The reasons for this schism in the imperial church were complex, and Duffy has muddied the theological subtleties that underlay them horrendously but ultimately, this hardly matters. Duffy follows the tradition that had her leave Constantinople as the mistress of a provincial governor, an ill-fated career change that ultimately brought her to Egypt: a Roman province, but one regarded by many self-professed orthodox Christians, including the emperor himself, as teeming with heretics. More challenging, however, is the need to square Procopius's portrait of Theodora with the shimmeringly jewel-encrusted empress who would end up a saint of the Orthodox church. There is even a brief and inglorious cameo for Procopius, who turns out to be under-endowed in the manhood department – which, of course, explains everything. Granted, her childhood and adolescence on the stage serve effectively to dramatise themselves: such is the fund of anecdotes and sheer filth to be found in Procopius that it is hard for the novelist to go wrong.ĭuffy certainly makes the most of her material: not only is Theodora herself engagingly brought to life as a sassy, wise-cracking tart with a heart, but Constantinople, the great imperial capital whose crowds she woos and seduces, is also a pulsingly vivid presence. Particularly lush is the novel's opening: Duffy's account of how the infant Theodora and her two sisters are trained in the arts of the stage by an exacting eunuch, and how Theodora herself goes on to become the most admired and notorious star of her day, reads like Noel Streatfeild on crack. 'Actress, empress, whore', screams the subtitle of Stella Duffy's new novel – and certainly, there is no end of showbusiness, court intrigue and exotic sex. Such a woman, it goes without saying, is an absolute godsend to the historical novelist. To this day, the famous portrait of her in Ravenna, dripping in jewels, her gaze fixed on eternity, serves as a convenient shorthand for the entire world of late antiquity. In mosaics, she was represented as an icon of power and sanctity. Saints hailed her as one of their own, and churches across the empire were honoured to acknowledge her as their founder. What made this all the more lip-smacking, however, was that Theodora had gone on to become a veritable model of Christian piety. Back in the sixth century AD, the Roman historian Procopius wrote a portrait of the empress Theodora that chronicled, in scabrous detail, her early life as an actress and whore: a career which had featured floor-shows so imaginative that classicists have generally preferred to follow the example of Gibbon, and leave the precise details 'veiled in the obscurity of a learned language'. The British press were certainly not the first to have fathomed this. T he grander the show of virtue, the more titillating the exposé.

Theodora by Stella Duffy