The obscurity which promptly descends on the brain of the intelligent reader who endeavors to gain a clear idea of the state of society or of the administration of government in these early ages of Italian history, makes the careful student very skeptical of any precise presentation he may find of them, and causes him to be particularly cautious and proportionately diffident in making, himself, any very definite statements concerning them. If he be a wise man and wish to make his investigation of some use to others, he frequently says "it seems probable," and he particularly avoids mentioning dates which are fixed and immovable. If this may be said of all matters not belonging simply to the narrative portions of history at this period, particularly true is it of the different functions attributed to various officers of local government, whose very titles we sometimes have to infer from their duties, and whose duties we often have to infer from their titles. To these the _judex_, though the most prominent, cannot be said to form an exception. That he was the head of the district judicial system has in part been already shown, and will come out more clearly when we come to define the powers of some of his subordinates. His leadership in war we have seen to be but the natural continuance of his original office; and that as _dux_ he was to be ranked among the first nobles of the land, the "optimates," the "viri illustres," we can see from the following passage in the laws of Liutprand, when in the prologue to the third book already quoted, he gives forth the edict with the judges as "una cum illustribus viris optimatibus meis ex Neustriae et Austriae et Tusciae partibus vel universis nobilibus Langobardis."[23] Although the position of the _duces_ as nobles of the land never altered, their power relative to that of the king suffered many modifications. The ducal power--"principes" of Tacitus--preceding among the Lombards that of the king, we see the dukes exercising much greater control in the earlier stages of the monarchy: even, on the death of Clefis--576--actually establishing a sort of aristocratic republic, under the leadership of thirty dukes, which lasted for ten years; after which time, on the event of a dangerous war with the Greeks and the Franks, Authari, the son of Clefis, gained the throne by election; the dukes giving up to him, says Paulus Diaconus,[24] the half of their estates for the support of his dignity, retaining, however, the rest, not as servants of the king, but as "principes" of the people, an important distinction. Agiluf--591 to 615--originally duke of Turin, met with much opposition from the power of the dukes; but when we come to the time of Rhotari--636 to 652--we find their power already declining, and in the eighth century, as for example under Liutprand--712 to 736--the laws show them reduced to the position of the other _judices_, but still representing a high aristocracy whose consent was, as we have seen,