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d to make an income of not less than L600 a year, equivalent to two or three times that amount in our day. All this great hierarchy of officials wielded powers derived, mediately or immediately, from the Emperor (or in the Ostrogothic monarchy from the King), and great as was their brilliancy in the eyes of the dazzled multitudes who crouched before them, it was all reflected from him, who was the central sun of their universe. But there were still two institutions which were in theory independent of Emperor or King, which were yet held venerable by men, and which had come down from the days of the great world-conquering republic, or the yet earlier days of Romulus and Numa. These two institutions were the Consulship and the Senate. The _Consuls,_ as was said in an earlier chapter, still appeared to preside over the Roman Republic, as they had in truth presided, wielding between them the full power of a king, when Brutus and Collatinus, a thousand years before Theodoric's commencement of the siege of Ravenna, took their seat upon the curule chairs, and donned the _trabea_ of the Consul. Still, though utterly shorn of its power, the glamour of the venerable office remained. The Emperor himself seemed to add to his dignity when he allowed himself to be nominated as Consul, and in nothing was the cupidity of the tyrant Emperors and the moderation of the patriot Emperors better displayed than in the number of Consulships which they claimed or forbore from claiming. Ever since the virtual division of the Empire into an Eastern and Western portion, it had been usual, though not absolutely obligatory, for one Consul to be chosen out of each half of the _Orbis Romanus,_ and in reading the contemporary chronicles we can almost invariably tell to which portion the author belongs by observing to which Consul's name he gives the priority. As has been already stated, after the resumption of friendly relations between Ravenna and Constantinople, Theodoric, while naming the Western Consul, sent a courteous notification of the fact to the Emperor, by whom his nomination seems to have been always accepted without question. The great Ostrogoth, having once worn the Consular robes and distributed largess to "the Roman People" in the streets of Constantinople, does not seem to have cared a second time to assume that ancient dignity, but in the year 519, towards the end of his reign, he named his son-in-law, Eutharic, Consul, and the sple
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