of fictitious and metaphorical
treason is extended to protect, not only the _illustrious_ officers of
the state and army, who were admitted into the sacred consistory,
but likewise the principal domestics of the palace, the senators of
Constantinople, the military commanders, and the civil magistrates of
the provinces; a vague and indefinite list, which, under the successors
of Constantine, included an obscure and numerous train of subordinate
ministers. II. This extreme severity might perhaps be justified, had it
been only directed to secure the representatives of the sovereign from
any actual violence in the execution of their office. But the whole body
of Imperial dependants claimed a privilege, or rather impunity, which
screened them, in the loosest moments of their lives, from the hasty,
perhaps the justifiable, resentment of their fellow-citizens; and, by a
strange perversion of the laws, the same degree of guilt and punishment
was applied to a private quarrel, and to a deliberate conspiracy against
the emperor and the empire. The edicts of Arcadius most positively and
most absurdly declares, that in such cases of treason, _thoughts_ and
_actions_ ought to be punished with equal severity; that the knowledge
of a mischievous intention, unless it be instantly revealed, becomes
equally criminal with the intention itself; and that those rash men,
who shall presume to solicit the pardon of traitors, shall themselves be
branded with public and perpetual infamy. III. "With regard to the sons
of the traitors," (continues the emperor,) "although they ought to share
the punishment, since they will probably imitate the guilt, of their
parents, yet, by the special effect of our Imperial lenity, we grant
them their lives; but, at the same time, we declare them incapable
of inheriting, either on the father's or on the mother's side, or of
receiving any gift or legacy, from the testament either of kinsmen or of
strangers. Stigmatized with hereditary infamy, excluded from the hopes
of honors or fortune, let them endure the pangs of poverty and contempt,
till they shall consider life as a calamity, and death as a comfort
and relief." In such words, so well adapted to insult the feelings of
mankind, did the emperor, or rather his favorite eunuch, applaud the
moderation of a law, which transferred the same unjust and inhuman
penalties to the children of all those who had seconded, or who had
not disclosed, their fictitious conspiracie