560 Seated in Cyrene’s theatre beside her ‘patron’ – Hecebolus, governor of Libya Pentapolis – Theodora was hot, bored, and uncomfortable. The parasol held above her head by a slave was scant protection against the fierce African sun, as was the silk cushion against the hardness of the marble tier. And the play – Antony and Cleopatra, penned by an influential friend of Hecebolus with literary ambitions, which the governor was paying to produce, was unbelievably tedious, portraying Antony (who in real life, as everyone knew, was a loveable hedonist) as a stage villain of the deepest dye, who must be brought low for the crime of heaping disgrace upon the name of Rome. As Cleopatra opened the basket containing the asp (actually a harmless tree-snake) preparatory to holding it to her bosom, the creature escaped. In the ensuing hiatus, while stage menials rushed around the orchestra in a futile search for the offending reptile, Theodora let her mind drift back fifteen years to when she was a child of five, the daughter of Akakios, a bear-keeper in Constantinople’s Hippodrome .
