[8] Surrounding his person and
forming his court were usually those of the nobility who were the most
absolutely degraded by their vices, their flatteries, or their abject
subservience. But even these men were not commonly the repositories of
political power. The people of the greatest influence were the freedmen
of the emperors--men who had been slaves, Egyptians and Bithynians who
had come to Rome with bored ears and with chalk on their naked feet to
show that they were for sale, or who had bawled "sea-urchins all alive"
in the Velabrum or the Saburra--who had acquired enormous wealth by
means often the most unscrupulous and the most degraded, and whose
insolence and baseness had kept pace with their rise to power. Such a
man was the Felix before whom St. Paul was tried, and such was his
brother Pallas,[9] whose golden statue might have been seen among the
household gods of the senator, afterwards the emperor, Vitellius.
Another of them might often have been observed parading the streets
between two consuls. Imagine an Edward II. endowed with absolute and
unquestioned powers of tyranny,--imagine some pestilent Piers Gaveston,
or Hugh de le Spenser exercising over nobles and people a hideous
despotism of the back stairs,--and you have some faint picture of the
government of Rome under some of the twelve Caesars. What the barber
Olivier le Diable was under Louis XI., what Mesdames du Barri and
Pompadour were under Louis XV., what the infamous Earl of Somerset was
under James I., what George Villiers became under Charles I., will
furnish us with a faint analogy of the far more exaggerated and
detestable position held by the freedman Glabrio under Domitian, by the
actor Tigellinus under Nero, by Pallus and Narcissus under Claudius, by
the obscure knight Sejanus under the iron tyranny of the
gloomy Tiberius.

[Footnote 8:
"To the sound
Of fifes and drums they danced, or in the shade
Sung Caesar great and terrible in war,
Immortal Caesar! 'Lo, a god! a god!
He cleaves the yielding skies!' Caesar meanwhile
Gathers the ocean pebbles, or the gnat
Enraged pursues; or at his lonely meal
Starves a wide province; tastes, dislikes, and flings
To dogs and sycophants. 'A god! a god!'
The flowery shades and shrines obscene return."
DYER, _Ruins of Rome_.]

[Footnote 9: The pride of this man was such that he never deigned to
speak a word in the prese