Finally the senators have a title of nobility which they are able to command practically as a formal right[77]--_vir clarissimus_--“Very distinguished Lord” or “Your Magnificence.” Gratia, like every senator’s wife, is a _femina clarissima_; even her small sons can be addressed pompously as _pueri clarissimi_. To the multitude who make way for their litters, the rank of _clarissimus_ appears the acme of attainable happiness. The political power of the Senate has waned, but emperors are only mortal individuals. They come and go; the existence of the great, proud, wealthy, landed aristocracy seems to go on forever. Emperors usually succeed so far as they win its loyalty and favor; they somehow fail, and are branded across history as tyrants (often cut short by dagger thrusts) when they earn its hate. In an Empire of nigh one hundred millions the six thousand of the Senatorial Order form the normal apex of the human pyramid. It is a fine thing to be a senator. CHAPTER IX PHYSICIANS AND FUNERALS =138. Scanty Qualifications and Training of Doctors.=--People fall sick in Rome quite as much as in every other great center of humanity, but the healing art has not really progressed a great deal beyond that in Athens in the days of Hippocrates nearly five hundred years earlier.[78] A great proportion of even the most fashionable doctors are freedmen, and nearly all of these have Greek (or sometimes Egyptian) names. There is no medical examination. Anybody who has made a failure in other callings is welcome to pose as a physician and try to extract money from the unfortunate. There are many “surgeons” and “therapists” around the city who, a little while ago, were shoemakers, carpenters, or smiths, and who, perhaps, keep up their old handicraft on the side. Six months is time enough to learn a little medical jargon while serving as “disciple” to some experienced doctor; after that, let the invalids beware. Under such circumstances the glory of the medical profession suffers. Rightly did Pliny the Elder complain of doctors: “Any voluble person has powers of life and death over us, just as though thousands of persons did not live on without doctoring, as Rome existed for six hundred years [before the first physicians came].” Such gentry inevitably, if they fail at quackery, can then drift off to something else, and very familiar is Martial’s epigram: “Diaulus has been a surgeon and is now an undertaker. At last he’s begun to be useful to the sick in the only way that he’s able.”