We do not know how the son of a highly cultivated Emperor made the acquaintance of a tavern-girl. It is clear that she was a young woman of singular beauty--“a kind of miracle of nature,” Zonaras says--and most graceful figure, and I would conjecture that some courtier among the disreputable followers of the young prince brought her to his notice. There may have been a “beauty show,” and the publican may have boldly pressed the merits of his daughter, but some attention was generally paid to birth in these matrimonial contests. A tavern-woman was still held to be equivalent to a prostitute or an actress. It is useless to speculate. Constantine idly acquiesced, and the beautiful Theophano passed from the sordid scenes of a little wine-shop to the wonderful splendours of the palace. Courtly writers afterwards discovered that there was royal blood in her veins. The only serious clue we have to her origin is that she came from Laconia, and we may regard her as a common type of Greek. It is calculated that the marriage took place about the end of the year 956. For three years no events occur that enable us to penetrate the secluded life of the palace, though the subsequent events suggest that Helena and her daughters were disdainful of the vulgar beauty and were met with a virulent hatred. At the end of three years (August or September 959) Constantine died, and the ampler chronicles tell a circumstantial story of his being poisoned by his son Romanus and Theophano. A poison was, it is said, put in his physic. Either by accident or from suspicion he spilled most of the contents of the cup and escaped death. But his health was gravely impaired; he went to visit the monasteries of Mount Olympus, fell dangerously ill there--the chronicler says that _perhaps_ more poison was administered--and was brought back to the palace to die. We must regard this charge of poisoning as probably a construction put on his illness by the officials or people of Constantinople. It may or may not be true. We have no right to conclude at once that it is an historical fact, but it seems to me that some recent historians have just as little right to reject it as “improbable.” Romanus was a licentious and unscrupulous man, carrying his father’s amiable weakness for wine to the pitch of debauch and ruining his constitution by vice. Theophano, we shall see, was capable of murder, and her ambition would most certainly lead her to wish the older imperial family out of the way. On the other hand, there would be a prejudice against her in Constantinople, and in the mind of later writers, and we must leave this first charge against her what it is in the chronicles--a suspicion.