He is unemotional and detached when he writes about her death, yet he worked with her husband closely and admired him a great deal. He does not even discuss the Emperor's reaction to her death, which indicates how little he thought of the woman. He writes of Zoe's death, "So the gold was squandered with all the uncontrolled profusion of a flood, and Zoe, after a short and painful illness, but little change in her outward appearance, departed this life at the age of seventy-two." It seems that even in death, he cannot bring himself to say something positive about anything but her appearance, which may show his bias toward women more than anything else in the book may.

In conclusion,...

This book is an engaging, if prejudiced, look at her life and her rule, and the lives of those around her. The author judges her harshly and offers many negative assessments of her, but it seems that in fact she was a generous and religious woman, who may have not received all the credit she deserved as a ruler and as a woman, largely because of the time she lived and the fact that all the historians were men like Psellus
References

Psellus, Michael. Fourteen Byzantine Rulers. Penguin Books: London, 1966.

Michael Psellus. Fourteen Byzantine Rulers. Penguin Books: London, 1966, 157.

Ibid, 157.

Ibid.

Ibid, 239.

Ibid, 65.

Ibid, 75.

Ibid, 87.

Ibid, 170.

Ibid, 95.

Ibid, 157.

Ibid, 173.

Ibid, 240.