Stella Duffy
speaker
463 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 5 Jun
Stella Duffy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And the Purple Shroud.
They're a double act because the first one is just until she becomes Empress.
The second one is her time as Empress until she dies.
Fabulous.
Not a spoiler that she's dead.
She dies in 548.
Well, if any of your listeners have anything to do with the Russian or Greek Orthodox churches, they will have probably heard of her because in those churches, she's a saint.
Now that's a career trajectory.
Yeah, which is interesting given how the Roman historian, and I use that term loosely, Procopius, I've got no idea how to say his name, maybe you know better than I do, how he wrote about her.
He was writing a history of the time.
So this is the very end of the Roman Empire, the very beginning of the Byzantine.
And in his history, which he called the secret history, long before Donna Tartt, he writes about Theodora, calls her Theodora from the brothel.
He writes about her as an absolute tart.
who whiled her way into the love of the Emperor Justinian, who poisoned people, who was awful.
He also, it has to be noted, says that Justinian walked around their palace, the palace in what is now Istanbul, with his own head under his arm.
So I think that tells us that he's not the most reliable of narrators.
Just a little bit.
So basically, I'd never heard of her either.
She wasn't on my radar.
And in Ravenna, you can't say it with my half South London and half Aotearoa New Zealand accent.
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