Aelia Eudoxia Roman Bronze Coin (AD 401-460) NGC

Aelia Eudoxia (/ˈiːliə juˈdɒkʃə -ˈdɒksiə/; Ancient Greek: Αἰλία Εὐδοξία; died 6 October 404) was Eastern Roman empress by marriage to the Roman emperor Arcadius. The marriage was arranged by Eutropius, one of the eunuch court officials, who was attempting to expand his influence. As Empress, she came into conflict with John Chrysostom, the Patriarch of Constantinople, who denounced imperial and clerical excess. She had five children, four of whom survived to adulthood, including her only son and future emperor Theodosius II, but she had two additional pregnancies that ended in either miscarriages or stillbirths and she died as a result of the latter one.

She was a daughter of Flavius Bauto, a Romanised Frank who served as magister militum in the Western Roman army during the 380s.^[3][4] The History of the Later Roman Empire from the Death of Theodosius I to the Death of Justinian (1923) by J. B. Bury^[5] and the historical study Theodosian Empresses: Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity (1982) by Kenneth Holum consider her mother to be Roman and Eudoxia to be a "semibarbara", half-barbarian. However, the primary sources are silent on her maternal ancestry, though she would have been Roman.^[3][6]