Queens of a Fallen World

PROLOGUE: A CHILD WITHOUT A NAME

In Roman Africa, during the last years of Emperor Constantine the Great’s long reign, a slave spoke up to criticize her master’s daughter. The speaker was not the kind of person who is normally noticed by history, since she had neither wealth, nor power, nor legendary beauty. We know very little about her, only that she was a child. We do not know whether she survived to adulthood.

She may have been one of the many Roman children who did not live to see their tenth birthday. This was common in the Roman world, especially, but not only, among slaves and the poor. In the normal way of things, Illa would have been one of the forgotten people of history. But another child noticed her defiant act of truth telling and grew up to speak of what she learned from her.

We do not know what she was called. The one source that remembers her does so only as ancilla—the Latin for a handmaid or female slave—or illa, which simply means “she.” We will meet her more than once in what follows, and we will speak of her as “Illa,” letting the unfamiliar Latin form become something like a name.

In the Roman world, people living in slavery did not have legal names. They had informal nicknames, used perhaps by the people who cared for them as children or by those who exploited them when they were old enough to work. A slave’s nickname might change with his or her circumstances. A handmaid might be addressed simply as puella (“girl”) in the same demeaning way that men of color in the Jim Crow South were called “boy.” A name was a sign of standing, something a slave did not have. But if Illa had no standing, she had a voice. And, perhaps remarkably, she was not afraid to let herself be heard.

Illa would sometimes run errands with the master’s free daughter, and in later life the young mistress remembered her as a fierce little person. From Illa she learned a lesson she would carry with her all her life: that sometimes God’s voice speaks through unexpected people. A person’s earthly standing does not determine the value of what she or he has to say.

As the daughter of a provincial landowner of modest fortune, the young mistress was also a person who did not expect to be remembered in the historical record. But in the way of things, she grew up to become a mother, and one of her children grew up to become the most influential thinker of Latin Christianity: St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo. The young mistress would find a place in history as St. Monnica, one of the heroines of the early church.

Illa and Monnica grew up together in Roman Numidia, probably in the Tell, the countryside of fertile valleys just south of the coast, in what is now the northeastern corner of Algeria. It was a vast agricultural landscape dotted with rural estates and small communities that, even if they had municipal status, only counted a few thousand souls among their inhabitants. It was not the kind of place where one expected history to be made.

Yet long after she left Africa, Monnica told stories of her childhood to her children and grandchildren, and through her son Augustine, her stories passed into the historical record. They became part of the teachings of Christianity, along with the morals she drew from them. Monnica’s childhood companion could not have known that the story of how she challenged her little mistress would be told again and again, across the centuries, to illustrate the idea that we live in a fallen world where the people in power are not always right. This simple insight was central to Augustine’s mature thought, and it is in many ways Illa’s legacy.

Illa, Monnica, and the other women in our narrative lived and died well over a thousand years ago, and it is surprising how well we know some of them given the passage of time. They were remarkable women. But in the ancient world, remarkable women routinely lived and died without leaving a trace. Only a very few received more than a line or two in the historical sources—one thinks of Mary, mother of Jesus; of Livia, wife of the emperor Augustus; or perhaps of Cleopatra, who was queen of Egypt in her own right. In each case they are remembered for their role in the supporting cast around an important man. Rarely does a source record the woman’s inner thoughts.

But with Monnica of Thagaste, this changes. Alone among the women of the ancient Mediterranean world, Monnica raised a son who not only noticed women but explored in depth what he learned from them and broadcast what he learned to the wider world.

Monnica’s son Augustine, it has long been acknowledged, was the first ancient writer to produce an autobiography. His Confessions tells the story of his early life and the people he knew, and in them he tries to make sense of his thoughts and experiences. In reflecting on his life, he explored wider ideas about the relationship between men and women, forged by years of listening to and even arguing with the women in his life.

Other men had experimented with sharing their private thoughts. Marcus Aurelius had composed his Meditations more than two centuries earlier. But Augustine had the instincts of a novelist. He was interested in how the seemingly insignificant facts of daily life, and the seemingly insignificant people in a household—the women and children—contributed to the process in which his character and destiny had taken shape.

Augustine was a man who noticed women. Among the influential figures he captures in his narrative, his mother, Monnica, stands out. He returns again and again to her actions, to the stories she told, to the emotions that colored her life. Historians have long recognized her profound influence on her son, but they have paid less attention to what his writings can tell us about Monnica herself. If we listen closely, in her son’s words we can sometimes hear Monnica’s voice.

