A Late Antique Aristocracy

While Flavius Strategius I is the first landowner from a discernibly Byzantine tradition (in Rémondon’s sense of the aristocracy which he characterizes as ‘les hauts fonctionnaires latifondiaires’), other surviving exemplars of this group embody its essential features in an even purer form. But their connection with the Oxyrhynchite is worth emphasizing. With the appearance, in our evidence, of Strategius, Hardy’s suggestion that Count John, comes consistorii and governor of Arcadia in 488, was the ‘first Apion’ must certainly be rejected. Whatever his relation to the Apion family, he was not in the main line of descent which, as far as we can tell, must have passed directly from Strategius to Flavius Apion I, who was Praefectus praetorio orientis in 518. At any rate, the small archive of Count John preserves his full title and shows him to be an active participant in the running of his estate. The most illuminating agricultural document is P. Oxy.

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