FROM DIOCLES TO DIOCLETIAN
Diocletian was born on December 22 around 245. He came from Dalmatia—modern Croatia—possibly from the city of Salona, near Spalatum (the modern Split, Croatia). He was born Diocles, Greek for “Glory of Zeus,” the god called Jupiter by the Romans. His family was poor. His father was a scribe or perhaps the freedman of a senator. His mother was supposedly named Dioclea.
Diocles, a career soldier, had a talent for leadership. He rose in the ranks to hold command as a general on the Danube. Then in 283 he served with the emperor Marcus Aurelius Carus on his eastern campaign. Just under age forty, Diocles was now commander of the imperial bodyguard, an elite force created a generation earlier and separate from the Praetorian Guard.
Carus died in 283 after ruling for only a year. But it was an immensely successful year in which he captured the Sasanian capital in Iraq. In his tent after a severe storm, the emperor died either of natural causes, the aftereffects of a battle wound, or a lightning strike. Earlier, Carus had wisely named his sons corulers. It was unusual to have co-emperors but not unprecedented. Marcus Aurelius and Septimius Severus both named corulers, while Augustus and Vespasian each delegated power to his son and successor. In no case was there a formal division of the empire between East and West. One of Carus’s sons, Numerian (Marcus Aurelius Numerianus), was with the army in Mesopotamia and was proclaimed emperor there. His brother, Marcus Aurelius Carinus, was already recognized as emperor in the west, where he won a battle against a German tribe.
Although victorious against the Sasanians, the Roman army decided not to risk further fighting under an untested new ruler. So it marched back westward. Numerian stayed in a closed coach, because, according to his staff, he had an eye infection. They said that he needed to protect his ailing eyes from the wind and the sun. But after a few days, his soldiers smelled a foul odor. They opened the coach and discovered Numerian dead. His staff attributed the death to natural causes, but many people suspected foul play.
Who would replace him? The obvious choice was the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, a man named Arrius Aper, who was also Numerian’s father-in-law. But another, more impressive candidate emerged: a tough, ruthless, and experienced commander who knew how to wield power. Aper was passed over by a council of Numerian’s senior officers on November 20, 284, who chose Diocles instead. The man born plain Diocles now claimed the more Latinate sounding name Diocletianus—our Diocletian.
The new emperor took the army’s salute on a hill outside the prosperous city of Nicomedia, which lies at the head of a gulf off the Propontis (today’s Sea of Marmara), not far from modern Istanbul. (Today Nicomedia is known as Izmit.) After swearing an oath that he had not betrayed Numerian or killed him, Diocletian proclaimed Aper’s guilt for Numerian’s death, drew his sword, and executed the man in full view of the army. There is speculation that Diocletian was lying and that he was really part of a plot to murder Numerian. In that case, he killed Aper in order to silence him.
If Diocletian was lying, that was all the more reason for him to lay it on thick. One source, claiming to cite an eyewitness, says that Diocletian quoted a line from Virgil’s The Aeneid, that classic epic poem, as he ran Aper through—a rather literary turn for a soldier. The same source says that Diocletian once received a prophecy that he would become emperor after killing a boar. Aper means “boar” in Latin, as Diocletian supposedly noted after killing the man.
Rome had just acquired an outstanding new leader. Diocletian was not merely hard-nosed and violent, but also a man of energy, ambition, and vision. As little as he knew Rome, he was thoroughly Roman, because Rome was now less a city than an army, and the Roman army was his home. By the same token, Diocletian was no narrow-minded soldier but a shrewd political strategist. We often underestimate the intelligence of great soldiers. Doing so with Diocletian would be a fatal mistake because he was a political practitioner of the first order.
