We have seen Rome rise, step by step, to the headship of Latium, the headship of the West, the headship of the Mediterranean world. At most stages of her course her progress has been slow; at one stage only does she rise to a new position as in a moment. That is when, having been checked on her Eastern course by the Hannibalian war, the city that had overthrown the Eastern masters of the West sprang at once to the headship of the Eastern as well as of the Western world. The power which had trodden under foot the sons of Thunder was entitled to take its next step with the swiftness of the thunderbolt. But, once head of the Eastern Mediterranean, with her Senate once established as judge in all causes from the Hadriatic to the Euphrates, Rome was in no hurry to exchange her rule of influence for a rule of acknowledged dominion. Indeed, if her later hankering after provinces had begun sooner, it may be that she would have better checked the advance of the lords of Parthia and Pontos. As it was, it was by slow degrees indeed that cities and kingdoms which long kept a nominal freedom were formally brought within the grasp of her universal sovereignty. And as the forms of her _imperium_ grew up only by slow degrees, so the forms of her _libertas_ died out only by slow degrees. Slowly and stealthily did Rome march to the acknowledged sovereignty of her own world; slowly and stealthily did the citizen whom Rome placed at the head of her commonwealth march to the acknowledged sovereignty of Rome herself and her subject lands. It was almost at the same moment that the power of the _Imperator_ and his army finally supplanted the power of the Prince, the Senate and the People, and that all the free inhabitants of the Roman world were admitted to the rank of Romans. That is, they became equal subjects of the _Imperator_, while each man among them who could wield his sword with skill and good luck gained the chance of becoming _Imperator_ himself. The artificial Roman nation, the _Romani_ of the West, the Ῥωμαῖοι of the East, was now called into being. By the next step the master of that nation avowed his mastery. The diadem of Jovius and Herculius, the proud style of the Lords of All, the bendings of the knee, the whole ceremonial which surrounded the new Augusti, were a contrast indeed to the simple pre-eminence of the first of citizens, the highest of magistrates, to whom that sacred name was first decreed. Chief of a Roman nation, Roman alike on the Euphrates and on the Ocean, the Emperor was in no sort bound to the local Rome by the Tiber. Shall we say that Rome had been swallowed up in Romania, or more truly that all Romania had become Rome? Emperors were now as much at home at Nikomêdeia and at Antioch, at Milan and Ravenna, at York and Trier and Arles and the true Vienna by the Rhone as they had once been in the modest _regia_ of the elder Rome or in its prouder Septizonium. No wonder that in after years Emperors were found no less at home at