These tablets were so costly that Theodosius decreed in 384 that they should only be given away by the _Consules Ordinarii_, or the Consuls admitted on the 1st of January and who named the year, and not by those who replaced them or by any other officials; but this law was soon disregarded, and nine years later we read in a letter of the noble Roman Symmachus that, in honour of his son’s elevation to the quæstorship he is sending to the very same Emperor a diptych set in gold. This series of diptychs spreads over a period of about 150 years, from the end of the fourth to the middle of the sixth century. The sculpture steadily decreasing in value, the earliest examples show freedom of design and good work, but the last were nothing but indifferent repetitions of the same subjects, in bad proportion and worse relief till it became possible to produce a figure such as that of Orestes (Fig. 4). Soon after Orestes the Emperor Justinian abolished this ancient office, and, really, he must be held justified if all the consuls could do was to give bloodthirsty shows to the citizens, and still more corrupt the standard of art by distributing such despicable types of art among the provincials. It is noticeable that all the fifth century diptychs, the earliest and the best, both consular and otherwise are from the West. By the end of the century there was a complete collapse, following the further invasions of the Huns and other barbarians, and the Western Empire flickered out with the suppression, by Odoacer the Goth, of the last emperor, grotesquely named Romulus Augustulus, a sort of satire on his unworthy following of such mighty predecessors. Orestes, Consul at Rome, 530 (Fig. 4), No. 34,[1] is the only Western Consul of the sixth century whose diptych has been preserved; the style is so like that of Constantinople, that it gives weight to Graeven’s theory that the medallions on it represent Amalasuntha, daughter of Theodoric the Ostro-Goth, who was then ruling in the name of her young son Athalric, and who carried on that short renaissance of the Arts, so artificially introduced from Constantinople by her father. The busts cannot represent the reigning Emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora, because at that time he was forty-eight years of age, and they never had a son. Before passing to the real consular diptychs, it is impossible to leave unmentioned the splendid tablets of Probianus at Berlin (Fig. 2), No. 50.