Parochi
Parochi were certain people who were paid by the state to supply the Roman magistrates, ambassadors, and other official persons, when they were travelling, with those necessaries which they could not conveniently carry with them. They existed on all the principal stations on the Roman roads in Italy and the provinces, where persons were accustomed to pass the night. But as many magistrates frequently made extortionate demands from the parochi, the Lex Julia de Repetundis of Julius Caesar, B.C. 59, defined the things which the parochi were bound to supply, of which hay, fire-wood, salt, and a certain number of beds appear to have been the most important. (Hor. Sat. 1.5, 46; Cic. Att. 5.1. 6, 13.2; Heindorf, ad Hor. l.c.; Marquardt, Privatleben, 199.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.