This new Rome on the Bosporus had the great advantage of having been built from scratch. Old Rome had to undergo considerable urban renewal to shoehorn onto its central hills ostentatious new dwellings for its rulers, most notably the Golden House of Nero. But it was always crowded, and even the greatest houses were only a reflection of senators’ spectacular rural villas. They built their best properties in Campania and down around the Bay of Naples, with others—including some astonishing displays of wealth—in Sicily and even Africa. Rome’s wealth and power stemmed from those squires and gentlemen, short on talent but awash in abundance. What ability there was in the later empire went to the army and the court. Rome was very, very rich but could not be called a city with a future.
Constantinople
Constantinople, on the other hand, was all power and future. It was built for its rulers, and its rulers were men of that city: government officials, lawyers, bankers, careerists. Some heirs of great fortunes moved to town to pursue power, arriving as refugees from other cities and political events, both western and eastern. One sprig of the ancient Anicii of Rome, Olybrius, had ruled as emperor briefly in the west in 472 after Anthemius, with nominal support from Constantinople. He married Placidia, daughter of the emperor Valentinian III. Olybrius had a family tree that crossed and recrossed the house of Theodosius at several points. A detour through empire was a step down for him in some ways, so perhaps unsurprisingly it all came to naught. Ricimer and Odoacer were at that point the future in the west. In the next years, Olybrius’s beautiful and extraordinarily wealthy daughter Anicia Juliana emerged in Constantinople as a woman to be reckoned with bulgaria private tours.
Juliana and her mother had never gone west during Olybrius’s brief reign, when she was only about ten years old, or after, and so were entirely creatures of Constantinople. Juliana’s beauty, ancestry, and connections were all to be envied. At one point the emperor Zeno offered her hand in marriage to Theoderic, accompanied with the promise of a substantial dowry, in order to persuade him to remain loyal to the eastern throne. She escaped that marriage but accepted another man of even greater promise, Areobindus.
Areobindus’s family was not old, but of the first rank. His grandfather, Flavius Areobindus, had been consul in 434 and general in chief in Roman service from 434 to 449 and held the ultimate rank of patrician. His father, Dagalaiphus, was a consul in 467 and had married the daughter and granddaughter of other consuls, Aspar of 434 and Ardabur of 447. This would have been an absolutely stellar lineage in terms of power, except that the names were all of the wrong sort, stubbornly barbarian in flavor. Areobindus managed to smooth away these rough genealogical edges, however, by marrying Juliana, the premier heiress in Constantinople.
Areobindus and Juliana
Areobindus and Juliana begat between them a baby consul of their own, Flavius Anicius Olybrius, whose celebration they funded in 491. He went on to marry Eirene, the daughter of the emperor Anastasius. Areobindus took a modest part in military affairs, appearing as a general on the Persian front in 503-504, but soon ascended to the more comfortable dignity of consul in 506. We happen to have a copy of the ivory diptych—a two-leaved, hinged tablet—that memorialized his year. These exquisitely carved party favors were as elaborate as any later scrimshaw and typically showed the honoree in all his dignity. A foot or more high—the size that would now look good on a mantelpiece or coffee table—they were handed out to a few well-chosen recipients for each consular year and represented the acme of tasteful self-advertisement From Augustus to Theodosius.
In a capital where the monarch was an emperor without an heir, no family was better positioned to face the future. But Areobindus and Juli¬ana’s son was a cipher and not taken seriously, so it fell to Areobindus him-self to carry the family’s hopes. Anastasius was too intelligent and effective an emperor to be popular, so when the monophysitism of his puppet patriarch Timothy outraged the people in 512, he saw his own statues thrown down in the streets and a flurry of insurrection. Courtiers promoting church orthodoxy, or at least their own futures, offered Areobindus the throne, but Areobindus fled in fear and the streets calmed down as Anastasius prevailed. We do not hear of Areobindus again, though Juliana remained rich and prominent, corresponding with Pope Hormisdas, to praise his loyalty to Chalcedon, around the time of the reunion of the churches in 519.
