ABSTRACT
It is one of the peculiarities of history that whereas Theodosius I’s wife Flaccilla became the victim of violence when her image and that of her husband were toppled and abused during the Antiochene riot of 387 CE, the image of her passed down in history remains that of a model empress. To summarize Gregory of Nyssa, she was a paragon of philanthropy, wifely love, humility, and piety.1 Yet the wife of her son Arcadius, Eudoxia, with whom there are significant objective parallels, received the opposite treatment. While, in so far as we know, no violence was done to her physical image in the empire, the image of her passed down in history is that of a conniving Jezebel and a manipulated over-emotional barbarian. So persuasive and persistent has this Late Antique image been that modern scholarship has adopted it more or less wholesale. What will be argued here is that Eudoxia, innocent or otherwise, has been the victim of a highly successful smear campaign, in which her reputation has been successively undermined through rhetorical violence by parties hostile to her.
