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is doubtful; indeed, papyrological evidence suggests that it remained surprisingly stable over many centuries, from the early empire to the beginning of the Byzantine period in Egypt. This means that the net effect of Diocletian’s innovations was much less dramatic than is often supposed. Without technological innovations there was a natural limit to productivity, even had there been no adverse factors such as population drop or damage from war and invasion. Nevertheless, the new system of assessment may have helped to ensure a higher rate of recovery of notional tax revenue, and to that extent will have been helpful to the state (and unpopular); it probably also increased, if only temporarily, the ratio of tax receipts in kind over taxes collected in cash.

      But there were other problems to face, including continued inflation and a shortage of gold and silver in the treasury, which Diocletian and Constantine attempted to address by requiring the rich to commute precious metal for bronze. Matters were not helped however by the large-scale minting of bronze, or rather base-metal, coins (the bronze content was minimal) by the government in response to the collapse of the silver denarius, now a paper unit only; prices continued to spiral throughout Constantine’s reign as well as Diocletian’s. The latter’s most famous measure in the monetary sphere was his attempt to prescribe maximum prices by imperial decree (‘Price Edict’, or Edictum de maximis pretiis, AD 301). With its minute attention to detail, Diocletian’s edict provides us with our largest single source of information on the prices of ordinary goods. It could not succeed however in the absence both of an adequate mechanism for enforcement and of parallel regulation of supply. The disproportionate penalties it lays down conceal the fact that the means of enforcement simply did not exist. Hostile critics like Lactantius gloated when it was soon withdrawn:

      this same Diocletian with his insatiable greed was never willing that his treasuries should be depleted but was always measuring surplus wealth and funds for largess so that he could keep whatever he was storing complete and inviolate. Since, too, by his various misdeeds he was causing prices to rise to an extraordinary height, he tried to fix by law the prices of goods put up for sale. Much blood was then shed over small and cheap items, and in the general alarm nothing would appear for sale; then the rise in prices got much worse until, after many had met their deaths, sheer necessity led to the repeal of the law. (DMP 7.5–7)

      Diocletian’s attempt at price control was accompanied by equally unsuccessful measures to reform the coinage. Both failed because they were imposed from above without sufficient understanding or control of the general conditions which were in fact causing the difficulties. Lactantius uses a vocabulary and reflects a lack of economic understanding (‘economic rationality’) shared by all sides, which put strict limits on the ability of fourth-century emperors to manage the economy in any real sense. Diocletian’s measures went far beyond those of previous emperors in their imaginative perception of what was needed, and they were continued to some extent by Constantine, but modern references to a ‘command economy’ or a totalitarian state mistake the letter for the reality. Rather, we should read the threats of provincial governors directed against tax collectors who failed in their duty as a symptom of actual powerlessness.

      By his administrative reforms, Diocletian also laid the foundations of the late Roman bureaucratic system, whose object was to achieve tighter governmental control of all aspects of running the empire – fiscal, legal and administrative. It may be doubted whether the new system achieved its aim, though the original conception cannot be blamed for that. First, provincial government was reorganized; military and civil commands were separated, and each province henceforth had both a military commander (dux) and a civil governor. The provinces themselves were reduced in size and greatly enlarged in number: according to Lactantius, ‘to ensure that terror was universal, Diocletian cut the provinces into fragments’ (DMP 7.4). In fact the aim was to secure greater efficiency by shortening the chain of communications and command, and in so doing to reduce the power of individual governors. Inscriptions show that the process took some time; a list in a manuscript from Verona, known as the Laterculus Veronensis, or Verona List, indicates how far it had gone shortly after Diocletian’s abdication in AD 305. To give only two examples, Britain now had four provinces, Spain six and ‘Africa’ seven; the twelve larger units (dioceses) were governed by equestrian ‘vicars’ (vicarii) representing the praetorian prefects, who at the end of the reign of Constantine lost their military role and became the heads of the civil administration. Many of the laws in the Theodosian Code are addressed by the emperors to the praetorian prefects, who then had the task of passing the information on to the provincial governors. The praetorian prefects varied in number but for much of the fourth century there were three, four after AD 395. Under Diocletian the prefect was effectively the emperor’s second-in-command, with military, financial, legislative and administrative responsibility; from Constantine’s reign the military side was put under magistri militum (Masters of the Soldiers), who had command of the army and to whom the duces (military commanders in the provinces) were answerable. Below the prefects and vicars were provincial governors of various ranks, with titles such as praeses, proconsul, consularis and corrector. Rome and, later, Constantinople too, were outside the system, being governed by prefects of their own (praefecti urbis, prefects of the city). The system sounds neat and tidy, but as A. H. M. Jones points out, in practice it was constantly being circumvented, with constitutions addressed to ordinary governors and other direct communication not observing the theoretical chain of command. As time went on it was also circumvented by other means – patronage, bribery and less obvious forms of corruption. One should also be careful not to make too many assumptions based on modern preconceptions; the late Roman administration is scarcely comparable to a modern bureaucracy.

      This system of provincial government required large numbers of officials to run it. In addition there were the so-called palatini, the financial officers of the largitiones and the res privata, part of the comitatus (the imperial entourage), along with the eunuch officials of the sacrum cubiculum (emperor’s bedchamber), the quaestor sacri palatii (imperial secretary), the magister officiorum (Master of Offices), who originated under Constantine and had control of what may be called the secretariat (the scrinia, comprising the epistolae, the memoria and the libelli), and probably also the agentes in rebus, the imperial couriers, and the comes of the domestici, the palace guard – all, naturally, with their own staffs. This group, of which the above is a highly simplified and incomplete sketch, travelled with the emperor, as did the imperial mint and wagon trains of bullion and luggage of all kinds. It all sounds very impressive, but in fact it had developed piecemeal over a considerable period, so that there was much actual confusion and duplication of duties. The officials themselves were collectively regarded as belonging to a militia and received military rations and pay, which made imperial service highly desirable for the hard-pressed members of the town councils, especially as they then gained release from their tax burdens. The late Roman government had therefore to strike a balance that guaranteed that enough good men were recruited into the imperial service, while ensuring that a sufficient number of taxpayers remained.

      There are many problems in understanding the late Roman administrative system, which maintained an uneasy balance between bureaucracy and patronage; in particular, the number of those who were actually involved, and who were thus removed from the productive base and had instead to be supported (‘idle mouths’, to adopt the term used by A. H. M. Jones), has often been seen as a major factor in economic decline. These questions are discussed further in Chapter VII; meanwhile, we can note that by no means all of the system later known actually originated with Diocletian, though he is usually blamed for creating a top-heavy bureaucracy, just as he is for increasing the army to a size impossible for the empire to sustain.

      Many of the changes that were taking place during his reign were in fact more a matter of long-term evolution than of individual initiative. It is often suggested, for example, that senators were excluded from posts in the provincial administration under Diocletian, who, like many other third-century emperors, had himself risen through the ranks of the army. But epigraphic evidence shows that senators were never excluded altogether; the fact that they were few in number at this period is a result not so much of imperial prejudice as of the decentralized conditions of the third century, which disrupted the existing patronage system, brought military commanders

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