The Later Roman Empire

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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 enlarged and openings for military men in the administration greatly increased. More units had certainly also been raised in the course of the third century. The hostile Lactantius associates the reforms of Diocletian with his establishment of the tetrarchy:

he appointed three men to share his rule, dividing the world into four parts and multiplying the armies, as each of the four strove to have a far larger number of troops than any previous emperors had had when they were governing the state alone. (DMP 7.2)

But Lactantius can hardly be taken to mean that the army had quadrupled, especially as it is likely that it had already risen during the third century to something over 350,000. More probably this, like other remarks in the same chapter, is a hostile exaggeration, more a jibe than a sober estimate. Diocletian did perhaps increase numbers (new units were certainly created), but may not have done very much more in general than recognize and regularize the status quo. The backbone of the army had traditionally been the legions, well-armed and well-drilled units of about five thousand infantry. Reading back from the evidence of the Notitia Dignitatum (see above, Chapter II), Diocletian created new legions on a considerable scale, giving them names such as Iovia, Herculia, Diocletiana and Maximiana, while others had already come into being during the third century. But a large increase in the number of legions does not necessarily imply a doubling of the actual numbers of troops. Archaeological evidence drawn from the size of legionary fortresses and literary evidence both show that legions in the later Roman empire were much smaller than their predecessors, typically comprising only a thousand or so men, while special detachments (vexillationes) often stood at only five hundred or less; this implies that the calculations of total size based on earlier norms will be very misleading, and suggests that the actual total was considerably less than is often supposed.

Calculating the size of the late Roman army is very difficult. We have few actual figures for its total. At least one of them (six hundred and forty-five thousand, according to the historian Agathias, writing in Constantinople in the later sixth century) is impossibly high, although it might reflect a paper figure never realized in practice. Calculations based on the figures in the Notitia are likely to suffer from similar limitations. It ought to be possible in theory to base overall calculations on papyrus evidence surviving from AD 299–300, which gives the levels of pay for certain regiments, but here too there are many imponderables as to the actual size of the units. Yet the total size of Diocletian’s army is extremely important in assessing the economic problems which may have led to later decline, for if it really did double in size, the extra burden on the state revenues would indeed have been colossal. Current research seems however to point to an army size of not much more than four hundred thousand; even so, the implications for supply, pay and recruitment were extremely serious (for further discussion, see Chapter IX below).

Like Lactantius, the pagan historian Zosimus draws an exaggerated distinction between Diocletian and Constantine when he accuses Constantine of having damaged Roman frontier defences by removing ‘most’ of the troops from the frontiers, where they had been placed by Diocletian, in order to create a new field army (New History II.34). He adds that these soldiers thus became accustomed to the luxury of life in cities, and grew enervated as a result. But this is all part of his tirade against Constantine; we know from epigraphic evidence that the field army (comitatus) certainly already existed under Diocletian and indeed earlier (Constantine may simply have enlarged it), while the stationing of soldiers in or near cities was a direct function of the problems of army supply and requisitions. All agree that Diocletian strengthened the frontiers, building forts, strengthening natural barriers and establishing military roads from Britain in the west to the so-called Strata Diocletiana in the east, a road running from the Red Sea to Dura on the Euphrates. But it is unlikely that these borders were yet manned by limitanei, farmer-soldiers living on the frontiers, who emerge only later. Moreover, the policy of ‘defence-in-depth’ attributed to Diocletian and popularized in a book by the modern strategist Edward Luttwak and others, whereby the border troops were designed to hold up invaders until crack troops moved up from defensive positions further inside the empire, has been deservedly criticized by archaeologists and others who have studied the material remains in detail (see Chapter IX). The Roman army in the late empire was different from that of Augustus, and used in different ways. Ammianus gives a vivid picture of the varied and sometimes outlandish insignia in use in the second half of the fourth century. In the same period recruitment in some areas became difficult and unpopular; the place of volunteers was therefore taken more and more by conscripts and by barbarians, both as regular troops and as federate mercenaries. But like much else this took time to work through, and we should not attribute more to Diocletian than he actually did.

