THE MILITANT TYPE OF SOCIETY. 763 



every measure and every sentence, i. e., of putting his will in opposition to the 

 laws and magistrates; of summoning the senate or the people, and presiding 

 over it, i. e., of directing the electoral assemblages as he thought tit. And these 

 prerogatives he will have not for a single year, but for hfe; not in Rome only 

 . . . but throughout the empire ; not shared with ten colleagues, but exercised 

 by himself alone ; lastly, without any account to render, since he never resigns 

 his office. 



Along with these changes went an increase in the number and defi- 

 niteness of social divisions. The Emperor 



placed between himself and the masses a multitude of people regularly classed 

 by categories, and piled one above the other in such a way that this hierarchy, 

 pressing with ail its weight upon the masses underneath, held the people and 

 factious individuals powerless. What remained of the old patrician nobility 

 had the foremost rank in the city; . . . below it came the senatorial nobihty, 

 half hereditary ; below that the moneyed nobility, or equestrian order three 

 aristocracies superposed. . . . The sons of senators formed a class intermediate 

 between the senatorial and the equestrian order. . . . In the second century the 

 senatorial fiimihes formed an hereditary nobility with privileges. 



At the same time the administrative organization was greatly extended 

 and complicated. 



Augustus created a large number of new offices, as the superintendence of 

 public works, roads, aqueducts, the Tiber - bed, distribution of corn to the 

 people. ... He also created numerous offices of procurators for the financial 

 administration of the empire, and in Rome there were one thousand and sixty 

 municipal officers. 



The structural character proper to an army spread in a double way : 

 military officers acquired civil functions and functignaries of a civil 

 kind became partially military. The magistrates appointed by the 

 Emperor, tending to replace those appointed by the people, had, along 

 with their civil authority, military authority ; and while " under Au- 

 gustus the prefects of the pretorium were only military chiefs, . . . 

 they gradually possessed themselves of the whole civil authority, and 

 finally became, after the Emperor, the first personages in the empire." 

 Moreover, the governmental structures grew by incorporating bodies of 

 functionaries who were before independent. " In his ardor to organ- 

 ize everything, he aimed at regimenting the law itself, and made an 

 official magistracy of that which had always been a free profession." 

 To enforce the rule of this extended administration, the army was 

 made permanent, and subjected to severe discipline. With the con- 

 tinued growth of the regulating and coercing organization, the drafts 

 on producers increased ; and, as was shown by extracts in a previous 

 chapter concerning the Roman regime in Egypt and in Gaul, the 

 working part of the community was reduced more and more to the 

 form of a permanent commissariat. In Italy the condition eventually 

 arrived at was one in which vast tracts were " intrusted to f reedmen, 

 whose only consideration was how to cultivate the land with the least 



