with the apple he had given her. "I ate it," said Eudokia. Then of course, he produced it, and there was a scene.[1] As a result of the suspicion about Eudokia and Paulinus[2] she was banished, went to Jerusalem in 442, and stayed there eighteen years, till her death in 460. At Jerusalem whatever old remnants of the Pagan philosopher there were faded away. Eudokia became a kind of nun, devoting her old age to meditation on the Passion of Christ at the place hallowed by its memory. She fell in with the Monophysites. Perhaps the fact that her old enemy Pulcheria and Pulcheria's husband Marcian had so much to do with Chalcedon made her more ready to believe that that synod had betrayed the faith of Ephesus, held during her own reign. With her meditation she mixed Monophysism, and became, as Dowager Empress, a great power to that party. There are few more romantic episodes in Byzantine history than the story of the little Pagan Athenian, after her short burst of splendour as Empress, spending her old age in long years of mortification and prayer at Jerusalem, the head of a turbulent body of heretical monks.[3]
The monks then, with their patroness, drove out Juvenal and set up the Egyptian Theodosius as anti-Patriarch. Other Chalcedonian bishops were expelled and a Monophysite hierarchy intruded in most sees. Nearly all Palestine was Monophysite. Juvenal fled to Constantinople and implored the Emperor's help. Marcian published an edict against the heretics in Palestine and sent soldiers to enforce it. The monks had already shed blood in their rebellion. Now it was put down severely. After some fighting, order was restored. Theodosius was brought a prisoner to Constantinople, where he died in captivity; the Monophysite intruded bishops fled, mostly to Egypt.[4] Juvenal and the Catholic hierarchy were restored; for a time there was quiet. At the end of her life Eudokia was converted to Chalcedon by the Catholic
- ↑ This odd story is told by John Malalas: Chronographia, xiv.; ed. Dindorf (Corp. Script. Hist. Byz., Bonn, 1831), pp. 356-357.
- ↑ She always swore that she was perfectly innocent; very likely she was. The mighty Pulcheria was jealous of her influence, and wanted to get rid of her.
- ↑ Eudokia's story is told by C. Diehl: Figures Byzantines, i. (Paris, 1906), pp. 25-49.
- ↑ One of the chief of these was Peter of Iberia, who had been made Bishop of Gaza.
