the Gothic kingdom parallel with the court offices and central offices at Constantinople, now disappeared in Italy and were amalgamated with the central offices at Constantinople. The same applies to the Senate, which likewise was not a local but an imperial governing body. There was no need to dissolve it; it disappeared from Rome in the natural course of events, for the officials, of whom it was composed at that time, henceforth only existed at Constantinople, the residence of the single emperor.
The principle underlying the bureaucratic administration by which the Empire had been governed since Diocletian, and the details of which had only been developed during the centuries following his reign, remained unchanged: all autonomy was supplanted by a body of imperial functionaries grouped hierarchically, according to their local and practical powers, subject only to the absolute will of the Emperor and appointed by him, chosen from the ranks of the landowners, the only persons who had the right to migrate from their place of origin. They had at their disposal as an auxiliary force a body of officials (officium), arranged likewise hierarchically, but drawn from another class of the people. Opposed, however, to the ruling class, which carried out the will of the State by means of the bureaucratic organisation, stood, as the working members of the State, all the rest of the population, tied hereditarily to their class and its organisation, which as far as it existed had only the one object of making its members jointly responsible for the expenses of the State. The principle also of separating the civil from the military power, which had first been completely carried into force by Constantine the Great, though sometimes abandoned by Justinian in the East, was intended by the Emperor to come into full force in the West, as soon as an end had been put to the state of war.[1]
While the details of the Italian administration have to be gathered partly from the so-called Pragmatica sanctio pro petitione Vigilii, and partly from the remaining sources, chiefly the letters of Pope Gregory, which unfortunately nowhere present a complete picture, the Codex Justinianus (I. 27) contains the statutes of the organisation for the civil and military adjustment within the African dioecesis, issued by Justinian in the year 534. The statutes provided that the praefectus praetorio Africae, who as a functionary of the highest class and receiving a salary of 100 pounds gold (about £4500), stood at the head of the civil administration, should have (besides his private cabinet, the consiliarii and cancellarii, the grammatici and medici) an official staff of 396 persons, divided into ten scrinia and nine scholae. Four of the former, who were also the best paid, were entrusted with the financial administration, and one with the exchequer. Besides these there were the scrinium of the primiscrinius or subadiuva, and one each of the commentariensis and of the ab actis, who conducted the business of the chancery and the
- ↑ To avoid repetition a knowledge of the administration of the Roman Empire is here assumed. It has been described in Vol. I. Ch. II.
