“Smitten by Kassia’s beauty, the young emperor approached her and said: ‘Through a woman [came forth] the baser [things]’, referring to the sin and suffering coming as a result of Eve’s transgression. Kassia promptly responded by saying: ‘And through a woman [came forth] the better [things]’, referring to the hope of salvation resulting from the Incarnation of Christ through the Theotokos. According to tradition, the dialogue was:
“-Εκ γυναικός τα χείρω.” (Ek gynaikós tá cheírō)”-Kαι εκ γυναικός τα κρείττω.” (Kaí ek gynaikós tá kreíttō)
His pride wounded by Kassia’s terse rebuttal, Theophilos rejected her and chose Theodora as his wife.”
The neg has NEVER been a good strategy.
An ancient neg is but a paltry thing.
I don’t understand it at all! If your thought process is, “Hey! If I lower this woman’s self-esteem enough, she’ll sleep with me!” then maybe you should take a long hard think about what that says about YOU rather than what it says about women. Negging, man.
Well, thanks a bunch! Just discovered the so-called “seduction community” *and* today’s reason to despair.
Welcome to the club. What has been learned cannot be unlearned. But this is why we have the Toast.
Your name gave me a giggle, btw 😉
I am blithely ignorant of the “seduction community” and would prefer to remain that way, particularly if it’s as yucky as the name makes it sound.
The best way I ever saw it described was “Pickup artists and garbage men should switch names.”
This is a beautiful thing.
*takes a drag on imaginary cigarette with all the world-weary cynicism of a fifty something butch alone at the dyke bar* Men.
Bet Kassia wore her sleeves rolled up and leaned suggestively on things a lot.
But did she tuck cigarette packs into the rolled-up sleeve?
I’m so old also heterosexual female who can’t give a shit anymore, I love your picture in words. Men…
Say what you will about negging, but ‘Through a woman [came forth] the baser [things]’ is some next-level stuff.
its really the Crown Jewel of the negging art form.
How about “Through a woman COMES FORTH ALL PEOPLE ON THE EARTH. Can men do that? No, you can’t. Fuck off and go count up everything you cannot do.”
(Obligatory reminder that not everyone who gets pregnant/could get pregnant is a women and yes, some men can/do get pregnant)
That was his pick-up line? Has he ever met a woman? He salted his own game.
Of course the ego of a dude who opens with “Hey you, women suck. Marry me?” can’t handle a response that isn’t total acquiescence.
Has anybody here ever read the Book of Ceremonies? It’s great!
Pseudo-Kodinas is also incredibly worth getting your hands on. It’s way later than the BoC (which is around 10th c IIRC), from around the time of the Palaiologon Restoration. That the English edition was done by an old professor of mine who is totally rad is also a point in favour of recommending it.
I love the Byzantine Imperial Court so much. All the ritual has such a Nero fiddling while Rome burned vibe.
My favorite part of Byzantine protocol is the rampant title inflation. Look what happened to poor “sebastos:”
Sebastos (σεβαστός) – “August One.” This title is the literal Greek translation of the Latin term Augustus or Augoustos, was sometimes used by the emperors. As a separate title it appeared in the latter half of the 11th century, and was extensively awarded by Alexios I Komnenos to his brothers and relations. […] However, the parallel processes of proliferation and devaluation of titles during the 12th century resulted in the creation of a bewildering array of often ridiculously large variations, by using the prefixes pan (“all”), hyper (“above”), prōto (“first”): examples include pansebastos, panhypersebastos, or hyperprōtopansebastohypertatos.
Oh my God yes. The best known variation on sebastos is probably sebastokrator (a portmanteau of sebastos and autokrator). Caesar also suffered greatly at the hands of title inflation, in that it became less and less high ranking.
I hear that Caesar is the new B.A.
THAT’S WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS!
Hyperprotopansebastohypertatos sounds like what would happen if toastie ChloeKEvil’s dog Charlie Potato Hashbrowns had too much energy.
I wish I had more thumbs-up to give this comment!
Sounds like Kassia made a wise choice there. Also wondering if that’s not also the reason I’m not married. Viper tongue.
She’s giving us the okay sign. She’s doing allllright.
Yeah, I read the hands as “I’m OK, the Emperor of Byzantium can go roll his own scroll, IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Yeeesssssss!!!!! I’m so doing this the next time I burn someone.
Poor Theodora
She got her own back for a while after he died and she took regency and upended his policies, but eventually, more men ruined her life, including her own brother and son. Siiiiiiiiiiiigh. Men.
Yesss, reminds me of Spartan women keeping sons/husbands/etc in line with literally laconic one-liners, e.g. *gives man going off to war his shield* Ἢ τὰν ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς (Ḕ tā̀n ḕ epì tâs – “either this or on this” i.e. come back with your shield (not dropping it to run away) or on it”).
And if you’ll forgive the nit-picking, I think in the original Greek spelling (which admittedly seems to have had as limited an amount to do with Byzantine pronunciation as English spelling does to modern English pronunciation on either side of the Atlantic) it’s:
– Ἐκ γυναικὸς τὰ χείρω (Ek gunaikòs tà kheírō)
– Καὶ ἐκ γυναικὸς τὰ κρείττω (Kaì ek gunaikòs tà kreíttō)
Either way, I did a happy little dance to see Greek on the Toast 🙂
“with your shield or on it” is what I say to my husband every time he leaves the house for a MTG tournament
with your black lotus, or on it
It is also what my then-boyfriend said to me when I went to defend my dissertation in classics.
