fter Theodora's death, a
poet, desiring to gratify the emperor, recalled the memory of the
excellent, beautiful and wise sovereign, "who was beseeching at the
throne of grace God's favor on her spouse."

We can hardly think of Theodora as a glorified saint, yet her goodness
of heart and her charity may atone for many of the serious defects in
her character. We know not whence she came nor the story of her early
life; but as an empress she exhibited all the defects of her qualities.
She was a woman cast in a large mould, and her faults stand out in equal
prominence with her virtues. She was at times cruel, selfish, and proud,
often despotic and violent, utterly unscrupulous and pitiless when it
was a question of maintaining her power. But she was resourceful,
resolute, energetic, courageous; her political acumen was truly
masculine; in a critical moment she saved the throne for Justinian, and
during all her lifetime she was his wise Egeria, by her counsel enabling
him to succeed in great movements; when her influence ceased to exercise
itself a decadence began which continued during the remaining years of
Justinian's reign.

As a woman, she was capricious, passionate, vain, self-willed, but
sympathetic to the unfortunate and infinitely seductive. Truly imperial
was she in her vices, truly queenly in her virtues. Whatever may have
been her youth, her career on the throne is the best refutation of the
scandal of the _Secret History_, and she deserves a place in the records
of history as one of the world's greatest, most intelligent, most
fascinating empresses.

XII

OTHER SELF-ASSERTING AUGUSTAE--VERINA, ARIADNE, SOPHIA, MARTINA, IRENE

It is a noteworthy feature in the history of the Eastern Roman Empire
that periods in which empresses figure prominently in the affairs of
state alternate with periods in which the Augustae are mere ciphers.
Eudoxia, the wife of Arcadius, marks the early limit of feminine
predominance in the independent history of the eastern section of the
Roman Empire. The Empress Irene, who reigned at first with her son
Constantine and afterward alone, marks the later limit of the Roman, as
distinguished from the strictly Byzantine Empire, since during her
reign, at the beginning of the ninth century, the Empire of the West was
completely dissevered from all connection with Constantinople through
the crowning of Charlemagne as Emperor of the West by Pope Leo. Thus a
masterful woman was the