One of the most severe problems associated with the army was that of pay and supply. With the collapse of the silver coinage, used for the payment of taxes and the soldiers’ wages, the army had to be paid and supplied partly in requisitions in kind through the annona militaris and the capitus (a fodder ration). If such a system worked at all, it was bound to be unreliable, clumsy and extremely burdensome on local populations, who never knew what was going to be demanded from them or when. Since perishable goods could not be carried far because of the extreme slowness of land transport, there were also formidable problems of supply. It is a miracle that some level of central organization was nevertheless maintained in such conditions; however, some improvement had to be sought. Diocletian effectively recognized the status quo and introduced an elaborate new tax system in kind, based both on capita (‘heads’, i.e. poll tax, capitatio) and land (iugatio). All agricultural land was divided into notional units known as iuga, varying in size according to the assessment of their productivity. Iuga, tax units, are not to be confused with iugera, units of area; thus in Syria, five iugera of vineyard made one iugum, which might however comprise as much as forty iugera if the land were of poor quality. Mountain territory was specially assessed on a local scale of productivity; a later legal textbook describes the process:

at the time of the assessment there were certain men who were given the authority by the government; they summoned the other mountain dwellers from other regions and bade them assess how much land, by their estimate, produces a modius of wheat or barley in the mountains. In this way they also assessed unsown land, the pasture land for cattle, as to how much tax it should yield to the fisc. (Syro-Roman Law Book, cxxi, FIRA II.796 = Lewis and Reinhold, II. 128)

Not only that: what was actually to be paid also ideally had to be linked to what was produced locally. The whole was to be assessed by a regular census, organized by five-year periods, known as indictions, from AD 287 onwards.

By these means, Diocletian sought to establish for the empire something like a regular budget, and some check was placed on the ad hoc requisitions which had become such a burden during the third century. The system aimed at providing what the troops needed on a regular and reliable basis. A. H. M. Jones comments that its great virtue lay in its simplicity (LRE, I, 65). This however is a modern view; in the conditions of the late third century, the amount of work and organization needed to put it into practice was beyond all proportion to what had gone before, and the mechanisms of economic control were both crude and poorly understood. In practice there was considerable variety from province to province, and while a large amount of evidence survives to show how the reforms were carried out, it is very unevenly distributed. Thus we know something of what happened in some areas – Syria and Egypt, for example – but nothing at all about others, such as Spain or Britain. It is therefore impossible to judge how effective the system was in any detailed way, though we can assume that Diocletian’s arrangements remained in force. But cash payments also remained in force for the army, as can be seen from the ample evidence of minting of coin, and the annona itself often took the form of compulsory purchase of goods by the state rather than transactions wholly in kind.

These were reforms of practice, not of principle: the major tax burden continued to fall on those least able to bear it, the main tax still fell on the land, and the notion that high status should carry with it exemption from certain taxes was an idea which permeated Roman attitudes to taxation at all periods, even when the empire could least afford it. Diocletian did not attempt to introduce taxation of senators or merchants, and when Constantine did so the initiative was highly unpopular. Whether the overall rate of taxation was itself actually substantially increased, as has been argued in the past, 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 increasingly to the fore, and diminished the importance of the senate as an institution by locating the centre of government elsewhere than at Rome. Large numbers of extra provincial governors were needed to run the vastly increased number of provinces under Diocletian, and it is not surprising if they were in the first instance mainly of equestrian origin; the majority of provinces were accordingly placed under equestrian praesides. The separation of civil and military commands also doubled the amount of personnel needed. But senators were still used, for instance as correctores, regional governors in Italy. The distinction of title was kept, and when senatorial governors were reintroduced into a number of provinces by Constantine they were called consulares to distinguish them from the praesides, all of which suggests that the changes came about more for reasons of convenience and circumstance than of principle.