Augustine had been living in an all-male monastic community for some time when he wrote his Confessions, so the fact that his reflections on his past are so rich with female characters comes as something of a surprise. As he remembers them, the women he writes about are bright and sharp—even spiteful at times. They are people who have agendas of their own. Not all of them are people he knew personally or cared for, but always, without exception, he shares details about them that we would not otherwise know. In all but two cases, the women of the Confessions are figures who would otherwise be lost to history. The two exceptions are the Roman empress Justina and Monnica, Augustine’s own mother. In Monnica’s case the only other marker of her life that remains is the epitaph inscribed on her tomb—the wide canvas of her life distilled into brief lines about how a virtuous mother is made fortunate by her offspring.

Because he is our only source, the women in this book are in some sense Augustine’s women: they are characters in his narrative. We have no way of knowing what they were like aside from what he tells us, what uncomfortable facts he may have buried, or what he may have missed. As grateful as we may be for what he tells us about them in his Confessions, they are not the primary focus of the story he is trying to tell, and one can only imagine how the women themselves would have told their own stories. Augustine looms large, and seeing past him requires effort. His own thoughts and feelings keep intruding into the story in a way that is both revealing and distracting. So if we want to be able to imagine what it was like for these women to be alive, we have to be resourceful in reading between the lines.

Augustine and his women lived at a turning point in history, the closing decades of the Roman Empire. The whole Mediterranean was still under Roman rule in those days, and it had long been taken for granted that Rome’s power reached to the end of the known world, from the Western Ocean to the desert of the East. But that was changing. Pressure on the northeastern frontier had been building; in Augustine’s lifetime barbarian warlords would begin to chisel away whole regions, refashioning them as autonomous kingdoms.

Within living memory, a religious revolution had taken place: in the time of Augustine’s grandparents, the emperor Constantine had prayed to the God of the Christians before a battle and pledged himself to their God when his armies proved victorious. It is almost impossible to capture the sense of uncertainty experienced by Roman citizens as the empire was beginning its long decline and by Christians in the brave new world where Christians were no longer a persecuted minority. The possibilities were endless, and the stakes were high.

Augustine’s long life spanned from the reign of Constantine’s son Constantius (AD 337–362) to the barbarian invasions of the first decades of the fifth century. His mature adulthood fell during the years when the groundwork for the social and cultural world of medieval Latin Christendom was being laid—and as things turned out, he would play a significant part in laying this groundwork. The beliefs he came to hold about love and marriage, about human disappointment and human hope, would have a far-reaching influence on how medieval people saw the world. So, whether they knew it or not, the people in Augustine’s life—the women in his life—had a profound impact on the lives of Christians for centuries to come.

One of the central tenets of Augustine’s mature thought is that as human beings, we can never know the consequences of our actions ahead of time; only God can know the future. We humans are trapped in time, and this compromises us morally: unintended consequences are the stuff of human experience. We have no way of knowing how our actions will intersect with unfolding events or the actions of other human beings, so we can never adequately judge the possible effects of our actions or be sure what is the right thing to do.

This was particularly true where relationships between men and women were concerned. Augustine might have appreciated the irony that one of the things that made the world unpredictable for Roman men was the immense energy Roman women put into seeming biddable. Roman women were full of surprises: as children, they learned to erase the traces of their own efforts wherever possible, even as they passionately pursued their own agendas and goals. This led Roman men to find them baffling. It also makes them worth watching, from a modern historian’s perspective: sometimes keeping an eye out for what women were doing behind the scenes can shed a surprising light on the course of events.

Despite his own status as a privileged male, Augustine’s writings open a window onto the lives of women from all walks of life. He writes about ordinary housewives, about women living in slavery, and even at times about the women of the imperial family. Often, he gives us surprising and unexpected glimpses into the challenges women faced and the space they were sometimes able to carve out for themselves. The story Augustine tells of the women in his life offers a glimpse of their struggle to maintain their dignity in difficult circumstances and to leave a trace of their lives.

We are used to thinking of the women of the past as silent, since few sources have survived to preserve their voices. But Augustine is not a writer who expects women to be silent. He often found them memorable precisely for what they said. He recalls, for example, his concubine’s desperate vow when he ended their relationship and sent her away. Equally unforgettable are his mother’s prayers, her cajoling, and her conversations with bishops in her quest for advice on how to shape her errant son into a good Christian. Even the slaves and children in the house where Monnica grew up played a part: one thinks of the elderly nurse who took care of Monnica when she was a child and of Illa, the playmate who challenged her and changed the way she thought about herself.

It should not be surprising, then, that in the Confessions enslaved women consistently come across as honest and reliable people capable of speaking truth to power. Augustine was fascinated by the idea that God distributes the ability to do good in the world evenhandedly and that human beings are just as likely to hear his voice speaking through women, slaves, and children as through powerful men. If the Confessions is partly a story about women struggling to make a difference, it is also a story about Augustine’s own effort to understand those women. He needs to make sense of his relationships with them partly because he knows that those relationships are part of his path toward God.

