his three daughters destitute. Theodora, the second, became a pantomimist. What else she became may be read in the Secret History of Procopius. Suffice it to say that, unless the historian lies, no more abandoned woman ever stood among the ranks of those who live as the servants and ministers of sin. This woman, deserted by her lover at Alexandria, and reduced to the most abject distress, found her way back to her native city, and there—perhaps repentant, though that is doubtful—earned for a time, and until she attracted the attention of the Patrician Justinian, a precarious living as a sempstress. Like Madame du Barry, Madame de Pompadour, and so many other royal mistresses, she was above all a clever woman. She knew how to fix and retain the affections of her imperial lover. She made him pass a law, under the name of his uncle—for Justin was not dead—by which the old prohibition of marriage between a senator and a woman who had been dishonoured by a criminal, a servile, or a theatrical profession, was removed. And when his uncle died, the new emperor made Theodora empress of the East. In all the annals of self-made women, no parallel success is recorded. Even the Du Barry was never queen of France.
She became in power a woman as cruel as when in obscurity she had been worthless. She loved to retire to the privacy of a palace on the shores of the Propontis, where she could receive, in whatever mood was most congenial at the moment, the greatest personages of the state; where she had the satisfaction of feeling that, in the dungeons beneath her feet, languished the miserable
