s gods. Everything
that touched their person was sacred, and so men spoke of the sacred
palace, the sacred bed-chamber, the sacred Council of State, even the
sacred treasury.
The regime of this period has been termed that of the Later Empire as
distinguished from that of the three preceding centuries, which we
call the Early Empire.
The life of an emperor of the Early Empire (from the first to the
third century) was still that of a magistrate and a general; the
palace of an emperor of the Later Empire became similar to the court
of the Persian king.
=The Officials.=--The officials often became very numerous. Diocletian
found the provinces too large and so made several divisions of them.
In Gaul, for example, Lugdunensis (the province about Lyons) was
partitioned into four, Aquitaine into three. In place of forty-six
governors there were from this time 117.[171]
At the same time the duties of the officials were divided. Besides the
governors and the deputies in the provinces there were in the border
provinces military commanders--the dukes and the counts. The emperor
had about him a small picked force to guard the palace, body-guards,
chamberlains, assistants, domestics, a council of state, bailiffs,
messengers, and a whole body of secretaries organized in four bureaus.
All these officials did not now receive their orders directly from
the emperor; they communicated with him only through their superior
officers. The governors were subordinate to the two praetorian
prefects, the officials of public works to the two prefects of the
city, the collectors of taxes to the Count of the Sacred Largesses,
the deputies to the Count of the Domains, all the officers of the
palace to the Master of the Offices, the domestics of the court to the
Chamberlain. These heads of departments had the character of
ministers.
This system is not very difficult for us to comprehend. We are
accustomed to see officials, judges, generals, collectors, and
engineers, organized in distinct departments, each with his special
duty, and subordinated to the commands of a chief of the service. We
even have more ministers than there were in Constantinople; but this
administrative machine which has become so familiar to us because we
have been acquainted with it from our infancy, is none the less
complicated and unnatural. It is the Later Empire that gave us the
first model of this; the Byzantine empire preserved it and since that
time all absol
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