Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/373

Rh principle of the Imperial rule—local institutions and jurisdictions were respected, but there must be order and peace and obedience to law. In every state—whether free or provincial—the Emperor represents a law which pervades all and is above all, and to him every citizen of any state within the Empire, whatever its theoretical status, can, in the last resort, look for justice, can, as we should say, change the venue of his cause, if he had good reason to doubt getting justice in his own country. The case of St. Paul would naturally occur to the mind, but a stronger one is contained in a still existing letter of Augustus to the people of Cnidus, which was a libera civitas, not under a provincial governor. It concerns a case of homicide, in which the accused were evidently unpopular in their native town, and who, there- fore, “appealed to Caesar.” His answer in a Greek translation still exists engraven on a stone tablet:—

“Imperator Caesar, son of the deified one, Augustus, twelve times consul, in the 18th year of his tribunician power [i.e., B.C. 6], to the magistrates, senate, and people of the Cnidians, greeting:

Your ambassadors, Dionysius and Dionysius son of Dionysius, appeared before me at Rome, and delivered the decree accusing Eubulus son of Anaxandridas, now dead, and his wife Truphera, who was present, concerning the death of Eubulus son of Chrysippus. Whereupon I—having ordered my friend Asinius Gallus to examine the slaves by torture who were implicated in the charge—ascertained that Philinus son of Chrysippus came three nights in succession to the house of Eubulus and Truphera with violence and intent to break into it, and that on the third night he brought with him his brother Eubulus: that the