and Narcissus, the freedmen of Claudius, distributed offices and pronounced judgments; Helius, Nero’s freedman, had knights and senators executed without even consulting his master.  Of all the freedmen Pallas was the most powerful, the richest, and the most insolent; he gave his orders to his underlings only by signs or in writing.  Nothing so outraged the old noble families of Rome as this.  “The princes,” said a Roman writer, “are the masters of citizens and the slaves of their freedmen.”  Among the scandals with which the emperors were reproached, one of the gravest was governing Roman citizens by former slaves.

=Despotism and Disorder.=—­This regime had two great vices: 

1. Despotism.—­The emperor was invested for life with a power unlimited, extravagant, and hardly conceivable; according to his fancy he disposed of persons and their property, condemned, confiscated, and executed without restraint.  No institution, no law fettered his will.  “The decree of the emperor has the force of law,” say the jurisconsults themselves.  Rome recognized then the unlimited despotism that the tyrants had exercised in the Greek cities, no longer circumscribed within the borders of a single city, but gigantic as the empire itself.  As in Greece some honorable tyrants had presented themselves, one sees in Rome some wise and honest monarchs (Augustus, Vespasian, Titus).  But few men had a head strong enough to resist vertigo when they saw themselves so elevated above other men.  The majority of the emperors profited by their tremendous power only to make their names proverbial:  Tiberius, Nero, Domitian by their cruelty, Vitellius by his gluttony, Claudius by his imbecility.  One of them, Caligula, was a veritable fool; he had his horse made consul and himself worshipped as a god.  The emperors persecuted the nobles especially to keep them from conspiring against them, and the rich to confiscate their goods.

2. Disorder.—­This overweening authority was, moreover, very ill regulated; it resided entirely in the person of the emperor.  When he was dead, everything was in question.  It was well known that the world could not continue without a master, but no law nor usage determined who was to be this master.  The Senate alone had the right of nominating the emperor, but almost always it would elect under pressure the one whom the preceding emperor had designated or the man who was pleasing to the soldiers.

After the death of Caligula, some praetorians who were sacking the palace discovered, concealed behind the tapestry, a poor man trembling with fear.  This was a relative of Caligula; the praetorians made him emperor (it was the emperor Claudius).  After the death of Nero, the Senate had elected Galba; the praetorians did not find him liberal enough and so they massacred him to set up in his place Otho, a favorite of Nero.  In their turn the soldiers on the frontier wished to make an emperor:  the legions