Emperors Arcadius and Honorius Augustuses to Eutychianus, Praetorian Prefect. (After other matters.) No clerics or monks nor even those called synoditae shall be permitted to vindicate and hold by force or by any usurpation persons who have been sentenced to punishment and condemned for the enormity of their crimes. We do not deny to such clerics, monks, or synoditae the right to interpose an appeal in a criminal case, in consideration of humanity, if the legally prescribed time limits permit, in order that a more careful investigation may be made in a case where it is supposed that, through the error or the favoritism of the judge, justice has been suppressed to the prejudice of the safety of a person, provided that whether a proconsul, a count of the Orient, an augustal prefect, or a vicar was the judge, he shall know that he must refer the case not so much to Our Clemency as to the Most August authorities. For it is Our will that their jurisdiction over such cases shall be complete, so that, if the matter is of such a nature and the crime so demands, they may be able to punish the condemned persons more justly.

1. Also, after the time of appeal has elapsed, no person shall either hold or defend an accused person when he is going to the place of punishment under escort; and the judge shall know that he will be punished by a fine of thirty pounds of gold and the primates of his office staff by a capital sentence if such usurpation is not punished immediately. If the audacity of the clerics and monks is so great that it is thought that the outcome will be a war rather than a judicial trial, their unlawful action shall be referred to Our Clemency, so that by Our decision a more severe penalty may soon result.

2. It shall redound to the discredit of the bishops, of course, as shall all other such matters, if they should learn that any of those acts which We prohibit by this law have been perpetrated by the monks in that part of a district in which they, the bishops, guide the people by instilling the doctrine of the Christian religion, and if they should not punish such violations. From the number of these monks the bishops shall ordain clerics more suitably when, perchance, they think that they are in need of them. (Etc.) Given on the sixth day before the kalends of August at Mnyzus in the year of the fourth consulship of Honorius Augustus and the consulship of Eutychianus. July 27, 398.

 

(trans. Pharr 1952: 257)