Identifying Dissident Circles in Sixth-Century Byzantium: The Friendship of Prokopios and loannes Lydos
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prokopios’ Wars, released to the public in 551, was an instant success. When Prokopios published a supplement two years later he noted that his work had appeared in every part of the Roman empire. The popularity of the work was in every way to be expected. Thoughtful men who had experienced the eventful reign of Justinian would respond with enthusiasm to a book as superb as the Wars. After all, Prokopios, who had traveled to Africa, Italy, and the east with Belisarios, had witnessed many of the events he described and had access to the court and contacts throughout the known world. His prose was concise and elegant and always reflected the humanity and cultural discretion of what he himself called a "liberal education," έλευθέριοι λόγοι και παιδεία (e.g., in 1.24.12). It was inevitable that he would be admired and imitated by his successors, such as Agathias, Menandros, Evagrios, and the last historian of antiquity, Theophylaktos. Later Byzantine accounts of the sixth century, e.g., the chronicle of Theophanes, consisted in large part of excerpts from the Wars. It is no accident that modern surveys still rely heavily on that work.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".