icae' perhaps = curatores annonae.]

35. KING THEODORIC TO FAUSTUS, PRAEPOSITUS.

[Sidenote: Unreasonable delays. The sucking-fish and torpedo.]

'This extraordinarily dry season having ruined the hopes of our
harvest, it is more than ever necessary that the produce should be
brought forward promptly. We are therefore exceedingly annoyed at
finding that the crops which are generally sent forward by your
Chancellor from the coasts of Calabria and Apulia in summer have not
yet arrived, though it is near autumn and the time is at hand when the
sun, entering the southern signs (which are all named from showers),
will send us storm and tempest.

'What are you waiting for? Why are your ships not spreading their
sails to the breeze? With a favourable wind and with bending oarsmen,
are you perhaps delayed by the _echeneis_ (Remora, or sucking-fish)?
or by the shell-fish of the Indian Ocean? or by the torpedo, whose
touch paralyses the hand? No; the echeneis in this case is entangling
venality; the bites of the shell-fish, insatiable avarice; the
torpedo, fraudulent pretence.

'The merchants are making delays in order that they may seem to have
fallen on adverse weather.

'Let your Magnitude put all this to rights promptly, otherwise our
famine will be imputed, not to bad seasons, but to negligence[241].'

[Footnote 241: For a fuller translation of this marvellous letter, see
Introd. p. 18.]

36. KING THEODORIC TO THERIOLUS, VIR SPECTABILIS.

[Sidenote: Guardianship of children of Benedictus.]

'We wish you to take the place of the late Benedictus in the city of
Pedon.

'As we never forget the services of the dead, we wish you to undertake
officially the guardianship of the sons of the said Benedictus.

'We always pay back to our faithful servants more than we have
received from them, and thus we do not go on the principle "equality
is equity," because we think it just to make them _more_ than an equal
recompence.'

37. KING THEODORIC TO CRISPIANUS.

[Sidenote: Justifiable homicide.]

'Murder is abominable, but it is right to take into account the
circumstances which may have provoked to homicide. If the slain man
was trying to violate the rights of wedlock, his blood be on his own
head. For even brute beasts vindicate their conjugal rights by force:
how much more man, who is so deeply dishonoured by the adulterer!

'Therefore, if it be true that the man whom you slew had wronged you
as a husband, we d