Euphemia (Greek: Εὐφημία, died 523 or 524), born Lupicina, was an Empress of the Eastern Roman Empire by marriage to Justin I.

[4][7] Justin I was a Thracian or Illyrian peasant from the Latinophone region of Dardania, which is part of the province of Illyricum.

As a young man, he left for Constantinople to escape poverty, and rose in the ranks of the army of the Eastern Roman Empire.

According to John Malalas, the praepositus sacri cubiculi, Amantius, had intended to elect a comes domesticorum, commander of an elite guard unit of the late Roman Empire, by the name of Theocritus to the throne.

[16] The selection of this name is suspected to be an early indication of both Justin and Lupicina being fervent Chalcedonian Christians.

[4] In Justin, the First: An Introduction to the Epoch of Justinian the Great (1950), Alexander Vasiliev theorised that the original name of his wife may indicate a linguistic association in another language, with prostitution.

[4] While the word in its singular Latin form "Lupa" could literally mean a female wolf, it also was the epithet or disparaging slur for the lowest class of Roman prostitutes.

[18] Many of these denigrating uses may have origins in derisive comments about the priestesses of a cult of the Etruscan religion that predated the Roman, in which the deity was represented as a she-wolf (similar to Artemis in Greek Mythology), which would imply a quite different derivation and make greater sense of the choice of Euphemia, hence a euphemism, as an alternative name for the empress.

The wolf, Lupa, who nursed Romulus and Remus is related to the cult of this wolf-goddess and the matrilineal, Etruscan civilization that preceded the Roman.

Emulation of the cultural hero, the religious martyr Saint Euphemia, may have had a more contemporary association and reason for selection as the royal name for the empress, especially given the religious changes taking place in Constantinople at the time and the apparent interest of the empress in the veneration of the saint.

[14] Procopius also claims that both members of the imperial couple attained the throne in the closing years of their lives.

[19] The widowed Justin proceeded to pass a law allowing intermarriage between social classes,[20] presumably for the sake of his heir.