ABSTRACT
In 382 John Chrysostom, still a junior priest in Antioch, wrote a letter to a young widow whom he hoped to dissuade from remarriage. Among other things he argued that married life was far too risky for a sound-thinking woman to undertake a second time. To drive home the point, Chrysostom catalogued several empresses of recent memory who had been driven to grief by the downfall of their once exalted husbands:
As to the emperors' wives, says Chrysostom, some perished by poison, others died of mere sorrow; while of those who still survive, one, who has an orphan son, is trembling with alarm lest those who are in power should destroy him (probably Jovian's wife Charito); yet another only after many entreaties has returned from the exile into which she had been driven by him who formerly held the chief power (probably Severa, Valentinian's estranged first wife).l
Chrysostom's examples were easy enough to come by, for Late Antiquity, as indeed any period of history, had its fair share of cast-off queens. For all its glamour, this royal job was, after all, hardly without risks. Though it entailed power and prestige, it also brought ominous dangers, especially if an emperor preceded his wife in death or his marital affections soured.2
