Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Supersluts of History: Roman Empress Theodora

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

In this new mini-series, we're exploring and celebrating women whose sexuality was used to define them.First up is Roman Empress Theodora. How did "Theodora from the brothels", as she was known, rise to be the most powerful woman across the Roman Empire?Joining Kate today is author Stella Duffy, to take us back to the 6th century and help us get to know Theodora's incredible story.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to Betwix the Sheets. We need the fair do's warning before we go any further. Here it is. This is an adult podcast book by adults to other adults,

about adult things, an adulty way can arrange an old subjects, and you should be an adult too. We have to keep telling you that because on the off chance that a newbie has wandered in thinking Betwixt the Sheets was some kind of podcast about interior design and they're going to be shocked and upset with what is about to assail their ears. Right, everyone's feeling safer. Let's crack on. Constantinople is burning and the year is 532 AD.

And here in the greatest city in the Roman world, it's all kicking off. You've got rival political factions, the blues and the greens, uniting against the Emperor Justinian I. And for days, riots have been engulfing the city. Buildings are burned. Officials have been killed. and understandably inside the Great Palace, well, everyone's absolutely losing their minds.

Courteers are urging Justinian to flee, but his wife, the Empress Theodora, who, by the way, is not of noble blood, has other ideas. Her story is remarkable, as we're about to find out. Maybe it was her time as a performer that enabled her to deliver the killer line of defiance, Purple makes a fine burial shroud.

That'll make more sense when we talk about it in the episode, Trust me, that's an absolute belter. And with that line, Justinian's resolve hardened. The rioters were quashed and the Roman Empire lived to fight another day. Well, a few more days. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society with me, Kate Lister. Today we are starting a new limited series

which celebrates and explores the so-called super-sluts of history. The four women that we are going to be featuring over the next month have been defined by their sexuality for better or for worse, and I want to know how it affected them. Was it a reputation that was well deserved? Was it one that they enjoyed and cultivated, or one that they resisted and resented? Was their sexuality a superpower,

or something that was used to beat them about their head with? Or both? Well, today we're heading back to the last days of the Roman Empire, where the Empress Theodora is one of the most powerful women in the world, and a lot of people have to say that she was a super slut. Incredibly, she was from a very impoverished background and was likely to be a sex worker before she rose to be empress. Now, that is a career trajectory, isn't it?

Taking us through Theodora's story is the author Stella Duffy, who's published two books about this amazing woman's life. Right, without further ado, I think we should be cracking on. Well, hello and welcome to Betwicks the Sheets. It's only Stella Duffy. How are you doing? I'm good, thank you, Kate. I'm thrilled that you are here because this is the first installment in our little Riley titled miniseries of Super Sluts Through History. You are the author of Theodora Actress, Empress, Hoare.

Today we are looking at... And the Purple Shroud, which is the follow-up... And the Purple Shroud. They're a double act. Because the first one is just until she becomes Empress. The second one is her time as Empress until she dies. Fabulous. Not a spoiler that she's dead.

She dies in 540. She's hanging on in there with a bowl to the wall skin care routine. But we are talking about the Empress Theodora. Now this is a lady I have heard all kinds of rumors and salaciousness about Theodora from the brothels, she's sometimes known as. So for our listeners who may have never heard her name before, could you give us a bit of an overview of who this lady? Well, if any of your listeners have anything to do with the.

Russian or Greek Orthodox churches, they will have probably heard of her because in those churches she's a saint. Yeah. Now that's a career trajectory. Yeah, which is interesting given how the Roman historian, and I use that term loosely, Procopius, I've got no idea how to say his name, maybe you know better than I do, how he wrote about her. He was writing a history of the time.

So this is the very end of the Roman Empire, the very beginning of the Byzantine. And in his history, which he called the secret history, long before Donna Tart, he writes about Theodora, calls her Theodora from the brothel. He writes about her as an absolute tart who wilded her way into the love of the Emperor Justinian, who poisoned people, who was awful. He also, it has to be noted, says that Justinian walked around their palace, the palace in, well, what is now Istanbul, with his own head under his arm. So I think that tells us that he's not the most reliable of narrators.

