Ernest Marcos Hierro: The Contest of beauty and sainthood: The empress bride as the mirror of perfection

A handful of mostly hagiographical texts from the 9th and 10th centuries (The Lives of St. Philaretos the Merciful, of Empress Theodora, of Empress Theophano and of St. Irene Abbess of Chrysobalanton) provide apparently evidence of the practice of a bride-show at the Byzantine court to choose a new empress. While W. T. Treadgold (1979) affirmed its historicity based on these reports, L. Rydén (1985) denied it and dismissed them as literary fiction. M. Vinson (1999 and 2004) analysed them with good results as rhetorical pieces with narrative content in the context of the traditional logos basilikós in praise of an empress. The aim of my contribution is to resume my previous research on the subject (2001) and to focus on the way in which these texts draw the portrait of the ideal empress bride as the mirror of all human perfections. In accordance with a general literary development in Byzantine medieval age, her virtues are not merely rhetorically praised using traditional topoi such as in the case of Gregory of Nyssa but shown off through narratives in which they provide success to their owner. I intend to prove that, as in the previous cases of the Book of Esther and the story of Emperor Theodosius II and Aelia Eudocia in the Chronicle of John Malalas, the narrative of the bride-show provides an explanation for a marriage between unequal partners because of their different religious beliefs thus portraying the orthodox empress as superior to her heretical and/or unsuitable husband.