A Woman Beyond Time: Byzantine Empress Athenais-Eudokia in Modern Literature

The story of Athenais-Eudokia handed on by Byzantine tradition is a mixture of historical facts and romantic legend. Of Athenian origin and classical education, as the daughter of the pagan philosopher Leontius, she was baptized a Christian and crowned empress, as the wife of the Eastern Roman emperor Theodosius II. Suspected of adultery, she spent the last years of her life in Jerusalem, as an exile, pilgrim and benefactress. She is known for her erudition and religious poetry written in the epic genre and is remembered in the Orthodox calendar, as she was eventually restored to the Church after she had sympathized with Monophysitism. In recent decades, there has been a growing scholarly interest in this intriguing figure, mostly in her literary output. Our paper examines her image in modern literature, namely in historical novels by twentieth- and twenty-first-century female authors and is structured in two parts. The former concerns the novel published in 1952 by Anna Helen (née Mahler) Aszkanazy, a Viennese writer, feminist and political activist, who fled Austria after its annexation into Nazi Germany in 1938 and finally settled in Canada. The latter discusses the works of several Greek writers from the 1970s to the present day. The earliest work of this group is Ioanna Tsatsou’s monograph, published in 1970, amidst the seven-year military dictatorship imposed in Greece (1967–1974), and the latest is Anna Griva’s recent novel eloquently entitled “Exiled Queens” (2021). The themes running through these novels, such as love, marriage and motherhood, patriarchy and hierarchy, female education and creativity, liminality and exile, the search for faith and personal fulfillment, create a timeless image of Athenais-Eudokia that transcends boundaries.