippodrome and appeared in its theater. There she earned money herself by going off with men.

Theodora at first carried her mother’s stool around, in the audience. Then, when her elder sister Comito matured enough to catch the glance of men, Theodora followed Comito on and off stage clad in a slave’s tunic with sleeves. Quickly enough she discovered that if she did something funny it amused the audience. This critical audience tired of flute music and dancing and choruses only too easily; a bit of unconscious fun cheered it up.

By falling over a stool, by tangling herself in the flowing scarfs of dancers, and by blowing out her cheeks when she was slapped, Theodora began to act as an underage clown. She did so perhaps because she could neither play the flute nor dance well herself, but she learned how to attract an audience by impishness.

There was a popular trick dog at that time on the Hippodrome theater stage. It was blind. It could count, and above all could run among the spectators to point to the one who might be the greatest glutton or woman fancier. For a human actor to perform such tricks would be boring; the blind dog, being an animal, achieved fame and profit for its trainer. Theodora in those early years may have taken her cue from the dog.

In the Syrian woman’s family the mutual task was to earn food and sustenance by amusing gentlemen. No reputable women were allowed to attend the races, the plays, or the pantomimes. Nor had the Syrian’s brood any such fame as the popular dog. Comito began to sleep with men when barely old enough to do so.

Theodora, slight in body, delicate in features, with a mane of black hair, did not manage to get along so easily. Acting as mimic and child attendant upon Comito, she attracted attention only when she could make the watchers laugh. “No one,” rumor relates, “ever saw her embarrassed.” It would be no novelty for a ten-year-old girl to grow red and hang her head when male hands felt her body under her clothes. A smile, a quip, and a wriggle answered the situation better. Boldness paid off better than tears. To jump up on a festival table and walk around above the heads of the reclining diners with her dress pulled up to her armpits earned guffaws and Aves of approval, and kept an underage girl from having her dress stripped off by the servant louts waiting around the doors for their masters to emerge from the feast.

They say that the youthful Theodora lost no chance to take off her clothes, or as much of them as the theater allowed. She took them off herself. Like the fashionable dog, she had to depend on her tricks, and by them she gained some small reputation in the most sophisticated of all cities. It is certain, however, that while she lived with her mother she learned two things, never to forget to watch out for good coined money and to laugh when she was hurt.

If she had had the skill of oriental girls in dancing with flying swords, incense, or veils, she might have been a success. If she had had the clear voice of a Greek islander, she might have hit upon a popular song and earned pay in gold by performing at the feasts of the aristocrats. Lacking such talents, she had only her imagination and naturally quick wit.

For she outgrew her role of child clown. A mature woman of fifteen, even though unusually slender, could not amuse an audience by getting slapped. Moreover Theodora had not the fleshy vitality of western women; she could not hold the eye of an aristocrat by a display of breasts or thighs. Nervous and;, pale, her brilliant dark eyesheritage of her Syrian bloodunder brows that met across her slim forehead gave her only an elusive, brittle beauty. At the same time her mother’s looks were fading, while Anastasia had not become nubile. Theodora seemed to feel her responsibility for the family, while she had little hope for herself.

Circumstances had made her a pariah in the city. A woman of the theater was almost legally bound to serve as prostitute when sought by a spectator; the law barred her, definitely, from marriage with her betters unless by dispensation of the Church, after leading a sexless life for a while. The same law kept her children from any life but that of the circus, unless the child were bom after the grace period of redemption. While the law bound Theodora to a performer’s life, the huge Hippodrome was in reality her greatest antagonist and by now she had learned to detect any influence hostile to her. In that edifice of brick arcades and marble sheathing lay a power against which no half-breed woman, lacking an influential male protector, could possibly strive. It was the power of the men, assembled from the streets of Constantinople, that had, by a whim, once bestowed on her family the pay of a keeper of the bears.

The Hippodrome was the heart of Constantinople. Stretching for a quarter mile along the height above the sea, it accommodated sixty thousand spectators on its marble benches, and when the chariots raced the trees and rooftops to the east held almost as many more. All those thousands were bound by delight in the speeding four-horse teams, by the lust of gambling and the relief of hours of oblivion. Along the Spine that divided the track shone monuments of Roman glory, the Colossus in bronze, the giant nymph holding a warrior in her outstretched hand, the ancient column of the twining serpents of Delphi, and the obelisk of forgotten pharaohs of Egypt, The portrait statue of the reigning emperor was also there. But the crowds gave more heed to the tablets bearing the names of famous horses, and the statue of the immortal driver who had won his races for twelve years.

