1043b (return)
[ These, in the original institution as settled by Augustus, were only commanders of his body-guards; but in the later times of the Roman empire they were next in authority under the emperor, to whom they seem to have acted as a sort of prime ministers. M.]
1044b (return)
[ The provinces were divided into, a kind of circuits called conventus, whither the proconsuls used to go in order to administer justice. The judges here mentioned must not be understood to mean the same sort of judicial officers as with us: they rather answered to our juries. M.]
1045b (return)
[ By the imperial constitutions the philosophers were exempted from all public functions. Catariscus. M.]
1046b (return)
[ About $24,000.]
1047b (return)
[ Geographers are not agreed where to place this city; Cellarius conjectures it may possibly be the same with Prusa ad Olympum, Prusa at the foot of Mount Olympus in Mysia.]
1048b (return)
[ Domitian.]
1049b (return)
[ That is, whether they should be considered in a state of freedom or slavery. M.]
1050 (return)
[ "Parents throughout the entire ancient world had the right to expose their children and leave them to their fate. Hence would sometimes arise the question whether such a child, if found and brought up by another, was entitled to his freedom, whether also the person thus adopting him must grant him his freedom without repayment for the cost of maintenance." Church and Brodribb.]
1051 (return)
[ "This decision of Trajan, the effect of which would be that persons would be slow to adopt an abandoned child which, when brought up, its natural parents could claim back without any compensation for its nurture, seems harsh, and we find that it was disregarded by the later emperors in their legal decisions on the subject." Church and Brodribb.]
1052 (return)
[ And consequently by the Roman laws unapplicable to any other purpose. M.]
1053 (return)
[ The Roman provinces in the times of the emperors were of two sorts: those which were distinguished by the name of the provinciae Cæsaris and the provinciae senatus. The provinciae Cæsaris, or imperial provinces, were such as the emperor, for reasons of policy, reserved to his own immediate administration, or of those whom he thought proper to appoint: the provinciae senatus, or proconsular provinces, were such as he left to the government of proconsuls or praetors, chosen in the ordinary method of election. (Vid. Suet, in Aug. V. 47.) Of the former kind was Bithynis, at the time when our author presided there. (Vid. Masson. Vit. Plin. p. 133.) M.]
1054 (return)
[ A province in Asia, bordering upon the Black Sea, and by some ancient geographers considered as one province with Bithynia. M.]
1055 (return)
[ About $2,000. M.]
1056 (return)
[ Cities of Pontus near the Euxine or Black Sea. M.]
1057 (return)
[ Gordium, the old capital of Phrygia. It afterwards, in the reign of the Emperor Augustus, received the name of Juliopolis. (See Smith's Classical Diet.)]
1058 (return)
[ Pompey the Great having subdued Mithridates, and by that means enlarged the Roman empire, passed several laws relating to the newly conquered provinces, and, among others, that which is here mentioned. M.]
1059 (return)
[ The right of electing Senators did not originally belong to the censors, who were only, as Cicero somewhere calls them, guardians of the discipline and manners of the city; but in process of time they engrossed the whole privilege of conferring that honour. M.]
1060 (return)
[ This, probably, was some act whereby the city was to ratify and confirm the proceedings of Dion under the commission assigned to him.]
1061 (return)
[ It was a notion which generally prevailed with the ancients, in the Jewish as well as heathen world, that there was a pollution in the contact of dead bodies, and this they extended to the very house in which the corpse lay, and even to the uncovered vessels that stood in the same room. (Vid. Pot. Antiq. V. II. 181.) From some such opinion as this it is probable that the circumstance, here mentioned, of placing Trajan's statue where these bodies were deposited, was esteemed as a mark of disrespect to his person.]
1062 (return)
[ A thriving Greek colony in the territory of Sinopis, on the Euxine.]
1063 (return)
[ A colony of Athenians in the province of Pontus. Their town, Amisus, on the coast, was one of the residences of Mithridates.]
1064 (return)
[ Casaubon, in his observations upon Theophrastus (as cited by one of the commentators) informs us that there were at Athens and other cities of Greece Certain fraternities which paid into a common chest a monthly contribution towards the support of such of their members who had fallen into misfortunes; upon condition that, if ever they arrived to more prosperous circumstances, they should repay into the general fund the money so advanced. M.]
1065 (return)
[ By the law for encouragement of matrimony (some account of which has already been given in the notes above), as a penalty upon those who lived bachelors, they were declared incapable of inheriting any legacy by will; so likewise, if being married, they had no children, they could not claim the full advantage of benefactions of that kind.]
1066 (return)
[ This letter is esteemed as almost the only genuine monument of ecclesiastical antiquity relating to the times immediately succeeding the Apostles, it being written at most not above forty years after the death of St. Paul. It was preserved by the Christians themselves as a clear and unsuspicious evidence of the purity of their doctrines, and is frequently appealed to by the early writers of the Church against the calumnies of their adversaries. M.]
1067 (return)
[ It was one of the privileges of a Roman citizen, secured by the Semprorian law, that he could not be capitally convicted but by the suffrage of the people; which seems to have been still so far in force as to make it necessary to send the persons here mentioned to Rome. M.]
1068 (return)
[ These women, it is supposed, exercised the same office as Phoebe mentioned by St. Paul, whom he styles deaconess of the church of Cenchrea. Their business was to tend the poor and sick, and other charitable offices; as also to assist at the ceremony of female baptism, for the more decent performance of that rite: as Vossius observes upon this passage. M.]
1069 (return)
[ If we impartially examine this prosecution of the Christians, we shall find it to have been grounded on the ancient constitution of the state, and not to have proceeded from a cruel or arbitrary temper in Trajan. The Roman legislature appears to have been early jealous of any innovation in point of public worship; and we find the magistrates, during the old republic frequently interposing in cases of that nature. Valerius Maximus has collected some instances to that purpose (L. I. C. 3), and Livy mentions it as an established principle of the earlier ages of the commonwealth, to guard against the introduction of foreign ceremonies of religion. It was an old and fixed maxim likewise of the Roman government not to suffer any unlicensed assemblies of the people. From hence it seems evident that the Christians had rendered themselves obnoxious not so much to Trajan as to the ancient and settled laws of the state, by introducing a foreign worship, and assembling themselves without authority. M.]
1070 (return)
[ On the coast of Paphlagonia.]
1071 (return)
[ By the Papian law, which passed in the consulship of M. Papius Mutilus and Q. Poppeas Secundus, u. c. 761, if a freedman died worth a hundred thousand sesterces (or about $4,000 of our money), leaving only one child, his patron (that is, the master from whom he received his liberty) was entitled to half his estate; if he left two children, to one-third; but if more than two, then the patron was absolutely excluded. This was afterwards altered by Justinian, Inst. 1. III. tit. 8. M.]
1072 (return)
[ About $7,000.]
1073 (return)
[ About $175]
1074 (return)
[ About $350.]
1075 (return)
[ The denarius=7 cents. The sum total, then, distributed among one thousand persons at the rate of, say, two denara a piece would amount to about $350.]
1076 (return)
[ These games are called Iselastic from the Greek word invehor, because the victors, drawn by white horses, and wearing crowns on their heads, were conducted with great pomp into their respective cities, which they entered through a breach in the walls made for that purpose; intimating, as Plutarch observes, that a City which produced such able and victorious citizens, had little occasion for the defence of walls (Catanaeus). They received also annually a certain honourable stipend from the public. M.]