The Imperial Administrative System in the Ninth Century

This 1911 work is an edition of and commentary on a ninth-century guide to Byzantine precedence and court hierarchy.

This 1911 work examines the text (of which Bury provides an edition) of the 'Kletorologion' of Philotheos, an otherwise unknown administrative official at the Byzantine court of Leo VI in the late ninth century. The work is a guide to precedence, which at this time was of great political importance.The classical historian J. B. Bury (1861–1927) was the author of a history of Greece (also reissued in this series) which served as a standard textbook for over a century. He also wrote on the later history of the Roman empire, and, in this 1911 work, examines the text (of which he provides an edition) of the 'Kletorologion' of Philotheos, an otherwise unknown official at the court of Byzantine Emperor Leo VI in the late ninth century. The work is a guide to precedence and court hierarchy, which at this time were of great political and social importance. Bury uses it to throw light on an administrative process in a period from which few other administrative documents have survived, but also works backwards from it to the far better recorded period of the reign of Justinian, demonstrating the likely developments of the imperial system in the intervening three centuries.