THE ROMANCE OF EUDOXIA AND EUDOCIA  
WITH the Imperial ladies of the courts of Arcadius and Honorius we enter upon the final act in the tragedy of the fall of Rome. The sun is sinking rapidly to the Western horizon; the long shadows trail across the record of events; the chill of evening contracts the life of the historic Empire. The only aspect of that tragedy that concerns us is a consideration of the part that women played in the gradual enfeeblement of the Roman Empire. While taking full account of the various causes assigned by historians, it may be said that the fall of Rome was due to a coincidence. The invasion of Europe by the fierce Huns had pressed the Germanic tribes against the Roman frontier just at the time when the Empire was particularly feeble. That it was inwardly outworn and doomed—that the organization of a State has an appointed term of decay, like the frame of an individual—may be confidently challenged. Egypt maintained its vigour for close on 8,000 years; Babylon for nearly 6,000.
 
The only question we may touch here is whether the personality of the later Empresses counted for anything, either for good or evil, in this enfeeblement of the Empire; and the answer is clear that, with one or two exceptions, they counted for neither. They had no deep or large influence on the life of the Empire, even through their husbands. The Roman ideal of womanhood was changing once more. As in the early days, they were diverted323 from interest in public affairs, except in so far as the cause of the Church called for their interference. We must not conceive them as powerless witnesses of the gradual dissolution of the Empire. No one, man or woman, saw that the Empire was dissolving, or dreamed of its fall, until it lay in ruins under the feet of the northern tribes. None reflected that, since Constantine had assumed the purple, thirteen Emperors out of twenty had been either executed or murdered; that the blood of able officers or servants had generally been mingled with that of the fallen ruler; and that hundreds of thousands of soldiers had been wasted in civil war. None reflected that, while they were distracted with religious quarrels, a formidable avalanche was gathering on the hills; or that, while the courts absorbed enormous sums in Oriental display, the fiscal machinery of the State was running down. In any case, it was no longer the place of women to notice these things. Their duties were to rear the Imperial family, wear pretty robes of cloth of gold, and build churches. The age of Livia, Agrippina, or Plotina, was over.
These reflections will be enforced by the lives of the interesting Empresses whom we have next to consider. The new Emperors were unmarried youths at the time when their father died. Arcadius, a little, dark, unpleasant-looking youth, whose laziness appeared in his dull, lustre-less eyes, was in his eighteenth year. Honorius was a boy of eleven, and as, during a reign of twenty-eight years, he never rose above the character or intelligence of a boy, and his two Empresses were timid young girls, we must dismiss them in a page; though that page must contain an event that sent a thrill of excitement through civilization—the fall of the city of Rome. So little had our Imperial characters to do with it that a later age amused itself by saying that, when Honorius was told that “Rome was taken,” he wept for the supposed loss of his favourite fowl, which bore that name.
The real master of the Western world, over which324 young Honorius had nominal sway, was a powerful and gifted commander, Stilicho, of Vandal extraction. He had married Serena, the beautiful niece of Theodosius, and he led the armies and governed the Western Empire until his death. In 398, in his thirteenth year, Honorius was directed to wed Maria, the elder daughter of Stilicho. It was said that Theodosius had desired the union. Serena, at all events, desired it, and, although her daughter was yet immature, the wedding took place at Milan in 398. All that we have to say of her is that she died some time within the next ten years—probably, as Tillemont calculates, in the year 404. Her body was embalmed and buried in a Christian church at Rome, where the poor crumbling frame, laden with gold, was discovered in 1544.
In the year 408 Honorius married his deceased wife’s sister, Thermantia. Tillemont very properly laments that he finds no record of any protest on the part of the Bishop of Rome—who probably celebrated it—against this irregular marriage, but the modern reader will be more seriously concerned to hear the argument with which Serena urged it upon her reluctant husband. Maria, she said, had died a virgin. Before entrusting her immature child to the bed of Honorius, she had had some obscure operation performed on her, which would guard her virginity. Certainly, Maria had had no children. Thermantia was equally unprepared for marriage, Zosimus says, and the operation was repeated. It was a superfluous sacrifice to the ambition of Serena, because Stilicho fell, in a palace intrigue, a few months later, and the little maid was restored to her mother.
Such was the short and melancholy story of the Empresses Maria and ?milia Materna Thermantia, as an inscription calls the younger. Their monument was terrible. Within a few months the avalanche of the Gothic army descended from the Alps and devastated Italy; and Serena was, with the consent of her cousin Placidia, the Emperor’s sister, strangled by the Senate on the light, and325 probably false, charge of communicating with the enemy. Zosimus, at least, says that she was innocent; but he is not surprised at her fate, as she had one day appropriated a jewelled ornament from the statue of one of his goddesses. Within two years Rome was sacked by the Goths, and Placidia was carried off by them.
