[Footnote 115: I think the usual account of the matter is that which I
have given elsewhere (Italy and her Invaders, i. 227), that the Comes
had military command in the Diocese and the Dux in the Province. But
on closer examination I cannot find that the Notitia altogether bears
out this view. It gives us for the Western Empire eight Comites and
twelve Duces. The former pretty nearly correspond to the Dioceses, but
the latter are far too few for the Provinces, which number forty-two,
excluding all the Provinces of Italy. Besides, in some cases the
jurisdiction appears to be the same. Thus we have both a Dux and a
Comes Britanniarum, and the Dux Mauritaniae Caesariensis must, one
would think, have held command in a region as large or larger than the
Comes Tingitaniae. Again, we have a Comes Argentoratensis and a Dux
Moguntiacensis, two officers whose power, one would think, was pretty
nearly equal. The same may perhaps be said of the Comes Litoris
Saxonici in Britain and the Dux Tractus Armoricani et Nervicani in
Gaul. While recognising a _general_ inferiority of the Dux to the
Comes, I do not think we can, with the Notitia before us, assert that
the Provincial Duces were regularly subordinated to the Diocesan
Comes, as the Provincial Consulares were to the Diocesan Vicarius. And
the fact that both Comes and Dux were addressed as Spectabilis rather
confirms this view.]

Besides these three classes of dignitaries, the _Castrensis_, who was
a kind of head steward in the Imperial household, and most of the
Heads of Departments in the great administrative offices, such as the
_Primicerius Notariorum_ and the _Magistri Scriniorum_[116], bore the
title of Spectabilis. We have perhaps hardly sufficient data for an
exact calculation, but I conjecture that there would be as many as
fifty or sixty Spectabiles in the Kingdom of Theodoric.