Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

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a combination of state and local money. By law, various public amenities
such as harbours, bridges, roads and circuit walls were the responsibility of
either the provincial governor or the city; forts were, by contrast, that of
military commanders. In the west, Justinian’s Pragmatic Sanction of 554
provided for repair to Rome’s public buildings, including the Forum, the
city’s port and aqueducts. The tradition had earlier been maintained by the
Romanized Ostrogoths, who prevented spoliation of buildings in Rome
(and elsewhere) and provided a fund to maintain the buildings of the city. 5
The last known imperially funded repairs in Rome were those carried out
on the Salaria bridge by Narses in 565; in Italy overall, it was the repair of
Ravenna’s aqueduct by Maurice in c. 600. 6 The ancient tradition of private
individuals spending on public buildings was not as marked a feature of our
period as it had been earlier, with the important exception of spending on
churches. In Italy the last known private funding of a secular public building
was the restoration of Rome’s theatre of Pompey by Symmachus in
507–12, though private patronage of churches flourished – the most
famous instance being the largess of the banker Julianus Argentarius, who
financed several churches in sixth-century Ravenna, including San Vitale,
S. Apollinare in Classe and S. Michele in Africisco.
In the east, most public building at Constantinople was undertaken by
the state, private funding of secular public buildings being less established
than at Rome. Building in the diocesan capital Antioch was sponsored in
part by members of the imperial family: Eudocia, Theodosius II, Leo,
Anastasius, Justin I, Justinian and Maurice, as well as the rebel Illus, and
overseen by local state officials; private patronage is, however, also
recorded. Privately financed public buildings in the city of Gerasa include
at least six out of the ten churches built between 464 and 540. 7
In late antiquity two types of specialists were responsible for construction;
they were known in the Greek-speaking world as the mechanikos and
the architekton. The first, of higher standing, was not just an engineer but an
architect with a grounding in mathematics; the architekton was a master
builder, responsible for the majority of buildings, while an ordinary builder
was an oikodomos or a technites. The architects of Justinian’s St Sophia (Fig.
59), Anthemius of Tralles, a prominent mathematician, and Isidore of
Miletus, were mechanikoi. Texts give the names of other architects: Rufinus
of Antioch, who built the cathedral of Gaza under Arcadius, Isidore the
Younger, who rebuilt the dome of St Sophia, Stephen of Aila, who was
responsible for the monastery church at Mt Sinai, and Asaph and Addai,
who built St Sophia at Edessa, are all known from the reign of Justinian.
5 Jones, LRE 448–9, 461–2, 734–7; Ward-Perkins, Public Building 28–32, 38–48.
6 Ward-Perkins, Public Building 42–5, 70–84, 243–4.
7 Mango, M. M. (1984) Gazetteer, i.a.1 430/1, 438, 458, 483, 507, 526–7,c540,c588; vii.a.7 464, 526,
529, 531, 533, 540.
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