His full title was the high-flown Imperator Caesar Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus Augustus. Yet a realist like Diocletian understood that being acclaimed emperor by his troops was just a hunting license. He would have to earn the title by fighting and politicking. Numerian’s brother, Carinus, ruled the western part of the empire and claimed to be the only legitimate emperor. Diocletian quickly marched against him. They fought in a battle in Serbia in spring 285 that Carinus won—and then lost. According to one account, an officer whose wife Carinus had seduced murdered him. Equally likely, the officer was a traitor working for Diocletian. Carinus’s troops now accepted Diocletian as emperor. After securing control of the region, he then turned to the next phase of his campaign for legitimacy: politics. He crossed the Alps to Italy and visited Rome, probably for the first time.
The Roman Senate of that era exercised little direct political or military power, with one big exception: the Senate’s support was still needed to pass legislation recognizing the army’s choice of emperor. Besides, the Senate still held enormous indirect power. Senators could plot or promote behind the scenes. More important, the Senate represented wealth and the power of money in politics, since senators were rich on a grand scale. The Senate then was like Wall Street or Silicon Valley today but with the added advantage of being tax-exempt like a modern foundation or university. By opening or closing their moneybags, senators could make or break an ambitious politician.
Diocletian knew all that, and so he went to Rome. During a brief visit there, he traded favors and made friends; for example, by appointing key senators to consulships that in recent years had gone to military men instead. For the time being, at any rate, he had the Senate on his side.
Diocletian did not dawdle in Rome. Enormous challenges faced the empire, starting with military tests, and Diocletian now turned to these. He spent most of the next decade on campaign on the Danube and in the east.
THIRD-CENTURY CRISIS
Diocletian’s first and greatest accomplishment was to restore stability to an empire trapped in a cycle of violence. To get a sense of his achievement, we need to glance at the half century that came before him.
The fifty years between the murder of Alexander Severus and the accession of Diocletian marked a period of crisis and then slow recovery. Rome had faced emergencies before but nothing on this scale.
From around 240 on, Rome’s enemies kept pushing across the frontiers both east and west. Both Gaul and what is today Jordan declared independence. Decius (Gaius Messius Quintus Decius), an ambitious mid-third-century emperor, fell in a battle against German invaders in today’s Bulgaria. Decius’s son and coruler died first, which supposedly led Decius to say bravely that the loss of one soldier hardly mattered. The biggest shock came a few years later with the capture of the emperor Valerian (Publius Licinius Valerianus) by the Sasanian king in 260. That king had a stone relief carved on a cliff in Iran that showed him on horseback, triumphing over Valerian. An inscription on a stone structure nearby bragged that the king had captured Valerian and his officers with his own hands and deported them to Iran, where they died later. It was an enormous humiliation for the Romans.
Coping with invasion and revolt at opposite fronts stretched Rome to the breaking point. Defeats abounded, and most of the province of Dacia was abandoned for good. To pay for defense, the emperors devalued the currency, but the result was massive inflation. As if this wasn’t bad enough, another major epidemic broke out again at midcentury and raged through the empire for fifteen years, compounding Rome’s military manpower problems. Then too, a drought in the 240s brought an end to the favorable climate that had blessed agriculture.
The population shrank, especially in cities. Meanwhile, the danger of invasion led many cities to build new fortifications or expand old ones. Rome itself was the prime example. The thick city walls seen by visitors today were first built by the emperor Aurelian (Lucius Domitius Aurelianus) who ruled from 270 to 275, and were later renovated in medieval and early modern times.
Rome’s signature problem was politic
al instability. Assassinations and civil wars shook government stability. Between 235, when Severus Alexander was murdered, and 284, twenty men were emperor, however briefly in some cases. The average reign was less than three years.
Yet the empire rebounded, which is a tribute to Roman resilience as well as a sign of the disunity and weaknesses among the empire’s enemies. Recovery began during the reign of Valerian’s son and coruler Gallienus (Publius Licinius Egnetius Gallienus), who instituted a series of reforms during his unusually long fifteen years in power, from 253 to 268. Gallienus excluded senators from high military commands and replaced them with professionals. Moreover, he began a new, more modest policy of border defense. The Romans now conceded much of the frontier to the enemy and shifted to a defensive mode: fortified cities near the frontier served as bases from which to prevent deeper enemy penetration into Roman territory. Rome also concentrated mobile armies at strategic points in the rear, moving them where needed.
