Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

180 7. government and administration
to ecclesiastical functions as a dignitas or honos, even though the competitive
culture of honour was deeply offensive to his ideal of the priesthood.
With the church’s increasing administrative role should be linked
the partial replacement of the classical and civic by Christian and ecclesiastical
education, the decline of the curiales and other changes in civic
life, and Justinian’s purging of highly educated pagans from the government.
67
This overview of the structures of government has focused, justifiably,
on personnel and their organization. However, such a survey would be
incomplete without some consideration of that other quintessential element
integral to bureaucracies and their ethos – paperwork (i.e. records on papyri,
for which we have some local examples from Egypt and Palestine). The
evident increase in the number of bureaucrats during the late Roman period
compared with the principate would seem logically to imply, first, an increase
in the volume of administrative paperwork and, second, the need to organize
such material more effectively than is assumed to have been the case in
previous centuries. 68 The first proposition has in fact been disputed on the
basis of the papyrological evidence, 69 but it is a view which fails to give due
weight to the evidence of the laws contained in the Codes and collections of
Novels from the fifth and sixth centuries. In their mode of promulgation and
in much of their substantive content, these imply the generation of
significant quantities of official documentation. The second proposition is a
logical corollary not only of greater amounts of paperwork, but also of the
more sedentary lifestyle of emperors during the fifth and sixth centuries. As
a result of their active involvement in military campaigning, the governmental
apparatus of the tetrarchs and their fourth-century successors had to be
relatively mobile, which must have retarded the development of centralized
imperial archives to any great extent. The new pattern, initiated under the
sons of Theodosius I, of non-campaigning emperors who rarely travelled
far from the imperial capital will, by contrast, have favoured such a development.
Records could function as a symbol of government, but also as
weapons whose control gave power and wealth to the bureaucrats who
understood their language and had access to long-forgotten receipts. John
the Cappadocian earned great unpopularity in the praetorian prefecture by a
determined effort to reduce its paperwork and, ultimately perhaps, the
number of officials who handled it. 70
Repositories for a variety of records are attested in Constantinople
during our period – the judicial records of the office of the praetorian
67 Marrou (1956) ch. 10; Mango (1980) ch. 10; Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century 425–35;
Cameron, Rhetoric of Empire ch. 6.
68 John Lydus, De Mag. iii.11–13, 19–20, 68. Cf. Millar (1977) 259–68. 69 Harris (1989) 290, 317.
70 Symbols: John Lydus, De Mag. iii.14; Cass. Variae xi.38; weapons: Nov. Val. 1.3;cf.7.1–2, and Nov.
Maj. 2.1; John the Cappadocian: John Lydus, De Mag. iii.11–19, 66, 68.
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