Count Belisarius by Robert Graves

destroy Cappadocian John too. But I suppose that his many prayers in Church hindered Hecate’s action; for he continued to thrive. Then they swore by the Sacred Rattle – a most terrible oath – that they would never rest until one or other of them had reduced John to the nakedness and beggary which were his due. The sequel will be told before this book is over.
    An old Syro-Phoenician sorcerer from whom my mistress Antonina learned her magic – my master Damocles had befriended him – cast the two girls’ horoscopes one day, which amazed and terrified him by their brilliance. He told Theodora that she was fated to marry the King of the Demons and to reign more gloriously than any woman since Queen Semiramis and never to lack for gold. As for Antonina, she should marry a patrician, the one good man in a wholly bad world; and, whereas Theodora’s share of misfortune would occur in the earlier part of her life, Antonina should be spared misfortune until extreme old age, when it would be soon done.
    Theodora bent her brows at him and said: ‘Old man, are you trying your usual flattering tricks on us? Are you unaware, for a start, that men of birth are forbidden by ancient law to marry women of our profession? Confess that you lie!’
    He trembled, but would not retract a word, inviting her to show the figures of these horoscopes to any reputable astrologer. So she did so, and the second astrologer, an Alexandrian Greek, made much the same deductions as the first.
    Then she said to my mistress Antonina, laughing: ‘Dearest girl, what your husband will not be able to accomplish for us by goodness, I shall make my husband accomplish by demonry.’
    Another memory that I have is of Theodora going into the Theatre wearing nothing except the obligatory loin-cloth and a large hat. That was when she was almost fully mature in body. Her game was that her loin-cloth was always coming untied: she used to go with it in her hand to the busy faction-official who attended people to their seats and complain that ‘certain men of Belial’ had rudely pulled it off her. She desired him to escort her to some private place and assist her to put it on again. Meanwhile she modestly covered her thighs with her hat. Her gravity, her mock-distress, her persistence, used to exasperate the official, to the delight of the benches.
    Theodora was small and sallow complexioned. She was not a particularly good dancer or instrumentalist or acrobat; in fact, she was rather below the average of excellence at all these things. But she possessed an extraordinarily quick wit and a complete freedom from sexual shame: she seems, indeed, to have shown a singular inventiveness in her carnality, so that ‘I learned this from Theodora’ was a current joke under the statue of Venus, the chief trysting-place of the brothel district. And all the time that she was apparently engagedmerely in money-making and pleasure Theodora was busily studying Man; and there is no better way to study this subject than as a Megaraean sphinx, to whom young men and old reveal their true selves more openly than to their chaster mothers, sisters, or wives. My mistress Antonina was a student of Man, too, and she and Theodora soon learned to despise even the gravest of their clients for their unquenchable conceit and credulousness and ignorance and selfishness, and to turn these traits to their own advantage. By charms and remedies they both managed to avoid pregnancy, except Theodora, who had to procure an abortion on a couple of occasions, but without ill-effects.
    They had only two intimate friends, Indaro and Chrysomallo, girls of their set; with whom, some six months after Antonina’s visit to Adrianople, they planned to leave the stage, if they could get permission, and set up independently. Permission was extremely difficult to obtain, but Chrysomallo and Theodora had the good luck to gain the favour of the Democrat of the Blues,