Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 6 (1897).djvu/518

 496 THE DECLINE AND FALL palace of Constantinople. Under the reign of Andronicus the Younger, the great domestic ruled the emperor and the em- pire ; and it was by his valour and conduct that the isle of Lesbos and the principality of ^tolia were restored to their ancient allegiance. His enemies confess that, among the public robbers, Cantacuzene alone was moderate and abstemious ; and the free and voluntary account which he produces of his own wealth -- may sustain the presumption that it was devolved by inheritance, and not accumulated by rapine. He does not in- deed specify the value of his money, plate, and jewels ; yet, after a voluntary gift of two hundred vases of silver, after much had been secreted by his friends and plundered by his foes, his forfeit treasures were sufficient for tlie equipment of a fleet of seventy galleys. He does not measure the size and number of his estates ; but his granaries were heaped with an incredible store of wheat and barlev ; and the labour of a thousand yoke of oxen might cultivate, according to the practice of antiquity, about sixty-two thousand five hundred acres of arable land.-^ His pastures were stocked with two thousand five hundred brood mares, tAvo hundred camels, three hundred mules, five hundred asses, five thousand horned cattle, fifty thousand hogs, and seventy thousand sheep : ^* a precious record of rural opulence, in the last period of the empire, and in a land, most probably in Thrace, so repeatedly wasted by foreign and domestic hos- tility. The favour of Cantacuzene was above his fortune. In the moments of familiarity, in the hour of sickness, the emperor He is left Avas dcsirous to level the distance between them, and pressed empire his friend to accept the diadem and purple. The virtue of the great domestic, which is attested by his own pen, resisted the dangerous proposal ; but the last testament of Andi'onicus the Younger named him the guardian of his son and the regent of the empire. His regency Is Had the regent found a suitable return of obedience and attacked, '^ A.D. 1341, 22 See Cantacuzene (1. iii. c. 24, 30, 36). ^^Saserna, in Gaul, and Columella, in Italy or Spain, allow two yoke of oxen, two drivers, and six labourers, for two hundred jugera (125 English acres) of arable land ; and three more men must be added if there be much undenvood (Columella de Re Rustica, 1. ii. c. 13, p. 441, edit. Gesner). 2* In this enumeration (1. iii. c. 30), the French translation of the President Cousin is blotted with three palpable and essential errors, i. He omits the ioc» yoke of working oxen. 2. He interprets the TreiTftKoo-ict n-pb? i5icrxiAi'ai5, by the number of fifteen hundred. ("The mistake has not been corrected in the Bonn edition, vol. ii. p. 185.] 3. He confounds myriads with chiliads, and gives Canta- cuzene no more than 5000 hogs. Put not your trust in translations !