A fact, which may be accidental, and is certainly noteworthy, is that, of all the struggles of the Jews with their surroundings, after 68, none are localized in Asia Minor. It was, however, in Asia Minor that the Jews were especially numerous and influential. To a certain extent their propaganda had become most firmly established there, and their position was so intrenched that even the hostile legislation of the later Byzantine emperors found them in successful resistance. We find evidences of certain laxity in the practice of Jewish rites, but neither in 68 nor under Trajan or Hadrian did the Asiatic Jews take part in the movements that convulsed that section of the Jews of the empire. And yet it was in the cities of Asia that the Jews in earlier days did meet hostility and direct attacks, and needed the assistance of the Roman central government, to be maintained in the position which they claimed for themselves.[385] However, in that most ancient and fertile nursery of beliefs and mysteries, the Jewish mystery evidently found a grateful soil and, as we have seen, sent its roots deep.[386] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXI THE LEGAL POSITION OF THE JEWS IN THE LATER EMPIRE The empire established by Augustus was, as has been set forth (above, p. 259), a more or less abstract thing. It was the _imperium_, or supreme authority, which a single community, the city-state of Rome, exercised over all the other communities existing within certain not over sharply defined geographic limits. This _imperium_ was, by Roman statute or series of statutes, almost completely delegated to a single individual. The delegation however was not quite complete, and the legal theory that made it incomplete remained to work no little mischief in a crisis like the death of Nero or Domitian or Commodus. When Diocletian reorganized the empire in 286 C.E., the theory was completely changed. The _imperium_ was now a _dominium_; it was the authority that a single man possessed over all the inhabitants of a region greater even than it was under Augustus, and that authority was in point of law as limitless as that of a master over his slaves.