From that beginning, having run through many grades of honour, he rose to the prefecture, a man intelligent in other respects and satisfactory to the provinces, mild also and well-spoken, but on any and every occasion, and especially (which is odious) in hard-fought lawsuits and under all circumstances greedily bent upon filthy lucre. § 15.13.2 For when Constantine was closely investigating the different religious sects, Manichaeans and the like, and no suitable interpreter could be found, he chose him, as a person recommended to him as competent and when he had done that duty skilfully, he wished him to be called Musonianus, whereas he had hitherto had the name of Strategius.
With a sponge he effaced the lines of writing, leaving only the signature intact, and wrote above it another text far different from the original, indicating that Silvanus in obscure terms was asking and urging his assistants within the palace or without official position, including both Tuscus Albinus and many more, to help him, aiming as he was at a loftier position and soon to mount to the imperial throne. He had as abettors and fellow conspirators, as uncertain rumours declared, Lampadius, the praetorian prefect, and Eusebius, former keeper of the privy purse, who had been nicknamed Mattyocopus, and Aedesius, late master of the rolls, all of whom the said prefect had arranged to have called to the consulship as his nearest friends. § 15.5.4 So when the abovementioned commander was traversing Gaul in the service of the government and driving forth the savages, who had now lost their confidence and courage, this same Dynamius, being restless in action, like the crafty man he was and practised in deceit, devised a wicked plot. § 14.6.17 And as skilful directors of battles place in the van dense throngs of brave soldiers, then light-armed troops, after them the javelin-throwers, and last of all the reserve forces, to enter the action in case chance makes it needful, just so those who have charge of a city household, made conspicuous by wands grasped in their right hands, carefully and diligently draw up the array then, as if the signal had been given in camp, close to the front of the carriage all the weavers march next to these the blackened service of the kitchen, then all the rest of the slaves without distinction, accompanied by the idle plebeians of the neighbourhood finally, the throng of eunuchs, beginning with the old men and ending with the boys, sallow and disfigured by the distorted form of their members so that, wherever anyone goes, beholding the troops of mutilated men, he would curse the memory of that Queen Samiramis of old, who was the first of all to castrate young males, thus doing violence, as it were, to Nature and wresting her from her intended course, since she at the very beginning of life, through the primitive founts of the seed, by a kind of secret law, shows the ways to propagate posterity.
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