Procopius believed that there was a direct connection between the personal morals of Byzantium’s rulers and the moral state of Byzantine society. For him, the distinction modern observers often make between the private and public lives of government officials would have made little sense. In this excerpt from the Secret History, Procopius uses a particularly nasty story about Theodora as a prelude to the claim that the morals of Byzantine women went into steep decline during Justinian’s reign. As you read it, pay particular attention to the role Procopius has assigned Theodora in producing this decline. How did her actions affect both Byzantine women and men?

It so happened, during the days when she was still on the stage, that she became pregnant by one of her lovers and realized her misfortune late in the term. As usual, she did everything in her power to induce an abortion, but none of her methods rid her of the infant while it was still an embryo, given that it was now close to developing full human form. So, as nothing was working, she stopped trying and was forced to give birth. When the father of the newborn baby saw that she was on the verge of poverty and distressed—for now that she was a mother she could no longer exploit her body for work—and, also, he rightly suspected that she would resort to infanticide, he lifted the baby with his hands, acknowledging it as his own, and named it Ioannes (for it was a boy). He then departed for Arabia, which was his destination. When he was about to die, and Ioannes was a teenager, he revealed to his son everything regarding his mother. Ioannes performed all the customary rites upon the departure of his father from this world. Some time later he came to Byzantion and announced himself to those who had constant access to his mother. They did not suspect that her reaction would be different from that of the rest of humanity and so they announced to his mother that her son, Ioannes, had arrived. But the woman feared lest news of this reach her husband. She bid them bring him into her sight and, when she saw that he had entered, she turned him over to one of her servants, a man to whom she always delegated such cases. By what means this poor lad was made to disappear from this world I am not able to say, but no one has seen him again to this very day, not even after the empress died.

It was during this time that the morals of almost all women too were corrupted. For they were given full license to cheat on their husbands and no risk or harm could come to them because of their behavior. Even those convicted of adultery remained unpunished, because they would go straight to the empress and turn the tables by hauling their husbands into court through a countersuit, despite the fact that the men had been charged with no crime. All the men could do, even though they had not been convicted of anything, was to pay back to their wives the dowries that they had received, only twofold, to be whipped and then, for most of them, led off to prison. After this, they had to look on again as these adultresses preened and lusted after their seducers, only more flagrantly this time. Many of these seducers even received ranks and honors for performing this service. From then on most men were only too happy to endure without protest the unholy deeds of their wives. So long as they were not being whipped, they gave their wives the freedom to do whatever they wished by pretending not to know what was going on.

Source: Prokopios, The Secret History with Related Texts, ed. Anthony Kaldellis (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company: 2010), pp. 77–78.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER