largess of grain and coin, which amounted, at last, to
900,000 pounds a year. The people transferred to the
Emperor the plenitude of their own sovereignty. To
limit his delegated power was to challenge their omnipotence, to renew the issue between the many and the few
which had been decided at Pharsalus and Philippi. The
Romans upheld the absolutism of the Empire because it
was their own. The elementary antagonism between
liberty and democracy, between the welfare of minorities
and the supremacy of masses, became manifest. The
friend of the one was a traitor to the other. The dogma,
that absolute power may, by the hypothesis of a popular
origin, be as legitimate as constitutional freedom, began, by the combined support of the people and the throne, to darken the air.
Legitimate, in the technical sense of modern politics, the Empire was not meant to be. It had no right or claim to subsist apart from the will of the people. To limit the Emperor's authority was to renounce their own; but to take it away was to assert their own. They gave the Empire as they chose. They took it away as they chose. The Revolution was as lawful and as irresponsible as the Empire. Democratic institutions continued to develop. The provinces were no longer subject to an assembly meeting in a distant capital. They obtained the privileges of Roman citizens. Long after Tiberius had stripped the inhabitants of Rome of their electoral function, the provincials continued in undisturbed enjoyment of the right of choosing their own magistrates. They governed themselves like a vast confederation of municipal republics; and, even after Diocletian had brought in the forms as well as the reality of despotism, provincial assemblies, the obscure germ of representative institutions, exercised some control over the Imperial officers.
But the Empire owed the intensity of its force to the popular fiction. The principle, that the Emperor is not subject to laws from which he can dispense others, princeps legibus solutus, was interpreted to imply that he was above