We turn to the East, to follow the less tragic, but hardly less interesting, fortunes of Eudoxia and Eudocia. In the East, as in the West, Theodosius had left a powerful minister to guide the hands of his young and unpromising son. But the eastern minister, Rufinus, had not the manly qualities of Stilicho. He had entered the palace by craft, not by military exploits, and had easily dissembled his vices from the too indulgent eye of Theodosius. When that Emperor died, he cast aside the cloak, and pursued his native avarice, and exercised his cruelty, without restraint. By fines, taxes, despoilments, and the unscrupulous ruin of his opponents, the hated Gaul amassed wealth and power, and ruled like an autocrat. He had a daughter of marriageable age, and Arcadius seemed to listen in compliant mood when he proposed that she should become his Empress. The task of destroying an opponent took him for a time to Antioch, and he returned to hear that the Emperor was preparing for marriage. He awaited the appointed day with eagerness. At length the hymeneal procession set out from the palace, and the people gathered to witness its passage to the house of Rufinus, a superb villa in one of the suburbs. To the intense surprise of all, it stopped at a house in the city, and the blushing and beautiful daughter of a Frankish chief was announced to be the choice of the Emperor.
While Rufinus was pursuing his vengeance at Antioch, the eunuchs of the palace had conspired to defeat his plan and undermine his power. The chief of them was Eutropius, a slave by birth, castrated immediately after birth that he might bring a bigger price, and rising in time from the occupation of hair-dresser to the daughter of General Arintheus to the position of high chamberlain at326 the palace. Such were the rulers of Emperors in the fourth century. Eutropius knew that Arcadius had no attraction to the daughter of Rufinus, and chafed under the authority of her burly father. He cast about for a prettier companion, and soon had the affection of Arcadius safely engaged. The temporary absence of Rufinus gave them an opportunity, and Constantinople was enlivened by the rare spectacle of an Imperial marriage, and the still rarer spectacle of the defeat of Rufinus.
Eudoxia—such is the Greek name under which the new Empress is presented to us—was the beautiful daughter of Bauto, chief of the Franks. Historians, politely accepting the assurance of some of the writers of the time, say that she was being “educated” at Constantinople, her father having died in the service of the Eastern army. It is, perhaps, a pity to disturb the plausible phrase, but the duty of a biographer is stern. The house in the city from which she was taken to wed the Emperor was occupied by two young men of wealth. They were the sons of the commander Promotus, who had been one of the first victims of Rufinus. One of these young men, Zosimus says, “had a beautiful maid” in the house. We will not inquire too closely. The stern ideals of the Germanic tribes had relaxed as they came into closer contact with civilization, and it became common for them to lend or sell their daughters to the Romans. We remember the adventure of Pipera a century before. Eutropius submitted an adequate picture of the girl to Arcadius, whose pulse was quickened, and the son of Promotus easily parted with his tender pupil when he learned that it was for the purpose of discomfiting the destroyer of his father.
Eudoxia had no less spirit than beauty of person, and she would watch with interest the duel between the wily eunuch and the powerful Gaul. Arcadius, “whose feeble and stupid goodness,” says Tillemont candidly, “brought frightful evils on Church and State,” was a pawn in the game. But the big, wealthy, powerful Gaul now found a sterner opponent in Stilicho, of the Western Empire, and327 within a year his head was separated from his body, and his wife and daughter were permitted to remain alive at Jerusalem. Eutropius and Eudoxia now “led Arcadius like a dumb beast,” in the words of Zosimus, and sucked the resources of the Empire. The people of Constantinople gained nothing by the revolution. They had carried in triumph the grisly, extortionate hand of Rufinus through the streets of the city, but the supple hand of the eunuch proved as formidable. He surrounded himself with spies and informers, filled the prisons with men whose property he desired for himself or his friends, scattered statues of himself through the city, and assumed every title of honour short of that of Augustus. He would press his deformed person and painted face into the armour of a man, to review the troops, and would harangue the Senate with a feeble imitation of the authority of a statesman. While his exactions and the luxury of the court enfeebled the Empire of the East, he alienated the power of the West, and had Stilicho branded as a public enemy. And the Goths and Huns crept nearer.
Arcadius, lazily riding in his gold-plated chariot, studded with large gems, in robes of silk embroidered with golden dragons, or playing the monarch on a throne of solid gold, with a crowd of adoring eunuchs before him, had no more appreciation than a peasant of a Cappadocian village of the true situation of the Empire. Eudoxia, beautiful, haughty, spoiled, revelling in the luxury of the palace, generous to the Church and the poor, floated soothingly with the stream. She lived the languid life of an Oriental princess, within the confines of the palace, and was rarely seen even by the greater part of the palace servants. The only occasion when the populace saw her quit the marble city, which the palace of Constantine had become, was when, in 398, she walked humbly, with downcast eyes, but clothed in purple silk, with a glittering diadem on her head, by the side of St. Chrysostom, as he transferred certain relics of the saints. Chrysostom would find her in a different temper in a few years.
