The mere elements of society at Rome during this period were very unpromising.  It was a mixture of extremes.  There was no middle class.  At the head of it was an emperor, often deified in his lifetime, and separated from even the noblest of the senators by a distance of immeasurable superiority.  He, was, in the startling language of Gibbon, at once “a priest, an atheist, and a god.” [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 presence of his own slaves, but only made known his wishes by signs!—­TACITUS.]