Letter 10040: The recommendation I make in this letter is made on the basis of genuine knowledge and genuine judgment, not merely...

The contests of cities and peoples, since they are weightier than private ones, must yield to a more august judgment, our lords the emperors [the three reigning Augusti are addressed]. Rightly, when I perceived that the case of the people of Puteoli and of Tarracina - which after the examination of the governor of Campania passed by appeal to the sacred tribunal - was balanced in an even scale, I reserved it for the decision of Your Majesty. The matter at issue is of this kind: To the townsmen of Puteoli the deified Constantine granted one hundred and fifty thousand modii [a modius is a measure of grain] for the sustenance of the city, which sum, while the deified Constans was governing the commonwealth, was reduced by half. Afterwards Constantius, likewise received into heaven, when the supplication had been laid down [i.e. after his consecration], increased the grain-dole of the people of Puteoli by an addition of twenty-five thousand modii, and so it came about that this same people received one hundred thousand for its sustenance. But while the deified Julian was governing the commonwealth, when Lupus presided over Campania with consular authority and was considering the straits of the people of Tarracina - because the towns long ago decreed contributed no relief, lest the city so serviceable to the Roman people, which supplies wood for the public baths and lime for repairing the walls, should be suddenly exhausted by want and collapse - he assigned to the use of the Tarracinians five thousand seven hundred modii withdrawn from the townsmen of Puteoli, and reported to the most eminent praetorian seat the things established and determined. Mamertinus at that time was strong in the honor of the prefecture. When he had confirmed the arrangements made, he nonetheless consulted the imperial judgment, and received no reply, because at that time the ruler of the empire [Julian] was occupied with the Persian war. From then on for several years that allowance ran its course, until a Capuan embassy, before the deified and renowned Gratian, the brother of Your Divinity, lamenting only its own losses, obtained that the quantity of grain which Cerealis had claimed from many cities for the Roman people should be restored to all. But seizing the occasion of the rescript, when it had recovered for the provincials' sustenance only the thirty-eight thousand modii which had been added to the granaries of the eternal city, the townsmen of Puteoli also denied to the Tarracinians the five thousand seven hundred modii. When therefore this case had come into the provincial court, the most distinguished consular [governor], without considering the sum which was secured by the rescript of the deified prince, decreed by a general adjudication that everything was to be restored to the people of Puteoli. But after the appeal, the inquiry of the sacred tribunal, when it perceived that that amount of grain which had been restored to the Campanians had been separated from the five thousand seven hundred modii which the city of Tarracina received on account of the needs of the eternal city, could neither - the decree of the divine oracle [imperial pronouncement] remaining in force - confirm by its ratification those subsidies which the Tarracinians received by the judgment of Lupus and of the prefect Mamertinus, since no authority of a sacred reply was extant, nor take them away from the city, lest the people bound to the advantages of the eternal city should lack their just benefits. Therefore, as is wont to happen in doubtful matters, we have recourse to the salutary judgment of Your Clemency, although the Puteolan defense, after the relation had been promised, believed in vain that it should appeal. The record of the proceedings is at hand, which can inform Your Perpetuity. I ask and beseech that to a business long wavering through many a year a stable remedy may at last be granted.