Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore by Stella Duffy

Although historical figures are often ripe for fiction, doing justice to them often poses a challenge for many an author, thereby making historical fiction somewhat of a hit-or-miss genre. With Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore, British author Stella Duffy sets out to chronicle the life of Theodora, the sixth-century actress and prostitute turned Byzantine Empress, and somehow manages to downgrade a remarkable life story into a cheap, plodding Harlequin novel.

This unabashedly bawdy novel begins with Theodora’s childhood as a destitute young actress and dancer, and chronicles the procession of her career to prostitute to governor’s concubine to, eventually, the wife of Emperor Justinian I. During this time she makes a name for herself as the biggest star of the Hippodrome of Constantinople, travels to Africa, has a spiritual awakening in the middle of the desert, and undertakes secret missions for the Orthodox Church. At times, throughout her ordeals, she must work her way through the various political and religious disputes throughout the Roman Empire, such as the rise of Chalcedonian Christianity, and the clashing of the two political parties: the Greens and the Blues.

Contrary to what the title would have readers believe, we are only granted a look inside her life as an actress and as a whore; not so much as an empress, as the novel comes to a screeching halt with her marriage to Justinian. The majority of the book—which is everything leading up to her marriage—is weighed down by a lack of direction and character development. In portraying several historical figures as one-dimensional cartoons whose actions are purely driven by exposition, Duffy has reduced Theodora—who was perhaps the most influential and powerful woman in the history of the Roman Empire—into a lifeless, generic tart.

Duffy’s writing style is long-winded and digressive, as she makes excessive use of run-on sentences as a means of prose construction. That, coupled with the fact that she seems to be making it up as she goes along, turns the novel into a rambling sequence of events with a contrived, tacked-on ending that leaves loose threads untied, and questions about Theodora’s life unanswered.

In short, this pulpy romance novel does not do justice to the intriguing historical figure that is Theodora. Those interested in her story may be better off seeking nonfiction works such as The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by 18^th-century British historian Edward Gibbon, or the more recent Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium by King’s College London professor Judith Herrin.