In person Theodora was small, slender, graceful, and exquisitely beautiful; her complexion was pale, her eyes singularly expressive: the mosaic at Ravenna, in stiff and formal art, gives some evidence of character and beauty. She was accused, as I have said, of barbarous cruelties, of herself applying the torture in her underground private prisons; the stories are contradictory and inconsistent, but one story appears to be historical: “If you do not obey me I swear by the living God that I will have you flayed alive,” she said with gentle grace to her attendants. It is said that her illegitimate son, whom she had disposed of by putting him with his terrified father in Arabia, gained possession of the secret of his birth, and boldly repaired to Constantinople in the belief that her maternal affection would lead her to pardon him for the offence of having been born, and that thereby he would attain to riches and greatness; but the story goes that he was never seen again after he entered the Palace. Possibly the story is of the nature of romance. She dearly longed for a legitimate son, and the faithful united in prayer to that end; but the sole fruit of her marriage was a daughter, and even this girl was said to have been conceived before the wedding. When she was still adolescent she went for a tour in the Levant with a wealthy Tyrian named Ecebolus, who, disgusted by her violent temper or her universal _charity_, to use Gibbon’s sly phrase, deserted her and left her penniless at Alexandria. The men of Egypt appear to have been less erotic than the Greeks, for she remained in dire poverty, working her way back home by way of the shores of the Euxine. In Egypt she had become a Monophysite; and when she reached Constantinople it is said that she sat in a pleasant home outside the Palace and plied her spinning-wheel so virtuously that Justinian fell in love with her and ultimately married her, having first tried her charms. Passing over the obvious difficulty that a girl of the charm and immorality of Procopius’ Theodora need never have gone in poverty while men were men, the wonder naturally arises whether the girl who went away with Ecebolus was the same as she who returned poor and alone and sat so virtuously at her spinning-wheel as to bewitch Justinian. Mistaken identity, or rather loss of identity, must have been commoner in those days than these when the printing-press and rapid postal and telegraphic communication make it harder to lose one’s self. However, granting that there was no confusion of identity, one may believe--if one tries hard enough--that she was befriended by the Monophysites in Egypt, and may have “found religion” at their hands, and, by suffering poverty and oppression with them, had learned to sympathize with the under-world. Though the story may seem to be more suitable for an American picture-show than for sober history, still one must admit that it is not absolutely impossible. When she became great and famous she