At the same time as supposedly favouring those of bluff military origin like himself, Diocletian is credited with transforming the Roman empire into a kind of ‘oriental despotism’ by importing court ceremonial and titles from Sasanian Persia. Fourth-century writers state that he was the first emperor to demand homage in the form of adoratio (prostration), and that he wore gorgeous clothes and lived in oriental seclusion; the term dominus (‘lord’) was freely used alongside more traditional (but proliferating) Roman imperial titulature and everything to do with the emperor was referred to as ‘sacred’ or ‘divine’. Again this development had earlier antecedents; even during the first and second centuries there had been a noticeable change in the style of imperial rule, as the stance of first citizen adopted by Augustus gave way to a more monarchic perception. Diocletian’s immediate predecessors, especially Aurelian, had taken further steps in this direction, and his alleged innovations should be regarded rather as marking the culmination and recognition of an existing trend. The titles Jovius and Herculius taken by Diocletian and Maximian and their Caesars were part of a similar development; earlier third-century emperors had already associated themselves on their coins with Jupiter, Hercules, and Mars in particular, and Aurelian claimed a divine protector in Sol Invictus (‘the unconquered sun’), to whom he set up a great temple in Rome. It would be quite wrong to regard this as mere packaging; all the same, concern for their public image and its presentation was certainly an important part of the tetrarchic style, and the divine titulature played an important role.

Much more significant in the long run, however, was the failure of Diocletian and the tetrarchs to reverse the decline in Rome’s status as the centre of imperial rule. Though the empire was not formally divided under the tetrarchy, several ‘capitals’ developed in different parts of the empire, notably at Nicomedia, Diocletian’s main residence, Serdica (Sofia), Thessalonica, the main seat of Galerius, Sirmium in Pannonia, the seat of Licinius, and Trier in Germany, which was the residence of Constantius Chlorus, the father of Constantine. In practice, emperors in this period commonly spent their time moving from one residence to another: other centres which now came to prominence were Naissus (Nis), Carnuntum on the Danube, Milan and Aquileia in Italy. Rome is rarely if ever on the imperial itinerary. This travelling, together with the plurality of imperial centres (the term ‘capitals’ is misleading), had several important corollaries. First, it greatly weakened the hold of Roman tradition on government and administration and in a sense freed Diocletian and his colleagues and successors to introduce innovations. Second, it fostered imperial building and stimulated urban development, for each centre needed to have certain basic requirements. A typical ‘tetrarchic capital’ would have at the very least a palace with a substantial audience chamber and a hippodrome for the ruler’s public appearances, as well as for chariot racing; Diocletian retired to Split in the former Yugoslavia to a palace built in this style, and Constantine also followed the pattern when he transformed the existing city of Byzantium into Constantinople (AD 330). Some of these cities were very substantial, especially Nicomedia, where Diocletian was proclaimed emperor, Constantine was kept as a youth at the court of Diocletian, and Lactantius employed as a rhetor, and where there was also a notable Christian church. Since laws were issued wherever the emperor happened to be at the time, imperial travels can be at least partly traced from the dates and places recorded for each law. Finally, in the reign of Diocletian, each tetrarch had his own staff of officials (comitatus), his own court (sacrum cubiculum) and his own military guard, so that Lactantius can be forgiven for resenting the total increase in posts.

On 23 February, AD 303, the church at Nicomedia was destroyed by an official party led by the praetorian prefect, and on the next day, Eusebius says, Diocletian issued an edict ordering that churches should be destroyed and Christian Scriptures burnt; Christians holding public office were to be stripped of their rank and imperial freedmen who did not recant were to be reduced to slavery. Other orders quickly followed, which were put into practice in the east, demanding that bishops be imprisoned and compelled to sacrifice to the gods. Optatus, an African Catholic bishop of the later fourth century, preserves the record of what happened at Cirta in Numidia when the local official, who was both a pagan priest and the curator of the city, put the first decree into practice: the bishop and his clergy brought out all their church property, which included a rather large amount of men’s and women’s clothing and shoes, but the commissioner had to go to the ‘readers’ for the Scriptures themselves, obtaining from them about thirty copies described as ‘books’ and twenty-two smaller volumes (Optatus, Appendix I; Jones, History of Rome through the Fifth Century, no. 174). The persecution was very unevenly carried out: Maximian and Constantius Chlorus in the west evidently showed little enthusiasm for the policy, even if we disregard Eusebius’s apologia for the latter, but in the east many bishops and clergy were imprisoned and tortured or mutilated, and the bishop of Nicomedia and others were beheaded. The persecution made a deep impression on contemporary Christians. Lactantius’s pamphlet On the Deaths of the Persecutors (De mortibus persecutorum) was written when the persecution had ended and Constantine had defeated Maxentius; the work is a version of recent history designed to show beyond argument that God was indeed on the side of the Christians, and had horrible punishments in store for those who persecuted them. Soon after the ending of persecution in May, AD 311, Eusebius (who had escaped himself) wrote a moving account of what happened in his own province of Palestine, later incorporated into his Church History as book VIII; he had visited the ‘confessors’ (those who admitted to being Christians) who were imprisoned in Egypt, and saw some of them put to death. His own friend and mentor from Caesarea, Pamphilus, who was martyred in AD 310, was one of those whom Eusebius visited, assisting him to write while in prison a defence of the third-century Christian writer Origen, who had built up the great library at Caesarea. It has been pointed out that the overall numbers of those martyred during the persecution were small, and that its effects were geographically patchy, but Eusebius’s memorable account leaves no doubt as to the shock that was experienced by many eastern Christians.

There seems to have been little general support for the persecution; it was called off by Galerius in AD 311, and toleration declared for all religions by Constantine and Licinius in the so-called ‘Edict of Milan’ in AD 313 (Eusebius, Church History X.5; Lactantius, DMP 48). The motivation for the persecution itself is far from clear, though the sources confidently blame it on the influence of Galerius. The edict of AD 303 was preceded by a purge of Christians from the army, which itself is said to have followed an incident in AD 299 when diviners at an imperial sacrifice allegedly failed to find the right omens after some Christians who were present had made the sign of the cross. But whatever the immediate reasons, the attempt to control deviant belief and practice suited the ideology of the tetrarchy very well. Diocletian’s and Maximian’s adoption of the styles Jovius and Herculius was part of a heavy emphasis on moral and religious sanctions for their rule, and any sign of offence to the gods, as symbolically demonstrated by the failed divination, was interpreted as extremely dangerous for the future security of the empire. Exactly the same thinking in reverse lay behind Constantine’s adoption of Christianity; he presented himself as duty-bound by God to ensure correct worship throughout the empire, and as liable for personal punishment if he failed.

The style of government adopted by Diocletian and the tetrarchy was undoubtedly severe and authoritarian, at least in theory. Strict social and moral regulation was enjoined on all classes. Much legislation in the fourth century aimed at preventing coloni (tenants) from leaving their estates, keeping decurions (members of town councils) from abandoning their place of residence and ensuring hereditary succession in trades and crafts, and is expressed in luridly moralizing language typical of late Roman laws, and accompanied with threats of dire punishments for disobedience. If taken at face value, this legislation can look very much like the apparatus of a totalitarian state. We shall return to it later (see especially Chapter VII); for the moment it is enough to point out that there was a large gap between theory and practice, and that the motivation was something more immediate than social repression, namely the paramount need to ensure tax revenue and production in the face of actual governmental weakness. The old view, held for example by Jones, according to which Diocletian was credited with creating the institution of the ‘colonate’ and effectively tying the free population to the land, has increasingly come under criticism in recent years: well before Diocletian, private tenants in Egypt had paid their taxes through their landlord as intermediary, and it was perhaps this situation which Diocletian now made hereditary, thus regularizing an existing situation rather than imposing a new one. Nor did his legislation introduce a new and unified system for the whole empire; in contrast, current research emphasizes the regional variety which continued to hold in spite of the appearance of centralization sometimes given by the existence of the law codes.