Yes, I think it does, doesn't it? Just a little bit. So basically, I'd never heard of her either. She wasn't on my radar. And in Ravenna, you can't say it with my half South London and half Alterra, New Zealand accent. You've got to say Ravenna, not Rabina. That was very good. I was at Ravenna for a book festival.

And the lovely Italians that I was there with kept saying, you must come a see the mosaica. Now, because I don't speak Italian, Kate, I had no idea what they were saying. She's not in a long. You do speak Italian and now thinking I'm an idiot, but maybe I was. I didn't know they meant mosaics because I didn't know that Vavenna was the site of UNESCO World Heritage Mosaics. So unveiled in 548 because they will have taken longer than that to make were these mosaics, and that's probably pretty close to when she died.

And when you walk into this fairly small change, Chapel, it's not enormous. You, of course, see a massive Jesus in front of you in Mosaic. I mean, of course you would. It's Jesus. It's the Christian church. And on his right-hand side, appropriately, is the Emperor Justinian and all of Justinians' courtiers. Again, fairly path of the course so far.

But on his left-hand side is the Empress Theodora and all her women courtiers are the same size as the men. And that's so unusual, right? You show the women as important as the men. And this is also the early Christian church. So women had been allowed to be priests. Women had been taken seriously. If you look at the Gospels, you've got the Marys. They all matter.

But obviously, by the dark ages, we're getting rid of the women at any place we can. So this is kind of just the end of that as well. She's got this amazing stature. And I thought, well, she must have been important. I'll go, fly home from Ravenna. and read some good books about her. And I couldn't find any novels about her. And I was like, well, this is weird.

And then I found the procopias stuff. And she's mentioned a little bit on Robert Graves as Bellasaris. But every time she's presented as a whore, a slut, a tart who just liked sex. And not that there's anything wrong with liking sex. There is nothing wrong with being a slut on this podcast. Let me tell you. But that she's bad because of all of these things. and that she's, yeah, obviously, she's a bad woman.

And of course, what she is is she's a woman with power. And they always want to call a woman with power bad. And so I started doing this reading about her. And there's very few facts. There's some stuff about what happened when she was in power, where she did amazing stuff. She created the first halfway house for ex-prostitute. She brought in a law to give women back their dowry

when they'd just been dumped by their husbands, divorced, because the Christian church hadn't decided against divorce by them. She brought in first anti-rape clause. I mean, she's amazing. And she had a little power. Yeah, she's phenomenal. But there's very little about her own childhood. So I did a lot of reading around what it might have been like at the time,

what it would have been like for people from poverty, because she has talked about a lot as being lower class. Do we think that that's true then? because the mythology about her, she's Theodora from the brothel, she shagged away to the top from absolutely from nowhere at all. Was she born in poverty? Absolutely no idea, but we do know. Don't know. Her father was the bearkeeper in the hippodrome and that he died when she was five.

See, I figure if your dad's the bearkeeper in the hippodrome, you're not that high up on the pecking order. What we know, and this is part of the subtitle, actress empress, tour. I used to work in theatre and I, for a very long term, we didn't, we weren't happy with being called actresses because actress only ever meant whore. You know, it definitely didn't mean female actor when women weren't allowed on stage. So it is likely that if your father dies, and you're the bearkeeper, probably killed by a bear. We don't know for sure. If your father dies when you're five, you're going to have to go to work because there's no welfare state. There's nothing to look after the widow and children. And we know that she had at least two.

sisters. So I put her and her sisters in a dance troupe because women weren't actually actresses. They were dancers. That was what actress meant. It meant dancer and it meant prostitute. And it's not sex worker prostitute. These are girls sold into prostitution against their will, like highly likely. And their bodies were used. Where was this, by the way? Give me a time and give me a place. Yeah, so this is all between, I put her born in 500, we don't know for sure, but she's probably born sometime between 500 and 500 and 5.05. It's in Constantinople. Constantinople hasn't become Byzantium yet. And it's when the Roman Empire is really, it's losing itself back in Rome. You know, it's got so much powers going in its European arm. So instead it's looking to the east. And in the way of Western powers, it's thinking, quite soon, we'll go and fight Persia. Yeah, guys, that's never worked.

