Theophano’s sons, Basil and Constantine, now became joint Emperors, and they recalled their mother from Armenia to the palace. One would be inclined to suspect that the poisoning did not come to her as a surprise, but the chroniclers do not impeach her, and we need not strive to lengthen the list of her misdeeds. She makes no further mark, for good or evil, in the chronicles. Possibly the terrible experiences of her early womanhood and seven years of sober reflection in her monastic prison had destroyed her passion for intrigue. In any case, the very vigorous administration of her elder son left her little room to interfere, and she seems to have been content with the quiet enjoyment of the position of a dowager Empress. According to George the Monk (or his continuer) she lived for fifty years after the death of her first husband--that is to say, after 963--and so she must have passed her seventieth year at the time of her death. There seems to have been no rival Empress during that time. We may trust that the character of Theophano sobered and matured, and that the forty years’ silence means that she led a regular and unambitious life. However that may be, the personality she shows when she is under the full limelight on the imperial stage is one of unrestrained passion and greed. She was a tavern-keeper’s daughter in the purple, an appalling instance of the lowest type of Greek beauty. CHAPTER X TWO IMPERIAL SISTERS The long and prosperous reign of Basil II. (976–1025) has no further interest for us, since we find in the chronicles no reference to a wife of that hardy and brilliant soldier. His younger brother, Constantine, was more like their mother: a man of passion and greed, though with no higher ambition than that of an imperial enjoyment of wine and women, and in that enjoyment he was quite willing to await the natural death of his more sober and more distinguished brother. Although he approached his seventieth year when the undivided rule fell to him, his ways were still those of an aged and jaded, and not very refined, Sybarite, and the three years of his reign interest us only because they show us the earlier environment of his two daughters, Zoe and Theodora, who are the next to occupy--alternately or simultaneously, according to the course of the romance--the gynæceum, or women’s quarters, of the palace.