Ten Caesars

by Barry Strauss

  Diocletian was a warrior, but Galerius was his workhorse. After defending the Danube frontier and putting down a rebellion in Egypt, Galerius was sent eastward to deal with a Sasanian invasion of Armenia. Meanwhile, in 297 Diocletian had to go to Egypt to respond to another rebellion there. After a long siege, he took Alexandria by cutting off its water supply.

  That same year, Galerius suffered a big defeat against the Sasanian Empire. An angry Diocletian humiliated him. Having left Egypt for Syria, Diocletian now made Galerius, in his scarlet robes, run beside the emperor’s chariot for a mile as they both entered the city of Antioch.

  Yet Galerius’s shame was short lived. After gathering new troops from the Balkans, he defeated the Sasanians battle in 298. He even captured the Sasanian royal harem, complete with the king’s wives, sisters, and children. While Galerius marched south into what is now Iraq, Diocletian reoccupied former Roman territory in southern Turkey. Using the return of the harem as a bargaining chip, Diocletian negotiated with the Sasanian king and won recognition of Rome’s sovereignty over its regained territory. This great Roman victory led to a peace treaty that would last for nearly forty years. Now Diocletian welcomed back Galerius with open arms. Afterward, he sent Galerius to the Danube frontier, where heavy fighting awaited. Indeed, Galerius would spend much of the following ten years campaigning there.

  In the West, meanwhile, Maximian worked hard. He put down rebels in Gaul, Spain, and Africa, and pushed back various German invaders on land and pirates by sea. He failed, though, to retake unruly Britain. That job fell to Constantius, who crossed the British Sea (today’s English Channel) in 296 and finally crushed that island’s long-running rebellion. A gold medallion survives that commemorates his entry into London on horseback. The medallion’s legend hails Constantius as Restorer of the Everlasting Light.

  By 298, after fourteen years of continual warfare, Diocletian and his corulers finally settled the frontiers. They took the credit for defeating and slaughtering barbarians, as they called them, and so establishing “a peace which was earned with much sweat.” It was time to turn to reform at home and to refine and expand a program that was already well under way.

  BIG GOVERNMENT

  Diocletian’s plans were expensive. The military, with its endless series of wars, was the biggest-ticket item, but there was also a massive building campaign. In addition to the border forts and roads, every tetrarch needed at least one palace and often several. Nor did Diocletian neglect the city of Rome. He rebuilt the Senate House after a devastating fire (that rebuilt Senate House still stands in the Roman Forum today), erected a triumphal arch (no longer standing), and built the massive Baths of Diocletian, the largest baths ever built in Rome. Since then, the various parts of the sprawling, ten-plus-acre ruins of those baths have been converted into two Renaissance churches (one designed by Michelangelo), a major archaeological museum, an exhibition hall and former planetarium, and, last but not least, one of the main squares of modern Rome.

  Another expense was the new and expanded administrative structure that Diocletian imposed on the empire, doubling the number of provinces from about fifty to roughly a hundred. He also grouped the provinces into twelve new regions, which he called dioceses (a term still used in the Christian Church for a territorial administrative unit), each with its own administrator. Senators were virtually closed out of provincial governance, as nearly all the jobs went to knights. The purpose of the new system was to make it easier to collect taxes and to enforce laws and rules.

  Throughout the empire’s history, Italy was exempt from taxes. No longer. Diocletian treated the peninsula like any other province. Even the city of Rome had to pay taxes and—unkindest cut of all—so did senators. A reservoir of resentment began filling up.

  To meet the needs of a bigger army, the government established arms factories at various places around the empire. This in turn imposed duties on local populations. The administration had a very long reach. For example, records show that in September 298 an Egyptian blacksmith failed to show up for work in the local arsenal. The governor ordered the police to find and detain him and bring the man and his tools into his presence.

