Saint or devil incarnate?

Rare is the mother, I suspect, who would like to be known to posterity only by what her son has written about her—as is the case for Augustine’s mother, Monica. It would be worse for someone to be known predominantly from the writings of a man who hated her, as is the case for Theodora. Although today Theodora is a saint in the Syrian Ortho­dox Church, to the historian Proco­pius, her contemporary, she was the devil incarnate. David Potter, historian at the University of Michigan, takes up the challenge of understanding Theodora by painstakingly reconstructing the class, cultural, theological, and social setting in which she lived.

Potter contends that some of Pro­co­pius’s spiteful comments about her de­rive from sixth-century gossip. Other stories Potter interprets as “historical evidence light.” Procopius’s tales about Theodora may not be literally true, but they “reveal what people thought her capable of.” Procopius “tends not to make things up from scratch, . . . but [he] embellishes.”

Potter words his evaluations carefully, on occasion almost evasively, as when he writes that some of the allegations about Theodora’s behavior are “not inherently implausible” but must be taken “with a large grain of salt.” Yet Potter pronounces some of Proco­pius’s other stories about Theodora “thoroughly believable.”