The Apogee - Byzantium 02 by John Julius Norwich

- after repeated warnings - scourged and branded on the palms of his hands with red-hot nails; but after his release (at the intercession of the Empress) he is known to have completed at least two more important commissions, including a new gigantic figure of Christ to replace the one removed by Leo V from the Chalke, so his injuries cannot have been too severe.
    Lazarus was probably singled out for such punishment because of his prominence in the icon-loving community and his open defiance of the imperial decree; in the circumstances, the Emperor had little choice but to make an example of him. Similar considerations explain his actions in another case, still more fully documented: that of two brothers from Palestine, the writer Theodore and the hymnographer Theophanes, who had together assumed the mantle of Theodore of the Studium, after the latter's death in 826, as principal champions of the iconodules. According to their own account, they were summoned to Constantinople, kept for a week in prison and then brought before the Emperor. When he asked them why they had entered the Empire in the first place, they refused to answer, whereupon they were beaten severely about the head. On the next day they were flogged, but still refused to renounce their views. Four days later still, Theophilus offered them their last chance: if they would consent to take communion just once with the iconoclasts, they would hear no more of the matter. But they only shook their heads. And so, by the imperial command, they were laid across a bench while an abusive lampoon was tattooed across their faces. It was not, Theophilus admitted, a very good lampoon; but it was good enough for them. A free translation, thoughtfully provided by Professor Bury 1 — complete with its majestic mixed metaphor in the second line — confirms the Emperor's opinion:
    In that fair town whose sacred streets were trod Once by the pure feet of the Word of God —
    1 'Some admiration,' observes the Professor, 'is due to the dexterity and delicacy of touch of the tormentor who succeeded in branding twelve iambic lines on a human face.'
    The city all men's hearts desire to see -These evil vessels of perversity Were driven forth to this our Qty where, Persisting in their wicked, lawless ways, They are condemned and, branded in the face, As scoundrels, hunted to their native place.
    The tenor of the Emperor's questions - as well as that of this deplorable doggerel - suggests that not the least of the two brothers' offences was the fact that they were foreign immigrants who had, in Theophilus's eyes, entered the Empire deliberately to stir up trouble. They were not, however, returned to Palestine as the last line claims, but were imprisoned in the small Bithynian town of Apamea. Here Theodore died; his brother survived to become, in happier times, Bishop of Nicaea.
    This unedifying story demonstrates clearly enough the cruelty and brutality of which Theophilus was capable when his authority was openly defied; there can be little doubt, on the other hand, that his motives on such occasions were more political than religious. Where he drew the line was at the public profession of the cult of icons in Constantinople. Elsewhere in the Empire, or within the privacy of their own homes in the capital, his subjects might do as they pleased. Even in the Imperial Palace, although he must have been perfectly well aware -for all their transparent subterfuges - that both his pious Paphlagonian wife Theodora and her mother Theoktiste were enthusiastic iconodules, he made no serious attempt to stop them.
    Perhaps he himself subconsciously understood that the forces of iconoclasm were almost spent. The second period of its enforcement had after all been but a pale reflection of the first. Leo the Isaurian and Constantine Copronymus had changed the face of the Empire, subordinating all other issues to the single, simple belief that dictated and dominated their lives; Leo the Armenian,