5. Senator, Praetorian Praefect, to Valerian, Vir Sublimis.

[Written probably in the autumn or winter of 535, when Belisarius was in Sicily threatening the Southern Provinces of Italy.]

Measures for relief of Lucania and Bruttii.

'The ruler's anxiety for the common good of all over whom he is placed, may allowably show itself in an especial manner towards the dwellers in his own home, and that pre-eminently at a time when they need his succour from peril.

'The numerous army which was destined for the defence of the Republic is said to have laid waste the cultivated parts of Lucania and Bruttii, and to have diminished the abundance of those regions by its love of rapine.

'Now since they must take and you must give, and since the cultivator must not be robbed nor the army starved, know that the prices of provisions are fixed by the order of the Lord of the State at a much lower figure than you have been wont to sell at[814].

'Be not therefore anxious. You have escaped the hands of the tax-collector. The present instrument takes away from you the liability to tribute. In order that your knowledge may be made more complete, we have thought it better that the amounts of the provisions for which you are held responsible should be expressed in the below-written letters[815], that no one may sell you a benefit which you know to be conferred by the public generosity.

'Repress, therefore, the unruly movements of the cultivators[816]. While the Gothic army is fighting, let the Roman peasant enjoy in quiet the peace for which he sighs. According to the King's command, admonish the several tenants on the farms, and the better sort of peasants, not to mingle in the barbarism of the strife, lest the danger to public tranquillity be greater than any service they can render in the wars[817]. Let them lay hands to the iron, but only to cultivate their fields; let them grasp the pointed steel, but only to goad their oxen.

'Let the Judges be active: let the tribunals echo with their denunciations of crime. Let the robber, the adulterer, the forger, the thief, find that the arm of the State is still strong to punish their crimes. True freedom rejoices when these men are made sad. Here, in this civil battle, is full scope for your energies: attend to this, and enjoy the thought that others are fighting the battle with the foreign foe for you.

'Exercise great care in calculating the rations of the soldiers, that no trickery may succeed in defrauding the soldier of his due.

'The officers of the army are by the rulers of the State placed under my authority, and you are therefore to admonish them if they go wrong, while redressing all their real grievances. They, in their turn, must uphold discipline, which is the most powerful weapon of an army. Rise to the dignity of the occasion, and show that you are able to govern a Province in a disturbed condition of public affairs, since anyone can govern it while all things are quiet.

'The royal household is specially ordered to pay the same obedience to this rescript as all the rest of the Province; and as for my own dependants, I say expressly that, though I wish them well, I ask for no favour for them which I would not grant to all the other inhabitants of the Province.'