  However, it all played out against the background of a nearly worthless currency. Already, under Septimius Severus, Roman silver coins were only 50 percent precious metal. By the 260s, some coins contained only 2 percent to 3 percent precious metal. Not surprisingly, this led to a financial crisis. As usual, Diocletian had a response—actually several responses.

  As background, consider that during the uncertain times of the crisis years, farmers in various parts of the empire gave up their independence for protection by a local landlord. Formerly freeholders, they became tenants. Now Diocletian codified the situation and tried to tie them permanently to the land as tenants because fixed laborers were easier to tax than mobile ones. A new tax system paid in kind rather than currency was established.

  Soldiers, however, needed to be paid in coin, so the problem of inflation had to be faced. Around 294, Diocletian increased the weight of the gold coin, established a new and reliable silver coin, and reformed the bronze coinage. Despite this noble attempt, bronze coins remained overvalued, and inflation ran rampant. So in 301 the government stepped in, issuing a decree that in effect cut the value of bronze coins in half.

  A few months later, Diocletian and his colleagues made a massive attempt to impose wage and price controls, issuing their famous Edict on Maximum Prices. The preface is revealing. After decrying greed and profiteering, the four rulers set maximum wages and prices. They pronounced the punishment for violating price ceilings as death.

  They expressed special concern about the army, citing cases of soldiers who lost their whole salary plus their bonus in a single transaction. The villains, they said, were cheating not only individuals but also society as a whole, since tax money paid the military.

  The edict sets prices on more than a thousand goods and services ranging from chickpeas to mustard, goat to pheasant, compensation for marble workers to camel drivers, and veterinarians to schoolteachers. The goal was ambitious but doomed. In the end, goods were withheld from the market while a thriving black market developed.

  STANDING ON CEREMONY

  As the statue group of Diocletian and his three corulers suggests, the emperor paid a great deal of attention to self-presentation. In fact, under Diocletian, the imperial court lost all pretense of republicanism and became a place where the haughtiest of monarchs might feel at home. Several of his predecessors had already increased court ceremony, but Diocletian went much further.

  Diocletian often wore a purple robe with gold threads accessorized with jewels and silk shoes. To the ancients, purple was the color of kings. The first emperors avoided wearing purple, and although Hadrian and his successors made ever more use of it, no one had adopted the color with as much gusto as Diocletian. He also insisted on being called master (dominus) in public. Imperial palaces built during his reign all have grand audience chambers, organized so that the ruler would make a stunning impression on visitors. Often he was surrounded by figures that classical writers looked down on as a sign of despotism: eunuchs.

  Eunuchs had played a role in imperial government from early days, but it was generally a small role. Romans associated them with foreign autocracy but under Diocletian, they came into their own in Roman government. They were freed slaves, often from Armenia or Persia. They now held key positions in the emperor’s household, and they often controlled access to him.

  One point of access was the emperor’s entry into town, usually a grand ceremonial occasion. That, along with presentation at court, could be the time for a panegyric, or speech of praise. Never less than fulsome in earlier reigns, these speeches reached new levels of sycophancy under Diocletian. In 301, for example, Diocletian and Maximian held a meeting in the palace in Mediolanum (now Milan). A speechwriter exclaimed: “What a vision your piety granted when those who had been admitted into the palace at Milan to adore you
r sacred faces caught sight of you both, and your twinned godhead suddenly threw into confusion the customary practice of single veneration.”

  The same writer says that when the two rulers exited the palace and were carried on litters through town, the buildings themselves almost moved because of the throngs that poured out onto the streets or leaned out the upper-story windows to catch a view. He writes that people cried out joyfully and without fear: “Do you see Diocletian? Do you see Maximian? They are both here! They are together! How closely they sit! How they chat in harmony! How quickly they pass by!”

  The empire had come a long way from the days when Livia conspicuously wove her husband Augustus’s woolen toga on her own loom or when the Senate under Tiberius outlawed silk clothes for men. But the hard military men from the Balkans who now ruled came from a different world. Now that they had wealth and power, they liked to show off.

