Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

sources 169
it reminds us that a man’s power depended as much on contacts, relatives
and cultural prestige as on the posts he did or did not hold; prosopographies
dominated by office-holders give a misleading picture of the establishment
by ignoring the important gift-exchange relationships of praise
and honour which produced their own parallel system. 13 From
Constantinople, we have the poetry exchanged or collected among lawyers
and civil servants like Agathias, and preserved in the Palatine Anthology; from
Egypt, the poems which Dioscorus of Aphrodito addressed to local
bigwigs; from Ostrogothic Italy, the letters and poems of bishop Ennodius
of Pavia, or the account of Theoderic’s activity as judge and builder preserved
in the continuation of the Anonymus Valesianus; from Gaul at the end
of the empire, the letters and poems of Sidonius Apollinaris. 14 Boethius’
Consolation of Philosophy gives a brief attack on Theoderic’s administration
which balances Cassiodorus and stands in the ancient tradition of senatorial
opposition to bad emperors. Papal correspondence – for example, the
letters preserved in the Collectio Avellana – illumines the increasingly important
role of popes in maintaining relations between Rome and
Constantinople; the voluminous correspondence of Gregory the Great, in
particular, tells us much about Byzantine Italy at a period when the pope
was closely involved with imperial administration and diplomacy. 15
Papyri continue to be a source, not only for the running of Egypt, but
also of Palestine, and for the administrative personnel of Ostrogothic and
Byzantine Ravenna; 16 unlike most literary texts, they can sometimes yield
information about the lowest, almost invisible levels of the bureaucracy.
Well down into the sixth century, inscriptions, especially those from
Aphrodisias (Caria), continue to tell us much about the running of eastern
cities and their relations with provincial governors. 17 Archaeology, too,
casts light on the bureaucracy, specifically on archive storage (see below),
while in the sixth century, seals emerge as a useful source for offices and
office-holders. 18 New discoveries will produce more evidence, as for
example the collection of sixth-century papyri discovered at Petra in 1992
which, among other details of local life, refer to a Ghassanid leader in the
context of a dispute about water rights. 19
Perhaps the most serious deficiency of our sources is the near invisibility
of the minor civil servants referred to above. We seldom know even the
13 Cf., in general, Lendon (1997) ch. 3–4.
14 Anthology: see Cameron and Cameron (1966); McCail (1969). Dioscorus: MacCoull, Dioscorus.
Ennodius: Cesa (1988); Rohr (1997). Sidonius: Harries (1994b).
15 For interesting use of Gregory’s letters, see Brown, Gentlemen and Officers.
16 For a recent survey of eastern papyri found outside of Egypt: Cotton, Cockle and Millar (1995);
Ravenna: Tjäder (1955–82), with discussion in Brown, Gentlemen and Officers.
17 Roueché, Aphrodisias; Roueché, Performers and Partisans.
18 The most accessible collection of this information is in the fasti at the back of PLRE iii.
19 Daniel (1996).
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