Readers, I married him.
yess always mind your acutes and graves 🙂
<3 how “actually my gender contributes to goodness in the world” is a TERSE REBUTTAL.
Wait, did she even realize this was a proposal of marriage? Because it’s a fairly logical gendered extension of Paul’s “as through man came death, so also through man came the resurrection of the dead.”
I mean, maybe the Greek has some implications that I’m missing, or it was all in his body language, but this seems like a super-vague way to ask somebody to join with you in holy matrimony. So really, this looks like “dude makes statement (which he somehow thinks implies marriage), woman rejects his logic, dude gets pissy that she doesn’t want to marry him, has never actually asked her to marry him.”
Apparently she was a participant of a “bride show.”
So everyone there was kinda up for grabs.
Ah. So any conversation he had with a woman would be read as a proposal, then.
Why would he have talked to her otherwise. Really.
I’m picturing Emperor Kuzco at the beginning of Emperor’s New Groove now
https://49.media.tumblr.com/c698a2f10120e351450d9…
THIS, though. <3
For added context, he was sixteen and at a bride-show his mother had arranged. So I think maybe all talk was considered to be potential proposal material? But the whole thing must have been just grievously awkward, I can scarcely imagine.
From Patricia Storace, Dinner With Persephone:
[I get a phonecall from a male Greek friend] who wants to be sure I go to church tonight. I had planned to go to different churches on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, since every Holy Week service has a different character and drama, and I grumblingly ask him whether that isn’t enough. “No, no, no,” he says, “tonight is the night all intelligent women repent for the sin of their intelligence. So you must be there.” I tell him I am flattered he thinks I should participate, and ask him to explain. “Tonight, along with the hymn to Christ the bridegroom, they will sing the great hymn written by a woman named Kassiani. The story is that when the ninth-century Byzantine emperor Theophilius held a gathering of eligible women to choose a wife, he approached Kassiani with a golden apple, the symbol presented to the chosen bride. He offered her the apple, and said with inimitable tactlessness, one of the worst pickup lines in history, something like ‘Good evening, from women flowed corruption and our downfall.’ Kassiani, understanding the allusion to Eve, wittily responded with a reference to the Panagia [Virgin], ‘And from woman welled up the highest excellence, our salvation.’ This was too clever by half for Theophilus, who took his apple elsewhere. Kassiani retreated to a convent, where she wrote a hymn of lamentation in the voice of Mary Magdalene. ‘Lord, she who fell into many sins has recognized your Godhead and has joined the myrrh-bearing women…,’ he chants. “So she repents and joins the women who perfume with their intelligence the altar of male supremacy over them.
“Now I can hear that you want to ask if the men never repent of their own intelligence. But the rest of the story, which you won’t hear in church, raises the question of whether men have any intelligence to repent. Because as in all cultures where men’s sense of power and divinity rests on the theologically sanctified intellectual, moral, and political degradation of women, Theophilus’s descendants ultimately had to drink from the river he had poisoned. The woman Theophilus chose instead of the brilliant Kassiani helped sponsor what is considered one of the great political missteps of the Byzantines, which eventually contributed to the destruction of the empire. After Theophilus’s death, his wife Theodora took power along with an uncle, brother, and adviser. She was an advocate of the ruthless persecution of a sect of Christians she and her party considered heretical, who were concentrated on the easternmost borders of the empire. An army was sent east, where this colony was attacked; Christian literally crucified Christian. But the ones who escaped joined forces with the Saracen Arabs, and the process of undermining the eastern border began, a process which eventually culminated in the onslaught of the Turks and the fall of Constantinople. So go hear the hymn, and lament your sins, remembering that Didymus the Blind, an early Christian teacher from Alexandria, said that women must never be allowed to write books on their own authority without male supervison.”
I loved Dinner with Persephone!
Who knew they had mics to drop in Byzantium?
Being a Greek Orthodox Christian myself, this is awesome to see on here! There are a lot of bad-ass lady saints, including my own namesake St. Kalliope the Martyr.
Such a weird mix of theology and childish negging. “Hey girl, your gender is responsible for the evils of the world.”
>>weird mix of theology and childish negging.
>>typical example of fundamentalist theology.
Fix’d.
I think in this case, the non-proposal worked out well for both of them. Sometimes a little frank conversation right at the beginning of a relationship can save you a lot of heartache later on.
Exactly: don’t try to make a good impression, make an accurate one.
According to legend Saint Olga of Kiev had a slightly more subtle approach: Trick the Byzantine emperor into adopting you as his god-daughter, then point out this makes marriage impossible.
(Sadly this probably isn’t true, as he was already married – in fact, she took his wife’s name as her baptismal name.)
BURN!
Nothing quite like a theologically sound clapback! Totally going to be my future daughter’s patron saint!
Et tu, Brute?
Perhaps Theophilus was not proposing, but making an early argument for gay marriage?!