Four women stand at the center of Augustine’s story: an empress testing the limits of her power, an heiress preparing for an arranged marriage, a mother devoted to her son’s career, and a woman of humble origins who became the love of Augustine’s life. Two shared Augustine’s origins in Roman Numidia; two, whom he knew less well, lived out their lives at the imperial court in Italy, where he played a small role during a few heady years in the 380s. Each of the women contributed to shaping Augustine’s world and his worldview, along with the legacy he left to history.

We will meet the four women in descending order of their social standing, beginning with an empress and ending with a woman who may have been a slave. In this way, we will spiral in from the wider frame of late Roman society toward a more intimate story about the personal and private struggles of a group of women whose lives intersected more than a thousand years ago, with consequences that perhaps changed history.

Their stories converge in the imperial city of Milan during the pivotal years between 383 and 387, at a time when the Roman Empire was convulsed by civil war. A few years later, in 395, the empire was split permanently into two parts: a strong Eastern Empire centered on Byzantium, which would last for a further thousand years, and a weaker Western Empire with first Milan and then Ravenna as its capital, which was soon broken up into smaller barbarian kingdoms.

Empress Justina, mother of the child emperor Valentinian II and the first of our women, was a figure of unparalleled importance in the Western Empire during these years. History has dismissed her because she lost a propaganda war with a voluble bishop of Milan, Augustine’s mentor Ambrose. As with many such conflicts between powerful women and the men who oppose them, it was Ambrose’s side of the story that came to be handed down as historical truth. (Indeed, as we will see, Augustine himself played a role in amplifying Ambrose’s narrative.)

In cases where historical sources vilify an ambitious woman, there is almost always more to the story. So it is useful to look at the world from Justina’s point of view. In doing so, we begin to see that the culture war between empress and bishop was not, strictly speaking, about theological differences, as the sources suggest. It was about the emergence of a new kind of populist leadership in the church, which Justina understandably opposed. Like more than one female leader in more recent history, Justina found herself singled out by a master of misogynist rhetoric, who used stirring up indignation against her as a tool to steer the minds of their contemporaries. Remarkably, Justina was able to hold her ground in spite of the onslaught.

If Justina’s ambitions involved the fate of the empire, other women pursued smaller dreams with equal passion. Social mobility in ancient Rome was a game of fortune hunting and marrying well, and shrewd players of the game knew how to play the card of beauty or talent in exchange for social status and wealth. Even at the lower end of the social scale, being attractive to the right people could be a meal ticket to survival and perhaps even security.

The spark that sent Augustine’s life up in flames was a dowry, one belonging to a ten-year-old Milanese heiress whom he barely knew. It is unlikely that the child ever recognized the role their short-lived betrothal played in Augustine’s story or what mark the catastrophic mess he made of it left on his thought. But through this young woman, a pawn in the marriage game, we can begin to grasp the paradox that wealth and social standing sometimes meant very little to women and girls; often what they wanted was simply to stay close to their families.

Of our four women, we know Monnica most intimately, thanks to the many stories she told her children about her own childhood in the plains of Roman Numidia and her early married life in Thagaste. Her story, as Augustine remembers it, is the saga of a woman who lived for her children, did her best to manage an abusive husband, and found in widowhood a kind of freedom that she had not known as a daughter or wife.

Monnica’s influence on Augustine was profound, especially in her moral reasoning. He returns again and again to emphasize the lessons she taught him: to always look below the surface of a situation, to listen for what is going unsaid and to recognize the role that unexpected or unrecognized people might play in the course of events. Through her influence on her son’s way of thinking, Monnica contributed an element of moral depth to the history of Christian thought. And at the center of her story there is something unique in ancient literature: the account of an unusually close friendship between a woman and her son.

Yet of all the women in Augustine’s life, the one who perhaps came closest to knowing the truth of Augustine is the woman who lived with him as his star began to ascend, the mother of his illegitimate son. She crossed the Mediterranean with Augustine and stayed by his side for over fifteen years. His mishandling of the end of their relationship and her dignified reaction to his cruel treatment permanently damaged his sense of himself.

Augustine’s concubine is the most elusive of our heroines because he skates over her story in the Confessions very swiftly. It is difficult to say whether he veils her identity to protect her or because it pains him to confront his memory of her more clearly; perhaps both things are true. One imagines Augustine mid-dictation, opening an old wound and finding the feelings too fresh, too intimate, and perhaps too human to confess to his God. A review of his later writings suggests that he agonized for the rest of his life over the circumstances of their parting.