No bodies were carried out now from the small Gate of the Dead. The games of pagan Rome, the bruising pugilists and deadly swordsmen gladiators had ceased to exist after the Christian Church became the supreme force in the empire. The refinement of two centuries since the founding of the city did away with the holocausts of human victims, burned or devoured by beasts, and the conflicts of massed animals. The bears and other beasts of the modern Hippodrome were merely pursued and fought by human hunters For one thing, Asiatics like Theodora were not excited as the earlier Romans had been by war games and the mass shedding of blood. The Hippodrome, then, had become the center of the world of men. Women had to place their bets outside and learn the results of the races or the rioting afterward. For the arena served also as a rendezvous of the factions; it provided a congress for the folk of the streets. It heralded triumphs and it springboarded revolts. Curiously enough although nothing in Constantinople was really curious except to visiting barbarians the Hippodrome rose against the very walls of the Sacred Palace where the business of ruling went on methodically. There was even a way from the rambling palace through corridors, across a chapel, to the Kathisma, or imperial box, from which the emperor himself could watch the finish of the races or listen to the outcry of the crowd if it had a grievance. The old saying that the voice of the people was the voice of God lacked truth now that the patriarch of the Church had become the voice of God, but the outcry of the populace in the Hippodrome could send emperors hurrying into exile. Several years before, Theodora had heard the terrifying roar of the populace “Give another emperor to the Romans!” The roar had gone on, menacing and insatiable, until after a moment’s silence it had changed to a tumult of laughter. Some wooden buildings close by burned, and a costume keeper said she had watched some men in the street catch a running monk and cut off his head to put it on a pole. “Eh, it was the doing of Anastasius,” a tightrope walker assured Theodora afterward. (Although only an Egyptian acrobat, he had been privileged to sit in the arena. ) “He changed the orthodox words when he spoke the Trisagion, no longer saying Holy, Mighty, Immortal Lord’ as he should. Well, some of us thought it sounded like heresy. Why should that old goat Anastasius change our greeting to God? Perhaps the Devil put it into his silly head. I don’t know the truth of that. Then some of the Blues turned those houses into torches, and we all yelled c Give us another emperor!’ Anastasius ran back into the dressing room to wriggle out of his purple and gold in fright. He bobbed back into the box and made the announcer call out that he would never put on the purple again, so help him. It was really funny, and we had to laugh. We laughed so hard we told Anastasius to go and put on his clothes again.”

Anastasius was the emperor, a very old and well-meaning person, who saved up the money in the public treasury. Theodora never forgot that outcry of the Hippodrome crowd. Such things she could learn only by hearsay. From every entrance of the Sacred Palace she was barred as utterly as from the tiny palace in the garden by the sea where an empress in labor was carried, to bear her child in a chamber of purple marble. How few children nowadays seemed to be born in the purple!

A pariah, living in the side shows of the giant Hippodrome, she had left the stage where shapelier actresses bathed in tubs or wrestled in an odd fashion with men. The backstage of the theater is a place of hard reality, Theodora, having no role to pky or patron to give her prestige, became inferior even to the drudges who mended the costumes or put makeup on the clowns. Ixi that reality she could only pretend that she was busy and occupied. By trying to do so she had learned to read, and she had a bright way of chattering with the groups around the sporting aristocrats who sometimes wandered from the stables to look over the actresses in their dressing chamber. Where a quick word or an odd jest drew attention, she sparkled. It was easy for her to mimic well-known persons, and the older aristocrats found her a good companion. But whether on a pleasure barge up the Golden Horn, or at a feast in the gardens of the uplands, over on the Asian shore, men would force her to submit to them until they were satisfied. After that, seemingly, few of them desired a witty companion. Like satiated animals, they would go to sleep or bathe or drink more wine.

Perhaps the girl hated them as brute masters. There was some talk remembered and enlarged upon later that such wooers found the child clown still extant in Theodora. Gossip had it that decent men lying with her in darkness had unnatural tricks played on them, as if a demon had entered her. It does seem as if her companions of the night would dodge aside if they met her by day, to avoid touching her garment or to escape her eyes,

Out of this situation Theodora found a way, although not an easy one. She left the city. As a woman of one Hecebolus, a bearded and self-important merchant from Tyre Her own Syrian coast she journeyed across the great sea to—Pentapolis ? in Africa, where Hecebolus was to serve as governor. In ,that province she knew for a year the mild luxury of a governor’s house, and dislike of its master. There she had a child, a daughter. Some time later she left the house of Hecebolus without taking jewelry or money or even the clothes that had been given her. After that for a while all trace of her is lost.

During these years Peter Sabbatius had remained unnoticed in the city until the extraordinary happening of the summer of 518.

