Paul the Silentiary

[1][2] Paul also entered public life and became a silentiary – one of a group of 30 court officials of privileged backgrounds organised under three officers (decurions) whose first duty was maintaining order and silence in the Great Palace of Constantinople.

They also fulfilled important commissions, especially in church matters, and by the sixth century their order had attained the social rank of illustris, the highest in the late empire.

Agathias considered Paul's greatest work to be his long verse ecphrasis of Justinian's Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia), composed after the reconstruction of the dome in 562 or 563.

[citation needed] The panegyric consists of 1029 verses in Greek, starting with 134 lines of iambic trimeter, with the remainder in dactylic hexameter.

"[5] Although his subject matter is varied, much is explicitly erotic and uses Pagan imagery,[6] as in the following example: I press her breasts, our mouths are joined, and I feed in unrestrained fury round her silver neck, but not yet is my conquest complete; I still toil wooing a maiden who refuses me her bed.