Thanks to his new policies, Gallienus inflicted defeats on invading Germans. His successors checked the invaders decisively and reconquered both Gaul and the East. They won sweet revenge against the Sasanian Empire by conquering its capital and reestablishing the Roman province of Mesopotamia (which, in this case, refers not to Iraq but instead to a relatively small region that today is in southeastern Turkey).
Gallienus came from the senatorial nobility, but his successors were all self-made military men; products of the professional army that Gallienus himself created. None of these emperors was able to reestablish political stability. In fact, the most successful of them died suddenly and often violently.
Only Diocletian was able to restore order.
THE WARRIOR BAND THAT RULED ROME
As Diocletian understood, in order to hold power, you need to share power. So he did it on a grand scale. Within a year of being named emperor, he chose a fellow professional soldier from the Balkans to work with: a man named Maximian (Marcus Aurelius Valerius Maximianus), who was a few years younger than him. The son of a grocer from what is today Serbia, Maximian rose in the ranks like Diocletian. The two of them served together in the army, and Maximian was probably outside Nicomedia the day Diocletian was proclaimed emperor. First Diocletian named him Caesar—his deputy and successor—and sent him to Gaul. Then Diocletian named Maximian Augustus, or co-emperor, and put him in charge of the West. Diocletian mostly kept to the East, the wealthiest and most populous part of the empire.
A surviving marble portrait bust that might be Maximian shows him as strong featured and bearded, with deep-set eyes, sunken cheeks, and a shrewd, even skeptical expression. His critics during his lifetime called him fierce, wild, and uncivilized.
Although Diocletian was not the first emperor to take a coruler, what was extraordinary was his decision to add two more men as Caesars. He did this on March 1, 293, a little more than eight years after taking power.
During those years, the drumbeat of war went on and on, and Diocletian followed a punishing schedule of fighting, negotiating, and traveling. In just one year, for example, 290, it is estimated that he traveled ten miles a day. Over the years, he led military campaigns on the Danube, in Egypt, and on the eastern border, going back and forth from one theater of operations to another. He supervised the building of a new series of forts on the eastern front from the Euphrates River to the Arabian Desert. He negotiated a truce with the Sasanians. Diocletian met with Maximian to coordinate policy in the face of a revolt by the rebel commander of northwestern Gaul, who also led a breakaway movement in Britain. Meanwhile, he still had domestic reforms that he wanted to implement.
With so much to do, no wonder Diocletian called for help. Besides, sharing power with talented men was a way of discouraging them from revolting. It was a fine example of the principle of keeping your friends close but your enemies closer.
The two Caesars served the two Augusti and mostly played a military role. In the West, Flavius Valerius Constantius became Caesar to the Augustus, Maximian. Constantius was a former provincial governor and Maximian’s prefect of the Guard. In the East, Galerius (Gaius Galerius Valerius Maximianus), possibly prefect of the Guard to Diocletian, now became Caesar. All four men were poor boys from the Balkans who rose in the Roman army. And none of the four lived in Rome. Rather, they chose residences closer to the front. They lived in northwestern Turkey, Germany, northern Italy, Syria, and northern Greece. They were constantly on the move, coping with war and revolt, but rarely meeting one another except for occasional summit conferences. They communicated mostly by letter or messenger.
The rulers are sometimes called tetrarchs (literally, “four rulers”) and the system, tetrarchy (“rule by four”), but this is a modern term: the ancients did not use it. Nor were the four rulers equals. Diocletian was in charge. He showed this by inventing two new titles. Diocletian called himself Iovius—that is, Jupiter, the king of the gods. He gave Maximian the title of Herculius or Hercules, the son of Jupiter. While imperial coins of this period stress harmony and agreement, it’s clear that loyalty to Diocletian came first. As one ancient orator put it, the empire remained “an undivided inheritance.”
