Their family, however numerous or splendid, was composed entirely of their domestic slaves and freedmen.

Augustus or Trajan would have blushed at employing the meanest of the Romans in those menial offices, which, in the household and bedchamber of a limited monarch, are so eagerly solicited by the proudest nobles of Britain.
The deification of the emperors is the only instance in which they departed from their accustomed prudence and modesty.

The Asiatic Greeks were the first inventors, the successors of Alexander the first objects, of this servile and impious mode of adulation.

* It was easily transferred from the kings to the governors of Asia; and the Roman magistrates very frequently were adored as provincial deities, with the pomp of altars and temples, of festivals and sacrifices.

It was natural that the emperors should not refuse what the proconsuls had accepted; and the divine honors which both the one and the other received from the provinces, attested rather the despotism than the servitude of Rome.
But the conquerors soon imitated the vanquished nations in the arts of flattery; and the imperious spirit of the first Caesar too easily consented to assume, during his lifetime, a place among the tutelar deities of Rome.