Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

626 21c. egypt
as a landlord, not at Oxyrhynchus, but at Herakleopolis Magna. 56 It is this
Apion’s son, Flavius Strategius, who first appears as a great landlord
(geoucØn, magnus possessor) at Oxyrhynchus in a document dating to 497. 57
The father, still alive, had been honoured with consular rank; the son had
attained high, though perhaps purely honorary, military rank as a ‘count of
the most devoted domestics’ (comes devotissimorum domesticorum). Apion the
father has been identified with ‘Apion the Egyptian’, the leading patrician
who served as ‘quartermaster-general’ for the army Anastasius despatched
to relieve the town of Amida from Persian siege in 503. 58 The expedition
failed. Apion, when at Edessa, was relieved of his duties. In May 504 he
was, by one account, 59 summoned from Alexandria to Constantinople and
charged with having conspired against the expedition’s leading general,
Areobindus. He apparently spent the next several years in the imperial
capital, until the exile that led to his compulsory ordination at Nicaea in 511.
In 518, the accession of Justin I returned Apion to favour and raised him
promptly to the praetorian prefecture of the East, perhaps following upon
a conversion from Monophysitism to Chalcedonian orthodoxy. The office
was not long held. Apion is last mentioned as prefect on 1 December 518;
his successor was in place by 19 November 519. 60 He apparently survived
into the early years of Justinian’s reign, dying by 532 or at some early date in
533. If this is the Apion who is to be credited with having founded his
family’s fortunes, that effort must have been made in the fifth century, before
his sixth-century service and detention abroad, and by means that are lost in
the documentary record. It is likelier, though sheerly speculative, that he was
not the founder but the inheritor of the family fortune, and that the work of
accumulation had been that of his father or grandfather, unknown to us but
active in the middle third of the fifth century or even earlier.
Strategius, the son of this Apion, is named in Edict XIII (chapters 15,
16) as having been prefect of Egypt around 523. He reappears in a text of
uncertain date as a magister militum (strathla* thv) with consular rank, both
seemingly honorary titles, to which another, the patriciate, was added by
530. At the same time, he was a ‘leading citizen’ (prwte¸wn) of both
Herakleopolis and Oxyrhynchus. 61 In 532 he presided over a synod of
56 SB vi 9152 (492), Stud.Pal. xx 129 (497); cf. (perhaps) P.Oxy. xvi 1877 (c. 488). Discussions on the
family and its members: P.Oxy. xvi 1829.24 n.; Hardy (1931) and (1968); PLRE ii.110–12 (Apion 1,
Apion 2, Fl. Apion 3), 1034–6 (Fl. Strategius 8 and 9) and Stemma 27 on p. 1325; Gascou (1985) esp.
App. i (pp. 61–75), with full presentation of the evidence. An earlier generation of the family has been
recently identified. See P.Oxy. lxiii 4389 (439) and references in the note to line 1.
57 P.Oxy. xvi 1982. A possible earlier (489) appearance is in P.Flor. iii 325 (cf. Gascou (1985) 63 n.
356) where Strategius (restored) appears as a politeuomenos, i.e. curialis, of Oxyrhynchus and magnus possessor
(geoucØn).
58 Hardy (1931) 25–6, Gascou (1985) 62, PLRE ii.111–12 (Apion 2); contra P.Oxy. 1829.24 n.
59 Josh. Styl. Chron. (Wright) 58. 60 CJ vii.63.3; v.27.7.
61 P.Oxy. xvi 1984; xxvii 2779, similarly in xvi 1983 of a.d. 535. The significance of the term
prwte¸wn is unclear: Hardy (1931) 32 n. 4; Gascou (1985) 64; PLRE ii.1036.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008