He studied He hardly saw the Hippodrome or the palace area at the far point of the city. His orbit lay about the Auditorium that crowned the third hill with its halls where thirty-one orators and professors lectured students. At first, awed by the immense buildings and the dressed-up throngs hurrying over the paved streets, Peter had gone from lecture to lecture with the zeal of a neophyte. But after a while he ceased to be satisfied with the elderly lecturers wearing gray robes. They wasted so much time in argument, and they had a way of absenting themselves when the chariots raced. Since the students could follow their own inclinations and Peter began to believe that all Constantinopolitans went where their inclinations led them Peter started to study on his own account in the fine libraries, which had the additional advantage of remaining open at night. There he could investigate all the happenings of the past in the neatly copied manuscripts of Suetonius, Tacitus, and countless others. He enjoyed particularly delving into the private lives of the Caesars who had ordered those events.

Besides, Peter realized that he was older than most of the youths of the lecture halls; he had a poor background for the higher studies such as philosophy; he had to concentrate, and learn to read swiftly. Then, too, his practical mind probed for reasons and causes. Scientia potestas est, said the legend above tfie Auditorium portico. Knowledge was indeed power if the fcffbwledge were accurate, and not merely prating or preaching or the endless Greek theorizing.

For a long time the tall and clumsy Peter Sabbatius behaved like a starving man confronted by massed tables of unknown, delectable foods. He grudged each hour that took him away from his labor over the books. When daylight faded he would go out of the library, walking briskly to the main street, the midway, Mese, toward the enticing smell of the bakeries where he bought a fresh loaf of bread; then on his way back he added olives and a flask of wine, to provide his supper, which he ate on a bench in the University Forum, almost deserted at that hour. By then the oil lamps would be lit and he could go back to his study table until the closing hour, when he returned to his sleeping room and the books waiting for him there. It gave him a feeling of comfort to stretch out by his own lamp and draw the familiar volumes toward him. In the early hours of the morning the noisy street below him grew quiet as the fields of Taunsium and nothing disturbed him. Before sunrise he allowed himself to sleep. He had done well enough with as little sleep during harvest time in the mountains. Only here in the city there was an endless, strange harvest to be gathered. Not that the barbarian-born Peter created for himself a dream world of the books. He did penetrate such a world of memory and imagination; at the same time he related it to the human beings and the city around him. His hard common sense gave heed to the gossip of the bakers and the light chatter of prostitutes waiting under the arcades. In the taverns sailors had much to say of cargoes brought from the land of Punt and the far Indian Sea. Whatever he heard went into Peter’s memory to stay; he had never learned the trick of a cultured man, of taking notes of facts and then forgetting them. At the same time he made the mistake of believing almost everything he heard.

Count Vitalian reminded him of that. After finishing his supper on the bench Peter liked to climb up the column in the forum. Among the inscriptions about victories over the Goths on its base, he had found a narrow door that led to a precipitous spiral stair inside, up to the summit of the column and its statue of Theodosius the Great who had built the mighty threefold walls of Constantinople across the land. Everyone said these walls were impregnable.

Leaning out by the statue, Peter watched specks of light appear in the dark streets below, as the hanging oil lamps were lit. At such a moment his city assumed the magical aspect of an illuminated island, surrounded by the darkness of the harbor and the seas and the far land. He thought of it as an island of knowledge and order, secure in the darkness of a world adrift, a Happy Island.

Then going down and out the door one evening, he almost stepped into a passer-by. The man turned sharply and two who followed him ran up, drawing short swords from under their cloaks. “Let him live,” said the first quickly. “For he does not look to me like a spy, or an assassin either,” Peter recognized Vitalian, a noble although Bulgai-born a handsome, assured soldier who seldom showed his face by day in the city. Hurriedly for violence made him nervoushe explained how he used the column for a lookout. This seemed to amuse Count Vitalian. “An island of security?” he murmured. “Do you believe there is any such thing?”

“Yes, Noble Vitalian. If its walls be impregnable.”

“If! Theodosius had skillful engineers, and these walls will never be crossed by barbarians until somebody is paid to open a gate or start a riot inside.” As if exasperated, the soldier-patrician asked for Peter’s name and identification. Then he said in parting, “Don’t step out of monuments after dark, Noble Justinian. Or if you do, hire yourself a bodyguard. And for your own good, forget that you’ve seen me.” As if impatient at the delay, Vitalian strode off with the two swordsmen at his back. Peter wondered if he were not safer at his books than this distinguished soldier with his bodyguards.

