From Theophanes Continuatus

“This Theoktiste <sometimes> called Theodora’s daughters to her house, in the place where the monastery of Gastria is now fixed and established – she had bought it from the patrikios Nicetas. The daughters were five in number: Thecla, Anna, Anastasia, Pulcheria and Maria, and whilst greeting them with other gifts whereby the female sex is wont to be attracted, Theoktiste would take each aside privately and beg and entreat them not to show weakness nor remain feminine as they were, but to be manly and to have intentions fitting and worthy of their mother’s breast, rejecting their father’s heresy and kissing and embracing the traits of the venerable images. Putting these in their hands – she kept them in a certain chest – and pressing them to their faces and lips, she sanctified the girls and brought forth in them love for the images. But it did not escape Theophilus’s notice that she was doing this persistently and kindling in her granddaughters love for the images, and he would ask what had been given to them by their grandmother and what had been done to render thanks. With good understanding the others deftly got round his questions as if they were traps; but Pulcheria, in as much as she was a child, both in age and in mind, told of her kindnesses and the multitude of fruits, and she recounted also the worship of the images, thinking and saying in her innocent way that Theoktiste had many dolls in a chest ‘and she pressed these upon our heads and faces after giving kisses.’ Expressed in a whispering tone these things roused the emperor to rage. However, the woman’s modesty and piety, no less than her outspokenness toward all, prevented him from doing anything sharp or harsh – for she openly mocked and accused him on account of his daily persecution of confessors and his patent heresy, and she was almost alone in telling him of everyone’s hatred of him –; instead, he only curtailed his daughters’ visits to her, preventing them from becoming continual.”