LITMIR.BIZ

       III The New Empire: Diocletian

      BETWEEN THE accession of Diocletian in AD 284 and the death of Constantine in AD 337, the disturbed situation which held in the mid-third century came under control and the empire passed through a phase of recovery, consolidation and major social and administrative change. In effect, the system of government which was to prevail in the east until the early seventh century, and in the west, though with less success, until the fall of the western empire in AD 476, was put into place. It is natural to attribute the achievement mainly to the two strong emperors who ruled during the fifty-three-year period, especially since this is also the tendency of the ancient sources; but it is necessary to remember that the actual process certainly involved less forward planning and more piecemeal development than hindsight would suggest. Caution is particularly necessary in view of the tendency of the sources to draw an over-sharp distinction between Diocletian and Constantine because of their religious differences, and to let that distinction carry over into the interpretation of their secular policies.

      Diocletian came to the throne in AD 284, having risen from a lowly background in Dalmatia to command the domestici, the imperial guard. He was thus one of the several Illyrian soldier-emperors who reached imperial power after the death of Gallienus in AD 268. The Emperor Aurelian (AD 270–5) had been able to repel an invasion of Italy by the Alamanni, defeat Zenobia at Palmyra and put an end to the ‘Gallic empire’ under Tetricus. Like Gallienus and so many others, Aurelian was murdered, but this time the assassins were punished, and Probus (AD 276–82) not only drove back the Germanic invaders from the Rhine, which they had crossed in force, but concluded a treaty establishing a Roman military presence beyond the Rhine and taking large numbers of hostages and recruits for the Roman army. When Probus too was murdered by his own troops, Carus (AD 282–3) embarked on a major and successful Persian expedition, only to die suddenly with the army on the Euphrates. His son Numerian led a Roman retreat, but when he too died under suspicious circumstances while on the road, Diocles was elevated at Nicomedia in November, AD 284, allegedly accusing his rival, the praetorian prefect Aper, of having murdered Numerian and stabbing him to death on the spot in full view of the troops, quoting from Virgil as he did so (SHA Vita Cari 13); he then took the name Diocletian. In the following year Diocletian defeated Carus’s other son Carinus in a major battle in the former Yugoslavia and found himself in total control.

      Even more pressing than the question of military security was that of how to put an end to the rapid turnover of emperors. Diocletian’s answer lay in the establishment in AD 293 of a system of power-sharing known as the tetrarchy (rule of four), by which there would be two Augusti and two Caesars, the latter destined in due course to succeed. Once established, the tetrarchic system lasted until it was destroyed by the ambition of Constantine, who had been raised himself on the death in AD 306 of his father, Constantius, who had first been made Caesar and then Augustus during the reign of Diocletian. Diocletian’s scheme did not come into being immediately on his accession. His first step was to raise another Illyrian soldier, Maximian, to the post of Caesar, at the same time adopting him as his son, though he was only a few years younger than himself (AD 285). An ad hoc division of responsibility gave Maximian the west while Diocletian was in the east; the fact that a certain Carausius had been declared Augustus in Britain no doubt influenced Diocletian to make Maximian Augustus in AD 286. Even then, the further step of appointing two Caesars was not taken until March, AD 293. Constantius and Galerius now became Caesars to Maximian and Diocletian respectively; the arrangements were sealed by dynastic marriages and the adoption of Diocletian’s family name Valerius, and advertised on coins and in official panegyric. Diocletian and Maximian, meeting formally at Milan in the winter of AD 290–1, had already affiliated themselves to the gods Jupiter and Hercules by taking the divine titles Jovius and Herculius, and their Caesars shared the same titulature and the same religious associations. As heir to his father Constantius, Constantine too is attested as Herculius in AD 307.

      A porphyry statue group now to be seen as part of San Marco, Venice, shows the tetrarchs as squat figures in military dress, embracing each other. The surviving Latin panegyrics, like the Historia Augusta, emphasize unity and concord:

      Four rulers of the world they were indeed, brave, wise, kind, generous, respectful to the senate, friends of the people, moderate, revered, devoted, pious. (SHA Vita Cari 18)

      Such heavy-handed propaganda betrays the fragility of the new arrangement: it rested on nothing more solid than consent. Carausius, who had seized power in Britain, was murdered and replaced by his rival Allectus in AD 293; Allectus was defeated in turn by Constantius in AD 296, who then entered London as a liberator (Pan.Lat. 8(5)). Not that the defeat rewarded legality at the expense of usurpation, as the victors naturally claimed, for Carausius had been recognized as Augustus in Britain and north-west Gaul, and had issued coins in that capacity.

      The propaganda, and the religious aura claimed for the tetrarchy, no doubt helped to impress their subjects, and to reassure Diocletian and his colleagues themselves, but it was in fact military, and by extension political, success which conferred legitimacy. Diocletian’s system remained in place only until it was challenged from within, after Diocletian himself retired in AD 305. Luckily for the empire, however, even though the tetrarchy was threatened in its early years by the regime of Carausius, it did ultimately succeed in providing a period of stability lasting nearly twenty years – long enough for some far-reaching changes to be introduced.

      Any assessment of the nature of Diocletian’s reforms is rendered difficult by two factors: the unsatisfactory nature of the surviving literary evidence for his reign, and the fact that many individual changes either came in at a later stage, or are only attested later. Another problem is caused by the exaggerated contrast between Diocletian and Constantine which prevails in the sources; rather, Constantine’s secular policies, and even some aspects of his religious ones, should be seen as continuing the general line established by Diocletian.

      One of Diocletian’s first priorities was military: not only had the army to be brought under central control and made into a force capable of defending the security of the empire, but it also had to be reliably supplied. The literary sources attribute to Diocletian the most fundamental changes that the Roman military system had experienced since the days of Augustus, and they have been followed by most modern scholars; however, it may be doubted whether the break with what had gone before was quite as sharp as this suggests. The way had already been prepared by earlier emperors, including Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus (AD 193–211) and Caracalla (AD 211–17). During their reigns army pay was doubled, donatives to the soldiers institutionalised, the army itself

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