.
How he ruined the beauty and appearance of Constantinople and every other city, we shall now see.
First he determined to debase the standing of the lawyers. He deprived
them of all court fees, by which they had formerly lived in comfort and
elegance; and in consequence they lost caste and significance. And after
he had confiscated the estates of the Senators and other prosperous
people, as has been related, in Constantinople and all over the Roman
Empire, there was little use for lawyers anyway; men no longer had
anything worth mentioning to go to court about. So of all the many noted
advocates, only a few were left; and they were despised and reduced to
penury, reaping nothing but insult from their work.
Furthermore, he caused physicians and teachers of the liberal arts to be
deprived of the necessities of life. For he stopped all their living
subsidies, which former emperors had paid men of these professions from
the public treasury.
Also all of the taxes which the municipalities had devoted to public use
or entertainments, he transferred arbitrarily to the imperial treasury.
No consideration was now given to any physician or teacher; no one
dared pay any attention to public buildings; there were no public lights
in any city, nor any entertainments for the citizens. For the theaters,
hippodromes, and circuses, in which his wife had been born, bred and
educated, were all discontinued. Later he even stopped the public
spectacles in Constantinople, to avoid spending the usual State money on
them, by which an almost incalculable number of people had got their
livelihood. On these, individually and collectively, ruin and desuetude
descended, and as if some cataclysm had fallen on them from Heaven,
their happiness was slain. And no other subject was spoken of among men,
at home or in public or in the churches, than their calamities, their
sufferings, and their overwhelming by the latest misfortune. Such was
the state of affairs in the cities.
Of what is left to tell, this is worth mentioning. Each year two Roman
consuls were appointed: one at Rome, the other at Constantinople. And
whoever was called to this honor was expected to spend more than twenty
gold centenaries on the public; some of which came from the Consul's
private purse, but most was furnished by the Emperor. This money was
given to those others whom I have mentioned, but mostly to the poor and
those employed in the theater; all of which was to the good of the city.
But from the time Justinian came to power, these distributions were not
made at the customary time; for sometimes a Consul remained in office
for year after year, till finally people wearied of hoping for a new
one, even in their dreams. As a result, universal poverty was the case,
since the usual annual relief was no longer afforded to subjects; and in
every way all that they had was taken from them by their ruler.
Now I think I have shown sufficiently how this destroyer devoured all
the public moneys and robbed each member of the Senate, publicly and
privately, of all his estates; and how by bringing false charges he
confiscated the properties of everybody else who was reputed to be
wealthy, I imagine I have adequately told: as in the case of the
soldiers, subordinate officers, and the palace guard; the farmers and
landowners; those whose business is in words; merchants, ship owners and
sailors; mechanics, artisans, and market dealers; those whose
livelihood is in the theater; and indeed everyone else, who was affected
in turn by the damage done to these. And now let us see what he did to
those in need of alms: the poor, the beggars, and the diseased; for what
he did to the priests will be described later.
First, as I have said, he took control of all the shops, licensed
monopolies of all the wares most necessary to life, and exacted a price
of more than triple their worth from the citizens. And other details of
what he did I would not even attempt to catalogue in an endless book,
since they were simply uncountable.
He put a bitter and perpetual tax on the sale of bread, which the day
laborers, the poor and the infirm could not help buying. From this
source he demanded three centenaries a year, with the result that the
bakers filled their loaves with shells and dust; for the Emperor had no
scruples against profiting meanly from even this unholy adulteration.
Those in charge of the markets, turning this trick to their private
gain, with ease became very wealthy and reduced the poor to an
unexpected famine even in prosperous times; since it was not permitted
to bring in grain from other places, but all were forced to eat bread
purchased in the city.
