Count Belisarius (10 page)

Theodora was small and sallow complexioned. She was not a particularly good dancer or instrumentalist or acrobat; in fact, she was rather below the average of excellence at all these things. But she possessed an extraordinarily quick wit and a complete freedom from sexual shame: she seems, indeed, to have shown a singular inventiveness in her carnality, so that ‘I learned this from Theodora' was a current joke under the statue of Venus, the chief trysting-place of the brothel district. And all the time that she was apparently engaged
merely in money-making and pleasure Theodora was busily studying Man; and there is no better way to study this subject than as a Megaraean sphinx, to whom young men and old reveal their true selves more openly than to their chaster mothers, sisters, or wives. My mistress Antonina was a student of Man, too, and she and Theodora soon learned to despise even the gravest of their clients for their unquenchable conceit and credulousness and ignorance and selfishness, and to turn these traits to their own advantage. By charms and remedies they both managed to avoid pregnancy, except Theodora, who had to procure an abortion on a couple of occasions, but without ill-effects.

They had only two intimate friends, Indaro and Chrysomallo, girls of their set; with whom, some six months after Antonina's visit to Adrianople, they planned to leave the stage, if they could get permission, and set up independently. Permission was extremely difficult to obtain, but Chrysomallo and Theodora had the good luck to gain the favour of the Democrat of the Blues, who controlled the political side of the faction, while Indaro and Antonina laid successful siege to the Demarch, who controlled the military side. The usual ruling was that the husband of any actress who left the stage for the sake of marriage must pay a heavy contribution to the Fund. No other excuses were accepted except penitence, but no penitent might return to her old employment under a penalty of being shut in a house of correction for the rest of her days. Nevertheless, these four girls won permission to leave, on the understanding that they remained good Blues. With their savings, and money borrowed from their backers, they clubbed together to take a well-furnished suite of rooms in an elegant house close to the Statue of Venus, and opened it as a place of entertainment: being officially backed by the faction, it soon became the most fashionable resort of Constantinople. By this time my mistress Antonina's mother was dead; Antonina had inherited me from her. The club catering was entrusted to my charge. As independent entertainers the ladies were no longer forced to pay a high proportion of their private earnings to the Dancing Master; instead, they became full members of the faction, paying their subscriptions regularly to the fund. Indaro and Chrysomallo were both highly trained, the first as an acrobatic dancer and juggler, the second as a singer and instrumentalist; and my mistress Antonina was equal to either of them in those accomplishments. Theodora was their manager and their clown. The four of them had some very happy, amusing, altogether shameless times
together, and I am glad to record that they remained good friends both then and throughout their subsequent lives; and I, who have survived them all, regret them all.

One day Theodora told us – for I was treated more as a friend than a slave, and they all confided in me – that she had been invited to accompany a patrician named Hecebolus to Pentapolis, of which he had been appointed Governor, and that this opportunity of seeing the world at her ease was too good to be missed. We all begged Theodora not to leave us, and Chrysomallo warned her that Hecebolus was not a man to be trusted – was he not a Tyrian by birth and so a born trickster? Theodora replied that she knew how to take care of herself and that her only anxiety was about leaving us to manage without her. Off she went; after a couple of amusing notes from cities on the route to Pentapolis, we heard nothing more either from her or about her for a very long time. Then a staff-officer came on leave from Pentapolis and told us that one evening Theodora had lost her temper with Hecebolus, who had tried to keep her in a sort of cage all to himself: she had emptied a pail of slops over him, brocaded tunic and all, as he was dressing for dinner. He had thrown her out of his residence immediately, and refused even to let her remove her few clothes and jewels. The staff-officer believed that she had then persuaded the captain of a vessel to take her to Alexandria in Egypt; but he could tell us nothing further.

