ABSTRACT
In her book Women in Purple, Judith Herrin has drawn attention to Euphrosyne, a rather obscure royal gure of the rst half of the ninth century, a ‘second class’ empress when compared with the female gures that preceded and followed her: Irene, her grandmother, and eodora, the wife of her stepson, eophilos, both of whom were lauded in Byzantine historiography as the two most outstanding women of their time.1 Euphrosyne’s name is only sparsely recorded in the sources, and even then she is a background gure while the stage is occupied by actions of the rst-rank heroes to whom she was related by blood or by marriage.
