Though this doesn't make for undramatic storytelling, one misses the freedoms of the old Theodora. She is more or less trapped in the great imperial palace – the chilled corridors, terrifying dungeons and perfumed courtyards that Duffy lovingly summons into being. Whereas the old Theodora ranged through Antioch and Alexandria as well as her beloved home of Constantinople, now her wings are clipped. But, as rulers are apt to discover, she also finds herself horribly confined. Theodora – with all that restless energy and boundless freedom of spirit – finds herself the most powerful woman in the world. Now comes the sequel, the what-happens-next after the happily-ever-after. The novel ends with Justinian and Theodora being acclaimed new rulers of the empire. Swashbuckling, adventurous, brave and sexy, Theodora acted, improvised, endured and bonked her way to the Byzantine court, where she and the future emperor fell deeply in love and married. But in this novelist's hands, she was not depraved so much as born into a particular role, a role that she had the guts and character to transcend. Her jewel-encrusted mosaic portrait stares out to this day from the wall of the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, a monument to her power and piety.ĭuffy's Theodora was indeed a child actor and a prostitute. It is an especially scandalous piece of propaganda, horribly imaginative in the forms of depravity it devised for the empress who was officially known as an endower of churches and saint of the Orthodox church. In the leeringly voyeuristic series of vignettes known as The Secret History, Procopius cast the wife of the sixth-century emperor Justinian as everything from child prostitute to demon in human form. I n her last novel, Theodora, Stella Duffy took a scurrilous account of the Byzantine empress by the Roman historian Procopius and turned it on its head.

Theodora stella duffy