of dictating whatever laws their wisdom
or caprice might suggest; but those laws were ratified by the sanction
of the senate. The model of ancient freedom was preserved in its
deliberations and decrees; and wise princes, who respected the
prejudices of the Roman people, were in some measure obliged to assume
the language and behavior suitable to the general and first magistrate
of the republic. In the armies and in the provinces, they displayed the
dignity of monarchs; and when they fixed their residence at a distance
from the capital, they forever laid aside the dissimulation which
Augustus had recommended to his successors. In the exercise of the
legislative as well as the executive power, the sovereign advised with
his ministers, instead of consulting the great council of the nation.
The name of the senate was mentioned with honor till the last period of
the empire; the vanity of its members was still flattered with honorary
distinctions; but the assembly which had so long been the source, and
so long the instrument of power, was respectfully suffered to sink into
oblivion. The senate of Rome, losing all connection with the Imperial
court and the actual constitution, was left a venerable but useless
monument of antiquity on the Capitoline hill.

Chapter XIII: Reign Of Diocletian And This Three Associates.--Part IV.

When the Roman princes had lost sight of the senate and of their ancient
capital, they easily forgot the origin and nature of their legal power.
The civil offices of consul, of proconsul, of censor, and of tribune,
by the union of which it had been formed, betrayed to the people its
republican extraction. Those modest titles were laid aside; and if they
still distinguished their high station by the appellation of Emperor, or
Imperator, that word was understood in a new and more dignified sense,
and no longer denoted the general of the Roman armies, but the sovereign
of the Roman world. The name of Emperor, which was at first of a
military nature, was associated with another of a more servile kind.
The epithet of Dominus, or Lord, in its primitive signification, was
expressive, not of the authority of a prince over his subjects, or of a
commander over his soldiers, but of the despotic power of a master
over his domestic slaves. Viewing it in that odious light, it had
been rejected with abhorrence by the first Caesars. Their resistance
insensibly became more feeble, and the name less odious; till at le