Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beauty pageants were used as a ceremonial mechanism during the Byzantine Empire to select the emperor’s bride. This practice aimed to maintain the mystique surrounding Constantinople’s rulers and prevent local elites from gaining undue influence. These contests were exclusively held for the emperor’s firstborn sons during their initial marriages, and they aimed to identify the most beautiful and virtuous women to become empresses, adding magnificence to royal weddings. Primary Byzantine sources indicate that these contests took place between 788 and 882, with the first one officially held by Irene for her son Constantine VI. The criteria used to determine the winner were based on a combination of factors: age, appearance, demeanour, ideal facial features, graceful movements and gait, and modest posture. The Roman emperor could only be matched by a woman possessing the corresponding qualifications and, above all, the most appreciated virtue of the time – beauty. Only the most beautiful woman had the privilege of standing beside the emperor. The two symbols used to seal the bride’s choice were the golden apple and the golden ring. The Byzantine bridal pageants exerted their enchanting influence on the subjects of the empire during and after their existence. Even the ecclesiastical world was captivated by their glamour, and the most intriguing information about them can be found in the saints’ chronicles. This study aims to explore the portrayal of these bride shows in primary Byzantine sources and other contemporary scholars. Furthermore, it examines the impact of this custom on politics and the reasons behind its eventual extinction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.046 | 0.018 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".