could neither
love nor trust a woman who had violated the most sacred obligation; and
Theophano, instead of sharing his imperial throne, was dismissed with
ignominy from his bed and palace." Deprived of her place as regent, and
repudiated by her sons on whom she had brought shame, Theophano passed
the remaining years of her life in a monastery.

Of the two sons of Theophano, Basil II., after a long reign of over half
a century,--963-1025,--distinguished by his many victories over the
Bulgarians, died childless, and was succeeded by his brother,
Constantine IX., who was destined to be the last male of the Macedonian
house. After his short reign of three years, the story of the remaining
twenty-nine years of the Basilian dynasty gathers itself about the names
of his two elderly daughters, Zoe and Theodora, and the series of
princes who owed their position on the throne solely to them. It is a
period of decadence, and the reader cannot help but pity the two sisters
who were endeavoring to uphold a decaying dynasty in the midst of
corruption and folly. Zoe constitutes the central figure of the period;
but Theodora was vastly her superior, and casts a sort of glamour about
the closing years of the house of Basil the Macedonian.

Zoe, however, was notable not so much for her ability to govern as for
her extraordinary vanity and love of adulation. Yet, for some reason,
she had reached the age of forty-eight before she found a husband. Upon
his deathbed, Constantine summoned Romanus Argyrus, an aged nobleman, to
the palace and informed him that he had been selected to mount the
throne, but that he must divorce his wife and marry one of the imperial
princesses. Romanus hesitated, not that he cared not for the throne, but
because the conditions were too severe; he loved his wife, and he did
not fancy joining his lot with one of the elderly maidens. But he was
told that he must either obey or lose his eyesight. To relieve the
situation, his wife, with self-sacrificing devotion, took the veil and
entered a monastery. Constantine destined Theodora, the younger and more
capable of his daughters, for the throne as spouse to Romanus, but
through religious compunctions she refused to marry the husband of
another woman, and consequently Zoe was chosen as bride and empress at
the tender age of forty-eight. Romanus was sixty when he ascended the
throne.

Zoe never forgave her sister Theodora the fact that because of her more
stable cha