man noble aspiring to employment
in the Civil Service, there are some indications that the bent of his
own genius was towards Natural History, strange and often laughable as
are the facts or fictions which this taste of his has caused him to
accumulate.

[Sidenote: Consiliarius to his father.]

In the year 500[15], when Senator had just attained the age of twenty,
his father, as we have already seen, received from Theodoric the high
office of Praetorian Praefect. As a General might make an
_Aide-de-camp_ of his son, so the Praefect conferred upon the young
Senator the post of _Consiliarius_, or Assessor in his Court[16]. The
Consiliarius[17] had been in the time of the Republic an experienced
jurist who sat beside the Praetor or the Consul (who might be a man
quite unversed in the law) and advised him as to his judgments. From
the time of Severus onwards he became a paid functionary of the Court,
receiving a salary which varied from 12 to 72 solidi (L7 to L43). At
the time which we are now describing it was customary for the Judge to
choose his Consiliarius from among the ranks of young jurists who had
just completed their studies. The great legal school of Berytus
especially furnished a large number of Consiliarii to the Roman
Governors. In order to prevent an officer in this position from
obtaining an undue influence over the mind of his principal, the
latter was forbidden by law to keep a Consiliarius, who was a native
of the Province in which he was administering justice, more than four
months in his employ[18]. This provision, of course, would not apply
when the young Assessor, as in the case of Cassiodorus, came with his
father from a distant Province: and in such a case, if the Magistrate
died during his year of office, by a special enactment the
fairly-earned pay of the Assessor was protected from unjust demands on
the part of the Exchequer[19]. The functions thus exercised by Senator
in his father's court at Rome, and the title which he bore, were
somewhat similar to those which Procopius held in the camp of
Belisarius, but doubtless required a more thorough legal training. In
our own system, if we could imagine the Judge's Marshal invested with
the responsibilities of a Registrar of the Court, we should perhaps
get a pretty fair idea of the position and duties of a Roman
Consiliarius[20].

[Footnote 15: Or possibly 501.]

[Footnote 16: This fact, and also the cause of Senator's promotion to
the Quaestors