ABSTRACT
I have called Domna ‘the Syrian Empress’, and it is routine to refer to the wives of Roman emperors as empresses, right back to Livia.1 That is misleading when the woman’s position was inherently unofficial. The title implies legitimate and formal rights, usually derived from those of the husband, with attire, furniture, and ceremonial to match, as those of the most recent British Queen Consort Elizabeth matched those of the King Emperor George VI, although the crown might be smaller, the clothes less magnificent, or at any rate less military, the throne lower. The English title did not even exist in Latin. The question then is what did make a Roman ‘empress’, and the answer is that the position developed in various ways. From Livia’s time there were garments or jewellery to be worn by women who married into the imperial family.2 But even under Justinian and Theodora in the mid-sixth century we are told by Procopius that it was a novelty when subjects were required to offer her too the proskynesis (formal obeisance) that was afforded the emperor – itself a novel requirement, he says – in the extreme form of complete prostration.3