It was a very different Theodora who limped back to Constantinople many months later. The misfortunes prophesied for her by the Syro-Phoenician had been concentrated into a single year, and they had been very bitter ones. Our gay, self-reliant Theodora, who had never failed to tell us her most ludicrous and painful adventures, kept pretty silent on the subject of her experiences in Egypt and her humiliating return journey by way of Caesarea and Antioch and the interior of Asia Minor. We nursed her slowly back to health, but even when she was strong enough, to all physical appearances, she did not feel equal to resuming her work at the club-house. ‘I would rather spin wool all day than begin that life again,' she cried. Much to our surprise, she actually borrowed a spinning-wheel and began learning to use this melancholy if serviceable instrument in the solitude of her room. The other ladies did not laugh at her, because she was their friend and had evidently suffered almost beyond human endurance. So the steady sound of the spinning-wheel was now heard in the club-house
at all hours of the day and night; and when clients asked, ‘Will that damned whining noise never stop?' the ladies would answer, ‘That is only poor Theodora earning an honest living.' But they took it for a joke. They never caught sight of her.

One of our clients was a strange, round-faced, smiling, lecherous fellow named Justinian, a nephew of the illiterate old barbarian commander of the Imperial Guards, Justin. Justin had sent for Justinian when a youth, from the mountain village in Illyria where he had himself once been a shepherd-boy, and had given him the education that he regretted himself not having had. Justinian – whose baptismal name was Uprauda, ‘the upright'–still talked Greek with a strong foreign accent and far preferred Latin, the official language of his native province. None of the ladies knew what to make of Justinian, and though he was courteous and amusing and seemed destined to become a person of importance, he made them feel uncomfortable, in some obscure way, as if he were not quite human. None of them enjoyed taking him to her private room. My mistress Antonina, for one, successfully avoided doing so on every occasion, and without incurring his hostility. Indaro told a queer story: how one evening she had fallen asleep while Justinian was in bed with her and, suddenly waking up and finding herself alone, had seen a large rat scuttle from under the coverlet and out through the window. With my own eyes I saw a still queerer sight. Justinian said one night, as he and the ladies were talking together, ‘I heard noises at the front door.' But all were too lazy to investigate, and I was busy at some task behind the wine-bar. Then I noticed an emanation float out from Justinian's shoulders, a phantom head which swooped out of the door and presently returned. Justinian said: ‘The noise was nothing: let us continue our talk.' The ladies had not seen what I saw; but it was a characteristic of these phenomena that not more than one person ever saw them at a time, so that each one doubted his senses, and no argument was possible as to the authenticity of any particular vision.

He was a Christian and revelled in theological discussions, as much as, or more than, in faction gossip and salacious jokes and stories; and he used to fast regularly. He always came to the club-house at the close of his fast-days and would eat and drink enormously. Sometimes he had fasted, he said, for three days, and his appetite would have supported his boast if he had called it three weeks. But he never lost that rosy complexion of his, not to the day of his death in extreme old age.
My mistress Antonina used to call him Phagon, after the famous old trencherman who once, giving a display before the Emperor Aurelian, devoured at a sitting: a pig, a sheep, a wild-boar, and 100 loaves of full weight.

Justinian, too, complained of the spinning-wheel whine and derided our explanation of it. But one morning, when he happened to be there on a visit, Theodora came into the club-room to warm her hands at the fire, not expecting to encounter any guests at that hour. When she noticed Justinian on a couch behind the door, she was going away again; but he pulled at her dress and begged her to stay. So she stayed and warmed her hands. Justinian began a religious discussion with Chrysomallo, who liked that sort of thing, and was getting the better of her as usual when Theodora suddenly interposed with a quiet comment which showed her to be extremely well-informed on the doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ, which was the subject under dispute. Justinian exclaimed admiringly: ‘That is most ingenious, but also most unorthodox,' and turned his attack on her.

They continued to dispute endlessly, even missing the hour of their midday meal, until Justinian rose and left us in a hurry at the sound of the dull booming of mallet against board, which is the customary summons to public prayer in the City. Justinian's Orthodoxy was also due to foreign travel: he had lived for some years at the centre of Orthodoxy, Rome, as a hostage to King Theodorich of the Goths. Theodora routed him in a way that surprised us; but it seems that she had profited by her stay at Alexandria to learn these fine points of doctrine from the schoolmen there. Thus intimacy between these two started, and he was fascinated by her as by a repentant Magdalene – for had not St Mary Magdalene also been a prostitute? Whenever he came to the club-house Justinian now regularly went straight up to Theodora's room. What passed between them besides discussion of the nature of the Trinity, and of the fate of the souls of unbaptized infants and such topics, I do not know; at all events, her wheel was quite silent during those interviews. The other ladies were glad to be relieved of his company and of the sound of the wheel.

