The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars by Annelise Freisenbruch

Epilogue
    Galla Placidia and Pulcheria were the last women to make a significant impact on the annals of Roman history before the respective murders of Aetius and Placidia’s son Valentinian III, in 454 and 455, precipitated the spasmodic breakup of the western empire. Under pressure from barbarian groups such as the Vandals, the Franks and the reinvigorated Goths, emperor after emperor was sworn in at Ravenna, and then almost immediately eliminated, until the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed and replaced in 476 by the German Odoacer, son of one of Attila’s followers. In the interim, women continued to be deployed as marital bargaining chips, lending a seal of legitimacy to the ambitions of the western empire’s new political order. Valentinian III’s widow, Licinia Eudoxia, and daughters, Eudocia and Placidia – the daughter-in-law and granddaughters of Galla Placidia – were given a taste of their immediate forebear’s fate when they were abducted from Rome in 455 by Geiseric, leader of the Vandals, after he had subjected the city to its second sack in recent memory. On reaching their destination of Carthage, the Vandals’ stronghold on the North African coast, Eudocia was married off to Geiseric’s son Huneric, to whom she bore a son who would later become king of the Vandals. Licinia Eudoxia’s and the young Placidia’s release was eventually negotiated by eastern emperor Leo I in 462, and through the children of Placidia, who married Olybrius, the very short-lived western emperor of 472, the blood of Galla Placidia continued to flow through the veins of the nobility in the eastern empire. 1
    For the Roman Empire was not quite dead. The east survived the breakup of its western wing, and lived on under the banner of the Byzantine Empire, the history of which is littered with the colourful stories of empresses such as Theodora – the former circus-entertainer who became the wife of sixth-century emperor Justinian; her nieceSophia, who was said to have taken over the reins of empire when her husband Justin II went insane during the 570s; and Irene, who ruled on behalf of her son Constantine VI in the eighth century. All of them in turn became pathfinders for the medieval queens of Europe. And for the Byzantine empresses themselves, there was no uncertainty about whom they were expected to look to in history for inspiration. Statues of Constantine’s mother Helena continued to outnumber those of all other women honoured throughout Constantinople. A survey taken of the city’s antiquities in the eighth century tells us that of the twenty-eight imperial statues identified throughout Constantinople at that time, Pulcheria, Eudoxia, even Constantine’s disgraced wife Fausta were all accounted for, immortalised with two or three images apiece. But no fewer than six of the statues – almost a quarter, in other words – were of the first Christian Augusta . 2
    Not surprisingly, the names of Livia, Messalina, Agrippina and Julia appeared nowhere in the document. To all intents and purposes, the wives and women who had established the behavioural blueprint for Rome’s first ladies almost 500 years earlier were little more than a distant memory now – the Roman buildings to which they had once lent their patronage stripped or broken up to provide construction material for the Christian empire; many of their dedicated statues recycled and remodelled to assume the facial features of new female icons; a large proportion of the literary works responsible for the preservation of their names facing the threat of extinction, thanks to the heavily biased allocation of copying resources to the great wave of biblical and liturgical literature produced during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It would be many centuries, in fact, before the attention of authors or artists returned to the women of the early Roman Empire, and then, as we have seen, almost invariably with hostile intent in mind.
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