She collected more than five hundred harlots, who sold themselves for three obols in the market-place, thereby securing a bare subsistence, and transported them to the other side of the Bosphorus, where she shut them up in the Monastery of Repentance, with the object of forcing them to change their manner of life.

Some of them, however, threw themselves from the walls during the night, and in this manner escaped a change of life so contrary to their inclinations.
There were at Byzantium two young sisters, illustrious not only by the consulships of their father and grandfather, but by a long descent of nobility, and belonging to one of the chief families of the Senate.
They had married early and lost their husbands.

Theodora, charging them with living an immoral life, selected two debauchees from the common people and designed to make them their husbands.

The young widows, fearing that they might be forced to obey, took refuge in the church of St.Sophia, and, approaching the sacred bath, clung closely to the font.

But the Empress inflicted such privations and cruel treatment upon them, that they preferred marriage in order to escape from their immediate distress.