Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

168 7. government and administration
The contents of all such works require close but sceptical attention, though
they can serve to reveal the aspirations of the educated élite. The expectations
of a pious Christian are encapsulated in the deacon Agapetus’ treatise
of advice to the emperor Justinian. John Lydus’ On Magistracies, primarily a
highly informative, if often fictional, history of the praetorian prefecture by
a middle-ranking official in its legal department, includes some illuminating
autobiography, a Procopian attack on Justinian’s great reforming prefect
John the Cappadocian, and a general critique of changes which had affected
the prefecture since the reign of Constantine. 9 John’s history was not
unique; it had a partial parallel, now lost, in the work of Peter the Patrician,
master of the offices, who wrote a history of his bureau from Constantine
to Justinian; the sixth-century Liber Pontificalis may likewise be seen as an inhouse
history of papal administration. 10 An anonymous and fragmentary
dialogue on political science, probably from senatorial circles in the reign of
Justinian, may supplement Procopius and John with its approval of a noninterventionist
emperor. Like the works of John, Cassiodorus and
Agapetus, this dialogue exemplifies a marked and significant sixth-century
fashion for thinking about government. 11
More conventional historiography gives only incidental information on
administration, but, in its techniques, seems, like bureau-histories, to
suggest the increasing penetration of late antique culture by a bureaucratic
mentality. Historians seem willing to delve into archives, and to cite original
documents at length, to an extent foreign to the classical tradition: not
only church historians like Socrates, Sozomen and Evagrius, following the
Eusebian tradition, but the chronicler John Malalas, probably an official in
the bureau of the count of the east, and Menander Protector, on the fringe
of official circles in Constantinople; the continuator of the Anonymus
Valesianus at Ravenna provides a picture of Theoderic’s administration
comparable to the representation of Justinian’s in Malalas. 12 As in the early
empire, history continues to be largely the work of members of the classes
from which governors and imperial officials were recruited, but also to
show, at times, a latent or overt tension between their values and those of
the emperor and his immediate circle: the alienation from government of
a Procopius was hardly a novelty in the Roman world.
Upper-class circles – their cultural bonds, their political values and their
relations with officialdom – can also be illuminated by other types of literary
activity. This is a valuable corrective to the world of official documents:
9 Maas, John Lydus. 10 Noble (1990).
11 Cameron, Procopius ch. 14; the dialogue is edited by C. Mazzucchi, Menae Patricii cum Thoma
Referendario, De Scientia Politica Dialogus (Milan, 1982).
12 Scott (1985); Jeffreys, Studies 204–11; Blockley (1985) 18–20. Note too the hypothesis of Howard-
Johnston (1995) 166 n. 13 that behind the accounts of the Persian campaign of 503–4 in Theophanes
and Joshua the Stylite there lies an official report circulated as propaganda.
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