each with a chief town where the Vicar lived, to which the main roads led. Nothing was more natural than to accept these boundaries and to give central authority to the bishops of the central towns. We shall see afterwards how this idea, that the Church must follow the State in her organization, became almost a first principle with the Eastern bishops.[1]
The way it worked out then was this: Roughly each Roman province became an ecclesiastical province, to the Governor corresponded a Metropolitan, the civil dioceses tended to become ecclesiastically unions of Metropolitans under an Exarch or Primate, who would answer to the Vicar; and the Prefectures became more or less equivalent to Patriarchates. But the parallel does not really fit so exactly. All three Western Prefectures (Gaul, Italy, Illyricum) went to make up the huge Roman Patriarchate. There only remained the Prefecture of the East[2] to divide among all the others. The five civil dioceses of this Eastern Prefecture were:—(1) Thrace in Europe, from the Hellespont to the Danube and westward to the border of Dacia by Philippopolis (chief town Constantinople); (2) Asia, i.e., Mysia, Lydia, Pisidia, and part of Phrygia (chief town Ephesus); (3) Pontus, i.e., Galatia, Paphlagonia, Pontus, and Cappadocia (chief town Cæsarea); (4) The Diocese of the East, containing Syria, Palestine, and eastward to the Persian frontier (chief town Antioch);[3] and lastly (5) Egypt (chief town Alexandria).[4] Of these five State dioceses two, Egypt and the "East," corresponded to the Patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch. There remained the other three, Thrace, Asia, Pontus. It seems, then, to have been the influence
- ↑ It had certainly not been so in earlier times. At the end of the 2nd century the bishops of Cæsarea, Jerusalem, Ptolemais, Tyre, &c., meet in a provincial council (Eus. H.E. v. 23, seq.). But Tyre and Ptolemais belonged civilly to the province of Syria, Jerusalem and Cæsarea to Palestine: Cf. Duchesne, Orig. du Culté chrétien, p. 18.
- ↑ Præfectura Orientis. The Prefecture of the East must not be confused with the Diocese of the East, which was one of its divisions (the fourth).
- ↑ A Count of the East (Comes Orientis) ruled over this diocese at Antioch.
- ↑ There is a good map of the Empire in prefectures and dioceses in the atlas to Freeman's Historical Geography of Europe, ed. by Prof. Bury (Longmans, 1903). Compare with this the map " Orbis Christianus, sec. i–vi." in Kirsch's new edition of Hergenröther's Kirchengeschichte I.
