John Lydus: On the Months

expert"¹⁷ carried through a series of reforms, some of which touched John quite personally—in particular, the curtailing of fee-for-service payments to individual functionaries.¹⁸ John's rancor and vituperation flow freely in his scathing portrayal of the Cappadocian's professional and personal life:¹⁹ to hear John tell it, his arch-enemy was rapacious, petty, cruel, luxurious, and vulgar, a promiscuous drunkard and a glutton.²⁰ John claims to have been an eye-witness of a specific incident in which one Antiochus died of torture after being denounced to the Cappadocian—the latter's "most moderate" deed, he says, with bitter sarcasm;²¹ and he particularly goes on at length about the depredations wreaked by the prefect on his native Lydia.²² Although John carefully holds the Cappadocian, not Justinian himself, to blame for all that he railed against in this context, it is clear that the emperor appreciated the Cappadocian as an able administrator, keeping him in his post for nearly 10 years.²³ Surely this fact galled John more than anything.

One further issue meant much to John: the decline of literary excellence he perceived in the civil service.²⁴ John placed the "beginning of the end" a hundred years earlier, when Cyrus of Panopolis, Praetorian prefect of the East in the early 5th century, stopped issuing his decrees in Latin, using only Greek.²⁵ This brought about the fulfillment of an oracle, in John's view, which stated that when the Romans forgot their ancestral language, Fortune would leave them as well.²⁶ In this area too, John thought,

¹⁷ Carney, Bureaucracy 2: 10.
¹⁸ Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire, pp. 72-6.
¹⁹ De mag. 2.21; 3.57-69 passim.
²⁰ Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire, p. 57, suggests that John might have included in a lost final section of De mag. further allegations of treason against the Cappadocian, in connection with the latter's final disgrace in 541.
²¹ De mag. 3.57.
²² De mag. 3.58-61.
²³ Kelly, p. 61.
²⁴ For the importance of the traditional education for the civil service, see, for example, M. S. Bjornlie, Politics and Tradition between Rome, Ravenna and Constantinople: A Study of Cassiodorus and the Variae, 527-554 (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 48ff., and, more generally, P. Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, 1992), pp. 35-70. Latin in particular was crucial for working with legal texts; note, for the previous century, F. Millar, A Greek Roman Empire (Berkeley, 2006), pp. 88-93. For Latin in Byzantium, including attention to John, see Averil Cameron, "Roman Studies in Sixth-Century Constantinople," in P. Rousseau and M. Papoutsakis (eds.), Transformations of Late Antiquity: Essays for Peter Brown (Surrey, 2009), pp. 15-36; J. Schamp, "Pour une étude des milieux latins de Constantinople," in F. Biville and I. Boehm (eds.), Autour de Michel Lejeune (Lyon, 2009), pp. 255-72; B. Rochette, Le latin dans le monde grec (Brussels, 1997)—esp. pp. 135-9; id., "Justinien et la langue latine: À propos d'un prétendu oracle rendu à Romulus d'après Jean le Lydien," Byzantinische Zeitschrift 90 (1997), pp. 413-15.
²⁵ For Cyrus, see PLRE 2: 336-9; P. W. van der Horst, "Cyrus: A Forgotten Poet," Greece & Rome, 2nd series 59 (2012), pp. 193-201; Dubuisson-Schamp, 2: lxxii-lxxvii; Alan Cameron, "The Empress and the Poet," in Wandering Poets and Other Essays (Oxford, 2016), pp. 37-80.
²⁶ De mag. 2.12 and 3.42; De mens. fr. 7.