ABSTRACT
The treatment of the Empress Theodora has been one of the most intractable features of the Secret History in modern scholarship. To understand Theodora it is essential to begin with these chapters, and yet impossible to get beyond them. Since Gibbon, a stream of ‘biographies’, novels and plays with titles such as ‘Empress of the Dusk’ or ‘Theodora and the Emperor’ typify the fascination and the dilemma.1 All their authors must use Procopius even while sneering at him, just as a recent book, drawing almost exclusively on his material, calls him ‘sick and unbalanced’.2 Surprisingly enough even now Theodora suffers from approaches limited by prejudice or romanticism, quite apart from the methodological problem posed by Procopius’ evidence, and the great Diehl’s romantic vignettes3 have yet to find a satisfactory replacement. That this should be so, even after the belated entry of women’s studies to the field of Byzantine history,4 is one of the major deficiencies in Procopian scholarship.
