We have already seen how profoundly changed was the position of the Emperor himself. He was no longer essentially a Roman Imperator, a supreme War-Lord, a soldier Chief of State. He had become a King in a palace, secluded from the gaze of the vulgar, surrounded with all the attributes and ornaments of an eastern monarch, and robed in gorgeous vestments stiff with gold and jewels. Men were taught to speak and think of him as superhuman and sacrosanct, to approach him with genuflexion and adoration, to regard every office, however menial, attached to his person, as sacred. In speaking of the Emperor language was strained to the pitch of the ridiculous; flattery became so grotesque that it must have ceased to flatter. When Nazarius, for example, speaks of the Emperor’s heart as “the stupendous shrine of mighty virtues” (_ingentium virtutum stupenda penetralia_), and such language as this became the recognised mode of addressing the reigning Sovereign, we see how far we have travelled not only from Republican simplicity, but even from the times of Domitian. The Emperor, in brief, was absolute monarch, autocrat of the entire Roman world, and his will and nod were law. He stood at the head of a hierarchy of court and administrative officials, most minutely organised from the highest to the lowest. For purposes of Imperial administration, those next to the throne were the four Prætorian præfects, each one supreme, under the Emperor, in his quarter of the world. The Empire had been divided by Diocletian into twelve dioceses and these again into ninety-six provinces; Constantine accepted this division but apportioned the twelve dioceses into four præfectures, those of the Orient, Illyria, Italy, and Gaul. The four Prætorian præfects stood in relation to the Emperor—so Eusebius tells us—as God the Son stood in relation to God the Father. They wore—though not perhaps in the days of Constantine—robes of purple reaching to the knee; they rode in lofty chariots, and among the insignia of their office were a colossal silver inkstand and gold pen-cases of a hundred pounds in weight. Their functions were practically unlimited, save for the all-important exception that they exercised no military command. They had an exchequer of their own, through which passed all the Imperial taxes from their provinces; they had absolute control over the vicars of the dioceses beneath them, whom, if they did not actually appoint they at least recommended for appointment to the Emperor. In their own præfectures they formed the final court of appeal, and Constantine expressly enacted that there should be no appeal from them to the throne. They even had a limited power of issuing edicts. Thus in all administrative, financial, and judicial matters the four Prætorian præfects were supreme, occupying a position very similar to that of the Viceroys of the great provinces of China, save that they had no control over the troops within their territories.