nd administered mainly by officials
trained in the Imperial school. To a certain extent the same thing is
true of all the Teutonic monarchies which arose in the fifth century on
the ruins of the Empire. In dealing with the needs and settling the
disputes of the large, highly-organised communities, into whose midst
they had poured themselves, it was not possible, if it had been
desirable, for the rulers to remain satisfied with the simple, sometimes
barbarous, principles of law and administration which had sufficed for
the rude farmer-folk who dwelt in isolated villages beyond the Rhine and
the Danube. Nor was this necessity disliked by the rulers themselves.
They soon perceived that the Roman law, with its tendency to derive all
power from the Imperial head of the State, and the Roman official staff,
an elaborate and well-organised hierarchy, every member of which
received orders from one above him and transmitted orders to those
below, were far more favourable to their own prerogative and gave them a
far higher position over against their followers and comrades in war,
than the institutions which had prevailed in the forests of Germany.
Hence, as I have said, all the new barbarian royalties, even that of the
Vandals in Africa (in some respects more anti-Roman than any other),
preserved much of the laws and machinery of the Roman Empire; but
Theodoric's Italian kingdom preserved the most of all. It might in fact
almost be looked upon as a mere continuation of the old Imperial system,
only with a strong, laborious, martial Goth at the head of affairs, able
and willing to keep all the members of the official hierarchy sternly to
their work, instead of the ruler whom the last three generations had
been accustomed to behold, a man decked with the purple and diadem, but
too weak, too indolent, too nervously afraid of irritating some powerful
captain of _foederati_, or some wealthy Roman noble, to be able to do
justice to all classes of his subjects.

The composition of the official hierarchy of the Empire is, from various
sources,[82] almost as fully known to us as that of any state of modern
Europe.

[Footnote 82: Chiefly the "Notitia Utriusque Imperii" (a sort of
official Red-book of the time of Honorius,) but also the "Various
Letters" of Cassiodorus, to be described below.]

Pre-eminent in dignity over all the rest rose the "Illustrious"
_Praetorian Prefect_, the vicegerent of the sovereign, a man who held
towards Emp