Whatever Augustine may have wished or allowed her to believe, he could never have seriously intended to stay with her or marry her. Marriage was a carefully calculated game of advantage, and Augustine had long ago accepted that he would marry the richest woman who would have him. But when he and Monnica finally found their heiress and arranged the betrothal, he could not bring himself to go through with the marriage. His handling of the episode was a disaster that had far-reaching consequences. On the evidence of Augustine’s writings, both the Confessions and his later work, the episode shook the foundation of his self-understanding. It was the catalyst that started him on the path away from being a self-involved thirty-something and toward becoming an ethical thinker whose writings would endure long after his death.

What, if anything, did these four women have in common? Augustine’s narrative offers a rare opportunity to explore how women of different social backgrounds navigated the pressures and constraints of family and ambition in fourth-century Roman society and how much they had in common despite the vast differences of social class.

Theirs was a world where women were generally treated by their menfolk as pawns. In this game the single best opportunity for a woman lay in her ability to manage her sexual attractiveness. This involved a balancing act familiar to women across the centuries: being attractive but not too available—or available only on very specific terms. If she came from a respectable family, this meant refusing sex outside marriage. She would wed early, in her early to mid-teens, usually in an arranged marriage to a man who might well be twice her age, perhaps the owner of neighboring land or a business partner of her father. For a woman lower down the social scale, whether slave or free, things were more complicated. Controlling who had sexual access to her body was even more difficult. Avoiding sex altogether was often unrealistic, so the goal was to find someone who would shield her from the predatory attention of other men.

In a society that afforded few opportunities to act independently of men, women’s energy was largely channeled into trying to manage and mitigate the intentions and impact of the men around them. A woman who was both lucky and skillful could hope to capture the eye of a man above her on the social ladder and be lifted by him into opportunity. But it was a risky game, and even apparent success might come with unpleasant or dangerous consequences. Most women simply tried to make the best of their situation, be it an arranged marriage or, for those of low status, a more exploitative arrangement.

If women needed the help and protection men could offer, they also knew that husbands and lovers could not be counted on. The one man a woman could love without reservation was her son. Women with sons knew themselves to be paragons of good fortune. Bearing a son gave a woman status in the eyes of her community, and it gave her an unparalleled opportunity to cultivate a genuinely devoted male ally. A son was the man with whom she had the best chance of creating a relationship of trust and for whom she would reserve her fiercest loyalty. Three of our four women had sons, and it was their devotion to these sons that informed their actions.

In what follows we will begin by exploring the hopes and intentions of each of our heroines, trying to understand her aims, the constraints she faced—and, where possible, her blind spots. Next, we will examine the crisis that erupted when their lives intersected—a crisis that would have far-reaching consequences for the women themselves, for Augustine, and for the future of Christianity. In the final part of the book, we will look at Augustine’s later efforts to make sense of what happened and what he had learned.

What primed Augustine to notice the quiet struggles of women was a childhood spent listening to his mother’s stories. His narrative gifts clearly owed a great deal to Monnica: she was a born storyteller and a thoughtful observer, someone who noticed things other people missed. She had grown up in a household where both enslaved and free women tested the boundaries of the domestic social order and looked for opportunities to speak up for themselves, and she had paid close attention to how their efforts played out.

Through Monnica’s stories, as Augustine remembered and retold them, we gain a sense of what one ancient woman was able to make of the world around her, of the wisdom she was able to pass onto her children. But we will also have to reckon with the limits of that wisdom: during the heady and dangerous years in Milan, both Augustine and Monnica faced difficult choices.

Some of the choices they made are well known to historians: for example, Augustine’s decision not to marry, which opened his path to an unexpected and influential future as a Christian bishop. But what has been less well understood is that the choice was part of a wider web of consequence. It was taken in the threatening atmosphere of civil war, in a city that was soon to face invasion by a hostile army.

Historical distance has a way of ironing away the specific texture of a place and time, and for this reason modern readers of the Confessions have tended to miss the fact that in the Milan of the mid-380s, things were not always what they seemed. In making their private and personal decisions, Augustine and those around him had to take into account the consequences that might follow from trusting the wrong person or betting on the wrong faction.

In this context, matters of the heart could also be a matter of life and death. Things could quickly spiral out of control, and decisions had to be made without knowing which seemingly insignificant choice might bring disaster. Even afterward, it was impossible to be sure of why things played out as they did.

Of course it is even more difficult for historians to make such judgments long after the fact. But we should recognize that the forces of history may be steered by a person whom others overlook or fail to notice: someone who would never dream of herself as a person of consequence but who nonetheless hopes to leave her mark on the world.

CHAPTER ONE

JUSTINA

In the Civic Museum at Como, Italy, a marble portrait survives of a fourth-century Roman empress whom many scholars identify as Justina. This may be wishful thinking: no other likeness of the empress survives. Vivid and controversial, Justina has been sidelined by history, largely because she found herself on the losing side of the great theological dispute of the fourth century, the Trinitarian controversy.