328 The arrogance of Eutropius at last passed all bounds, and he ventured in the year 400 to threaten to expel Eudoxia from the palace. Whether she knew it or no, the time was ripe for the destruction of the repulsive minister. The people groaned under his terrible exactions, his infamous legislation, and his bloody tyranny; the leaders of the troops were prepared to sacrifice him. Eudoxia took her baby girls, Pulcheria and Arcadia, in her arms, and fled in tears to the Emperor. Arcadius, “becoming an Emperor for a moment,” says Philostorgius, signed the sentence of his favourite, and the eunuch soon found people and soldiers pressing, like wolves, for his destruction. He took refuge in a church, where Chrysostom protected him from the fiery crowd, but quitted it after a time, apparently on the oath of either Eudoxia or Arcadius that his life would be spared. He was exiled, recalled, tried, and—oath or no oath—put to death by the public executioner.
Eudoxia’s title of nobilissima (“most noble”) had been elevated to that of Augusta at the beginning of the year 400, and her second daughter was born in April of the same year.33 She was now complete mistress of Arcadius and the Empire, and she published her dignity with such extravagance that the Western court sent an angry protest that, in causing her statues to be borne through the provinces, she had exceeded the privileges of her sex. In the following year she completed her ascendancy by giving birth to a boy, Theodosius II, and seemed to have a prospect of a long and luxurious, if useless, reign. But she had meantime quarrelled with Chrysostom, and she was to pass through a period of humiliation to a premature grave.
In 398 Eutropius had transferred the austere and eloquent Chrysostom from his presbytery in Antioch to the archiepiscopal palace at Constantinople. The stern monk—as John of the Golden Mouth always remained at heart—was329 horrified from the first at the vice and luxury of the Christians of the Imperial city, and even of their clergy, but he allowed two years to elapse before he began his fiery campaign against the sins of the laity.34 He applied himself first to the reform of the priests and the control of the monks. With that we have no concern.35 It is enough to say that the clergy bitterly resented his reforms, and were ready to co-operate with Eudoxia in an effort to get rid of him. In 400 he began to attack the easy ways of the laity more sternly, and it is probable that some feeling was created between him and the Empress over the massacre of the Gothic Arian soldiers, which took place in that year. Their commander Gainas had rebelled, and Arcadius had virtually surrendered to him. He marched his troops to the city, obtained the use of a church for them, and allowed them to roam about, to the irritation of the people; until at last the people rose and slew seven thousand of the heretics.
It seems that Eudoxia was alienated from Chrysostom, who had resented the grant of a church, from that time. When, in the following year, St. Porphyry of Gaza came to the capital to obtain an Imperial order to destroy the pagan temples of his town, Chrysostom declined to introduce him at court, and referred him to the eunuch Amantius. The sequel is not without interest in a study of the Empress. The holy man was presented to Eudoxia, and promised that she should bear a boy if she would secure the destruction of paganism in Gaza. She promised to do so, but Arcadius, who seems to have resented religious wrangles, refused to grant permission. Then the boy was born, and Eudoxia felt an obligation to secure Porphyry’s request. She instructed him to draw up a formal petition, and present it to the baby-C?sar as he was carried from the baptismal font. The noble who carried the baby was then instructed330 how he was to behave, and a little comedy was arranged. Porphyry presented his paper to the infant C?sar. The noble read a little of it to the baby in a low voice, so that Arcadius should not hear, and then bobbed the child’s head as a sign of assent. Arcadius wearily overlooked the trick, eight beautiful temples were burned at Gaza, and Eudoxia supplied the funds for building a large church on their ruins. Tillemont, whose admiring course through the fourth century is much tempered by groans, complains that “this kind of piety favours only the demons.”
Chrysostom then went on to denounce, in unmeasured language, the vicious and luxurious ways of the wealthy women, especially widows, of his church. He had diverted the coins of the laity from the army of monks, deprived the clergy of their mistresses, and declared that the great majority of the bishops of his province were hopelessly corrupt. With the aid of his rival, the Bishop of Alexandria, they conspired against him, and they reached the ear of the Empress through the courtly and comfortable bishop, Severian. The other ear of the Empress was now assailed by the wealthy widows who smarted under the preacher’s fierce lash. Such fine ladies as Marsa and Castricia would not be likely to sit under the Socialistic oratory of the archbishop, but shorthand (notatio) was as commonly used in those days as in our own, and he could thus irritate the eye of the rich as well as gladden the ear of the poor. They brooded darkly over his impersonal strictures, and no doubt detected occasional references to the luxurious Empress in them. In fine, Archbishop Theophilus was summoned from Alexandria; the bishops of the province eagerly drew up and passed a lengthy indictment of their superior; and, before the orthodox population could gather what was happening, the............