Letter 10038: My duties are not yet finished, and the city's demands are not yet satisfied.

In matters that have been concluded by lapse of time and by judgment, it is fitting to refrain from any excursion of lengthy oration, lest a too-prolix discourse burden the salutary acts of Your Divinity, and lest a peevish loquacity, devoid of substance, give offense, O most glorious emperors. When, before the court of the governor of Apulia, a dispute on a charge of violence was being adjudicated between Marcellus, who complained that he had been ejected from his possession, and likewise Venantius, a groom [strator, an imperial equerry] (as he himself maintains), together with his full sister Batrachia, an ill-advised appeal was lodged by the defendants, on the ground that the provincial judge [cognitor], having promised letters to the vicariate authority, was retaining the inquiry that had been taken up. Then the judge of the sacred auditorium [the court of the praetorian prefecture], consulted upon the appeal by the address of the governor, both fixed a prejudicial fine to be paid by the appellants and handed the examining magistrate himself over to the charge, with execution of the penalty. After this, through the misrepresentations of the parties, certain proceedings were carried on, so that the completed judgment was drawn out. For my predecessor too, a man of senatorial rank [vir spectabilis], when he had learned that the fine had been exacted which the prejudicial appeal had acknowledged by the decree of the sacred auditorium, decided that the case on the criminal charge ought to be transferred to himself; and I likewise, following in his course, summoned the parties to examination. But since both the time allowed for reinstatement [of the appeal] had expired, and the treasury had either awaited or taken up the penalty for the appeal, and since the profession [the formal declaration of status] of Venantius and Batrachia, as well as the capital condemnation of certain persons, had brought the case of violence itself to an end, I pronounced that the cognizance of the sacred inquiry was at an end, and I judged that Venantius, whom the most distinguished and illustrious Master of the Offices [magister officiorum] had ordered to be produced, ought to be handed back to Decentius, an agent in affairs [agens in rebus, an imperial courier-official], under whose escort he had come. But since Marcellus charged that the military service of Venantius the groom was unlawful and usurped, on the ground that, being enrolled on the register of the decurions [the town councillors], he had (as the records showed) crossed over to the palace camps [the imperial service] contrary to the laws, I ought not to have passed over in silence the objections raised, so that in this matter, which went beyond the scope of my examination, Your Eternity might judge, more august by those very laws which it protects.