The moralizing, threatening vocabulary of imperial legislation did however indeed become habitual; it is only too apparent from the pages of Ammianus, who employs the same kind of terminology for his own judgements. But the abundant evidence which is available from the reign of Constantine onwards, and especially from the later fourth century, suggests that hard though life might be, the regimentation preached by Diocletian and his colleagues did not in fact prevail.

Diocletian was nothing if not true to his aims: he abdicated together with his senior colleague Maximian on 1 May, AD 305, and retired to his palace at Split, refusing to return to political life thereafter. Lactantius, who wished to give him an exemplary death as a persecutor, claims that he starved himself to death in AD 311 or 312 (DMP 42), but other sources have him living longer. Diocletian had no direct heirs and the tetrarchy hardly survived his retirement. Constantine succeeded his father Constantius in AD 306, secured his position as Augustus by an alliance with Maximian in AD 307 and soon proceeded to work for the elimination of his rivals. One of those who fell victim to him was Maximian himself (AD 310), and he defeated Maximian’s son, Maxentius, in AD 312. Once sole emperor, Constantine was to set great changes in motion which have invited both contemporaries and modern historians to contrast him sharply with Diocletian; but he was himself a product of the tetrarchy and was in many ways Diocletian’s heir – many of the social, administrative and economic developments in his reign simply brought Diocletian’s innovations to their logical conclusion.

IV The New Empire: Constantine (#ulink_05ab2bb3-185f-5156-be67-e9269a2ec451)

EVEN MORE THAN Diocletian, Constantine suffers from bias in the verdicts of both ancient and modern commentators. The problem centres on his support for Christianity, which fundamentally changed the fortunes of the Christian church and may well be responsible for its later history as a world religion. Our main contemporary source, Eusebius of Caesarea, was the author of a Church History which turned into a glorification of Constantine, and later became Constantine’s panegyrist in his Life of Constantine. Lactantius, too, sharply differentiates the virtuous Constantine from the wicked Diocletian, although in his case at least, since he was writing his tract On the Deaths of the Persecutors (DMP), on any dating, before the final victory of Constantine over Licinius in AD 324, Licinius is allowed an equal rating with Constantine. The relevant Latin Panegyrics naturally give maximum credit to Constantine and arrange their historical material accordingly. For the secular aspects of the reign, we unfortunately depend a good deal on Zosimus’s New History, which is not only equally biased (albeit in the opposite direction) but also naively distorted. As for documentary proof, much of the evidence for Constantine’s legislation is contained only in the Life of Constantine by Eusebius, and thereby comes under some suspicion (see Chapter II). Finally, though the imperial letters on the subject of Donatism preserved in the Appendix to Optatus’s history of the Donatist controversy are now normally accepted as genuine (and if so are highly revealing of Constantine’s own mentality), we have to remember that they were preserved in a Catholic milieu and represent only one side of the controversy.

As for modern historians, one must be equally on the look-out for bias, open or hidden. Sometimes it takes a very overt form: as a saint of the Orthodox church and the founder of Constantinople, Constantine is often straightforwardly and favourably presented as the founder of Byzantine civilization; his contribution to its religious development is thus what is most emphasized. Others, especially the nineteenth-century German historian Jacob Burckhardt and the twentieth-century Belgian scholar Henri Grégoire, have sought to denigrate the integrity of Constantine by attacking the credibility of Eusebius, an approach that has provoked a defence both of Constantine and of Eusebius, notably by Norman Baynes, in his essay, Constantine the Great and the Christian Church. Since to write about Constantine at all entails choosing between the conflicting sources, or at least, taking a view about the credibility of Eusebius, the main Christian source, it is impossible to avoid being drawn into these controversies. Constantine is one of the most important figures in the history of the Christian church; given the significance of the latter in our culture, even apparently neutral studies tend at times to reveal a hidden agenda. A critical approach is therefore needed, though not necessarily an ultra-sceptical one.

