General Notes

Eudocia, original name Athenais (d. 20 Oct 460, Jerusalem), wife of the Eastern Roman emperor Theodosius II.  She was a highly cultured woman who exercised great influence over her husband until her withdrawal from Constantinople.

Athenais, as she was then called, came from Athens, where her father, Leontius, was a pagan philosopher.  Before she and Theodosius were married (in June 421), Athenais was baptized a Christian and changed her name to Eudocia.  A year later she gave birth to a daughter, Licinia Eudoxia, who married (437) the Western emperor Valentinian II (reigned 425-455).  In 438 Eudocia went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  After a quarrel with Theodosius' influential sister Pulcheria, she returned to Jerusalem in 443 and remained there for the rest of her life, directing the rebuilding of that city's fortifications and the construction of several splendid churches.

Eudocia was sympathetic to Monophysitism - a heresy that maintained that Christ's human nature is absorbed in his divine nature - but she died an orthodox Christian.  In addition to religious poetry she wrote a panegyric on the Roman victory over the Perians (422).

[Encylopaedia Britannica, 1995]