ded with the forms of the administration.
The emperors, if we except those tyrants whose capricious folly violated
every law of nature and decency, disdained that pomp and ceremony which
might offend their countrymen, but could add nothing to their real
power. In all the offices of life, they affected to confound themselves
with their subjects, and maintained with them an equal intercourse of
visits and entertainments. Their habit, their palace, their table, were
suited only to the rank of an opulent senator. Their family, however
numerous or splendid, was composed entirely of their domestic slaves and
freedmen. Augustus or Trajan would have blushed at employing the meanest
of the Romans in those menial offices, which, in the household and
bedchamber of a limited monarch, are so eagerly solicited by the
proudest nobles of Britain.

The deification of the emperors is the only instance in which they
departed from their accustomed prudence and modesty. The Asiatic Greeks
were the first inventors, the successors of Alexander the first
objects, of this servile and impious mode of adulation. * It was easily
transferred from the kings to the governors of Asia; and the Roman
magistrates very frequently were adored as provincial deities, with the
pomp of altars and temples, of festivals and sacrifices. It was natural
that the emperors should not refuse what the proconsuls had accepted;
and the divine honors which both the one and the other received from the
provinces, attested rather the despotism than the servitude of Rome.
But the conquerors soon imitated the vanquished nations in the arts
of flattery; and the imperious spirit of the first Caesar too easily
consented to assume, during his lifetime, a place among the tutelar
deities of Rome. The milder temper of his successor declined so
dangerous an ambition, which was never afterwards revived, except by the
madness of Caligula and Domitian. Augustus permitted indeed some of the
provincial cities to erect temples to his honor, on condition that they
should associate the worship of Rome with that of the sovereign; he
tolerated private superstition, of which he might be the object; but he
contented himself with being revered by the senate and the people in his
human character, and wisely left to his successor the care of his public
deification. A regular custom was introduced, that on the decease of
every emperor who had neither lived nor died like a tyrant, the senate
by a sole