By then his uncle Justin had made good his promise and adopted Peter Sabbatius as his son, with the name of Justinian. As Peter had suspected, his uncle thought well of his studies because he wanted his new son to serve as his secretary. Whenever letters came to the old man, he would have Peter read them and write down his answers. Justin kept insisting he could not read, but Peter caught him sometimes conning over the written answers carefully. Although more than sixty-five years of age, the mountaineer held his tall body erect; he never worried about what might happen, saying that you could not see Fate until the wench caught up to you. He married the peasant girl who had followed him faithfully. A simple soldier, he called himself, waiting to retire with his medals to his garden. Yet he dressed with the care of a young sportsman criticizing Peter’s habit of wearing shapeless tunics and drab cloakshe had been promoted to lieutenant general after a successful campaign, and quite abruptly he was put in a cell by his friend John the Hunchback, Master of the Armed Forces, on the order of the emperor. Justin had been charged with conspiracy. This meant that Peter himself might be arrested as well, as a conspirator. Startled by the news, Peter hurried by the courier road to the Asia shore where his uncle seemingly awaited execution. Inquiring his way to headquarters, he found Justin playing dominoes with John the Hunchback, who had decided to release the prisoner. “Officially,” Justin explained to his nephew, “the commanding general has had a dream. In that dream a mighty being appeared to himcertainly no human being. It said to him that he should release me, because the prisoner and his family were fated to be of great aid to his country. That dream satisfied the emperor, our master. You are all my family except little Lupicina.”

“It was a revelation,” said John the Hunchback, over his dominoes.

“The most difficult situation,” agreed Justin, “can usually be solved by a revelation.”

Peter had heard Justin’s name joined to that of Count Vitalian, who had caused trouble in the northern armed forces. When they were alone in Justin’s quarters no longer a cell the veteran admitted that he respected Vitalian and had discussed politics with him. It seemed that Vitalian had angered Anastasius, the emperor, by starting rumors in the camps that Anastasius had relapsed into heresy. This affected the soldiers on the frontiers.

“The truth is that in Vitalian, my son, you will find the strongest will of all of us. But he is a nuisance because he cannot be controlled. Anastasius is weak as a water lily, and doting besides. Eh, he gets things done by making promises which he never carries out. Vitalian is so brilliant he gives us no peace of mind, while Anastasius keeps everything calm.” Justin sighed. “Command brings worries with it. I had a better time with Lupicina, in the ranks of the excubitors.” Peter did not believe that. It seemed as if both Justin and John the Hunchback, while appeasing the irresolute emperor, did not want to make an enemy of the determined Vitalian. And he reflected that it was lucky for him that Vitalian had recognized his name at Theodosius’ column. When, thereafter, Vitalian made his appearance unexpectedly with a small fleet of galleys filled with seditious soldiery off the harbor of the Chrysoceras, the Golden Horn, Justin met him with an escort of government war galleys discharging flames. This fire from the ships was contrived by chemical experts borrowed from the university. The result of the encounter was that the restless Vitalian turned back his prows and fled, while the simple soldier Justin was appointed Count of the Excubitors, or commander of the emperor’s guard, and perforce took up his residence near the Sacred Palace. There he insisted that Peter—Justinian should join him.

And there, with his library moved to a great room over a garden, Peter realized that he would no longer be allowed to study at will. As Justin’s adopted son he was expected to guard the mind of his tolerant uncle, to serve as an intelligent spy and adviser at need. Henceforth he could only work at his books at night, while Justin enjoyed his sleep, but this he continued to do as before. Justinian as Peter was called thereafterbrought to the palace his consuming curiosity, his instinct for fact finding and remembering, and the quiet persistence of his peasant blood. His good nature made a pleasant impression and attracted no attention. Because he stopped to chat with the perfectly mannered custodians of the palace as he had done formerly with bakers and street girls, he got on their good side and passed for a harmless busybody. Silently he had learned the value of silence he discovered a great deal about the workings within the palace and the tensions within its. folk. No one else took such pains to probe into situations. The day came, unnoticed, when he began to lead his new father. Justin, who had acquired an education by the simple process of adopting an educated son, did not realize that Justinian was gaining notable importance through the celebrity of his adopted father. The veteran still felt a faint contempt for the studious man who, in the prime of life, had never heard the tramp of a disciplined regiment following him and could not parry a sword thrust at his ungainly body. Yet because Justinian served him faithfully, the old soldier trusted him. Justin kept the three hundred excubitors drilled and turned out like automatons of silver and steel; otherwise he devoted himself to enlarging his estates with the weal :h that came by devious ways into the practiced hand of a Count of the Excubitors. Especially since the Master > Offices the Secretary of State was Celer, with whom lie had shared command qn the Persian front. Having taken hard knocks together, he and Magister Celer now watched out for each other. His wealth, of course, would go to Justinian, his sole heir. “You should take a wife,” he urged his son. “You should have children and a proper villa. You won’t have ’em unless you marry.”

