Fortune’s laughter and a bureaucrat’s tears:Sorrow, supplication, and sovereignty in Justinianic Constantinople

Charles F. Pazdernik (Grand Valley State University)

“‘What follows no longer would I be able to express in words without tears,’ to cite Euripides’ Peleus” (John Lydus, De magistratibus 3.25 p. 170.18-19; trans. Bandy).

This learned reference distinguishes one out of several instances in which John Lydus punctuates his account in De magistratibus populi Romani (“On the Magistracies of the Roman State”) with an assertion of his own tearfulness in composing that account and of the tear-inducing qualities of that account. De magistratibus is a tendentious institutional history of the Praetorian Prefecture of the East, the ministry responsible for the administration of justice and public finances in the greater part of the diminished Roman empire of the sixth century. The work has also been aptly described as “a polemical history of [Lydus’] own decline and fall” (C. Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire [2004] 11). The deep sense of personal grievance that animates the work combines with its author’s conviction that his own misfortunes are the product of larger and impersonal forces in striving after a kind of tragic nobility, which emerges out of a recognition of human fallibility and the capriciousness of fortune.

The window that De magistratibus opens into one individual’s own self-absorption and parti pris is at the same time a mirror of some of the preoccupations of the age, which witnessed a variety of attempts to link the fortuitous circumstances and idiosyncratic choices of individuals to the growth and decay of institutions and ultimately to the fate of the Roman empire itself. From this perspective, tears are an irresistible and inexorable response to circumstances that are ultimately in the grip of fortune and to that extent are themselves irresistible and inexorable.

Persisting in tension with Lydus’ ostensibly pessimistic, ‘tragic’ world of tears, however, is the vision of a providential, benevolent world order presided over by a divinely appointed emperor, toward whom tears of supplication represent an efficacious means of redressing grievances. If grief signals despair and self-abnegation, a sense of grievance betrays an abiding investment in the expectation of redress and therefore in the existence of a predictable, comprehensible, and ultimately just moral order.

Lydus accordingly juxtaposes his own tears, equivocal tokens both of despair and of the prospect of amelioration, with Fortune’s own fickle and fleeting laughter, which confounds belief in a morally comprehensible universe and demonstrates her power over emperors and their subjects alike.