EUDOCIA, yu-dō'shi-a, ÆLIA: Empress of Byzantium and wife of Theodosius II. (408-450); b. at Athens 394; d. at Jerusalem c. 460. Her original name was Athenais, and she was the daughter of the pagan rhetorician Leontius, she herself attaining wide celebrity as a scholarly defender of the ancient faith. After the death of her father, she is said to have gone to Constantinople to protest to Pulcheria, the sister of the empress, against the provisions of the will of Leontius, but Pulcheria, charmed by her beauty and culture, converted her to Christianity and presented her to her brother as a bride. The marriage is dated in 421, and she bore Theodosius a daughter Eudoxia, who became the wife of the Western emperor Valentinian III. In 438 Eudocia went to Jerusalem and brought back relics which included the two chains of St. Peter, depositing one at Constantinople and presenting the other to her daughter at Rome, where it gave its name to the church of St. Peter ad Vincula. Two statues were erected at Antioch is gratitude for Eudocia's eulogy of the city. Before 444 she was again in Jerusalem, where she passed the remainder of her life, apparently in banishment. The cause of her disgrace is unknown, although Malalas ascribes it to an intrigue. It is at least certain, however, that in the commotion caused in Egypt and Palestine by the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon Eudocia took the side of the Palestinian monks against the government, her influence being so powerful that Pope Leo wrote her in 453, seeking to change her attitude; and after consulting with the famous Simon the Stylite and Euthymius, a monk of the Syrian desert, she accepted the decrees. In her closing years Eudocia wrote in hexameters a paraphrase of the Octateuch and the history of Cyprian and Justine. The latter work, portraying the life, conversion, and martyrdom of a Magian, is of interest as the oldest poetic form of the Faust-legend.

(C. NEUMANN.)