It never works for the Western powers to say, I know, we'll fight Persia. So this is in a little period when Rome's Western European power is really waning. So his uncle was the Emperor, Emperor Justin, and he didn't have any sons or daughters, as far as we know. So he gave, if you can, the emperor post to his nephew, Justinian. So Theodora is coming up through the ranks of dancers, and I made her a very successful dancer because why not? We don't have any proof or truth about this. Well, maybe in between the lines,

to have been on a collision course with the emperor, like the most powerful man, like she's got to have had something that brought her to his attention. It's got to have some spark, right? He's not going to go and watch a shit dancer, is he? Well, the thing about these dancers is they're not just... So the whole point about the dancer sex worker crossover is that... So I looked up, you know, costumes and all of that sort of stuff. The dancers were cloaked in diaphanous clothes

that meant that when they half flooded the hippodrome, their clothes got wet and so they could be seen semi-naked. Because nakedness was against the law. Because it was only men who were going to the hypodrome. So this was a way for the men to get their rocks off, basically. It was a sector. And then you'd have a bit of killing and a bit of bear baiting. It's all in one night.

Afternoon, actually, because they didn't have lighting. And so she's working her way up in my story. We do know that she had a relationship with a man who became the governor of a part of Egypt. And so she went away with him. We know that somehow she made her way back to Constantinople. And then after that, the story starts being that she's using her feminine wiles to win over Justinian. Because he's not quite the emperor yet because she knows he's going to do so well. And Justinia is actually a really important figure in history.

So our law, British law, some of Scottish law, certainly American law, Australian, New Zealand, not French law, but lots of Germanic law is based on Justinian's Codex even now. No way. Yeah. Wow. What kind of stuff did he come up with? For generations and no one had put them together. And so Justinian spent a really long time. I tried to not make it boring in the books.

A very long time. So the whole point about Justinine is he's a bit of a nerd. I love a nerd. He's 20 years older than her and he's a bit of a nerd. And he's really serious about the law and he's very serious about religion. and here's this probably gorgeous, certainly very sexual, very physically in and of her body woman. And after she broke up with the governor, he kicked her out, she went and had a religious conversion. Now, we don't know if this is true or not.

And the people who didn't like her, of course, said, well, of course it wasn't true. How could it be true? She's evil. She was just pretending to come to the faith. You know, she couldn't possibly have meant it. But for my money, she kept on with her religious belief for decades afterwards. And if it was just to get power, I think she would have dropped it. Was Justinian Christian?

Yes, he was. But they had slightly different views on Christianity. You've got to remember, this is still... Early days, yeah. Now, if you brought up Catholic like me, you think the body and blood of Christ and Jesus is a man and his God is perfectly normal. But at the time, they were having big arguments about it. And it wasn't just the people running the countries.

It was like our equivalent of football teams. It was our equivalent of which side do you vote for Brexit. It was that. It was, well, was Justinian God and man? Or were they two separate things and the same person? And it really mattered. And could he have been body and blood and human flesh? Or would that just be just the story?

and we have to follow the faith. These were really important arguments for what the Roman Empire, the end of the Roman Empire, the beginning of the Byzantine Empire, was becoming. And Justinian and Theodora, whether they worked her out or not, we have no idea, but they took opposing sides. And I mean, that's so clever, isn't it? You're both running the country and you take opposing sides. Keep everyone happy.

Uh-huh. That's right. And so Theodora from the brothel is a way of saying Theodora from the poor. Justinian is the nephew of the man who'd been the emperor. So even though he's not from the eastern end of the empire, he's from back there in Europe, he's perceived to be of a higher class. So what you're doing is you're bringing the blue and the green factions together in these two people who end up ruling.

And they were all together for a good 20-odd years. Can't have been normal, though, for an emperor like just in his to marry a poor girl. No, it wasn't normal. He had to change the law for her to be allowed to marry him. Oh, wow. That's determined. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and this was religious law as well as state law.

