golden coin as largess among the citizens,[1] and emissaries are dispatched in all directions throughout the provinces to announce his elevation,[2] and to deposit in the local archives his diptychs, a pair of ivory plates inscribed with his likeness or insignia.[3] Immediately afterwards, the office relapses into a sinecure, and the Consul resumes his ordinary avocations in life.
On Sunday there is a cessation of business and pleasure throughout the city, though not of agricultural labour in the rural districts.[4] At the boom of the great semantron,[5] a sonorous board suspended in the porch of each church, and beaten with mallets by a deacon, the various congregations issue forth to attend their respective places of worship. In the forecourt they are met by a crowd of mendicants, exemplifying every degree of poverty and every form of bodily infirmity, who enjoy a prescriptive right to solicit alms at this; Reiske's Notes, op. cit., p. 235. The instrument is still in use in the Greek Church, but literary notices of it seem to be unknown before the seventh century.]
- ↑ Cod. Theod., XV, v, 2. No lower dignitary was allowed to distribute anything more precious than silver.
- ↑ Cod. Theod., VIII, xi; Cod., XII, lxiv.
- ↑ Cod. Theod., XV, ix. Numbers of these diptychs are still preserved. There is a specimen at South Kensington of those of Anastasius Sabinianus, Com. Domest., who was consul in 518. Each plate was usually about twelve by six inches, and they were hinged so as to close up together. The designs on each face were practically duplicates. Generally as to the position of consuls at this time see Godefroy ad Cod. Theod., VI, vi, and the numerous cross references he has supplied.
- ↑ Constantine instituted a regular observance of Sunday as the Dominica or Lord's Day in 321; Cod. Theod., III, viii, with Godfrey's Com.; Cod., III, xii, 3. Towards the end of the ninth century, however, Leo Sapiens prohibited even farmers from working on Sundays; Novel. Leo. VI, liv. Daily service was only instituted about 1050 by Constant. Monom.; Cedrenus, ii, p. 609.
- ↑ See Ducange, sb. [Greek: Sêmantron
