1. The Nobilissimi (the very noble); these are the imperial family;
2. The Illustres (the notable)—the chief ministers of departments;
3. The Spectabiles (the eminent)—the high dignitaries;
4. The Clarissimi (most renowned)—the great officials, also sometimes called senators;
5. The Perfectissimi (very perfect).[173]
Every important man has his rank, his title, and his functions.[174] The only men who are of consequence are the courtiers and officials; it is the régime of titles and of etiquette. A clearer instance has never been given of the issue of absolute power united with the mania for titles and with the purpose to regulate everything. The Later Empire exhibits the completed type of a society reduced to a machine and of a government absorbed by a court. It realized the ideal that is proposed today by the partisans of absolute power; and for a long time the friends of liberty must fight against the traditions which the Later Empire has left to us.
THE CHURCH AND THE STATE
Triumph of Christianity.—During the first two centuries of our era the Christians occupied but a small place in the empire. Almost all of them were of the lower classes, workmen, freedmen, slaves, who lived obscure lives in the multitude of the great cities. For a long time the aristocracy ignored the Christians; even in the second century Suetonius in his "Lives of the Twelve Cæsars" speaks of a certain Chrestus who agitated the populace of Rome. When the religion first concerned the world of the rich and cultivated people, they were interested simply to deride it as one only for the poor and ignorant. It was precisely because it addressed the poor of this world in providing a compensation in the life to come that Christianity made so many proselytes. Persecution, far from suppressing it, gave it more force. "The blood of the martyrs," said the faithful, "is the seed of the church." During the whole of the third century conversions continued, not only among the poor, but among the aristocracy as well. At the first of the fourth century all the East had become Christian. Helena, the mother of Constantine, was a Christian and has been canonized by the church. When Constantine marched against his rival, he took for his ensign a standard (the labarum), which bore the cross and the monogram of Christ. His victory was the victory of the Christians. He allowed them now to perform their religious rites freely (by the edict of 313), and later he favored them openly. Yet he did not break with the ancient religion: while he presided at the great assembly of the Christian bishops, he continued to hold the title of Pontifex Maximus; he carried in his helmet a nail of the true cross and on his coins he still had the sun-god represented. In his city of Constantinople he had a Christian church built, but also a temple to Victory. For a half-century it was difficult to know what was the official religion of the empire.
Organization of the Church.—The Christians even under persecution had never dreamed of overthrowing the empire. As soon as persecution ceased, the bishops became the allies of the emperors. Then the Christian church was organized definitively, and it was organized on the model of the Later Empire, in the form that it preserves to this day. Each city had a bishop who resided in the city proper and governed the people of the territory; this territory subject to the bishop was termed a Diocese. In any country in the Later Empire, there were as many bishops and dioceses as there were cities. This is why the bishops were so numerous and dioceses so many in the East and in Italy where the country was covered with cities. In Gaul, on the contrary, there were but 120 dioceses between the Rhine and the Pyrenees, and the most of these, save in the south, were of the size of a modern French department. Each province became an ecclesiastical province; the bishop of the capital (metropolis) became the metropolitan, or as he was later termed, the archbishop.