He had to change what they were taking on as the truth and what apparently was passed down on the Gospels for an ex-actress to marry at all he had to change the law. Well, they can't have liked that. Well, no, of course they didn't like that, because they're the blokes who are in power, and they want to be telling people what they're meant to do. And they also want to start, because as we're moving into later, you know, this stage of Christianity,

we're starting to say that women don't have a place, women shouldn't have a voice, women are bad and wrong, and they certainly shouldn't have a sexuality. And so they fall in love. I think they fall in love. And the reason I think they fall in love is that he was alive for 20 years after she died. She was probably only in her late 40s when she died because we don't know her exact birth dates.

So we don't know exactly when. So mid to late 40s. And he didn't marry again. They didn't have children. He could, he probably should have married again so that he would have had an heir and he didn't. And at least for the first 10 years, he has reported as going to visit her grade. every single week. Wow, look at that

historical love match. We don't often get that in leaders, do he? I mean, it must have been a scandalous marriage, even though it changed the law. Oh, it was a hugely scandalous marriage. And then if you go to Istanbul today

and you go to see the Ayes Sophia, which is now a mosque, having been a museum and having been a church, that was built for her. So there was a major rebellion in 532. It's called the Nika Rebellion. and the big the factions, the green and blue factions fighting against each other, and the old Hyas Sophia Church was burnt down.

And he built, he had this build, Justinian had this built as an emotional gift to her. You know, it was partly to rebuild the state and to go where, you know, we're coming back. But it was also partly, in my opinion, as a thank you to her. Because in the rebellion, there was a lot of machinations and there was a lot of suggestion from Justinian's own men that he should leave, that they should get in a boat, they should cross the boss for us, they should go over to the Asian side of Constantinople

and get away because the people didn't want him in power anymore. Okay. And Constantinople was really interesting at the time. You know, we talk about refugees asylum seekers as if they're brand new. But Constantinople at the time had, it's something like 25 or more languages. people were flooding in to Constantinople. Very cosmopolitan.

Because, yeah, because it was where the new life was. It was this meeting point of western and eastern Rome. And also, they were getting kicked out of their own countries. And so all of that foments and this big rebellion in 532. And again, we don't know if this is true or not, but it is said, and even Procopius writes this, that all of his courtiers are saying to Justinian getaway. You and Theodora are you? To get away,

we'll send the version of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet away with you. And if it calms down, we'll bring you back. And if it doesn't, well, we'll just try and stop you being killed. And Justinius is preparing to go. And Theodora, bearing in mind, the very least she was a dancer. But I like to think of her as a great orator. She makes a speech to Justinian where the famous line is Purple makes... Oh, I want to cry.

I find it really moving. Oh. Her line is, Purple makes a great burial shroud. So rather than run away... This woman who had been through such a lot, she definitely was born into, if not terrible, poverty, when her father died when she was five, that will have thrown them. into extreme poverty.

Women had no way to earn. I mean, women didn't have any way to earn until 1950, really. But they really had no way to earn. And so this woman who made her way through a lot of adversity is not going to give up the purple of the throne. And she says to him, purple makes a great barrier of shard. Let them come. Let them come.

We're going to stand. We're going to make a stand. Yeah. God, that's amazing. And they did. And Belisarius, the general who Robert Graves wrote about in the book called Belisarius, goes out and kills possibly 30,000 people. In one fevered rebellion battle on the hippodrome in what is now Istanbul. And you can go there.

You can go to the hippodrome. You can see where it was. And what you need to know is that way beneath that there's the blood of. of all of these people who were killed. So they stayed and they fought. Yeah. And she's not necessarily the goody in this. You know, Justinian was bringing in big taxes.

He was being quite draconian with some of his rules. But she's not prepared to give up or let him give up. Once she's got a taste, see, I think that perhaps once she's got a taste of power, then she does become problematic. But her journey to getting power, that's not the problem. I'll be back with Stella and Theodora after this short break. She sort of ends up as a co-ruler with Justin, who I'm now on first name terms with. That doesn't seem usual for an emperor at this point.

Normally the wife would just fade into the background to have some babies and perhaps be wheeled out for charity dues. But she's there co-ruling. I can't think of another example of that happening. Not that I know of either, but then I'm not a historian and you are. There were mums. They were like Nero's mum hung on in there and with the region, but an actual wife who was like, no, I'm co-ruler too.