There were patrician girls enough ready to mate with the adopted son of the majestic Count of the Excubitors. Perhaps for that reason, Justinian had not married as yet; perhaps he did not want to change his routine of constant work and occasional visits to attractive girls of the Mes6 arcades. And as for the count’s wife, even in the jeweled coronet and silk of court ceremonial she still resembled a dumpy camp cook.

Such little things disturbed Justinian’s sense of order. It troubled him to discover that the Golden Milestone in the courtyard before the Senate chamber was actually not gold but gilded copper. This milestone marked, theoretically, the beginning of all the routes of the empire or what remained of the empire. Over it stood the giant statue of Augustus, the founder, who had brought order and law and peace into the world for the first time. Or so Roman history said. If the Golden Milestone had proved to be an illusion, Justinian realized that the living emperor was also something of an illusion. That is, the ailing Anastasius was far from being an Augustus Caesar. Along with the higher officials, Justinian prostrated himself when ceremony required before the dais of porphyry and gold on which rested the scarlet-hosed foot of the sitter on the throne, of the Autocrat, the surviving Emperor of the Romans, He felt the impact of the throneroom gleaming with gold mosaics under invisible lights and wreathing incense. He heard the chime of distant silver bells, more subtle than the call of trumpets. The figure of the motionless emperor might have been a statue encrusted with amethysts and rubies. But he prostrated himself, as did the others, to the majesty of Roman tradition, to the memory of Augustus the first emperor and Constantine the founder of his city. The real work of government, he understood now, was carried on by such personages as Magister Celer, the patriarch of the Church, the leaders of the senate, and the prefects of the provinces.

Anastasius himself had been a lesser official, chosen as consort by a widowed empress, Ariadnea kindly man who had managed skillfully to avoid trouble ever since The extraordinary happening of July, in the year of Our Lord 518, was that at eighty-eight years of age Emperor Anastasius died unexpectedly in the night before anyone had been chosen to succeed him. It seemed to those in the Sacred Palace at the time that Fate had intervened in their affairs. Lacking children, Anastasius had spoken of his three nephews, without naming one of the three. The dominant Ariadne lay in her purple marble sarcophagus. In the midsummer heat most of the senators slept tranquilly in thendistant suburban villas. So it happened that no one could be summoned immediately to became the new Autocrat.

Tradition required that one be named without delay, and tradition insisted that he be acceptable to the Church, the army, and the people.

“That night,” Peter the Patrician wrote afterward, “some confusion occurred.” This was a truly diplomatic understate-ment The man who took advantage of the confusion was Justinian. Roused by the silentiaries the noble personal attendants of the dead emperor the two veteran commanders, Justin and Celer, took charge of the aimed men outside and inside the palace. Justin told his officers, “Our lord has ceased to exist, as a man. Now they must deliberate and elect an emperor, guided by God,” The more sophisticated Celer watched the patriarch and high officials hurry into the portico of the great hall at sunrise. After listening to their arguments, he warned them briefly: “We should decide on a name quickly. If we do, all others will follow our lead without thought. But if we don’t act quickly we’ll have to follow them.” Still the arguing went on without result. As the sun rose the stately nobles in the hall began to hear the voice of the Hippodrome. Word of the emperor’s death had passed through the city streets, and the populace was thronging to its meeting place. As Celer had anticipated, the people’s factions gave tongue as soon as they beheld the curtains drawn across the imperial box. “Long live the senate! Roman senate, do something! Where is our emperor given by God, for the army, for the people?”

As the throng increased outside, it tired of shouting and began to act for itself. Some soldiers sighted John the Hunchback, and hoisted him up on a shield, announcing that he was the choice of the army. A volley of stones from the Blue benches greeted him. Justin’s excubitors rallied to the defense of his friend, and blood flowed, The not surged along the passage to the Ivory Gate of the palace, where other soldiers raised the Master of the Armed Forces to a table and shouted that here was their emperor. “Bring out the purple, you m the palace! Bring out the crown!”

But the experienced guards at the Ivory Gate refused to open to a mob. In their turn the excubitors drove at the rival candidate. The fighting, between trained iiien, became deadly. It was more than unruly conflict of mobs: the faction fortunate enough to get its candidate accepted might gain great power.

Justinian, who had come out to watch developments, managed to hold back the excubitors and escort the man on the table away to a safe place. Whereupon the excited excubitors seized on the son of their officer and demanded that he offer himself as candidate. Justinian refused, and broke away. Then the factions joined together to shout at the gatekeepers to pass out the imperial regalia. This the guards would not do without knowing the name of the man to wear the crown. Name after name was called by the crowd, while the guards shook their heads.

