SIAMESE TWINS AT BYZANTIUM?

SIAMESE TWINS AT BYZANTIUM?

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"At this time appeared in many lands of the Roman Empire two male twins, that descended from the country of Cappadocia,; I myself, who am writing these lines, have often seen them in Asia, it was a monstrous and novel spectacle. For all the parts of their bodies were whole and complete, but their sides were attached from the armpit to the hip, uniting their bodies and combining them into one corpus. And with their adjacent arms they embraced the back of each other's necks, and on the other hands, they carried staffs, on which they supported themselves as they walked. They must have been about thirty years old. Their bodies well developed physically, appearing beautiful and youthful.

On their long journeys, they used to ride on a mule, sitting on the saddle in the female fashion (sideways), and they had indescribably and caused everywhere feelings of cheerfulness and sympathy. But we said enough about them."

- Leo the Deacon, medieval Roman historian of the mid and late 10th century and a valuable primary source for the period.

Notes: This short autobiographical passage from the History of Leo disproves further the old propaganda of the "Byzantine empire", of the Roman Empire of the Middle Ages, being a theocratic, narrow-minded state with a highly intolerant suspicious society.

The words of Leo express the acceptance of the Greek society, concerning the "other", the communal acceptance to the exception of a neighborhood. Those two unknown brothers, travelled in all East Romaniae (that is Asia Minor) and Constantinople, on their mule. They survived the hunger, thirst and banditry of the roads of the past and reached safe in the Queen of the Cities, so for a Constantinopolitan resident, such as Leo the Deacon, to stare at them. In order for those journeys to be successful, from Cappadocia and everywhere in Asia Minor, they must had found shelter, supplies of life, beds to sleep and friends to cast a helping hand.

The story of the siamese brothers, that we can easily call Michael and Gabriel only reminds me the words of many couch-wise philosophers of the 21th century, lamenting the "death" of antiquity due to the Roman emperors in Constantinople and also the murder of any non-perfect, non-ideal, non-Aryan little babe in the canyons of Kaiadas from the very hands of their Spartan parents.

In the 15th century: the Romans of the East, the later to be called Greeks, such as the Grand Duchess Anna Notaras would bring in the West and Italia, a humanism long existent in Romaniae and this humanism also included these twin brothers that despite their disabilities and low quality of life, only earned sympathy and love from the common herd man and farmer woman of this not-"decadent" Byzantium, but bright New Rome.