But see, I mean, I think it makes sense if you think about the overall political situation. So she's from there. I mean, I suspect just because of the nastiness about her, I suspect that her family were probably from North Africa, which Rome had taken most of. So my guess is she's brown, or at least she's not white, white. And therefore, you get some of the racism about her, which I think really shows up in Procopius. They talk about her as dark. They talk about her as swarthy.

I mean, they're just horrendous. So she's other. She's outside. She's from poverty. She's one of the people. And Justinia needed that. You know, the Roman Empire is on its last legs. They have had enough of these blokes coming over from Europe and trying to run everything in Constantinople.

And the next lot of mistakes is going to fight with Persia. So that doesn't work. It's actually really strategic. So I don't know for sure that it was a love match on either of their part, but I think it became one. She's like Ava Peron. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's a lot of potential Ava Peronness to her. You know, it's great cry for me, Constantinople.

she's definitely very smart when she gets into power and having these two people from the two different factions so the old Roman Empire based in Rome had four factions of white the red the green and the blue by the time it's mostly centred around Constantinople have to say I'm astonishing myself with the things I'm remembering I wrote these books at least 12 years ago doing spectacularly well

well I think all of this stuff is really interesting. I'm really interested in how people in charge use the populace. And I think they really used what the populace cared about. And so you've got all of these people coming in to Constantinople. You've got your old guard who don't like the new people. They don't like that refugees coming in. They don't like that they've got their version of boat crossings. But then you've got this mix of new people who are going, well, where the new people are going, well, where the new Roman Empire. We're this mix of people. We're bringing in talent and thoughts and different ways of being from all over the world. You should want us. You've got these old fashioned factions

that are still fighting, but rather than only fighting in the Hippodrome, they're fighting over what was Jesus really like. And you've got the church trying to work out how it can use the Roman Empire. Oh, I'm not sure if the church was trying to work out how it could use the Roman Empire or the Roman Empire was trying to work out how it could use the church. But either way, the Holy Roman Empire absolutely ended up using the Christian Church to put down people to invade Britain to invade all of these lands and impose Christianity on people who weren't already Christians. So around this time, everything's in flux.

And what Justinina and Theodora offer, I think, It does look like a love match because why would he marry this apparently scurals woman? And therefore it must be love or it must be something important. Or she's rich craft on her part. Possibly. Possibly. I've heard worse accusations in my time. And I don't doubt that in her time she learned a lot of stuff and the skillful use of herbs has always been used by many people, including people, dancers, you know, you go see anyone who's in the cord of ballet.

They know what things to put on their broken toes, poor things. Who was I talking to a French historian and we were talking about Madame de Barry and her affair with the King? And I was asking, why her? Because she came from the brothel as well. And the answer was probably sexual experience. It was probably that she rocked his world. And I wonder if maybe, maybe this is a possibility.

He's such a nerd. He's such a nerd. He's the bloke who's, you know, currently now doing some amazing genius thing and going to scare us all with what the next turn of AI is, right? He's not charismatic. He's not exciting. He's really... Oh, God, he's a tech nerd.

Yeah, can we pay attention to the law that was written in 422 because it's really whatever? You know, that's what he cares about. And he's only got his role in government because of his uncle. And then she comes along, she gets them some kugos. You know, she gives them some sparkle. So is she popular then? At the time, was she popular?

At first she was. Then when they start bringing in higher taxes, when he... At first she's like, she's one of us. This is brilliant. She's our Theodora for the ordinary people, which, you know, the Roman historians don't like. But then once she starts colluding with... him because the Roman Empire is falling apart, as they knew it, at least led from Rome.

It gets much messier. And so it's almost as if, oh, she went over to their side. Ah, right. Okay. Okay. So her popularity wanes then. To some degree. But again, it's really hard to know. Because the only extant contemporaneous counts we've got are by the men who hated her. Is that it? That's there's nothing at all. We know about the laws she helped make. We know about the laws that were made for her, but we don't have anything else.