While the tumult echoed in the hall, a late-comer took the lead there. Amantius the Chamberlain very quickly sensed the nervous frustration of prelates and senators. With the instinct of a politician he suggested a compromise, naming a certain Theocritus belonging to no faction except Amantius’ own. He had come armed with gems and gold, which he immediately turned over to the only spectator, Justin the Count, to distribute among the quieter senators while Amantius made the rounds after him to urge that Theocritus’ name be cried. Unmistakably, there was no more time to waste*

Justinian noticed tins, and saw a priceless opportunity in it. Going to his father’s shoulder as Justin proceeded mechanically to carry out the Chamberlain’s bidding, he whispered, “Do as he says quickly, but say nothing yourself at all.” There was such confusion in the hall that no one noticed him. He stepped over to Magister Celer, who was glowering at the frantic officials. Then he vanished from the hall. Justin continued obediently to hand out wealth to men in the corners. Clearing his throat, Magister Celer let out his voice as if in command.

“Long live Justin, our emperor given by God!”

Both Amantius and Justin were too amazed to protest. The senators who had been bribed added their voices for the munificent Justin; the patriarch, with a sigh of relief, bestowed his vote on a man who, at least, might preserve the peace; the senators quickly agreed. They hurried the bewildered veteran out the passage, where one of the mob cut his lip open with a blow.

Witnesses say that Justin acted like a man amazed. But he may well have suspected that his old comrade Celer would cry his name.

Silence fell on the Hippodrome as the curtains of the Kathisma were drawn back. There stood Justin, bleeding at the mouth, and voiceless.

At sight of their commander, the excubitors roared approval; soldiers cried the name of the friend of John the Hunchback; the Blues rose to acclaim a candidate of their own faction. Even the Greens had nothing at the moment against Justin. They all cried, “J us ^ n ^ August, thou wilt conquer.”

Hearing this consent of the patriarch and approval of the army and people, the guards of the wardrobe hurried to the box with the imperial purple mantle and scarlet hose. The guards of the box raised the military standards from the floor, and several held their shields as a screen over Justin while the purple was fitted on him. A lancer placed a gold chain on Ms head for a crown, the patriarch blessed the chain, Justin grasped the lance and a shield and stepped out to face the Roman people, his new subjects,

Unaccountably, Magister Celer, who should have presented him then, was absent, complaining of pains in his feet from long standing. Nor was Justinian to be seen in the box.

Justin promised five gold pieces to each soldier who had held a shield over him, then remembered that, as Autokrator, he should speak to the people. The patriarch prompted him. “Emperor Caesar Justin, Victorious, ever August, says to you—”

He sought for something to say. “May God aid us to accomplish what is good for you and the state.”

“Reign as thou hast lived!” the crowd shouted excitedly. “Be abundant to the world! Live long, Imperator! Worthy of the city! Give us honest magistrates.”

“I will give each of you a pound of silver.”

“May God protect the Christian emperor.”

Justin had recovered his poise. Truly he made a fine figure, although his erect head was bloody. “Our care shall be to provide prosperity, with divine help, and keep you altogether at peace.”  

“Worthy of the empire, Justin, thou wilt conquer! God will surely help thee.”

In this manner, according to the chronicle of Peter the Patrician, was the soldier Justin elected to the throne “beyond any expectation.” The election, engineered by Justinian and Celer on the spur of opportunity, had the great advantage of surprise. No effective opposition could be formed in a few hours. Vainly the startled Chamberlain, Amantius who had no more money in hand spread slander that the emperor-elect had been a swineherd and was an ignoramus, unable to sign his name. Being a eunuch and unpopular with army officers, Amantius rallied no following and accomplished nothing except to nettle Justin, who soon convinced himself that it was now his duty to serve his country as emperor.

There remained one final test: to manifest to the populace that the election had taken place by divine providence, as Celer had announced and Justin himself, prompted by the patriarch, had repeated. Fortunately, since he had assumed office early on a Monday, his new friends had a week to prepare for his recognition in church on the coming Sunday. Celer, still doubtful of the final result, continued to be invisible while he cared for the sudden pain in his feet, and Justinian kept out of the public eye. But tales went out into the streets and were repeated from mansion to tavern that John the Hunchback had dreamed that Justin and his family would be the salvation of the country, and that the dead Anastasius also had dreamed that he would be succeeded by the first officer to enter his chamber after his death. That officer, unquestionably, had been Justin.

Unquestionably, too, Justin was orthodox in his religion. Unlike Anastasius or Vitalian, he had never bothered his head about religious whys and wherefores. As a simple soldier, he had attended communion reverently; this attitude of mind was shared by the leaders of the Blue faction wealthy magnates who wished to preserve the status quo here in life and hereafter beyond the grave.

