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Do you remember the man who sat upon the seats of the knights and scoured the Via Sacra with his toga, though he had been scourged from pillar to post for his villainies? I always think of that man when I hear Melmotte's name mentioned. Hoc, hoc tribuno militum! Is this the man to be Conservative member for Westminster? 'Do you know of the scourges, as a fact?
Join him in that entreaty to succour us, for the commonwealth is in such distress, that unless God inspire him to show us his servants the mercy of his natural disposition, and move him to give us a single Magister militum and a single Dux, we are utterly destitute, for Rome and its neighbourhood are specially defenceless.
Transigite cum expeditionibus: imponite quinquaginta annis magnum diem: approbate reipublicae nunquam exercitui imputari potuisse aut moras belli aut causas rebellandi." XXXV. Et alloquente adhuc Agricola, militum ardor eminebat, et finem orationis ingens alacritas consecuta est, statimque ad arma discursum.
He went back to Italy, and Alaric returned, plundering as he went, to Illyricum and Thrace, where he made terms with the government of New Rome, and received the desired title of magister militum per Illyricum.
It does not figures, it is true, in the notice of the dignities of the Empire, as the seat of a superior magistrate, but, nevertheless it is spoken of, as a town having a garrison; and, it was there that the præfectus militum Ursariensium or, as we should say in English, the colonel of the regiment of the Ursarians, resided.
We can hardly doubt that it was in this capacity, as the husband of his niece and a trusted friend, not as a general, that Stilicho received Theodosius' dying wishes; it was as an elder member of the same family that the husband of their cousin could claim to exert an influence over Arcadius and Honorius, of whom, however, the latter, it would appear, was more especially committed to his care, not only as the younger, but because Stilicho, being magister militum of the armies of Italy, would come more directly into contact with him than with his brother.
Laying aside, as we necessarily must, the account of Pomponius, which has evidently arisen solely out of the anecdote of Brutus dressed up with ever-increasing ignorance as history, we reach the simple result that the -tribuni celerum- entirely correspond in number and character to the -tribuni militum-, and that they were the leaders-of-division of the horsemen, consequently quite distinct from the -magister equitum-.
To find in so small and imperfectly developed a state the two leading functionaries or ingredients deriving their appellations from a command and control over the rude feudal militia, might alone warrant the conclusion that the most essential requirement of Venice, even when it had so far modified the form of administration, was felt to be the possession, under responsible direction, of a means of securing internal order and withstanding external aggression, if it were not the case that from the Gothic era onward we hear of scholæ militiæ cum patronis, manifestly the schools of instruction for the body over which the magister militum presided.
It is most probable that no regular account of the knights' fees was ever taken until they became liable to taxation, either in the form of auxilium militum under Henry I, or in that of scutage under his grandson. The facts, however, which are here adduced, preclude the possibility of referring this portion of the feudal innovations to the direct legislation of the Conqueror.
Barony coming henceforth to signify all honorary possessions as well of earls as barons, and baronage to denote all kinds of lords as well spiritual as temporal having right to sit in Parliament, the baronies in this sense were sometimes more, and sometimes fewer, but commonly about 200 or 250, containing in them a matter of 60,000 feuda militum, or knights' fees, whereof some 28,000 were in the clergy.
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