Gondor and Ancient Rome

The parallel between Gondor and Rome is hardly worth bringing up - it is just so obvious. But there is one feature of them that is particularly striking and on which a key plot feature of the Lord of the Rings hinges. Gondor was the southern branch of the much larger realm of the exiled Numenoreans. This split of an empire into two related ones which nonetheless maintain a connection is one that sounds like a piece of pure fiction. Emperors don't often split their empires up, not willingly at any rate. Any half decent ruler wants to ruler a bigger area not a smaller one. So you will have to look hard into history to find a precedent. But there is one. And it is in that most Gondor-like of empires, Rome. The emperor Theodosius was the last to rule both halves of the empire. He had many qualities that Tolkien would have approved of. He sorted out religious dissent firmly and established the Church with a set of standards based on the Nicene creed. He made Christianity the official religion of the empire. I can imagine that the catholic JRR would have been quite happy under Theodosius. On his death he split it between his two sons Arcadius and Honorius. From then on the split become permanent until the final extinction of the Western Empire at the hands of the Goths. The Eastern Roman Empire continued for another thousand years in Constantinople. Greek became the language of the empire and the culture drifted away from its latin roots. But right up until the end the emporers continued to think of themselves as and call themselves Romans. I imagine that a descendant of Julius Ceaser who turned up in the fifteenth century when the empire was basically just the city of Constinople, might well have been welcomed as a saviour in the same way as Aragorn at Minas Tirith.