On the Magistrates of the Roman Republic

...exceptional learning, poetic sweetness, and Latin erudition: certain favors were conferred upon him, and more were promised, with an added exhortation that he should extend the light of his talent to more citizens. Inflamed by this praise, for some time he publicly taught He likely held a state-funded professorship something or other—Latin, I believe, or Greek. In the year of his honorable discharge original: honestæ missionis; a formal retirement from service—see Book III, chapter 30, page 202—during the year 552, while Hephaestus, the Praetorian Prefect original: P. P., the highest administrative official in the empire, was presiding in the tribunal, Lydus retired. This occurred after forty years and four months of service original: militiam; Lydus was a civilian bureaucrat, but the Roman civil service used military titles and structure. Having completed his term as Cornicularius and laid aside his belt The cingulum or belt was the physical symbol of holding imperial office, he moved to the palace in the sixty-second year of his age to enjoy the rights and grain allowances original: annonisque; state-provided food rations given as a pension of the retired. In this leisure, he devoted himself entirely to writing, at almost the same time as the historian Procopius of Caesarea, while Justinian was still reigning. Whether he survived the Emperor and reached the time of Justin the Younger (who succeeded in the year 565), I do not know; he would then have been seventy-five years old. However, all the works preserved under his name were certainly written during the reign of Justinian.

IV. The spurious or lost writings of Lydus.

IV. Indeed, one might apply to the age of this prince Emperor Justinian these lines of an unpublished and quite elegant poet:

As an island rises in the ocean surges,
Adorned with ridges and vine-clad peaks,
With a blooming meadow and well-wooded cliffs;
Which travelers sailing past call blessed,
Herding away the pains of unwearying care.
original Greek: Ὡς δὲ θαλασσαίοισιν ἐν οἴδμασι νῆσος ἀνίσχει, / Δαιδαλέη ῥαχέσσι καὶ ἀμπελόεντι κορύμβῳ, / Καὶ θαλερῷ λειμῶνι, καὶ εὐδένδροισιν ἐρίπναις· / Τὴν δὲ παραπλώοντες ἐπολβίζουσιν ὁδῖται, / Ἄλγεα βουκολέοντες ἀλικμήτοιο μερίμνης.