Literary evidence 



399 



agriculture of a district more prosperous was to attract the attention 

 of greedy officials. To resist their illicit extortions was to attract the 

 attention of the central government, whose growing needs were ever 

 tempting it to squeeze more and more out of its subjects. Why then 

 should the rustic, tied to the soil, trouble himself to seek more economi- 

 cal methods, the profits of which, if ever realized, he was not himself 

 likely to enjoy ? 



LII. LIBANIUS. 



In order to get so far as possible a living picture of the conditions 

 of rustic life and labour we must glean the scattered notices preserved 

 to us in the writers of the period of decline. Due allowance must be 

 made for the general artificiality and rhetorical bent of authors trained 

 in the still fashionable school^ of composition and style. For even 

 private letters were commonly written as models destined eventually 

 to be read and admired by the public, while in controversial works and 

 public addresses the tendency to attitudinize was dominant. The cir- 

 culation of literary trivialities and exchange of cheap compliments, 

 especially prevalent in Gaul, was kept up to the last by self-satisfied 

 cliques when the barbarians were already established in the heart of 

 the empire. Nevertheless valuable side-lights on questions of fact are 

 thrown from several points of view. This evidence agrees with that 

 drawn from the imperial laws, and is in so far better for our purpose that 

 it deals almost exclusively with the present. When it looks to the future, 

 it is in the form of petition or advice ; while the normal substance of 

 the laws is to confess the existence of monstrous abuses by threatening 

 offenders with penalties ever more and more severe, and enjoining re- 

 forms that no penalties could enforce. A writer very characteristic of 

 his age (about 3 1 5-400) is the ' sophist ' Libanius, who passed most 

 of his later years at Antioch, the luxurious chief city of the East. For 

 matters under his immediate observation he is a good authority, and 

 may help us to form a notion of the extent to which imperial ordinances 

 were practically operative in the eastern parts of the empire. 



Two of the ' orations,' or written addresses, of Libanius are par- 

 ticularly interesting as appeals to the emperor Theodosius for redress 

 of malpractices affecting the rustic population and impairing the 

 financial resources of the empire. The earlier 1 (about 385) exposes 

 gross misdeeds of the city magistrates of Antioch What with the 

 falling of old houses and clearing of sites for new buildings there were 

 great quantities of mixed rubbish to be removed and deposited else- 



1 Or at 50. I take the date given by Forster. 



