March
19
/ 2018
Both Empress Euphemia and the succeeding empress Theodora transformed from sinners to Saints and although 5th to 6th century Roman society may have been more lenient, due to the empresses’ charity and piety, contemporary historians were not that tolerant nor forgiving in their opinions of the wives of the emperors. The two women seem to have achieved upward mobility in a similar fashion - first as slaves, then concubines, and then as wives, maternal-figures, and rulers. However, their lives and rise to power were represented rather ambiguously by their contemporary writers. To investigate the reasons for and the nature of these similarities, it is worth looking at the sometime hostile authors’ depictions of the women’s actions, as authors from late
