126. His beauty, we are told, was that of Achilles or Nireus.**126 But whereas, in the case of these heroes, the poet’s language, having in imagination endowed them with a body compounded of all manner of beauties, barely sufficed to their description, with Constantine it was different, for Nature, having formed him in reality, and brought him to perfection, with the fine skill of the sculptor shaped him and made him beautiful, surpassing with her own peculiar art the imaginative effort of the poet. And when she had made each of his limbs proportioned to the rest of his body, his head and the parts that go with it, his hands and the parts that go with them, his thighs and his feet, she shed over each of them severally the colour that befitted them.
His head she made ruddy as the sun, but all his breast, and his lower parts down to his feet, together with their corresponding back parts, she co1oured the purest white all over, with exquisite accuracy. When he was in his prime, before his limbs lost their virility, anyone who cared to look at him closely would surely have likened his head to the sun in its glory, so radiant was it, and his hair to the rays of the sun, while in the rest of his body he would have seen the purest and most translucent crystal. His personal characteristics, too, contributed to the general harmony of the man, his refined speech, his charming conversation, and a singularly attractive smile which exercised an immediate fascination over those who saw him.
Concerning the Emperor’s Illness
127. Such was the beauty with which the emperor was endowed when he ascended the throne, but a year had not gone by before Nature, in her efforts to glorify him, seemed to falter before such wonder and delight: it was as if she gave up the task in exhaustion, and then destroyed his strength and ruined his manhood.
At all events, there can be no doubt that a radical change took place in the disposition of the primary substances in his body (that is, the basic humours) and they accumulated, in proportions that made harmony impossible, in his feet and the cavities of his joints, then in his hands. Later they descended in great waves on the muscles themselves, and the bones in his back, shaking him through and through, like seacurrents converging on a ship of burthen which had started its voyage in calm water.
Read More about Zoe and Theodora part 59