First of all, Constantine has to be seen in the context of the tetrarchy. Born in AD 272 or 273, his father was Constantius, yet another Illyrian soldier who had risen to praetorian prefect and Caesar to Maximian, and who had been made Augustus on the latter’s abdication in AD 305. Constantine accompanied Diocletian and Galerius on a number of military expeditions. The Constantinian version, wishing to blacken Galerius, has it that he eventually eluded the suspicious emperor only by a ruse, escaping post-haste and finding his father already on his deathbed; in fact he found his father about to cross the Channel, and went with him to York, where on the latter’s death Constantine was proclaimed Augustus on 25 July, AD 306 by his father’s troops. The politics and the chronology of the events between the joint abdication of Diocletian and Maximian in AD 305 and Constantine’s defeat of Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in late October, AD 312, are extremely confused and difficult to establish, even though the tendentious literary sources can be supplemented by the evidence of coins and papyri, as well as by a few inscriptions. Constantine’s propaganda began early: an anonymous panegyrist of AD 307 shows him allying himself with Maximian (who had returned from his short-lived abdication) by marrying his daughter Fausta. The author ends by imagining that he is addressing Constantine’s dead father Constantius and envisaging the joy he must be feeling in heaven that Constantine has the same adopted father (Maximian, the senior Augustus in the Herculian line), while he and Maximian now share the same son (Pan. Lat. VI (7).14).

Though Lactantius claims that he was already pro-Christian (DMP 24), the same panegyric makes much of Constantine as a Herculian, stressing his claim to the divine titulature adopted by Maximian. By AD 310, however, things had changed dramatically: Maxentius, the son of Maximian, had seized Rome and Maximian himself, having turned on both Maxentius and Constantine, had committed suicide after Constantine had taken up arms against him. A further justification of Constantine’s position was now required, and an anonymous panegyric of AD 310 duly produces a novel claim to dynastic descent from the third-century emperor Claudius Gothicus, as well as crediting him with a symbolic vision of Apollo:

you saw, Constantine, I believe, your own Apollo, accompanied by Victory, offering you a laurel crown, signifying three decades of rule. (Pan. Lat. VII (6).21)

In the same year Mars gave way on Constantine’s coins to Sol Invictus, the sun-god, with whom Apollo was identified. This new step looked back to the pre-tetrarchic precedent set by Aurelian (AD 270–5), who issued coins commemorating his immediate predecessor, the deified Claudius Gothicus, and associated himself with the sun-god. Constantine now claimed legitimacy on grounds of dynastic descent in order to defend himself against charges of having broken away from the tetrarchy.

The truth was that the tetrarchy had already broken down, and that Constantine was looking to the future. In AD 311, the eastern Augustus Galerius called off the persecution on his deathbed and expired in great pain, to the satisfaction of Lactantius and other Christian writers. Maximin (Maximinus Daia, nephew of Galerius), who had been declared Augustus by his own troops, now seized Asia Minor from Licinius, who had been appointed Augustus at the Conference of Carnuntum in AD 308. Constantine had now to protect his position; in 312 he marched down through Italy, besieging Segusio, entering Turin and Milan and taking Verona. Maxentius came out from Rome to meet his army and Constantine inflicted a heavy defeat on his troops at the Milvian Bridge over the Tiber on 28 October, AD 312. Many of Maxentius’s soldiers drowned in the river and his own head was carried on a pike through Rome. Constantine entered Rome in triumph and addressed the anxious senators, many of whom had supported Maxentius, promising clemency. The battle was depicted as a great defeat of tyranny by justice, as is recorded on the inscription on the the Arch of Constantine, still standing near the Colosseum in Rome and erected for Constantine’s decennalia (tenth anniversary) in AD 315. Dedicated in honour of Constantine by the senate and people of Rome, the inscription reads:

by the inspiration of the divinity and by the nobility of his own mind, with his army he avenged the republic by a just war at one and the same time both from the tyrant and from all his faction.

The Arch is decorated with reliefs depicting the campaign and the entry to Rome: the siege of Verona, the defeat of Maxentius, with his soldiers drowning in the Tiber, Constantine’s address to the Senate and his bestowing of largess.

