Byzantine texts from the sixth to the twelfth century and contemporary Byzantine and later European images relate the story of how, having received an amazingly large apple as a gift, Theodosius II (r.402-450) sent it to his wife Eudocia, who sent it to the magistros Paulinus (her alleged lover), who sent it to Theodosius. The jealous emperor then tested his wife, who unwittingly swore that she had eaten the fruit, thus leading to Paulinus’ execution and Eudocia’s banishment. There is no reason to doubt this story (McClanan 2002; Gardiner 2013), which, as I show, served to diversely contemplate the intersection of gender and power in Byzantium and early modern Europe.
My presentation combines textual references with visual imagery, contextualizing and explaining their different messages by the specifics of the genre of the work and societal expectations. The corresponding Byzantine texts include the semi-official Chronicle of Count Marcellinus, which omits personal details; Euagrius Scholasticus’ Ecclesiastical History, which focuses on Theodosius’ benefactions to Antioch prompted by (the estranged) Eudocia and on her pious residence in Jerusalem; the classicizing Chronicle of Malalas, which presents the affair in political terms; the Patria, which molds the “apple affair” to illustrate the history of Constantinople; and Theophanes’ Chronicle, which interprets that affair in the context of a political power play, when, Theophanes says, Eudocia was “directing the Empire.” Two very fragmented poems by Christopher of Mytilene stressed Eudocia’s physical beauty, reflecting the rising interest in the subject (Ringrose 2013; Bondoux and Grélois 2014), and introduced the image of the “golden apple,” a necessary attribute of bride shows, a new form of interplay of power and gender in Byzantium in the ninth century. And the verse Chronicle of Constantine Manasses focused on emotions through a description of the same expressive nature as his Aristandros and Callithea and other contemporaneous love novels (Jeffreys 2012).
The visual component of my presentation comprises both Byzantine images — such as illustrations from Manasses’ Chronicle — and the earliest available western European visual reflections of the “apple affair” from the seventeenth century, such as a Baroque set of six tapestries, each with a separate scene from the story, from Brussels and the image of Theodosius producing the apple to Eudocia, created by Willem de Passe, the Dutch printmaker residing in England. Examining these visual reflections against the Byzantine literary traditions shows how they followed the later Byzantine poetic interpretations of the “apple affair,” departing from its earlier perceptions as a political event and focusing on its display of gender roles within a family.
My analysis of Byzantine and early modern textual and visual evidence for the “apple affair” reveals interpretations of the entanglement of power and gender as diverse amalgamations of traditional societal conventions (like a woman’s passive role in a marriage: Beaucamp 2010; Lung 2017) and cultural imagery (like that of an apple: Littlewood 1968; Schmitz 2017) with new social realities (Neville 2019) and literary expressions (Rosenqvist 2007).