Was that Swan story about her that she was... The story is that she fucked to Swan. Yes, I did hear that. I just wasn't entirely sure that I'd got that right. An ordinary man wasn't enough for her, so she had to fuck her swan. So I thought... That's not true. That seems a little extreme.

And also... That's... Swans are a bit hissy. Well, they are. And, you know, oh, they break a man's leg. That's what they say. So what I did about that was I wrote her as if it was, so I went back to Roman mythology, the idea of Zeus turning himself into a swan so he can fuck Lida.

And so I did the mythological story of Leder and the Swan with her playing leader as a dancer. See, that sounds more believable. I mean, nobody wants to have sex with the Swan. That's deranged, even by Roman standards. I'm not sure. Swans are just too pecky. The logistics alone don't make any sense at all. But isn't it interesting that that was even a rumour that was in currency at the time? There might have been someone that went, well, yeah, that sounds about right?

I bet she did. But the problem with this book, Secret History, is it's full of things like that. And at the same time, so you'd be reading it. And Procopius is going, so at this point, we went to battle against so and so and so. And the taxes were this and this. And then Theodora was fucking a swan. And then... So he's saying it in a monks

a whole bunch of stuff that we know is true. Trying to weed it out. It's how some of our better newspapers managed to tell those stories, do you? Yeah. She's interesting. She's probably sexy. Her husband clearly loves her. I mean, it's the posh and Bex thing, right?

How dare he love her? How dare he? How dare she get the love of our golden boy? Of course, she's going to piss off the people who are telling the story 100 or 150 years later. They raise you up and they pull you down. Yeah. How does her story end then?

Do we know that at all? No, we know that there's a spot. I'm doing this with my hands. For the podcast listener, I'm moving my hands. There's a spot in the gallery where women would have stood because women wouldn't be allowed to be in the main. body of the church with the men. And this was all church standing. There weren't pews back then. But there's a beautiful green jade spot, which was the Empress's spot. But the Iosophia did not

come to fruition as a building until, I think, if I'm remembering rightly, just before she died. And we know that she died in 548. And those mosaics that are in Ravenna were finished in 548. So we don't know what killed her, but she died somewhere between, say, 43 and 45. Is there any place that she's buried? Was just Denise? Well, I don't know. I don't think she's still there. I'm sure that that would have got, like, you know, the Crusades and the rise of the Ottoman Empire.

I don't know. Maybe I did once, but I've forgotten. I don't know where she's buried now. The church, which then became mosque, where she was, because a lot of those churches that were churches in Constantinople, what are mosques now. And they're very beautiful. They've had minarets added. But the basic church shape was already there, which was the...

Oh, the thing about the dome. I have to tell you this. The dome of the Hyasovia was the first time anyone had built a dome that worked on that scale. They've done little domes. There's a little Aya Sophia. And it's still there in Istanbul. But they hadn't done one so big. I think that's interesting.

There was an earthquake and it fell. And then they built a less... You know how St. Paul's Dome goes quite high up? This is much flatter, but it's still rounded. But the key thing about it is a bunch of Russian envoys came. I can't remember which emperor it was. But anyway, they came to see this amazing church. And they went back and they said it was the pictures that they drew of the architecture

that made the Russians, the Russian emperor at the time, go, we will be Christians too. Oh no, that's an impressive building. That's goes, right? I mean, I don't know if it's just an apocryphal story about the start of the Russian Orthodox Church, but I love the idea that a bit of very good architecture might be enough to make you go,

oh, God loves this faith. I too will follow it. I am signing up. Yeah, because this god lets domes exist. I'll be back with Stella and Theodora after this short break. Why was she made a saint? Because that's an interesting outcome. Given what we know about her is very, very biased

and written by strange men who have swan fixations and all kinds of stuff. A swan fixation and believe that Justinian walked around the palace with his own head under his arm. Yeah, I think that's an unreliable narrator. I think so. Why was she made a saint? Patron saint of swans. Oh shit, not the patron saint of sowing. Oh, or she'd like that.

