Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

634 21c. egypt
later in Alexandria. 105 Before his death in 547 Apollos founded a monastery
named for the ‘Holy Christ-Bearing Apostles’, appointing his own son,
the family’s second Dioscorus, as the foundation’s lay ‘curator’ (�rontist
v). 106
This Dioscorus, so it seems, received a fine literary, rhetorical and legal
education, paid for by his entrepreneurial and upwardly mobile father. It is
usually assumed that this educational polish was applied in Alexandria, a
flourishing, cosmopolitan ‘university town’, where, in Dioscorus’ day, a
major intellectual figure would have been John Philoponus, 107 the prolific
grammarian, philosopher and theologian. So it is perhaps a bit ironic that
in Dioscorus’ first dated occurrence in the papyri, in a.d. 543, he appears
as victim of a typically rustic trespass: the standing crops in a field he was
holding, apparently under lease from a local monastery, had been trampled,
uprooted and mired, thanks to an unruly drover who had run his sheep
through them. 108 Like his father before him, Dioscorus travelled to
Constantinople. He was there in 551 to defend the right of Aphrodito to
collect its own taxes (the privilege called ‘autopragia’, ‘self-collection’)
without interference from the district’s pagarch. It was on that visit that he
and some fellow villagers secured a rescript from Justinian and hired two
exsecutores negotii (‘executors of the business’), one of them a count of the
sacred consistory, both of them citizens of Leontopolis in Cappadocia, to
assist in enforcing the village’s claimed rights against the pagarch’s alleged
violations back home. 109 That in Constantinople he met Romanos the
Melodist, and in later retrospect commemorated the occasion with an
acrostic poem in his honour, is an attractive but problematic bit of speculation.
110
Back in Egypt, Dioscorus had by a.d. 566 taken up residence in the provincial
capital, Antinoopolis. There he put his legal training to use, settling
disputes and drawing up contracts and other documents in Greek and in
Coptic, 111 including the will of Flavius Theodore discussed above. This was
one of many papers Dioscorus brought back to Aphrodito on his return
in 573. The remarkable thing about the documents written in Antinoopolis
is that they were often on very large sheets of papyrus which Dioscorus
saved for scrap. On their versos he composed, in autograph drafts showing
105 P.Cair.Masp. ii 67126; discussion: Keenan (1992).
106 See esp. P.Cair.Masp. i 67096, cf. Thomas (1987) 64, 73.
107 RE ix.2 (1916) 1764–95 (Kroll). 108 P.Cair.Masp. i 67087, with Keenan (1985b).
109 Critical documents include P.Cair.Masp. i 67024 (rescript), 67032 (contract with exsecutores negotii,
also accessible as Meyer, JJP 52 and FIRA iii 179), SB iv 7438 (letter of recommendation for
Dioscorus); synoptic discussion with pertinent references: Keenan (1975) 244–6. Further, esp. on
P.Cair.Masp. 67024: Geraci (1979) with extensive bibliography.
110 Kuehn (1990) (for the connection); van Minnen (1992) esp. 97–8 (opposed).
111 MacCoull, Dioscorus esp. ch. 2 (pp. 16–56); cf. MacCoull (1981) and (1986b) (�MacCoull (1993b)
chs. xii and x).
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