  THE GREAT PERSECUTION

  It might seem odd that Diocletian devoted time and energy to religious persecution. In fact, a military man like him might have been expected to exclaim as Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin did, “How many divisions does the Pope have?”

  But the Romans, unlike modern people, did not grow up in the shadow of the belief that God is dead. On the contrary, most Romans saw in the empire’s misfortunes a clear sign of divine disapproval. The gods were angry at Rome. They needed to be appeased, and the state had to restore what the Romans called “the peace of the gods.” But how?

  To some the answer was “with new gods.” The crisis of the third century, with its many miseries, encouraged conversion from the old gods to new ones.

  A variety of foreign and in some cases new religions had been coming to Rome from the east during the empire’s first centuries. The religious marketplace of third-century Rome was like a multicolored mosaic. Worshipers could choose from among Greek mystery cults offering the secret of eternal life; the worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis, whose priests paraded through the streets chanting in robes like today’s Hare Krishna but with the addition of self-flagellation; the men-only worship of Mithras, a combination of sun god and machismo symbol whose members took part in bull sacrifices in underground rooms that call to mind the chapter houses of some American college fraternities; or the Persian-imported egghead’s religion of Manichaeism, which saw the world in dualistic terms as a struggle between light and darkness. Judaism attracted many converts and probably more sympathizers who liked its theology and time-honored holy book more than its strict laws.

  Finally, there was Christianity, which offered salvation, ritual, community, and Judaism’s benefits without its restrictions. Official hostility did not keep the church from spreading. In fact, the Roman government largely left Christianity alone. Persecution was sporadic, local, and relatively rare, with the exception of the 250s, when the emperors, reeling from a series of disasters, began a short-lived persecution of Christians who didn’t sacrifice to the gods. The previous situation of de facto toleration soon returned.

  Christianity won followers by its emphasis on charity and community. The church was open to women and slaves. In spite of apocalyptic and revolutionary strains, Christianity largely became mainstream. Wealthy people, intellectuals, and even Romans soldiers began converting.

  Christians were a minority and concentrated in the east and North Africa. But they made up perhaps 10 percent of the empire’s population overall, which is no small number, especially because most Christians lived in cities, the nerve centers of Roman civilization. By the same token, Christians generally looked and acted like everyone else. They didn’t wear special clothes, live in ghettos, bury their dead separately, or speak a different language. They were the neighbor, the woman who ran the household or engaged in business, the teacher, the lawyer, or the soldier in the next tent. The only thing that made them different from other Romans was their absence from temple and festival ceremonies, their worship in churches (mostly rooms in private houses), and their disinclination to sacrifice to the gods on behalf of the emperor.

  Diocletian noticed that disinclination, and he considered it a dereliction of duty. He was not someone to seek the peace of the gods with a new religion. On the contrary, the man born to humble circumstances in Dalmatia doubled down on the old Roman deities with the fervor of an outsider. In addition to sacrificing to the old gods himself, he decided to persecute those who did not. Maybe the idea had been brewing in his mind for some time, but, if so, he couldn’t act until after 298, when the war with Persia was finally over. Perhaps he acted because he was thinking of his legacy as he grew older and wanted to win the favor of the gods before his time in office came to an end. At any rate, in 303 he made his move.

  First Diocletian turned on the Manichaeans, who were suspect not only for being new and different but also for their origin in Persia. Manichaeans were, the emperor said, like poisonous and evil snakes. Then he turned on the Christians.

  Diocletian feared and disliked the growing power of the church, especially in the army. His instinct was to smash it. In this, he had the strong support of his colleague Galerius. Indeed, some sources say that persecution was Galerius’s idea. One intriguing possibility is that the driving force behind Galerius was his mother, Romula, moved by her strong faith in the pagan gods. It is at least possible that behind the worst persecution that the Christian Church faced in ancient times stood a woman from the rolling hills of rural Serbia.

