offered; where such attacks were anticipated, the small farmers prepared for them, and with the aid of the local peasantry joined battle with the raiders. Thus the provinces were almost constantly the scene of a miniature warfare.[1] In the midst of these disorders the Rector held the balance of justice and inclined the scale towards whoever weighted it with the heaviest bribe. Often, in fact, he was himself one of the worst offenders; and in his capacity as collector of the revenue, or under the pretence of giving police protection, he plundered and committed outrages in every direction throughout the country.[2] And in such license he was
- [Footnote: priests, but mostly women," etc.; Nov. xxx, 5. "What can be more
trying than the driving off of oxen, horses, and cattle in general, or even (to speak of small matters) of domestic fowl . . . whence a multitude appeals to us here (CP.) daily; men, women, hustled from their homes, in beggary, sometimes to die here"; Nov. lxix, 1; cf. Edict viii.]) in every part of his province, to whom the Rector delegated his full powers, thus becoming a hundred-handed Briareus to rack the provincials; Nov. viii, 4; xvii, 10; cxxxiv, 1; Salvian, writing in the West, c. 450, complains that the Rector commits himself every crime which he sits to]*
- ↑ Nov. xvii, 2; lxxxv, passim; Edict viii, praef., etc.
- ↑ The conduct of Rectors is often described in detail. "They dismiss many culprits, selling to them their offences: very many innocent people they condemn in order to benefit obnoxious persons, and not only in money actions, but in criminal cases"; Nov. viii, praef. "We hear how unjustly the provincial judges act for the sake of lucre, declining their duties as to wills, attestation of facts, marriages, settlements, and even burials" (without bribes); Nov. cxxxiv, 3. "He abstained from no sort of actual depredation, plundered towns and returned to this happy city loaded with gold, leaving the region in the utmost poverty"; Edict xii. Also by giving a licence to agents: "They are not to despatch 'pursuers of brigands' or 'inhibitors of disorder,' rather to be called thieves and rioters who, using the occasion as a cloak, are guilty of the worst excesses"; Nov. viii, 12. "As to curators and tractators, we abolish the very names, looking back to the injuries they have inflicted in the past on the wretched tributaries"; Nov. xxx, 2. Another expedient was to plant deputies (vicarii, loci servatores, [Greek: topotêrêtai
