Justinian

APPENDIX III

DID THEODORA REALLY MAKE HER ‘WINDING SHEET’ SPEECH?

To suggest that Theodora’s famous speech ending with the words, ‘the purple is a glorious winding sheet’, is actually a piece of propaganda fabricated by Procopius, might cause many to react with scepticism, disbelief, disappointment, or even outrage. However, in the interests of objectivity, a writer of historical fiction (with some allowance for artistic licence) has, I think, an obligation to stick broadly to historical truth — even when this risks upsetting cherished beliefs by airing controversial facts or theories. (No doubt many were upset when it emerged that the saintly Thomas Jefferson had sired a child by one of his female slaves.)

In The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, Leslie Brubaker makes a case for Procopius penning Theodora’s speech as a ‘rhetorical set-piece’, rather than as factual reportage — an accepted literary device on the part of ancient authors. (Witness the famous speech that Tacitus puts into the mouth of the Caledonian leader, Galgacus — ‘They create a desert and call it Peace’.) According to Brubaker, the crisis for Justinian resulting from Hypatius’ apparently successful coup was so bad that in order to invest it with maximum dramatic effect, Procopius reverses the natural order, ‘with men quaking like women and a woman speaking like a man’. In this, Procopius was expressing a typically ‘Roman’ attitude (some would say prejudice) regarding gender roles: women were supposed to be gentle, modest, submissive and dedicated to home and family; men were expected to be courageous, strong, just and wise.

To those who like their historical heroes and heroines consistently heroic, I would emphasize that the above is just a theory, developed only very recently. That Theodora herself made the speech has in the past been regarded as ‘kosher’ by almost all historians. To those who prefer their history ‘warts and all’, Brubaker’s argument is reinforced by reference to convincing theories, based on solid research, presented by Elizabeth Fisher and Averil Cameron in the late twentieth century.

The question remains: if not Theodora, then who did galvanize the demoralized little band loyal to Justinian into mounting the operation that ended the Nika revolt?