The paraphylax (Greek: παραφύλαξ, "chief guardian") was a low-ranking provincial military office in the middle Byzantine Empire.
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. It has the longest documented history of any living Indo-European language, spanning more than 3000 years of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history; other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems.
The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinople. It survived the fragmentation and fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD and continued to exist for an additional thousand years until it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. During most of its existence, the empire was the most powerful economic, cultural, and military force in Europe. Both the terms "Byzantine Empire" and "Eastern Roman Empire" are historiographical terms created after the end of the realm; its citizens continued to refer to their empire simply as the Roman Empire, or Romania (Ῥωμανία), and to themselves as "Romans".
The paraphylax is often attested in lead seals of the 7th–9th centuries, and mentioned in lists of offices. The post was low-ranking (bearers typically held the dignities of hypatos, strator, or, at most, spatharios), and apparently concerned with the maintenance of public order and/or the command of irregular forces. In seals, the office is frequently combined with provincial fiscal posts as well, such as the kommerkiarios or the chartoularios of the genikon.
Hypatos and the variant apo hypatōn was a Byzantine court dignity, originally the Greek translation of Latin consul. The dignity arose from the honorary consulships awarded in the late Roman Empire, and survived until the early 12th century. It was often conferred upon the rulers of the south Italian principalities. In Italian documents the term was sometimes Latinised as hypatus or ypatus, and in Italian historiography one finds ipato. The feminine form of the term was hypatissa (ὑπάτισσα).
Α strator was a position in the Roman and Byzantine militaries roughly equivalent to a groom. The word is derived from Latin sternere.
The spatharii or spatharioi were a class of Late Roman imperial bodyguards in the court in Constantinople in the 5th–6th centuries, later becoming a purely honorary dignity in the Byzantine Empire.
Alexander Petrovich Kazhdan was a Soviet-American Byzantinist.
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