Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

administrative change 193
appointment, while usually stressing the nominee’s noble birth and rhetorical
skills (both linked with personal integrity), also emphasize his or his
family’s record of service and the close attention paid by the monarch to
performance, in and out of office. The system, especially at the top, was
still far from professional, but was probably less amateurish than that of
the early empire. 132
iv. administrative change
The difficulty involved in effecting permanent change to administrative
arrangements is well illustrated by Anastasius’ abolition of the chrysargyron
tax. Once the emperor had decided that the tax should no longer be collected
– whether for moral reasons, as asserted by Evagrius, or because the
empire’s finances were sufficiently healthy to do without the relatively small
return – he instructed his reluctant officials to destroy the relevant paperwork.
This stage removed the records stored in central archives, but
Anastasius surmised that there would be enough information in provincial
archives to reconstruct the tax precept if a future emperor decided, or was
persuaded by grasping officials, to do so. Hence, Anastasius played a trick
on his administrators by persuading them to assemble all surviving paperwork
relevant to the tax, on the grounds that he had realized his mistake
and now wanted to reinstate the chrysargyron; the officials gladly obliged,
only to find that their endeavours resulted in another bonfire of their precious
records. Even if embroidered in the telling, Evagrius’ story, 133 besides
providing an intriguing glimpse of the extent of official archives, including
the existence of parallel record systems in Constantinople and provincial
centres, illustrates how administration was a collaborative process: the
emperor was all-powerful, but the exercise of that power depended on
numerous individual officers who transmitted information into, and orders
out from, the imperial centre. Abolition of the chrysargyron had significant
consequences quite unconnected with the motivation for the change: the
sacrae largitiones lost a sizeable chunk of revenue and, even though
Anastasius replaced it by allocating to a special fund imperial estates which
generated the same income, this ensured that the comes sacrarum largitionum
was now, to an extent, beholden to the administrators of those estates. The
appointment to the post of comes sacrarum largitionum of John the
Paphlagonian, a tractator in the praetorian prefecture, may have been
intended to help secure the reform. 134
Any change was bound to tread on vested interests, as in the case of the
chrysargyron, and it was more common for processes and structures to
132 Cass. Variae i.42.2; v.40–1; viii.16–17, 21–2.Goffart (1970); Barnes (1974).
133 Evagr. HE iii.39. 134 Stein, Bas-Empire ii.204.
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