The defeat of Maxentius left Constantine in control of the west. In February, AD 313, he and Licinius met at Milan, where Licinius married Constantine’s sister Constantia; a few months later Licinius defeated Maximin, leaving himself and Constantine as sole Augusti, based in the east and west respectively. Maximin had renewed persecution in AD 312 (Eusebius, Church History IX.9), but like Galerius is alleged by Christian writers to have called it off again before his death (IX.10). The so-called ‘Edict of Milan’ (X.5; Lactantius, DMP 48), confirming religious toleration, is often attributed to Constantine alone, but is in fact an imperial letter sent out by Licinius in the east and issued by convention in joint names.

Not until AD 324, therefore, when he finally defeated Licinius at Chrysopolis, did Constantine become sole emperor. A preliminary and inconclusive clash took place at Cibalae in AD 316, after which the two Augusti patched up their alliance, declaring their three sons Caesars on 1 March, AD 317. Since Lactantius wrote his pamphlet On the Deaths of the Persecutors before the battle of Cibalae, and since Eusebius was living in the east under Licinius, his coverage for this period is thin; moreover, in Eusebius’s account of the campaign of AD 324 in the Life of Constantine biblical allusion and tendentious rhetoric take the place of factual detail. In AD 324 he hastily touched up his Church History, removed or altered as many of the favourable references to Licinius as possible and added a brief description of the final victory. For the rest of the reign the main source is the Life of Constantine, written much later and completed only after Constantine’s death in May, AD 337, which it describes. The character of the Life itself also changes when it reached this point in the narrative: so far it has followed, supplemented and subtly reshaped the narrative in Book IX of the Church History, but from now on the work (which is expressly described as a portrait of Constantine as a Christian emperor rather than a complete history of the reign) becomes a repository of information of very varied type and origin, all of which needs careful and detailed analysis.

Before turning to the subject of Constantine and Christianity, however, the extent of continuity between this period and the previous one first needs to be stressed. We are badly informed about Constantine’s secular policies; here too the evidence is more readily available for the period between AD 324 and 337. As we have seen, on the military front Constantine was blamed by pagan authors, especially Zosimus (II.34), for having weakened the frontier defences by taking troops away to serve in the field army. Clearly the military needs of the years AD 306–24 did imply the development of strong mobile forces, but this was in fact no innovation. In other respects too, for instance in the idea of a Persian campaign that he entertained in his last years, Constantine followed precedent. He also continued and consolidated Diocletian’s provincial and administrative arrangements, with the significant alteration that the praetorian prefects now lost their military functions. The reasons for, and the details of the change, which did not take place until the end of the reign, have been much disputed; it is probably attributable to the assignment of territorial areas to Constantine’s remaining sons and to two sons of his half-brothers in AD 335, but in any case it was a perfectly logical extension of Diocletian’s reforms. Similarly, the chief treasury minister henceforth, the comes sacrarum largitionum (literally ‘Count of the Sacred Largesses’), is first attested only in the latter part of the reign, and probably evolved in a similarly ad hoc fashion. Inflation continued under Constantine just as it had earlier. He was able to issue a new gold coin, the solidus, which was never debased and which remained standard until late in the Byzantine period; however, this does not indicate any fundamentally new economic measures so much as the fact that he had the necessary gold at his disposal. In part this came from the treasures of the pagan temples, which Eusebius tells us were confiscated, but it also derived from new taxes in gold and silver which were imposed on senators (the follis) and merchants (the chrysargyron, ‘gold-and-silver tax’):

he did not even allow poor prostitutes to escape. The result was that as each fourth year came round when this tax had to be paid, weeping and wailing were heard throughout the city, because beatings and tortures were in store for those who could not pay owing to extreme poverty. Indeed mothers sold their children and fathers prostituted their daughters under compulsion to pay the exactors of the chrysargyron. (Zos. II.38, writing after the tax had been abolished in AD 499)

