THE SCENE: In this psychologically interesting passage, the emperor’s mother uses her vegetarianism as a way of deflecting her responsibility for her son’s act’s of tyranny.
THE TEXT: The emperor was no less dismayed and frightened by his own mother’s vision. It seemed to her (who was a frequent visitor at the holy church of the Mother of God at Blachernae) that she met a maiden there carrying a lance, escorted by two men dress in white. But she also saw that sacred church filled with blood; and the maiden in the vision ordered one of those dressed in white to fill a vessel with blood and give it to Leo’s mother to drink. She protested that throughout her long widowhood she had eaten neither meat nor anything else containing blood, and this was her excuse for not touching the vessel. “Then why,” the maiden angrily exclaimed, “does your son not refrain from filling me with blood and from angering my son and God?” From then on, she used to interceded with her son to desist from the heresy of the iconoclasts, recounting the vision in tragic tones.
– John Skylitzes, Synopsis of Histories, 11th Century AD