T
HESE
opening years of the sixth century of the Christian era were evil ones for the Empire. Belisarius's mother may be pardoned for her superstitious belief that the Devil was then at the height of his power. The reigning Emperor was old Anastasius, known as ‘Anastasius Odd-Eyes' because one of his eyes was brown and the other blue (a peculiarity occasionally noted in domestic cats but never before, to my knowledge, in human beings); or as ‘Anastasius the Usher' because he had once been an officer of the Gentlemen Ushers at the Court of his predecessor. He was an energetic and able ruler, despite his age, and no blame could be attached to him personally for most of the misfortunes of his reign: such as earthquakes, which greatly damaged some of the richest cities in his dominions, and the first appearance in the Bosphorus of Porphyry the whale, and the plague that spread from Asia, and a wide failure of crops, and an embitterment of the rivalry between Blues and Greens which led to mutiny and sedition. All these things occurred in or about the year of Belisarius's birth, together with vexatious wars with the Saracens in the country inland from Palestine and with savage Bulgarian Huns raiding across the Danube. Orthodox Christians ascribed all these misfortunes to a religious portent, namely the simultaneous appearance of two rival Popes; holding that it was blasphemy for two Vicars of Christ to exist simultaneously. The election of one Pope, at Constantinople, took place on the same day exactly as that of the other at Rome, the slowness of communication between the two capital cities causing the inadvertent confusion. But, once entrusted with the Keys of Heaven, neither of the rivals wished to yield his bunch to the other: the Roman Pope standing for rigid Orthodoxy in the (to me) highly fanciful dispute as to the single or double nature of the Son, while the other, Anastasius's nominee, stood for graceful compromise. Each anathematized the other as Anti-Pope, and we Hippodrome heathen were much amused at the spectacle and exacerbated the conflict by taking sides, Greens for one Pope, Blues for the other.

As if all this trouble were not sufficient, Anastasius became involved
in a war with Kobad, King of the Persians, who utterly destroyed one of our armies and ravaged Roman Mesopotamia in a dreadful manner. Anastasius was forced to buy peace at the price of 800,000 gold pieces, and at a time when gold was scarcer than it ever had been, owing to the exhaustion of the principal European and Asiatic mines. In the year that Belisarius went to school at Adrianople, the Bulgarian Huns were ravaging Eastern Thrace again, and actually pasturing their horses in the kitchen-gardens and parks of suburban Constantinople. Anastasius set to work and built a great defensive wall at thirty-two miles' distance from the City, straight across the isthmus. This has been a comfort to us ever since, though it has been allowed to fall into disrepair and is not difficult to turn at either end.

As for the religious disputes: Anastasius, though inclined to the theory of the single nature, had, as I have explained, found it politic to nominate a Pope who favoured a compromise between this and the Orthodox, or double-nature, view. The Blues were Orthodox for political reasons; the Greens were either for compromise with Monophysitism or for plain Monophysitism. One day such rioting broke out in the Hippodrome over these religious differences that the old Emperor had to stand as a suppliant by the race-post (as Theodora and her family had done some nine years previously), and offer to resign his throne. The Blues pelted him with stones, but the Greens stood by him, since to them, as the stronger faction, he had allotted the best seats in the Hippodrome. In gratitude, he gave the Monophysite cause every possible support. But not long afterwards the Blues massacred a party of arrogant Monophysite monks; and because Anastasius did not venture to avenge their deaths, the power of the Blues became dominant in the City and Senate. But Vitalian, a Green of patrician rank, raised an army of 40,000 Thracian Monophysites and led them against the Blues, laying siege to the City. In fear of his life Anastasius then announced that he would assemble a General Church Council to resolve the whole religious difficulty; at which Vitalian disbanded his army before any fighting had taken place. But Anastasius did not keep his promise.