A Pagan Philosopher at the Imperial Court: The Case of Pamprepius

In 484, a battle was fought near Antioch between the forces of the beleaguered emperor Zeno, and his renegade general Illus, together with the usurper he had created, Leontius. Zeno’s 17-year reign was beset with civil strife, and his troubles with Illus had been long-standing. Among Illus’ more surprising confederates, and heavily involved in the rebellion, was an Egyptian grammarian, poet and pagan philosopher named Pamprepius. From his early years at Panopolis, a major centre for learning in late antique Egypt, Pamprepius had made his way to Athens and then on to Constantinople, where the patronage of Illus saw him rise to public prominence and to dizzying high office, despite his well-known religious affiliations and the intensely Christian environment of the late fifth-century court. The Neoplatonist Damascius, writing not long after the fall of Illus, Leontius and Pamprepius, would declare of the pagan in no favourable light that everyone living knew what sort of a man he was. Pamprepius’ notoriety aside, his career offers a remarkable insight into the heights to which a pagan philosopher could still climb, thanks to the help of a powerful Christian patron, at the court of Constantinople in the late fifth century.