In practice and for day-to-day affairs, Maximian and Constantius ran the West while Diocletian and Galerius ran the East, but there was no official division of the empire. Diocletian controlled its overall strategy, and he made the final decisions. Yet in a real sense, the Roman Empire was divided. Diocletian recognized that Rome’s problems were too big for one man to handle. For the rest of its history, the empire usually had two emperors.
MOTHER COURAGE AND THE MATE OF MARS: IMPERIAL WOMEN OF THE TETRARCHY
Following standard Roman procedure going back to Augustus, Diocletian used marriage to cement political relations. He had Maximian marry his daughter to the Caesar Constantius, who was required to divorce his wife, and then also had Maximian adopt Constantius as his son. A soldier-statesman, Constantius spent a large part of his career on military campaigns, with little noticeable desire to leave the field as he got older.
Meanwhile, Diocletian married his only child, Valeria, to the Caesar Galerius, whom he also adopted as his son. Coins show Valeria as a pretty young woman with a somewhat masculine face and elaborately plaited hair raised above the forehead. She wears a small diadem. She and Galerius had a baby girl, who was promised in marriage to Maximian’s son.
A shepherd as a boy, Galerius joined the army and rose in the ranks. He was tall and rugged. One ancient source, admittedly hostile, calls him intimidating and coarse. He supposedly kept pet bears and fed criminals to them while he ate dinner.
In spite of the importance of imperial marriage in Diocletian’s policies, we know frustratingly little about the wives of the four rulers. Diocletian was married to Aurelia Prisca. As later events would show, she was a loyal and courageous mother, but her role as a wife is largely undocumented. She had the title of Most Noble Woman, and Diocletian put her statue in a temple of Jupiter, in Salona, but he didn’t give her the title of Augusta. We are not sure why not—perhaps to avoid offending the wives of his three fellow rulers.
Galerius’s mother, by contrast, stands out as an intriguing character. Romula, as she was called, was one of those Roman mothers such as Atia or Agrippina who loomed large in their sons’ lives and public image. Even Galerius’s retirement villa, an enormous estate built on the site of Galerius’s boyhood home in what is now Serbia, was named after her.
Romula was supposedly a very religious pagan. Galerius claimed that she had mated with Mars, the god of war, in the form of a snake, and he was their child. The claim harks back to Augustus’s propaganda that his mother had mated with the god Apollo in the form of a snake. No doubt Galerius was honoring his mother when he built temples to the mother goddess and to Jupiter within his retirement villa.
Diocletian and his three fellow rulers were already a band of brothers from the army. Now they were a family (or at least two families), joined by marriage. A famous statue group of the four
rulers, originally in the Roman East but now on the exterior of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, shows the image they projected. They stand in two groups, in each of which the senior man is bearded and the junior smooth shaven. They all wear heavy armor and Danube-region-style woolen caps. Their sword handles have barbarian-looking eagle-head pommels. Each man has one hand around the shoulder of his fellow ruler and the other hand on the hilt of his own sword, suggesting that they are ready to fight outsiders while protecting each other.
The statues are made of porphyry, a precious stone from Egypt used to represent emperors. The style is anything but classical. Stubby and heavy, the figures look like something from the early Middle Ages. But they are typical of the big changes in Roman sculpture during the third century, a period when art became simpler.
“A PEACE WHICH WAS EARNED WITH MUCH SWEAT”
With his three colleagues in place in spring 293, it was time for Diocletian to advance on all fronts. All the while, he increased troop deployments on the frontier and beefed up border forts. Compared with earlier Roman forts, Diocletian’s were smaller, thicker, and harder to access. Networks of them have been found in various border and coastal regions, east and west.
The number of legions shot up from thirty-three under Septimius Severus to fifty under Diocletian, but with fewer men per legion. Whether Diocletian increased the size of the army is unclear, but he certainly made it easier to reach recruitment goals; he reinstated an annual draft for the first time since the days of the republic. He also required the sons of serving soldiers or veterans to join up.
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