John Lydus: On the Months

however, talking about the 5th century, "we fall easily into traps created by our own categories. It was easier to combine Christianity with other, apparently contradictory, allegiances than the ecclesiastical spokesmen from whom we tend to take our cues would wish."McLynn, p. 585. Alan Cameron, on the other hand, would argue that John was a Christian, plain and simple—perhaps with some esoteric interests, but nothing that could not easily be accommodated in the brain of an antiquarian scholar.Thus, in "Paganism in Sixth-Century Byzantium," p. 285, he describes the poets of Agathias' Cycle (discussed on pp. 277-81) as a quite useful model for understanding the kind of "secular belles lettres" still flourishing at the end of Justinian's reign, and in whose company John would have felt at home.

Rather than assuming a simple pagan-Christian dichotomy, it is useful to explore more sophisticated ways of categorizing people in an attempt to shed more light on John and his self-identification. The tempting, traditional, exclusive dichotomy—whether it is consciously or unconsciously held, and whether it comes from the perspective of an assumption that certain "pagan" elements are inherently incompatible with Christianity or from the perspective of wishfully constructing a unified pagan front in opposition to Christianity—has rightly been under attack in recent scholarship. Maijastina Kahlos, for example, appeals to the idea of a "middle ground" of sorts, a category of incerti (uncertain ones).Debate and Dialogue: Christian and Pagan Cultures, c. 360-430 (Aldershot, 2007). Identifying John in this way, however, while certainly possible, goes beyond the evidence. It is more than the texts can tell us to assert that John saw himself as both pagan and Christian in any meaningful sense—and the supposition is perhaps superfluous.One might simply allow for the possibility of a "Christian lay public, some of whom, as in most ages, were poorly informed about and perhaps not even very interested in their faith" (Cameron, "Paganism in Sixth-Century Byzantium," p. 281). At one point, Cameron himself lays out a more complex system of classification: "committed (or rigorist) Christians" and "committed pagans" on the extremes, "center-Christians" and "center-pagans" near the middle, and between them all, those who "resisted straightforward categorization."Last Pagans, pp. 176-77. For this last category, Cameron's example is Bacurius, who served as magister militum (master of soldiers) under Theodosius; as Cameron points out, Rufinus considered him a Christian, but Libanius deemed him a pagan (p. 175—citing PLRE 1: 144). For those whose primary interest is determining the sincere convictions of an ancient personality, the definition of the "center" is disturbingly vague: "Center-Christians would include both time-servers and sincere believers who were nonetheless not interested in or well informed about details of theology, and saw no reason to reject secular culture (Ausonius). Center-pagans would be people brought up as pagans but with no deep investment in the cults themselves (people like Servius)." Under this definition, however, John could easily be classified as a "center-Christian."This category is quite similar to the "moderate Christians" who were more and more strongly pressured by rigorists in the 4th century to take a more extreme, dichotomous position. Even more suggestive as an approach might