Ammianus Marcellinus Res Gestae 28.1.10

[10] Thus Maximinus gained the power of doing harm and poured out the natural cruelty implanted in his hard heart, as often happens with wild beasts in the amphitheatre, when they break in pieces the back-gates and are at last set free. And while the business was being looked into in many ways, as if in a kind of preliminary practice, and some persons, whose sides had been torn into furrows, had named certain nobles as having, through their clients and other common people who were notorious as malefactors and informers, made use of men skilled in harmful practices, the hellish judge, going beyond his last ¹ (as the saying is), in a malicious report to the emperor informed him that the offences which many men had committed at Rome could not be investigated or punished except by severer measures. ²