Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1827) Vol 1.djvu/476

 452 THE DECLINE AND FALL CHAP, by the union of which it had been formed, betrayed to titles were laid aside®; and if they still distinguished their high station by the appellation of emperor, or more dignified sense, and no longer denoted the gene- ral of the Roman armies, but the sovereign of the Ro- Impeiial man world. The name of emperor, which was at first tiUes*^ ^" ^^ ^ 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 com- mander 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 length the style of * our lord and emperor,' was not only be- stowed by flattery, but was regularly admitted into the laws and public monuments. Such lofty epithets were sufficient to elate and satisfy the most excessive vanity ; and if the successors of Diocletian still dechned the title of king, it seems to have been the effect not so much of their moderation as of their delicacy. Wher- ever the Latin tongue was in use, (and it was the lan- guage of government throughout the empire,) the imperial title, as it was peculiar to themselves, con- veyed a more respectable idea than the name of king, which they must have shared with an hundred bar- barian chieftains; or which, at the best, they could derive only from Romulus or from Tarquin. But the sentiments of the east were very different from those « See the twelfth dissertation in Spanheim's excellent work De Usu Nu- mismatum. From raedals, inscriptions, and historians, he examines every title separately, and traces it from Augustus to the moment of its disap- pearing. ^ -Pliny in Panegyr. c. 3. 55, etc. speaks of dominus with execration, as synonymous to tyrant, and opposite to prince. And the same Pliny re- gularly gives that title (in the tenth book of the epistles) to his friend rather than master, the virtuous Trajan. This strange contradiction puzzles the commentators, who think, and the translators, who can write.
 * __ the people its repubHcan extraction. Those modest
 * imperator,' that word was understood in a new and