Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

202 7. government and administration
military–civilian disputes in Pisidia and Thrace by uniting powers. 173 The
archive of Dioscorus of Aphrodito illustrates the problems caused by
conflict between a community’s traditional right of autopragia, the right to
pay its taxes direct to the provincial governor, and the desire of the governor’s
tax-collector, in this case the pagarch Menas, to have all local taxes
gathered under his authority (with consequent opportunities for graft).
Dioscorus’ reports of the violence inflicted on Aphrodito may well be
exaggerated (see pp. 185 and 188 above), but his plea appears to have been
upheld, and he was able to obtain an injunction from the duke of the
Thebaid that ordered the pagarch to behave properly, and confirmation for
Aphrodito’s special tax position from the imperial court after an appeal to
the empress Theodora. From Dioscorus’ perspective, the actions of Menas
were an unwarranted encroachment on Aphrodito’s long-standing privileges,
but from a broader perspective this competition to extract tax revenues
might have been seen as a means of ensuring the full payment of fiscal
dues. 174
A final area of change deserving comment is the linguistic dimension of
government. Latin had always been the official language of administration
and continued to be so in the various barbarian successor states of the west.
In the surviving eastern half of the empire, however, our period sees its
gradual displacement by Greek – one aspect of the broader transformation
of the Roman empire into the Byzantine. Although during the principate
the imperial government had generally communicated with Greek-speaking
communities in their own language, this was a practical concession on
the part of emperors drawn almost uniformly from Latin-speaking parts
of the empire, who issued their legislation in Latin (even if it was then
sometimes translated into Greek) and who communicated in Latin with
their officials, most of whom were from the same background. Indeed, the
advent of the military emperors of the late third and fourth centuries,
accustomed as they also were to Latin as the language of the army, seems
to have resulted in a renewed emphasis on Latin as the language of administration
even in the Greek east, while the opportunities offered by an
enlarged bureaucracy and the emergence of Constantinople as an administrative
centre created a demand in the fourth-century east for education
in Latin, much to the chagrin of Libanius. 175 This heightened profile for
Latin, however, proved relatively short-lived. Concessions to the predominant
language in the east began to appear from the turn of the fourth
century onwards – a law of 397 allowed judges to give their decisions in
Latin or Greek, another of 439 accepted the legal validity of wills in Greek,
while the contemporary praetorian prefect of the east, Cyrus (439–41),
173 Nov. 24.1; 26. 174 MacCoull, Dioscorus 10–11, 23–8.
175 Dagron (1969) 38–40; Liebeschuetz (1972) 242–55, esp. 251–2.
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