Saint Aelia Eudocia - Athenais [ΑΘΗΝΑΙΣ], Enlightened Empress of Byzantine

Aelia Eudocia wife of Theodosius II​

Aelia Eudocia started life as Athenais [ΑΘΗΝΑΙΣ], born in Antioch to a prominent Pagan professor of rhetoric. Raised on the classics, she blossomed into a beautiful young woman who was an accomplished poet and orator. When her father died and her brothers cut her out of any inheritance, she traveled to Constantinople in AD 420 to seek redress from the emperor Theodosius II [ΑΥΤΟΚΡΑΤΟΡΑΣ ΘΕΟΔΟΣΙΟΣ Β ΜΙΚΡΟΣ]. But the scholarly young emperor was in the market for a wife and he was immediately smitten with Athenais.

Theodosius II' sister, the devout Pulcheria, insisted that she convert to Christianity before any marriage, terms Athenais readily accepted, taking the name Eudocia [ΕΥΔΟΚΙΑ]. Although she was born into a pagan family and given the name Athenais [ΑΘΗΝΑΙΣ], chosen by her family in honor of the pagan goddess Pallas Athena, the patroness of the city [Athens], the young bride was given the name Eudokia [ΕΥΔΟΚΙΑ] after being baptized as a Christian shortly before their wedding.[From the time of Aelia Flacilla, first wife of Theodosius I, the name Aelia became the standard name for empresses].



The new Empress quickly became an advocate for universal education and tolerance, particularly toward Jews and other persecuted sects. She also sought to blend Classical Hellenism and Christianity. This placed her at odds with Pulcheria, who began to denigrate the sincerity of her conversion. To prove her devotion, Eudocia made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in AD 438, but soon after returning she was accused of adultery and banished from the court. Theodosius still loved her, however, and the terms were not severe. She was able to retire to Jerusalem where she continued her writing and charitable work until her death in AD 460.

With over 3,400 lines of poetry and no single monograph dedicated to her literary productions, Aelia Eudocia is an understudied poet. The first of her surviving poems is a seventeen line epigraphic poem from the bath complex at Hammat Gader, which acclaims the bath's furnace for its service to the structure's clients but, at the same time, illustrates the religious competition that surrounded late antique healing cults, of which therapeutic springs were part.

Next is the Homeric cento, which borrows and reorders lines from the Iliad and Odyssey to retell parts of the biblical narrative. Eudocia's attempt at this bizarre genre underscores the interplay between the Homeric poems, and the classical culture they represent, and the biblical story, with its theology and ethics.

Last is the Martyrdom of Saint Cyprian, the first verse hagiography of its kind, which, because of the disparate sources available to Eudocia, is divided into two sections. The first part relates the conversion of Cyprian, an Antiochene magician, a story, I suggest, that depends on the Christian apocrypha, particularly for the development of its heroine, Justa. The second part recounts, in a speech by Cyprian himself, how he learned magic and why he converted. This section provides a glimpse into the ways late antique Christians understood paganism and the rhetoric they used to limit its hold in the later Roman empire. The big picture of Eudocia's poetry is that of a corpus, which uses Homeric language to convey fifth century, Christian concerns, and of a poet who can aptly be called a Homeric Christian.