Yeah, I think so. So on the other side of the Bosphorus, so you're allowed to, it's a little bit like, you know, how prostitutes used to, in London used to be called Subic Geese. Yes. And it was because you couldn't be a sex worker in the city of London, but you were allowed to be one in Suffolk. Yes. So as long as you were over the water. I mean, it still wasn't approved of, but they'd let them be a bit more. Similarly, when Theodora came into power, she built a sanctuary.

for ex-dancers, ex-prostitutes, women of ill-recute. They had to believe in God, though, but they had to be religious. And she called it Metanoia, which means redemption in Greek. And it was on the other side. It was on the other side of the Bosphorus, so the Asian side of what is now Istanbul. And as far as I know, and I don't know much about Orthodox Christianity,

that was the main reason for her becoming a saint. Obviously, to be a saint, you have, these days, you have to have some miracles. But in those days, you just had to be brilliant and a martyr. The bar was much slower. She died young and she looked after women and she was cool. Does that maybe mean she was martyred? Or are they just playing fast and free with the rules?

Not as far as I know. I mean, I think even Procopius would have put that in the book. Yeah, actually, yeah. Yeah, that would have been a big deal, wouldn't it? They wouldn't have left that out? Okay. Okay, what about Justinian? He doesn't really get remembered.

He's not juicy like Nero or Caligia. He really is this plodding nerd. And he also gets blamed for losing the Roman Empire and then it becomes Byzantium and people get pissed off with him. But it was falling apart before him. And the whole world, as they knew it, was changing. You know, they were expanding and they weren't able. Good luck anybody who wants to hold, we've got the whole of North Africa and we've got all of Europe. And now we're taking all of Asia and we'll go and fight.

the Persians. And yet again, some Western arrogance believes that it can go into the mountains of Persia and find the people it needs and take over. And that happened, not some years after she died. So he kind of dies not much beloved. The taxes are getting higher and higher to keep wars going. But he is, so I have a friend who's a, I went to, I went to a, I went to a student who became law professors and high court judges. And I became an actor and theater. person and finally a psychotherapist and writer. Anyway, my high court judge friend and my law professor friend both know about Justinine because of the Codex.

So he is still taught at law school, at least he was when they were. And I'm in my six years. Well, that's something. It's cool, right? It's not nothing. He'd have been happy with that. Yeah, it's not a bad thing. So what's lovely is that they're there.

They're there in the mosaics. They're the same size. They are treated. as if in ones, you walk in, you see them. No one's saying, oh, she doesn't count because she's from the brothel. And he's much more important because his uncle was the emperor. It's just, it's two people. She's the empress.

He's the emperor. And they're ranged alongside each other with their courtiers. And she's got the same amount of courtiers that he has. So this series is called super sluts. Do you think, it's kind of a difficult term to bat around, isn't it? I guess it depends. who's doing the calling? You can be in a state of reclamation about it.

But if a slut is someone who acts promiscuously, although I quite like the urban dictionary definition, which is that a woman who acts like a man, can we? Oh, people thought she acted like a man. I mean, this is a thing that I always think. There we go. People say, oh, Thatcher was just a man in drag

and Thatcher were just behaving like a man. No, she wasn't. She was behaving like a person with power. Even now we only have one paradigm for people in power And it's masculine It's why just Cinder Adirn suffered with it so much We only know one way to be a person in power And it's to be like a bloke

So if being a slut means being like a bloke Yeah, she knew how to do that So should we confidently say Theodara The Empress Theodara super slut Are not interested in swans, thank you very much Not interested in swans And frankly if slut also means enjoying one's own sexuality. I really like to think, particularly given the start she had in her life, I really like to

think that she came to enjoy her own sexuality. I hope so too. Stella, you have been wonderful. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? I have a blog. If you Google Stella Duffy, it's what comes up. But you want my writing one, which is called not writing, but blogging, as opposed to my therapy one. Unless you want therapy, in which case, get in touch for that too. And are you on the social? Are you on the social at all. I am on Instagram and on threads and blue sky. Stella Duffy, there aren't many of us.

Thank you so much. You have been marvellous. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Stella for joining us. And if you like what you heard, as always, don't forget to like and review and follow along because that really does help us. Coming up, we've got episodes on Adam and Eve in all of their sinful ways

and the next instalment of Super Sluts of History. And if you'd like to explore a subject If you just wanted to say hello, then he can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.