  A series of orders proclaimed in 303 and 304 formed what Christians called the Great Persecution. The first orders targeted clergy as well as Christians in high office. Then the regime turned on ordinary Christians as well and demanded that they sacrifice to the pagan gods. Churches were torn down and holy books confiscated. Diocletian was particularly interested in driving Christians from the army.

  According to a Christian source, the persecution began in winter 303 with the destruction of a Christian church in Nicomedia near Diocletian’s palace. The writer accuses Galerius of then setting fire to Diocletian’s palace and blaming Christians, in order to inflame the emperor’s enthusiasm for persecution. Diocletian seemingly took the bait and had his servants tortured in the hope of extracting a confession, but he failed.

  Diocletian supposedly even suspected his wife and his daughter. That, at any rate, is probably why he ordered them to sacrifice to the gods. They were surely not Christians, but maybe they had expressed sympathy for Christians.

  Christians reacted to persecution in various ways. Some went into hiding, some bribed officials, some agreed to sacrifice, and some refused and were executed for their faith. Martyrs there were, as Christian literature recounts. A veteran named Julius with twenty-seven years of military service and seven campaigns behind him preferred to be executed rather than offer incense to the gods. Crispina, a wealthy mother with children who lived in what is today Algeria, also accepted execution rather than sacrifice. Bishop Felix, in what is now Tunisia, refused to turn over his holy books and so was executed at the age of fifty-six.

  These were terrible times for Christians. The persecutions lasted on and off for ten years and caused great suffering, but ultimately they failed. Steadfastness on the part of martyrs is one reason, while another is the unwillingness of certain non-Christian authorities to take part. How many Romans were ready to condemn to death fellow citizens who had committed no real crime? In Britain and Gaul, Constantius limited himself to tearing down churches but otherwise left Christians alone. He was surely not the only official who tempered Diocletian’s order.

  There were not many martyrs, but martyrdom loomed large in Christian consciousness and probably won non-Christian admirers, so that Christianity emerged stronger from the persecution.

  As for Romula, after she died, she was buried in a specially built mausoleum at Galerius’s estate named for her. She was then declared a goddess. You could hardly guess from her fate that the pagan religion that she championed would soon itself be persecuted.

  CABBAGES AND KINGS

  D
iocletian was the first and only Roman emperor to retire. Even more remarkable, he lived unmolested for nearly a decade after stepping down.

  Why did he leave office? The sources say that Diocletian’s health failed him, but other emperors clung to power in spite of strokes, heart disease, and gout. No Roman strongman had given up power voluntarily since the dictator Sulla stepped down from office nearly four hundred years earlier, which Julius Caesar called an act of political illiteracy, arguing that dictators can’t retire. But Diocletian was not unschooled. He knew that his loyal fellow rulers would stop being loyal the minute they smelled blood. Each of them coveted the purple and would fight for it, but Diocletian wanted to choose his own successor, and couldn’t do that from the grave. He probably thought it was better to hand over power, to step down, and then pull strings as needed from the wings while he was still alive.

  Maximian and Constantius were both able and ambitious men, but Diocletian preferred Galerius. For over a decade, Galerius had been Diocletian’s faithful servant and his military enforcer. He was also the husband of Diocletian’s daughter, Valeria, and father of Diocletian’s grandchild. So the emperor prepared for the big day.

  Around 300, Diocletian began building his retirement home at Spalatum in Dalmatia, near his birthplace in Salona. The ruins, which still stand in considerable splendor, are usually called Diocletian’s Palace, but it was more than just a palace. It was to retirement homes what Fort Knox is to the corner bank.

  Diocletian’s Palace covered an area approximately 705 by 590 feet and housed thousands of people. The palace was walled, fortified, divided into four parts like a Roman military camp, and included a small arms factory. There was also a temple and a mausoleum. Unlike previous emperors, Diocletian did not build his mausoleum in Rome.