The recent reforms were still working themselves through during the reign of Constantine, and if there was some sense of recovery, it was doubtless partly because the changes then introduced were now gradually being felt. The wars of Constantine’s early years also eventually gave way to his sole rule, which in itself brought respite and consolidation. One way however in which he seems at first sight to have dramatically departed from Diocletian’s precedent is in his use of senators in high office. According to Eusebius (VC IV. 1), Constantine greatly expanded the senatorial order, bestowing senatorial rank without the obligation to reside in Rome and attend meetings of the Senate itself. Later, a second Senate was founded at Constantinople, which had to be filled largely by new appointments. The role played by the new senators was however significantly different from that of senators in the early empire (see Chapter I). Interestingly, in view of their eclipse during the third century, Constantine used members of the great Roman families in his administration, as senatorial governors (consulares), as correctores, governors of provinces in Italy, as prefects of the city of Rome, and in the now largely honorific office of consul. Emulating their early imperial predecessors, these men were proud to record their offices on inscriptions, though the offices themselves were often different. The consul of AD 337, the year of Constantine’s death, was Fabius Titianus, who had been corrector of Flaminia and Picenum, consularis of Sicily, proconsul of Asia, comes primi ordinis (in Constantine’s comitatus), and was prefect of the city from AD 339–41 (ILS 1227, see Barnes, New Empire, 109). One of the consuls of AD 335 was Ceionius Rufius Albinus, son of Rufius Volusianus, who was himself consul in 311 and 314; the son survived exile for magic and adultery by Constantine in the fateful year 326 to become consularis of Campania, proconsul of Achaea and Asia, consul and prefect of the city (Barnes, New Empire, 108; for his father’s career, see 100).

This development gives the lie, incidentally, to the commonly held theory of estrangement between Constantine and the Roman Senate. It would be natural to suppose that Constantine surrounded himself with Christians, but few of his appointees, to these posts at least, are provably Christian. An exception is the famous Ablabius (cos. AD 331), a Cretan of humble birth who came to Constantine’s attention, rose to become praetorian prefect and had the honour of having his daughter betrothed to the emperor’s son Constans (see Barnes, New Empire, 104); but most were from the new aristocracy which emerged in Rome out of the third-century confusion. Constantine’s expansion of the senatorial order was extremely important; it was to provide the foundation of a further enlargement over the next two centuries, in the course of which the equestrian order effectively disappeared. But it can be seen as supplying a need rather than as an act of deliberate social policy, and it seems less of a reversal of Diocletianic policy when it is recognized that the latter had no provable animus against senators as such; nor is it likely that it was part of a deliberate effort by Constantine directed at conciliating the still-pagan Roman aristocracy.

Constantine’s legislation continued the tendencies already apparent under Diocletian, by further restricting the freedom of movement of decurions and coloni. The financial burdens on the former were considerable, as is clear from the difficulties Constantine had in enforcing his law exempting Christian clergy from service on the town councils (Euseb., Church History X.7) – their disgruntled fellow-townsmen, with their own burdens correspondingly increased, kept trying to enrol them and had to be repeatedly restrained. Ironically, Constantine also found himself legislating to control the numbers of those who now flocked to be ordained and gain these privileges for themselves; ordination was to be permitted only when a member of the clergy died, or if there was a vacancy for other reasons. Coloni too were forbidden to leave their estates; landlords harbouring such runaways must give them up, and if those whose coloni had left succeeded in recovering them, they were allowed to keep them in chains as if they were actually slaves (CTh. V. 17.1, AD 332).

Even in the religious sphere, Constantine was following good precedent in claiming to be under special divine protection; it is very possible that he initially saw the Christian God in the same light as Apollo and Sol Invictus, as a protector who would grant favours in return for his own attachment. At any rate, he continued to put Sol on his coins until as late as AD 320–1, although in his letter of AD 313 exempting Christian clergy from curial responsibilities he clearly identifies the maintenance of Christianity with the good of the empire, saying that by being so relieved of fiscal demands, they will

be completely free to serve their own law [i.e. Christianity] at all times. In thus rendering service to the deity, it is evident that they will be making an immense contribution to the welfare of the community. (Euseb., Church History