So when Sunday came, the vast candlelit depths ‘of the Sancta Sophia cathedral-church were packed with orthodox believers and their families, eager for the return of the old religion. This assemblage was keyed by the presence of women who had had no share in the Hippodrome election; they wore their finest dresses and egged on their husbands or lovers with growing excitement. For these women, satirical though they might be of their social life and even of themselves, held blindly to religious faith and, without understanding the nature of religion very well, insisted on the ritual of it. Their critical eyes approved the curled white hair and fine carriage of the new Autocrat and they felt instantly sympathetic to this “Old Justin’’ as they termed him in whispers to their men.

The congregation of St. Sophia was accustomed to debate as noisily as the crowd in the Hippodrome, and the appearance of the patriarch in robes drew its vociferation upon him. Standing without escort among the worshipers, Justinian heard the outcry with satisfaction. “Live long, Patriarch! Live long, Emperor! Live long, Augusta [the new empress, Lupicina, the peasant camp follower]. Why have we been without communion? Give us communion now, with your hands. Ah, go up in the pulpit. Comfort us! You are orthodox. What are you afraid of? The faith of the Trinity conquers! Why dqn’t you proclaim it? An orthodox emperor reigns at last. Throw out the Manichaeans. Whoever does not say it is a Manichaean himself. Throw out the falsifiers. The faith of the emperor conquers the faith of the Augusta prevails. Live long, the new Constantine: live long, the new Helen.” In two days it was all decided. The congregation held the floor of St. Sophia until its demands were satisfied with promises. The congregation did not raise the question of Justin’s election, in its eagerness to have him accomplish all it wished. His sanctification as the ruler chosen by God went forward with only admonitions to hurry. With much truth Justin himself could dictate a letter to the distant orthodox Pope at Rome in the west, at Justinian’s advice: “Against our will we have been elected ... by favor of the Almighty, by choice of the highest ministers of the palace and of the venerable senate, after the nomination of the most powerful army.”

This letter spoke of his wife, sensibly enough, as “most pious.”   In fact the former Lupicina, now empress under the well-sounding reign name of Euphemia, realized that the only thing she could do effectively in the public eye was to aid the Church. Euphemia declared that politics gave her a headache; she seldom showed herself at court ceremonies and began, as a religious recluse, to build a nunnery in the city. Justinian remained almost as inconspicuous, taking the title of Count of the Domestics (of the palace) which had been held by the unfortunate Theocritus who was put to death with Araantius on the charge of conspiracy.

So in the year 518 the surviving Roman Empire came under the rule of a handsome man sixty-eight years of age whose chief qualification was that he had been a popular soldier. To aid him he had Justinian, whose only demonstrated ability was that of a hard-working student.

II.Theodora’s House

ONCE THEODORA HAD HAD FRIENDS IN THE CITY OF Constantinople; she had never gone hungry there for long because when the market men took down their stalls at the end of the day they would hand out stale sesame bread or leftovers to an alert girl who passed on to them the latest rumors of the Mese. Uprooted from such familiar haunts, the city girl knew hunger in Africa.

She had the feel of dirt upon her each day, sleeping in it, soon neglecting to wash her food clean, for water no longer poured from city aqueducts. Skeletons of children around her would make a meal off a handful of decaying grapes from which the flies rose to their faces. Once Theodora had taken hours to cleanse herself in a public bath, in the scented vapor and cooling chambers ....

A young circus performer with a repertory of jests and a baby could not make a living in the desert. The desert had its herds of thin animals and wandering black folk fearful of being enslaved. The caravans that crossed it demanded silver from her, she could not walk carrying a burden like the black women. To reach the nearest great city she shared the tent of a caravan master, and slipped out of the tent on the night before the last for dread that she would be sold bodily in the market at the end of the journey. But she lost her way in the unmarked waste of clay that had never been plowed up or made into bricks by human hand.

When she started to walk toward a square outcropping of red rock that might have been a guardian f orl, she found that the embrasures in the rocks were small caves. Evil-smelling rain water stood in a hollow hewn in the rock. One other woman lived in a cave, sleeping on a mat and eating only a few grapes and lentils at the end of the daylight. This woman amazed Theodora because she insisted she had been Caesaria, a patrician owning hundreds of slaves and ordering whatevei she fancied for a meal. Now with shrunken arms and breasts she exposed herself to the burning sun; her skin had become like old parchment, her fingers claws.

