also used to supervise the arrest of senior officials as required, to escort senior Romans into exile (such as John Chrysostom in 404), and even to assist in the enforcement of government regulation of the church. Ammianus Marcellinus and Procopius also noted their use as ambassadors on several occasions. Other tasks included supervising the provincial bureaucracy and delivering Imperial commands, often staying in the area to ensure their implementation. Being outside the control of the provincial governors, some agentes, the curiosi (, diatrechontes) were appointed as inspectors and acted as a sort of secret agents, for which they gained a reputation as a secret police force. As their routine assignments brought them into contact with matters of great concern to the court, and as they reported back to the court on everything they saw or heard on their varied missions, the agentes can be seen to have had an intelligence function, in the broadest modern sense of the term. This role, as well as their extraordinary power, made them feared: the 4th-century philosopher Libanius accused them of gross misconduct, terrorizing and extorting the provincials, "sheep-dogs who had joined the wolf pack". Nevertheless, the vast majority operated quite openly, and the claims of the agentes operating as a modern-day secret police are certainly exaggerated. The numbers of the agentes tended towards inflation, and the corps was viewed with a measure of mistrust by the emperors, who repeatedly tried to regulate its size: 1,174 in the year 430 according to a law of Theodosius II, and 1,248 under Leo I (457–474). Imperial edicts also regulated their promotion, which was to be strictly on seniority, with the annual exception of two officers, whom the emperor could advance at his pleasure. In popular culture Harry Turtledove's alternate history novel, Agent of Byzantium, features a magistrianos as the eponymous protagonist. Gillian Bradshaw's historical novel Imperial Purple, set in the 5th century, features one of the agentes and the Master of the Offices as the antagonists. In John Conroe's Demon Accords, Agents in Rebus (A.I.R.) was founded at the end of the Revolutionary War by patriots, eventually evolving into a rogue intelligence and black ops subsection of the U.S. government. In Eric Flint's alternate history Belisarius series, the agents in rebus target enemies of Justinian and Theodora after a failed assassination attempt on the emperor. Q. V. Hunter's Embers of Empire series chronicles the career of