One of the municipal aqueducts, which furnished not a small share of the
city water, collapsed; but the rulers disregarded the matter and
refused to repair it, though the constant crowds who had to use the
wells were fairly stifling, and all the baths were shut down. On the
other hand, he threw away great sums of money senselessly on buildings
by the seashore and elsewhere, in all the suburbs, as if the palaces in
which all the former emperors had been content to dwell were not enough
for this pair. So it was not to save money, but to destroy his subjects,
that he refused to rebuild the aqueduct; for no one in all history had
ever been born among men more eager than Justinian to get hold of money,
and then to throw it immediately away again. Through the two things
left to them to drink and eat, water and bread, this Emperor injured
those who were in the last extremes of poverty; making the one hard to
procure at all, and the other too expensive to buy.
This he did not only to the poor in Constantinople, but to inhabitants
elsewhere, as I shall now relate. When Theodoric captured Italy, he
permitted the palace guard to remain in Rome, that some trace of the
ancient State might be left; and he continued their daily pay. These
soldiers were quite numerous, comprising the Silentiarii, the Domestics,
and the Student Corps, who were soldiers only in name; their pay was
just enough to live on; and Theodoric ordered that this should revert,
on their deaths, to their children and families. Among the poor, who
lived near the Church of St. Peter the Apostle, he distributed each year
three thousand bushels of grain from the public granary; which they
continued to receive until the arrival in Italy of Alexander the
Scissors.
This man immediately decided to deprive them of all this. When
Justinian, Emperor of the Romans, learned of this economy, he was
greatly pleased, and favored Alexander more than ever. It was on his way
here that Alexander treated the Greeks as follows. The fortress at
Thermopylae had long been guarded by the neighboring farmers, who took
turns watching the wall whenever an incursion of barbarians into the
Peloponnese was anticipated.
But this Alexander, when he arrived there, claimed it was to the
advantage of the Peloponnesians not to allow this pass to be kept by
farmers. So he stationed two thousand soldiers there, to be paid not out
of the imperial treasury, but by all the cities of Greece; and on this
pretext, he diverted all their public and entertainment revenues to the
general fund, saying that from it food would be bought for these
soldiers. In consequence, after this, everywhere in Greece, including
even Athens, no public buildings or any other benefit could be
considered. But Justinian of course approved this action of the
Scissors. And that is what happened here.
Then there is the matter of the poor in Alexandria. Among the lawyers
there was one Hephaestus, who, on being made Governor of Alexandria, put
a stop to civic sedition by intimidating the rioters, but reduced all
the inhabitants to the utmost misery. For he immediately brought all the
wares in the city under a monopoly, forbidding other merchants to sell
anything, and himself became the only dealer and sole vendor of all
wares: fixing prices as he pleased under his supreme power. By the
consequent shortage in necessary provisions the city of Alexandria was
greatly distressed, where formerly even the very poor had been able to
live adequately; and the high price of bread pinched them most. For he
alone bought up all the grain in Egypt, not allowing anyone else to
purchase as much as a single bushel; and thus he controlled the supply
and price of bread as he pleased. In this way he soon amassed unheard-of
wealth, at the same time satisfying the greed of the Emperor. The
people of Alexandria through fear of Hephaestus bore their suffering in
silence; and the Emperor, awed by the abundance of money that
continuously came to him from that quarter, was wonderfully delighted
with his Governor.
This Hephaestus, planning to incur even greater favor of the Emperor,
contrived the following additional scheme. When Diocletian became ruler
of the Romans, he ordered a large quantity of grain to be given yearly
to the poor in Alexandria. And the Alexandrians, distributing this among
themselves at that time, had transmitted the right to receive this
bounty to their descendants up to this time. But Hephaestus, depriving
these needy ones of this charity, which amounted to two million bushels,
diverted it to the imperial granary, and wrote to the Emperor that
these men had been getting this dole unjustly and not in accordance with
the interests of state. The Emperor, approving this action, was still
fonder of him than before. But such Alexandrians whose hope of life had
been in the distribution, in their present bitter distress felt the full
benefit of his inhumanity.
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