The Empress Eudocia

Aelia Eudocia, the learned Athenian-born widow of the Emperor Theodosius II, spent her last years in Jerusalem as a great builder and patroness, and after the Council of Chalcedon (451) she lent her support for a time to the anti-Chalcedonian monks and the usurper Theodosius. According to Cyril of Scythopolis she was at length reconciled to the Council and to the lawful patriarch through St. Euthymius the Great — counseled, in the wider tradition, by Pope Leo and by Symeon the Stylite, who directed her to the old hermit of the Judean desert — and she died in communion with the Church in 460, buried in the basilica of St. Stephen she had built. This file gives Eudocia’s career, her place in the Chalcedonian crisis, and her return as the Life presents it, with the contested chronology flagged.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; father of Palestinian monasticism)

Eudocia: Empress, Exile, and Patroness of Jerusalem

Aelia Eudocia was among the most remarkable women of the fifth century. Born Athenais, the daughter of an Athenian philosopher, she was a pagan of high learning who, on her marriage to the Emperor Theodosius II in 421, was baptized and took the Christian name Eudocia (cf. the chronicle tradition: Chronicon Paschale, s.a.; Holum, Theodosian Empresses, 1982). She was a poet — verse paraphrases of Scripture and other works are attributed to her — and an Augusta of the eastern court, second in influence at Constantinople only to the emperor’s powerful sister, the Augusta Pulcheria, with whom she eventually fell into rivalry. Around 443, after a breach with the court whose causes the sources report variously, Eudocia withdrew to Jerusalem, where she lived out the rest of her life — some seventeen years — as the city’s foremost benefactress (Holum 1982; Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, 1982; cf. Evagrius, HE 1.20–22). [Disputed: the date of Eudocia's definitive settlement in Jerusalem is given as c. 443 by some and c. 444 by others, and the sources differ on whether her first pilgrimage (c. 438) and her later permanent residence are clearly distinguished; the chronicle and ecclesiastical sources are not fully harmonized (Holum 1982; Hunt 1982).]

Eudocia’s building program transformed the holy city and its monastic landscape. She restored and extended the walls of Jerusalem, endowed churches, hospices, and monasteries, and crowned her works with the great basilica of St. Stephen the Protomartyr north of the city, where the protomartyr’s relics were enshrined and where she herself would be buried (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 30, 35; Evagrius, HE 1.22; Hunt 1982). Cyril of Scythopolis, whose interest is in her dealings with Euthymius, records that she built much in the desert as well — including, in the tradition of the Life, a tower and cisterns near Euthymius’s lavra and other structures for the use of the monks (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 30, 35). She was thus, before any question of the council arose, already woven into the life of the Judean desert as its imperial patroness — a fact that gives the story of her later reconciliation through Euthymius its plausibility, for she was a woman who already sought out the desert fathers.

Eudocia and the Anti-Chalcedonian Party

The Council of Chalcedon met in 451, the year after the death of the Emperor Theodosius II, Eudocia’s husband (he died in 450; cf. Holum 1982). When the Definition was published and the Palestinian monks rose against it under the usurping monk Theodosius — seizing the see of Jerusalem in the absence of Patriarch Juvenal and persecuting the Chalcedonians (see Against the Monophysites) — Eudocia, then resident in Jerusalem and bound by ties of patronage and piety to the very monks who led the revolt, took the side of the anti-Chalcedonian party (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 27, 30; Evagrius, HE 2.5; Holum 1982). Her support was significant: an Augusta, even a widowed and semi-retired one, lent the rebellion a measure of legitimacy and protection, and her wealth had endowed the houses from which the resistance drew its strength.

It must be said, in fairness to Eudocia and to the monks she supported, that their cause was not understood by them as heresy but as fidelity. The Palestinian opposition to Chalcedon sprang from loyalty to Cyril of Alexandria and from the fear that the council’s language of “two natures” reopened the door to Nestorius, whom Ephesus (431) had condemned (Perrone, La chiesa di Palestina, 1980; Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 1972). Eudocia, a devout woman attached to the monks of the holy places, shared their alarm. Her alignment with the rebel party was therefore the position of a pious patroness following the lead of the holy men she revered — not the calculated heresy that a polemical reading might suppose. This is the both-sides care the controversy demands: the non-Chalcedonian concern was a real and reverent one, and Eudocia’s first allegiance to it was of a piece with her devotion.

