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Updated: May 1, 2025
It is certainly not generally known that, as late as the tenth century, the bishops of the great cities called themselves Popes the 'Pope of Milan, the 'Pope of Naples, and the like and that Gregory the Seventh, the famous Hildebrand, was the first to decree that the title should be confined to the Roman Pontiffs, with that of 'Servus Servorum Dei' 'servant of the servants of God. And indeed, in those changing times such a confusion of titles must have caused trouble, as it did when Gregory the Fifth, driven out by Crescentius, and taking refuge in Pavia, found himself, the Pope of Rome, confronted with Arnulf, the 'Pope' of Milan, and complained of his position to the council he had summoned.
"Go," replied he instantly, "to alcove twenty-four, shelf one hundred and thirteen, of the College Library at Cambridge, and you will find the information you need in a thick quarto, bound in vellum, and lettered 'Potgiesser de Statu Servorum." I straightway sent for Potgiesser, and found my fortune made, it was one of those patient old German treatises which cost the labor of one man's life to compile and another's to exhaust, and I had no reason to suppose that any reader had disturbed its repose until that unwearied industry had explored the library.
Drawn without respect of rank, as well as of sex and age, from every nation under heaven by an organized slave-trade, to which our late African one was but a tiny streamlet compared with a mighty river; a slave-trade which once bought 10,000 human beings in Delos in a single day; the 'servorum nationes' were the only tillers of the soil, of those 'latifundia' or great estates, 'quae perdidere Romam. Denied the rights of marriage, the very name of humanity; protected by no law, save the interest or caprice of their masters; subjected, for slight offences, to cruel torments, they were butchered by thousands in the amphitheatres to make a Roman holiday, or wore out their lives in 'ergastula' or barracks, which were dens of darkness and horror.
Gaius, iii, 222. Salvius Julianus, Pars Secunda, xv. Aulus Gellius, xx, i. Paulus, v, 16. Paulus, iii, v, 5 ff. Pliny, Letters, viii, 14. Tacitus, Annals xiii, 32. Valerius Maximus, vi, 8, in a chapter entitled de fide servorum speaks with great admiration of instances of fidelity on the part of slaves. Seneca ate with his Epist. 47, 13.
Place Alexander ille Magnus beside Malcolm's friend Epictetus, ille servorum servus; take his crutch from the slave and set the hero upon his Bucephalus but set them alone and in a desert: which will prove the great man? which the unchangeable?
What was there in her aimless and useless life which made it so precious that she could not afford to fling it into the gutter, if need be, on the bare chance of enriching some fuller existence? OF all titles ever assumed by prince or potentate, the proudest is that of the Roman pontiffs: "Servus servorum Dei" "Servant of the servants of God."
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