maximus was elected by the people for life, could take no civil office, must never leave Italy, touch a corpse, or contract a second marriage; and ho dwelt in the old king's house, the regia. Augustus himself exercised the office despotically enough, though with great prudence. He nominated and increased at pleasure the members of the sacer- dotal college, chose the vestal virgins, determined the authority of the vaticinia, purged the Sibylline books of apocryphal interpolations, continued the reform of the calendar begun by Cajsar, and changed the month Scxtilis into Augustus in his own honor, as Quintilis, the birth-month of Julius Cassar, had before been rebaptized Julius. Comp. Charles Merivale : Hist, of the Romans under the Empire, vol. iii. (Lond. 1851), p. 478 sqq. (This work, which stops where Gibbon begins, has been republished in 7 vols, in New York, 1863.) I § 26. THE EMPEEOK-PAPACY AND THE HIERARCHY. 133 § 26. The Emperor-Papacy and the Hierarchy. And this, in point of fact, took place first under Constan- tine, and developed under Ms successors, particularly under J\istinian, into the system of the Byzantine imperial papacy,' or of the supremacy of the state over the church. Constantine once said to the bishops at a banquet, that he also, as a Christian emperor, was a divinely appointed bishop, a bishop over the external affairs of the church, while the in- ternal aflFairs belonged to the bishops proper." In this preg- nant word he expressed the new postm-e of the civil sovereign toward the church in a characteristic though indefinite and equivocal way. He made there a distinction between two divinely authorized episcopates ; one secular or imperial, cor- responding with the old oSice of Pontifex Maximus, and ex- ' In England and Scotland the term Erastianism is used for this ; but is less general, and not properly applicable at all to the Greek church. For the man who furnished the word, Thomas Erastus, a learned and able physician and professor of medicine in Heidelberg (died at Basle in Switzerland, 1583), was an opponent not only of the independence of the church toward the state, but also of the church ban and of the presbyterial constitution and discipline, as advocated l y Frederick III., of the Palatinate, and the authors of the Heidelberg Catechism, especially Olevianus, a pupil of Calvin. He was at last excommunicated for his views by the church council in Heidelberg. ' His words, which are to be taken neither in jest and pun (as Xeander supposes), nor as mere compliment to the bishops, but in earnest, run thus, in Eusebiusf Vita Const. L iv. c. 2-1: 'T/uety (the eVi'o-KUTroi addressed) /uev riiv etcrw rrjs skkXti' ff ias, iyu 8e t w v i kt h s inrh i&eoD Ka^eaTaixivos iiriffKOiros 61/ enjj'. All depends here on the intrepretation of the antithesis ray darca and ruv e'/crbs t^s iKK\7](rlas. (a) The explanation of Stroth and others takes the genitive as masculine, ot ela-o) denoting Christians, and oi