The Return to Orthodoxy: Cyril’s Account

Cyril of Scythopolis makes Eudocia’s reconciliation to Chalcedon one of the showpieces of Euthymius’s authority. As the Life tells it, the bloodshed and disorder of the revolt — and, in Cyril’s narrative, a series of personal afflictions Eudocia suffered — led the empress to doubt the course she had taken and to seek counsel. She did not at first turn to Euthymius. According to Cyril she sent to the great pillar-saint of Syria, Symeon the Stylite, whose fame as a wonder-worker and oracle drew petitioners from across the empire; and Symeon, far from confirming her in the anti-Chalcedonian cause, directed her away from Theodosius and his party and told her to seek out the hermit Euthymius in the Judean desert, whose counsel she should follow (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 30). The wider tradition adds the counsel of Pope Leo of Rome, the author of the Tome received at Chalcedon, among the authorities who pressed the empress back toward the council (cf. the chronicle and ecclesiastical tradition; Honigmann, “Juvenal of Jerusalem,” DOP 5, 1950; Hunt 1982). [Disputed: Cyril's *Life of Euthymius* §30 names Symeon the Stylite as the one who redirected Eudocia to Euthymius; the role of Pope Leo's correspondence in her return is attested in the wider tradition rather than spelled out by Cyril, and the relative weight of these counsels cannot be fixed from a single coherent record.]

Eudocia, the Life continues, sent to Euthymius, who — true to his love of solitude and his refusal to be made a courtier — would not come to her, but received her message and instructed her through an intermediary (in Cyril’s narrative, by the agency of the monk and former Saracen bishop and other go-betweens) to abandon the communion of the usurper Theodosius, to return to the communion of Juvenal and the council, and to embrace the faith of Chalcedon (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 30). She obeyed. Cyril presents her reconciliation as complete and public: she renounced the anti-Chalcedonian party, returned to the communion of the orthodox patriarch, drew many with her by her example, and spent her remaining years in works of piety and in devotion to the council she had once opposed (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 30, 35). Cyril, who is concerned to magnify Euthymius, makes the old hermit the decisive human cause of the empress’s return — the still center of the desert proving stronger than the rebellion that an Augusta had backed.

What the Life Claims and What the Record Confirms

A careful account must distinguish Cyril’s narrative from the independent evidence, for the chronology of Eudocia’s return is one of the genuinely contested points of the period. The bare facts are reasonably secure: Eudocia lived in Jerusalem, supported the anti-Chalcedonian monks after 451, and died at length in communion with the Chalcedonian Church. What is debated is the timing and the mechanism of her change.

[Disputed: the chronology of Eudocia's return to Chalcedonian orthodoxy. Cyril, *Life of Euthymius* §30, attributes the reconciliation to Euthymius's counsel (himself prompted by Symeon the Stylite) and places it within the saint's biography without precise dates. The independent record — imperial correspondence and the ecclesiastical historians — suggests a more gradual and politically conditioned return, influenced by the changing imperial situation, the restoration of Juvenal in 453, the pressure of the orthodox court, and possibly the *Tome* and letters of Pope Leo; some accounts place her formal return to communion in the mid-450s. Scholars accordingly read Cyril's account as a hagiographically focused version of a more complex process: J. F. Haldon and especially E. Honigmann, "Juvenal of Jerusalem," *DOP* 5 (1950), reconstruct the political dimension; K. G. Holum, *Theodosian Empresses* (1982), and E. D. Hunt, *Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire* (1982), weigh Eudocia's piety against the court politics; and J. Binns, *Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ* (1994), treats Cyril's §30 as essentially trustworthy in substance — Euthymius's authority was a real factor — while cautioning that Cyril compresses and personalizes a process that also had its imperial and conciliar causes. The honest position is that the *Life* preserves a true tradition of Euthymius's influence on the empress, set within a sequence whose exact dates and balance of causes the sources do not let us fix.]

The methodological discipline of this collection applies with full force here (METHODOLOGY §§3, 4): Cyril of Scythopolis is an exceptionally reliable hagiographer — near-contemporary, internal to Euthymius’s communities, and checkable against the councils and chronicles — but he is also a focused and partisan witness who organizes events around his saint (Flusin, Miracle et histoire, 1983; Binns 1994; see Cyril of Scythopolis’s Life of Euthymius). That Euthymius’s authority weighed with Eudocia is the Life‘s claim and is broadly credited by historians; that it was the sole or sufficient cause, in the neat sequence Cyril gives, is a hagiographer’s simplification of a process that also had its imperial and conciliar dimensions. Both things are true together: the desert father’s counsel was a real force in the empress’s return, and the return belonged also to the larger political and ecclesiastical settlement of the Chalcedonian crisis in Palestine.

Eudocia’s Last Years and Death

Whatever its exact date, Eudocia’s reconciliation was, in the unanimous tradition, sincere and final. She passed her last years in Jerusalem in works of charity and building, in communion with the orthodox Church, and — in Cyril’s narrative — in continued devotion to Euthymius and the desert he led. She is said to have completed her great foundations, above all the basilica of St. Stephen, and to have continued her benefactions to the monasteries of the Judean wilderness (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 35; Evagrius, HE 1.22; Hunt 1982).

