Former actress from the Hippodrome world of Constantinople who married Justinian I and became empress in 527; she held the court together in the Nika riots of 532, protected the Miaphysite clergy and is portrayed in the San Vitale mosaic at Ravenna.
Theodora was empress of the Eastern Roman Empire from 527 until her death in 548 as the wife of Justinian I. The daughter of a bear keeper at the Hippodrome of Constantinople, she worked on the stage until Justin I changed the law so that his nephew and heir could marry her.
She is remembered for the speech with which, according to Procopius, she stopped the court fleeing during the Nika riots of 532, for protecting the Miaphysite clergy, and for the mosaic in San Vitale at Ravenna that still shows her in full imperial dress. Procopius's Secret History, written after her death, turned her into a byword for vice, and separating the empress from that pamphlet is the central problem in writing about her.
Theodora was probably born in Constantinople around 495. Her father, Acacius, kept the bears of the Green circus faction; after his death the Greens refused to help his widow and daughters, and the rival Blues gave the family work. Theodora followed her elder sister Comito onto the stage, a profession that law and common opinion placed close to prostitution. She became the companion of Hecebolus, governor of the Libyan Pentapolis, was abandoned by him, and returned to the capital by way of Alexandria and Antioch. By the early 520s she had met Justinian, and she already had a daughter, whom she later acknowledged openly.
Almost every portrait of Theodora comes from Procopius, and he painted three. In the Wars she has the courage that saves the throne in 532; in the Buildings, a panegyric for Justinian, she is pious and beautiful; in the Secret History, first printed in 1623, she is a shameless performer turned vindictive tyrant with secret prisons in the palace. The obscene stories of her youth in that book follow a formula in which a good empress is chaste and a bad one lustful and greedy, and David Potter has called them an exaggerated diatribe. Yet Anthony Kaldellis and Clive Foss point out that independent sources confirm the book's outline: her theatrical past, the marriage law and her ruthlessness towards enemies.
Other witnesses show a hard political operator with real commitments. John of Ephesus, a Miaphysite bishop who knew her, praised her charity and her protection of his church while freely admitting that she had come from the brothel. A letter of the Ostrogothic king Theodahad has been read as evidence of her hand in the death of Queen Amalasuntha. She did not forgive opponents: the praetorian prefect John the Cappadocian, who had spoken against her to Justinian, was trapped into apparent treason by her and by Antonina, the wife of Belisarius, and exiled in 541.
Justinian, nephew and chosen heir of Justin I, could not legally marry her: a law dating back to Constantine barred men of senatorial rank from marrying actresses, and Justin's wife, Euphemia, opposed the match. After Euphemia died in 524, Justin allowed actresses who had left the stage to marry men of any rank. Justinian and Theodora married soon afterwards, probably in 525. When Justin made Justinian co-emperor in April 527, Theodora was crowned augusta, and on Justin's death that August the couple ruled together.
Justinian treated her as a colleague. In his law of 535 against the sale of provincial governorships he called her his partner in deliberation, and officials had to swear loyalty to emperor and empress together. She also arranged marriages that tied her family to the old aristocracy: her sister Comito married the general Sittas, and her niece, the future Empress Sophia, married Justinian's nephew Justin II.
In January 532 the Blue and Green factions, furious that the government would not pardon two of their men who had survived a botched hanging, joined forces under the cry “Nika”, meaning “conquer”. They burned much of the centre of Constantinople, including the church of Hagia Sophia, and proclaimed Hypatius, a nephew of the late emperor Anastasius I, as emperor. As Justinian's council discussed escape by sea, Procopius has Theodora declare that for one who has reigned it is intolerable to become a fugitive, and that royal purple makes the finest burial shroud.
The speech is Procopius's composition, and its closing line adapts advice once given to the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, but it probably reflects a real argument in the palace. The court stayed. The generals Belisarius and Mundus trapped the crowd in the Hippodrome and killed some 30,000 people, and Hypatius and his brother Pompeius were executed, in one account at Theodora's insistence.
Theodora openly favoured the Miaphysites, who rejected the Council of Chalcedon, while Justinian tried to bring them back into the imperial church. Procopius and Evagrius suspected the couple of dividing the parties between them on purpose, but her commitment was real. She hid the deposed patriarch Anthimus in her own apartments for years and filled the Hormisdas Palace with Miaphysite monks, so many that a floor is said to have given way beneath them. She helped install Theodosius as patriarch of Alexandria. Pope Silverius, who refused to restore Anthimus, was deposed on her instructions and died in exile on an island.
She also used her position on behalf of women. Early in the reign she and Justinian closed brothels in the capital and bought out the girls held in them, and she founded the Metanoia, or Repentance, a convent on the Asian shore for women leaving prostitution; Procopius sneered that some inmates jumped from its walls to escape. Her name stands beside Justinian's in the dedication inscription of the church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus in Constantinople.