This gradual loss of power by the senate meant a corresponding increase of course in the influence of the emperor, but his supremacy was assured also by positive additions to his authority in other directions. Hadrian in the early part of the second century built up a bureaucracy[11] so large and so systematically organized that it enabled him and his successors to reach into the remotest parts of the empire and control the government of municipalities and the lives of all the citizens. Probably the world has never known so complete and crushing a paternalistic system as is revealed to us by the _Codes_ of Theodosius and Justinian in the fifth and sixth centuries. The drift toward autocracy was greatly accelerated by the influence which Egypt and the Orient exercised on the development of the principate. Perhaps the Oriental practice of identifying the secular and divine rulers of the world never found complete acceptance in Rome, but the erection of altars in the provinces to Rome and Augustus, the attribution of the titles “Master and God” to Domitian by his procurators, and in the third century the introduction into the court of Elagabalus of the Persian practice of paying divine honors to the sovereign, the presence of eunuchs in the palace of Aurelian, and the wearing of the Eastern diadem by Diocletian, show clearly enough that the principate was taking on the form of an Oriental despotism. The conception of the emperor’s authority which these practices suggest finds expression in the _Code_ of Justinian in the sixth century.[12] The first words of the rescript in which Justinian authorizes Tribonian to codify the laws of the empire are: “We, under divine guidance governing our realm, which has been entrusted to us by the powers above, etc.” We shall see in the next chapter that under the prevailing theory of Roman lawyers from the second to the sixth century the emperor derived his authority from the people, but this utterance of Justinian and other passages in the _Code_ show us the beginnings of the doctrine of the divine right of kings which Rome transmitted from the Orient to the states of modern times. When this point in the development of the empire had been reached, the preëminence of the city of Rome had gone, the distinction between Italy and the provinces had been obliterated, Roman citizenship had lost its significance, the splendor of the senate and the magistracies had faded, and the municipalities, which had been the pride and glory of the early empire, were plunged in poverty and wretchedness. In their place is an autocrat, kept in power by an army made up largely of barbarians, who carried out his wishes through a bureaucracy; and this, in turn, was supported by a body of citizens divided into groups by a system of castes, and held in most cases to the soil and to their hereditary occupations by the will of the state. II. ROMAN POLITICS AND MODERN POLITICS 1. ROME AND THE CHURCH OF ROME