DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 73 buildings shall be constructed at Rome until the ruins of the ancient buildings have been repaired ; the year following they forbid their subordinates to despoil out-of-the-way towns of their marbles and columns in order to adorn this or that metropolis. In 389 private landowners who tap the public aqueducts to irrigate their farms are threatened with confiscation of their land. Some workers are forced by pen- alties to pursue the same trades as their fathers; others are encouraged in their callings by immunities and exemption from taxes. Skilled labor seems to be getting scarce. It is also difficult for the government to procure enough ships to bring provisions to the populaces of Rome and Constanti- nople, or the workmen necessary for a number of other public enterprises. The toilers in the state mines and quar- | ries often run away. So difficult has it become to keep the J governing class in the municipalities at their disagreeable j task of tax- collecting that evildoers are sometimes forced to j join a curia by way of punishment, while five gold pieces are I offered as a reward to any one who drags a runaway decurion
- back to his office. Life in the country has become as burden-
some as in the town, since as early as the reign of Constan- tine a law shows us that the tenants or coloni are now bound to the soil like the later medieval serfs ; that the landowner on whose estate a colonus belonging to another is discovered must not only restore the fugitive to his rightful master, but pay damages for the time that the said colonus has worked for him; and that coloni who "are meditating flight" may be put in chains and "compelled by such condemnation as a slave deserves to perform the tasks that a freeman should. The burden of taxation became so great, and the petty tyranny exercised by the host of officials whom the bureau- cracy of Diocletian an& his successors necessitated became in many cases so oppressive, that at about the time the Huns were appearing on the scene the emperors established in the cities new officials called defensores, or "protectors," who were to defend their subjects from their own other officials. Numerous laws were also passed to protect the peasants against oppressive exactions. Finally we may note X*X*&*tSv
