Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 2).djvu/99

 abolished, the wretched rustics were driven to despair in their efforts to dispose of their stock. Thus the roads were constantly filled with straggling bands of women, heavily laden, and often with infants at the breast, obliged to cover a long route in order to effect a shipment at the sea-ports; whilst the wayside was littered with the unburied corpses of those who succumbed under the excessive toil.

Such were the hardships the Byzantine population had to suffer as a consequence of the obligations imposed on them directly by the Imperial government, but these were largely aggravated by their being forced to minister to the private needs and even lustful passions of all those in power throughout the Empire. Every impost was augmented by an overplus which went into the pocket of the agent who exacted it or through whose hands it passed. The Rector of the province, generally an impecunious aspirant to place and fortune, had paid a large sum to the bureaucracy, and borrowed it at usury, for the bestowal of his codicil. He proceeded, therefore, to his local seat of power accompanied by a body of creditors to whom he had guaranteed the liquidation of their claims out of the revenue of his vicegerency; and he had, moreover, to make a provision from the artificially swollen taxes against the time when he hoped to retire from office into a position of leisured affluence. When an army passed