Take Your Place in the Chronicle

Junior kentarchos of the Scholai

A salaried soldier of the capital, sent eastward with sealed orders. You ride at the head of a hundred and answer to a strategos you have never met.

Notary to the bishop's chancery

Quill, ledger, and the unreadable hand of the metropolitan. You know whose son was disinherited, whose vineyard was reassessed, and which monk drinks.

Stratiotes of the theme

A free farmer who owes the empire a horse, a coat of mail, and his own back. The land is yours so long as you ride when summoned.

Caravaneer of the Antiochene road

Greek by tongue, Aramaic by trade, suspect to everyone. Silk, glass, and rumor cross the frontier in your bales.

Distant kinswoman to a logothete

Embroidered into the court at a safe distance. A house in Nicaea, a name in the capital, and the dangerous art of being remembered.

Of a small house on Olympos

Black-robed, sun-thinned, and politically inconvenient. You have spoken with the empress's confessor and you remember icons being broken.

Trained at a hospital of the City

Galen on your shelf, Paul of Aegina under your pillow. You have closed the eyes of a protospatharios on Monday and a porne on Thursday, and the same hands did both. Vinegar, opium, the smell of pus.

Grammarian and reader of the Greeks

You teach Homer to the sons of senators and read Photios in private. Your stipend is a patron's whim. The wrong commentary on the wrong Father could end you.

Armenian, Khazar, or Tzakon of the hired bandon

Your hundred men are yours so long as the silver lasts. You are not tagmatic. You are not stratiotic. You are paid, and everyone in the camp knows it.

Of the Taurus passes, half-Roman, half-Arab

You owe the empire nothing it cannot collect. Your grandmother was taken from a caravan and never sent back. You ride with your own men, hunt with the emir's, and know the road to Tarsos in the dark. The City has summoned you west — to answer for a raid, to be honoured, or to be quietly held.

Master of a small workshop — mosaicist, ivory-carver, silversmith

Your hands make the beauty by which Rome remembers itself: tesserae set into apse-gold, an ivory plaque for a logothete's chapel, a silver paten the Metropolitan will lift at the liturgy. Three apprentices sleep above the shop and a journeyman grinds pigment in the yard. Patrons are fickle, guild dues fall due, and the iconoclast decades taught your trade to keep its head down.

Holder of an imperial writ to collect

The fisc has sold you the right to extract a duty in its name. You make your money on the spread between what you owe the empire and what you can wring from the wharf. Your writ bears the imperial seal; the men you summon may not refuse you. Most who held your office before you ended rich; the rest ended audited.

A paid set of eyes for the Prefect of the City

You walk the agora and the guild halls with no badge and no sword, and you remember everything. Guild grievances, heretical mutterings, the back-room price of grain — all of it goes, by way of a fee per name, to the Prefect's chancery. You eat well. You sleep poorly. You know which names will be taken next month, and one is sometimes a cousin.

Of the Cherson run

You buy Slavs at Cherson and Pannonian boys at the mouth of the Don, and you sell what the Sacred Palace and the great houses will pay for: eunuchs for the bedchamber, nurses for the nursery, oarsmen for the dromons. The trade is older than the empire and the empire pretends not to see it. Your hold smells of vinegar and fear, and your purse is heavier than a logothete's.

Ordained but listened to with suspicion

You hold the orders of a deacon and the suspicions of a heretic. Where you preach, the small folk weep; where you write, the metropolitan's archdeacon takes a copy. Some say you are a Paulician at heart; others, a Bogomil before the name; you say you are only reading the Fathers honestly. The next emperor's mood will decide whether you die in a monastery or on a pyre.