Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 1).djvu/134

 golden coin as largess among the citizens, and emissaries are dispatched in all directions throughout the provinces to announce his elevation, and to deposit in the local archives his diptychs, a pair of ivory plates inscribed with his likeness or insignia. Immediately afterwards, the office relapses into a sinecure, and the Consul resumes his ordinary avocations in life.

On Sunday there is a cessation of business and pleasure throughout the city, though not of agricultural labour in the rural districts. At the boom of the great semantron, a sonorous board suspended in the porch of each church, and beaten with mallets by a deacon, the various congregations issue forth to attend their respective places of worship. In the forecourt they are met by a crowd of mendicants, exemplifying every degree of poverty and every form of bodily infirmity, who enjoy a prescriptive right to solicit alms at this; Reiske's Notes, op. cit., p. 235. The instrument is still in use in the Greek Church, but literary notices of it seem to be unknown before the seventh century.]