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).
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