Danube, and the Euxine on the north, to the Euphrates on the east, and on the south to the securest frontier of all, the impassable deserts of Libya and Arabia.
The first emperors affected to rule as civil magistrates and accepted their appointment from the Senate, but their successors assumed the purple as the nominees of the troops, and often held it by right of conquest over less able competitors.[1] Concurrently the Imperial city had been insensibly undergoing a transformation; by the persistent influx of strangers of diverse nationalities its ethnical homogeneity was lost;[2] a new and more populous Rome, in which the traditions of republican freedom were dissipated, was evolved; and the inhabitants without a murmur saw themselves deprived of the right to elect their own magistrates.[3] The laws of the Republic were submitted for ratification to the citizens, but in the ascent to absolutism the emperor became the sole legislator of the nation.[4] The elevation of an emperor seemed*
- ↑ The favourite title of Augustus was Princeps or "First citizen," but the more martial emperors, such as Galba and Trajan, preferred the military Imperator, which after their time became distinctive of the monarch. By the end of the third century, under the administration of Aurelian and Diocletian, the emperor became an undisguised despot, and henceforward was regarded as the Dominus, a term which originally expressed the relation between a master and his slaves; see Jn. Lydus, De Magistr., i, 5; the series of coins in Cohen's Numismatics of the Empire, etc.
- ↑ Strabo says it was full of Tarsians and Alexandrians; xiv, 5. Athenaeus calls it "an epitome of the world"; i, 17; cf. Tacitus, Ann., xv, 44; "The city which attracts and applauds all things villainous and shameful."
- ↑ Tiberius made an end of the comitia or popular elections, and after his time the offices of state were conferred in the Senate, a body which in its elements was constituted at the fiat of the emperor; Tacitus, Ann., i, 15, etc.
- ↑ Under Diocletian (c. 300) the legislative individualism of the em-*