Eudocia died in 460, reconciled to the Church and in the communion of Chalcedon (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 35; the chronicle tradition; Holum 1982). [Disputed: the year of Eudocia's death is most commonly given as 460, following the chronicle tradition and the standard scholarship (Holum 1982); a few sources give 459 or 461, the variation arising from the indiction reckoning, but 460 is the received date.] She was buried, as she had wished, in the basilica of St. Stephen the Protomartyr that she had built outside the northern wall of Jerusalem — a fitting resting-place for an empress who had given her last years to the holy city (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 35; Hunt 1982). Cyril notes that her death came not long before Euthymius’s own counsel and intercession had drawn her fully into the desert’s orbit, and the Life presents her end as that of a daughter reconciled to the Church through the old hermit’s word.

The Meaning of the Episode

The story of Eudocia and Euthymius is, in the Orthodox memory, a parable of the relation between the desert and the throne in the Christian empire. An Augusta — learned, powerful, devout, and for a season ranged on the side of the rebellion against the Fourth Ecumenical Council — is brought back to the faith of the council not by imperial command or conciliar argument but by the counsel of a hermit who would not so much as leave his cell to meet her. The episode dramatizes a conviction deep in the monastic tradition: that the holy man, precisely because he wants nothing from the powerful and will not flatter them, can speak to them with an authority the court cannot command (cf. Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” JRS 61, 1971; Binns 1994; on the desert’s standing, Monasticism).

It also belongs to the larger story of how Palestine was reconciled to Chalcedon. Eudocia’s return, like the reclaiming of monks who had followed Theodosius and the eventual loyalty of the next generation under Sabas and Theodosius the Cenobiarch, was part of the turning by which the Judean desert — which in 451 had nearly all gone over to the revolt — became within two generations the firmest stronghold of the council in the East (Cyril, Life of Euthymius 27, 30; Life of Sabas; Binns 1994; Perrone 1980; see Against the Monophysites and Sabas and the Next Generation). In that turning the figure of Euthymius stands at the head, and the conversion of the Empress Eudocia is its most famous single instance — a hagiographically vivid sign, whatever its exact chronology, of the authority the desert father wielded over the conscience of his age (see The Palestinian Monastic Trinity and Feast and Cult).

References

Cyril of Scythopolis. Life of Euthymius. In R. M. Price, trans., Cyril of Scythopolis: The Lives of the Monks of Palestine (Cistercian Studies 114; Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991), cited by the section numbering of E. Schwartz, Kyrillos von Skythopolis (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1939). (Eudocia’s support of the anti-Chalcedonian party at §§27, 30; Symeon the Stylite’s redirection of the empress to Euthymius and her reconciliation at §30; her buildings, last years, death, and burial in St. Stephen’s at §35.)
The Council of Chalcedon (451), Definition of the Faith. In Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (1990), vol. 1; and Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, trans., The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (Translated Texts for Historians 45; Liverpool, 2005). (The two-natures Definition Eudocia first opposed and later embraced.)
Evagrius Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History 1.20–22; 2.5. Trans. Michael Whitby (Translated Texts for Historians 33; Liverpool, 2000). (Eudocia’s career in Jerusalem, her buildings, and the revolt of Theodosius.)
Holum, Kenneth G. Theodosian Empresses: Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. (Eudocia’s life, the breach with the court, the date of her settlement in Jerusalem, and the chronology of her death.)
Hunt, E. D. Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, AD 312–460. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. (Eudocia as patroness of Jerusalem; her buildings, including the basilica of St. Stephen; her piety amid the Chalcedonian crisis.)
Honigmann, Ernest. “Juvenal of Jerusalem.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 5 (1950): 209–279. (The political and conciliar dimension of the Palestinian crisis and of Eudocia’s return; the restoration of Juvenal in 453.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (Cyril’s §30 weighed for substance and chronology; Euthymius’s influence on Eudocia as a real but compressed factor.)
Perrone, Lorenzo. La chiesa di Palestina e le controversie cristologiche. Brescia: Paideia, 1980. (The Palestinian church and the Christological controversies; the monks’ and Eudocia’s fidelity to Cyril.)
Flusin, Bernard. Miracle et histoire dans l’œuvre de Cyrille de Scythopolis. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1983. (Cyril’s method, reliability, and tendency to organize events around his saint.)
Frend, W. H. C. The Rise of the Monophysite Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. (The anti-Chalcedonian movement Eudocia first supported, on its own terms.)
Brown, Peter. “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity.” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 80–101. (The authority of the holy man over the powerful, the social meaning of the Eudocia episode.)