Yet this Caesaria abode voluntarily in the cave, believing that by torturing her body she would gain eternal life; happily she numbered off the days when she would fast and eat nothing. Theodora listened to her with fear and took only a part of the green food the hermit offered her, It seemed that the desert had many such rock residences of people from the best society who starved themselves as a preparation for death. Theodora believed that suicide by walking into the sea, or buying granulated virus from a physician, would be swifter. Secretly she thought that to become an anchorite in the deseit must be the newest craze of the Christians of Alexandriaalthough her hostess insisted that generations ago a certain Hypatia had walked the streets there unescorted, although shapely and young, to lecture to crowds that gathered around her. Paving a fine education in mathematics and the science of the stars, Hypatia answered readily all questions put to her, and became th^ disciple of a bishop who saw in her an instrument for good .*’ Aflpreover, Hypatia had gained a martyr’s crown, when a crowd stoned her to death.

It seemed to Theodora that the hermit woman had a hidden purpose in telling her about the brilliant Hypatia. Strangely, this woman eyed her with dread-Theodora could sense thatas if, strong and soft-skinned, she were an unhallowed pagan girl wandering the desert. Just as strangely the woman looked at the baby and made an awkward attempt to fix up a bed for it by laying fresh rushes on a pile of sand. This woman, shrinking like an ancient mummy within her baglike clothing, had never borne a child .... In the great port of Alexandria, named after the legendary conqueror of the world, Theodora left her own child at a house of strangers. She fixed in her memory the name of the family and the number of the house. The sickness of the foul marshes had come on her, in her weakness. She could not even pretend to sing in the wineshops where slim brown girls rattled castanets against the legs of sailors for copper coins. Beggars wailed at the food stalls in the steaming alleys; Theodora was not yet scarred or emaciated enough to beg, and with a flash of her stubborn temper, she resolved that she would never hold out her hand for a coin.

To try to escape the stench of the alleys, she made her way to a canal. A houseboat lay tied in the shade of an archway, and she pulled herself over the side to lie down on sacks that smelled of spices from the east.

In her fever the merchant who tended her, bringing clean pomegranates and goat’s milk, seemed to be a brisk fantastic being. Trying to talk to him, to thank him and to ease the ache of her body, she learned that he had set himself a task to travel the world. How could anyone do that without baggage or servants or money? she wondered. The merchant explained that he was making $*book of the world. On the houseboat he had gone up the river Nile, to discover what made it flow.

Because of th?t%iey called him Cosmas the Merchant, but no one knew about his book because he had not written it down as yet. As for money, he did not need any because he went from hostel to monastery, At such refuges the folk aided him because he was performing a great task in writing down the manifold wonders of the world. He was eastbound, to locate the place of the sun’s rising. According to the enthusiastic Cosmas, the sun did not rise daily out of Ocean as Theodora had heard in Constantinople and sink again into the same enveloping Ocean. No, it came out at dawn from behind a very high mountain and vanished at dusk in the same way.

Had the kind Cosmas ever seen this mountain?

Regretfully the sunburned wayfarer admitted that he had not, as yet. But he knew it was there. In proof, did not the sun take longer to pass around the base of the mountain during winter, when it hung low in the heaven? Certainly in summer, when the sun stood high, less time was needed to pass behind the summit of the mountain.

Theodora did not quite understand that. This Cosmas proved to be very awkward as a nurse, he stumbled over her and prayed when she talked wildly in delirium. It seemed ridiculous that he wanted to put the shape of the earth into a book, when he could not even pour milk from a bowl without spilling it down her throat. Of all things he fancied he knew where paradise could be found. Beyond the last great river, beyond the land of India and beyond the Land of Silk there stretched a gigantic canal, vaster than these canals of Alexandria that led to the outer seas. On the far side of this canal lay an island on which rose the mountain of paradise. What would Cosmas do, Theodora asked with malice,

when he found himself at paradise?

Cosmas knew what would happen then. He could not enter where Adarn and Eve had been driven out by the angel with the flaming sword, because the sins of mankind had not yet been cleansed. That was why no human eyes could actually see paradise, high up where the angels sang across the stars. There was something appealing in the clumsy Cosmas, as there had been in the hermit Caesaria; both of them believed in a strength that had nothing to do with their own bodies or minds. As if they expected to find a luxurious home and garden awaiting them around an invisible corner. Appar3ntly they expected to die before reaching that home ... like the lovely Hypatia ....

When the lilt of flutes and fanfare of trumpets came faintly from the shore, Theodora knew that a festival was going on, and roused herself to go out to it in the hope of something turning up. In Constantinople money had been thrown to crowds during festivals. She thanked Cosmas for the fruit and milk and said gently, “I am sure you will find the mountain of the sun.” Because the Admiralty harbor was lined with residences of white stone for the officials and potentes (magnates), who moored their yachts to their porticoes, Theodora had to find a fishing boat to take her there, where the northern breeze drove away the stench and the flies.