castle and the palace as the centre of high history, and in it the feeling of the exercise of power, Themis, transforms itself into that of government, Dike. Here feudal unity is inwardly overcome by national, even in the consciousness of the First Estate itself, and here the bare fact of rulership elevates itself into the symbol of Sovereignty.
And so, with the sinking of feudalism, Faustian history becomes dynastic history. From little centres where princely families have their seats (whence they "spring," as the phrase goes, reminding us of plant and property), the shaping of nations proceeds — nations of strictly aristocratic constitution, but yet so that the State conditions the being of the Estate. The genealogical principle already ruling in the feudal nobility and the yeoman families, the expression of the feeling for expanse and the will-to-history, has become so powerful that the appearance of nations transcending the strong unities of language and landscape is dependent upon the destinies of ruling houses. Marriages and deaths sever or unite the blood of whole populations.[1] Where a Lotharingian and a Burgundian dynasty failed to take shape, there also nations already embryonic failed to develop. The doom that overhung the Hohenstaufen involved more than the imperial crown. For Germany and Italy it meant for centuries a deep unsatisfied longing for a united German-Italian nation, while the House of Habsburg, on the contrary, enabled, not a German, but an Austrian nation to develop.
In the Magian world, with its cavern-feeling, the dynastic principle was quite otherwise constituted. The Classical princeps, the legitimate successor of tyrants and tribunes, was the embodiment of the Demos. As Janus was the door and Vesta the hearth, so Cæsar was the people. He was the last creation of Orphic religiousness. The "Dominus et Deus," on the contrary, was Magian, a Shah participating in the divine Fire (the hvareno of the Mazdaist empire of the Sassanids, which becomes the aureole in Pagan and Christian Byzantium), which radiates about him and makes him pius, felix, invictus (the last-named, from Commodus's reign, his official title).[2] In Byzantium in the third century of our era the ruler-type underwent the same transition as was implied in the taking-down of Augustus's civil-service state to build Diocletian's feudalism. "The new creation begun by Aurelian and Probus and built up on the ruins by Diocletian and Constantine was about as alien to the Classical world and the principate as the empire of Charlemagne."[3] The Magian ruler governed the visible portion of the general Consensus of the orthodox, which was Church,
- ↑ P. 181, et seq.
- ↑ F. Cumont, Mysterien der Mithra (1910), pp. 74, et seq. The Sassanid government, which about A.D. 300 changed from the feudal union to the aristocratic State, was in all respects the pattern for Byzantium in ceremonial, in the knightly character of its Empire, in administrative management, and above all in the type of its Ruler. Cf. also A. Christensen, L'Empire des Sassanides, le peuple, l'état, la cour (Copenhagen, 1907).
- ↑ Ed. Meyer, Kl. Schriften, p. 146.
