In the late Empire, the scope of existing offence categories was extended and several new offences were introduced by imperial legislation to tackle new forms of wrongdoing induced by societal changes.

For example, the crime of extortion (crimen repetundarum) was defined in a broader manner to encompass all kinds of infractions perpetrated by state officials in the course of their administrative or judicial tasks.^[535] The ambit of crimes such as treason (crimen maiestatis) and corruption (ambitus) was likewise expanded,^[536] and more severe penalties were instituted for the offence of misappropriation of state property (peculatus)⁹ Diverse offences were subsumed under the crime of sacrilege (sacrilegium) and these involved neglect or violation of imperial orders or enactments.^{[537] [538]} The concept of violence (vis) was also extended to cover acts of violence and various kinds of abuses committed by private individuals and state officials.^[539] After the recognition of Christianity as the official religion of the empire, acts of opposition to the established religious doctrine were punished as crimes.

Overall, criminal legislation in the later imperial age was fragmentary and often inconsistent, with little attention devoted to the subjective requirements of criminal liability such as dolus or mens rea^[542] The removal of all limitations on the emperor’s power entailed the non-existence of safeguards in practice against the arbitrary exercise of power (except perhaps through the Church). It also meant no restrictions on the punishments that could be inflicted with the emperor’s authority. The state­ment of the jurist Hermogenianus that interpretation should be used to mitigate rather than aggravate the penalties of the laws,^[543] and the notion that it is better to let the guilty go unpunished than to condemn the innocent,^[544] mentioned in the Digest of Justinian, meant very little in the later imperial era. In this savage and degenerate age, only the wealthy and powerful individuals who could corrupt or intimidate state officials and judges were relatively safe from arbitrary punishments.

4.5.1