one side, and the despotic instinct to control all social forces on the other, brought about a close union between State and Church which altered the character and spirit of the State, and constituted perhaps the most striking difference between the early and the later Empire." The origins of the change began in the reign of Aurelian, who promoted the worship of Sol Invictus as the supreme deity of the empire. Although the worship of Sol Invictus did not remove the veneration towards the traditional Roman gods, it was seen as a mark of imperial favouritism, and the emperors linked his cult to the well-being of the state and on-going military victories of the empire. Next, it was during Diocletian's reign that emperor worship was fully adopted by the emperors, as a method of expressing loyalty to the state. Previously, deceased emperors had been worshiped as divus across the empire. Living emperors had been worshiped as gods in the eastern half of the empire since the time of Augustus, but this was not officially encouraged during the Principate, and it was not introduced into Italy. It was Diocletian who altered this to have the worship of the living emperors as an official part of the religious framework of the entire empire. To facilitate this, Diocletian was linked to the god Jupiter, while his colleague Maximian was associated with Hercules. It was under Constantine I that the religious transformation began to take its late Dominate shape, initially with Constantine officially favouring the worship of a single deity in the shape of Sol Invictus. During the course of his reign, the identification of Sol Invictus as the principal god began to merge with the Christian god. To avoid offending Christians, Constantine abandoned the emperor's formal claim to divinity and ceased to demand sacrifices to the emperor that formed part of the imperial cult. In an attempt to appeal to both Christians and pagans, Constantine adopted two new religious symbols into the imperial iconography, in the form of the Chi Rho and the Labarum. By the time of Constantine's death in AD 337, this process was largely complete, with Constantine being baptized on his deathbed. At the Imperial court, Christians began indiscernibly to rise in favour, to the detriment of pagans. This did not begin to immediately hamper the advancement of pagan courtiers after the defeat of Maxentius in 312, as the full