The Economic History of Byzantium - Dumbarton Oaks

1014 NICOLAS OIKONOMIDES
too, would have been substantial and must have represented a considerable drain on
the state treasury.
We have no information to allow us to assess the significance of the sum represented
by the salaries paid to civilian employees, though we can assume that it was not particularly
great since many of them were paid, wholly or in part (though generously, see
above, p. 1009), by the citizens who used their services. These compulsory contributions
in money or in kind were often proportional to the value of the issue under
consideration; excesses were frequent, and the state was repeatedly compelled to attempt
to stamp them out.
Our information about payment of the roga indicates that it was handed out once a
year, despite the rigidity this created and the lengthy period for which large quantities
of gold coin were destined to be immobile. We can be sure that the roga was paid once
ayear, for the entire year, in the case of senior officials and titleholders, for whom the
receipt of the money from the hands of the emperor himself or his aide was of great
symbolic significance and created a personal bond with authority. The roga of the
themes was also paid in a single installment, in those years in which the soldiers were
summoned to arms and inspected, a process called the adnoumion, which meant precisely
“pay parade.” However, one can hypothesize—and it is no more than a hypothesis—that
the roga of the mercenaries who were on long-term hire was paid in installments,
perhaps on a monthly basis. What we do know for sure is that the men who
were enlisted on a circumstantial basis, for a single campaign, and whose discipline
could thus not be guaranteed, were paid by the month, 108 but of course this was done
to ensure that they would remain at their posts throughout the campaign.
Afurther item of expense has to be mentioned with respect, primarily, to the army:
the philotimiai (literally, “honor payments”), ceremonial distributions of money or silk
cloth made by the emperor as additional incentives for his servants when a campaign
was in the offing or when he wished toreward a distinguished act. 109 Although these
handouts were undoubtedly of minor economic significance since they involved officers
primarily, they took place at frequent intervals—now in one place, now in another—and
consequently represented a regular item of state expenditure.
These “extraordinary” items of expenditure, which became regular because they
were repeated in various parts of the empire, included ceremonial gifts from the emperor
called apokombia, distributed among groups of officials on occasions such as the
festivities of the Brumalia (at the winter solstice). There were predetermined tables for
these payments, and each beneficiary received a sum in accordance with his rank on
thebasis of that paid to the person at the head of the list. 110 The largest of the apokombia
was that which the emperor paid into the coffers of the Great Church, for the patriarch
and the clergy of Hagia Sophia.
Large sums to serve the purposes of imperial “propaganda” were spent on charitable
108 E.g., the Mardaitai of the west. De cer., 1:668.
109 See, for example, De cer., 1:471, 485–86.
110 Cf. Oikonomides, Listes, 225–31.