Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

administration in operation 183
The church provided another means of access to the emperor: imperial
attendance at major church festivals offered an especially good opportunity
for the submission, sometimes with tumult and outcries, of petitions, and
the quaestor sacri palatii was delegated to receive and pass these on; petitioners
deterred by fear of a powerful individual were authorized to approach
the emperor with the help of the patriarch or of ecclesiastical defensores. 85 In
the provinces, the clergy could act as a channel for reports back to the centre,
as is illustrated by the commending of Stephen, governor of Palestina Prima,
to Justinian by a delegation of clergy; assemblies of bishops regularly
demanded that their acclamations be transmitted to the emperor. Justinian
explicitly sought to exploit the clergy to monitor judicial abuses in the provinces;
by contrast, his complaint about the shortage of information from
Egypt might reflect his lack of contact with the Monophysite church which
dominated the province. 86 Another linkage was provided by high officials
themselves, who might well lend a sympathetic ear to petitions from their
home provinces. 87 Overall, the role of curial élites in sustaining links
between the imperial centre and its subjects was diminishing as other channels
took over. A determined official, however, was likely to override local
opposition, regardless of who was articulating it: at Philadelphia in Lydia
John Maxilloplumacius, a relative of John the Cappadocian, for whom he
acted as a local agent in securing tax revenues, is alleged to have forced the
bishop and clergy to perform a mock eucharist in the theatre after they had
tried to rescue an upper-class citizen from a scourging over taxation. 88
A crucial question is whether the laws issued by the emperor and the
central administration represented, to any significant degree, responses to
the concerns of the empire’s inhabitants communicated via these channels.
As one might expect, explicit indications in the surviving evidence of such
causal links are elusive, but some imperial legislation can clearly be characterized
in these terms. Perhaps the most striking instance relates to the
office of quaestor exercitus, effectively an additional praetorian prefect
created by Justinian to provide more efficient logistical support to the
armed forces on the lower Danube; in the same way as any praetorian
prefect, the quaestor exercised both fiscal and judicial authority over the
provinces under his responsibility – in this case, Moesia II and Scythia
(where the troops were stationed), and Caria, Cyprus and the (Aegean)
Islands (from where army supplies were to be gathered). This institutional
arrangement was established on 18 May 536, but soon proved problematic,
though not on the logistical front: in order to gain legal redress from the
quaestor’s court, the inhabitants of Caria, Cyprus and the Islands had to
travel all the way to Odessus on the Black Sea coast, where the quaestor was
85 CJ i.12.8. 86 PLRE iii.1184–5, s.v. Stephanus 7; Nov. 86.1; Edict 13 (preface).
87 Cass. Variae xi.39; xii.5, 13–15. 88 John Lydus, De Mag. iii.59.
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