Michaela Dirschlmayer: Biblical exempla against women in power

‘Again Herodias raves; again she is troubled; she dances again; and again desires to receive John’s head in a charger’. With these words, which follow Socrates’ and Sozomens portrayals of the events in the first half of the 5th century, John Chrysostom, the bishop of Constantinople, accused the Empress Eudoxia of demanding his head from the emperor. For his argumentation against the imperial court, especially against the Roman empress, he used exempla from the Old Testament. In so doing, his passage offers a prime example of a special form of Christian argumentation against imperial women, which is the topic of my paper: to compare them to bad exempla from the Bible. John invokes Herodias and her intrigue to gain the head of John the Baptist, and compares Eudoxia to Jesebel, an idolater and assassin of hundreds Christian prophets. Other empresses, too, saw their position discredited by drawing comparisons to female figures from the Bible: Ambrose of Milan was probably the first Cleric who used this form of argumentation against an imperial woman of great influence at the western court of Valentinian II, against the Emperors mother Justina. Besides the letters and orations of these two bishops, literary sources like the church histories of the 5th century and the early byzantine chronicles offers some more examples, which will also be taken into account.