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The Crisis Ends

Diocletian (284-305)

It now becomes increasingly difficult to narrate the history of the Empire in terms of individual emperors. With Diocletian we get a formal division of the Empire into east and west, with an emperor for each, and sub-emperors besides. The system he developed was falling apart even in his own lifetime, but something like it eventually came to be. After Diocletian we will almost always have at least two emperors. Fairly or unfairly, I’m going to concentrate on the western emperors.

He was born simply Diocles, the son of a poor Illyrian family who made his career in the army. He defeated the emperor Carinus on 1 April 285 and adopted the name Diocletian (well, Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus, actually, but we’ll go with the short version).  He spent several years dealing with invasions and rebellions on a variety of fronts: Moesia, Pannonian, Sarmatia, Syria.

In 293 he created the Tetrarchy, a system of four rulers. He and his friend Maximian took the title of Augustus, with Maximian ruling the West and Diocletian ruling the East. He also chose Constantius to serve as Maximian’s second in the West, and Galerius to serve with Diocletian in the East. These men took the formal title of Caesar. The idea was that each Augustus would be succeeded by his Caesar, who in turn would choose a new Caesar.  This system created four commanders who could be deployed in various parts of the Empire. Each had substantial honors, so there would (in theory) be no need to create general civil war as rivals vied for all the chips. It also would mean that the successor was clearly chosen long before the death of the Augustus, removing the likelihood of rival claims.

The Empire was divided in military terms, but not in political or legal terms. Laws were passed with the names of all four men on them, for example, and applied equally across the Empire. It was not so much an admission that no one man could rule the Empire as it was a recognition that political power needed to be distributed to help keep the peace.

Diocletian was responsible for reforms in many areas of the Empire. He completely reorganized the provincial system, doubling the number of provinces from fifty to a hundred. One reason for doing this was to make it harder for any one governor or commander to have sufficient resources to raise a serious rebellion. The provinces were grouped into larger administrative units called a diocese, ruled by a governor general who answered to a praetorian prefect, who in turn answered to one of the tetrarchs.

The army was re-created. With Diocletian we get formal organization of frontier armies and field armies. The field army was mobile and could be posted anywhere. Each tetrarch had one field army under his command. Each tetrarch also got a palace guard, an innovation that effectively reduced the famous Praetorian Guard to little more than a city garrison. The frontier troops were called limitanei (border men) or riparienses (literally, river men, reflecting the importance of the Rhine, Danube, and Euphrates as borders). He also simply increased the number of soldiers, so that the Empire now had half a million men under arms.

Paying for the army and the imperial bureaucracy necessitated increasing government revenues. Diocletian saw to it that existing taxes were collected as efficiently as possible, but that alone was not enough. In 294 he tried to reform the currency, but these measures failed. He tried to fix both wages and prices, but these measures also failed. He made tax collection regular where it had previously been exceptional, levied whenever there was a need. He tried to fix certain professions in their families, requiring sons to follow the profession of their fathers. He was not very successful in his attempts, for the finances of the Empire were in a shambles and would take time to recover. But the tactics he tried would be repeated by later emperors, with greater success.

Diocletian is notorious in Christian history as the sponsor of one of the worst of the persecutions. It seems clear that the real insitgator of the so-called Great Persecution was his Caesar, Galerius, who repeatedly urged Diocletian to take strong action. The Augustus was reluctant, but once he finally agreed, in 303, he prosecuted with typical energy and thoroughness. The persecution was so effective that whole churches simply disappeared, as Christians either abandoned their faith or went into hiding.

Diocletian abdicated his position on 1 May 305. This sounds very strange—he’s the only emperor ever to retire—but it appears that he intended to abdicate at some point all along. That he retired when he did was in response to a very serious illness in 303, but once he determined to do so he proceeded with steps long-planned. For example, he forced his co-emperor, Maximian, to retire with him.  Maximian didn’t at all want to retire, but did so out of respect for his long-time friend. They both resigned on the same day.

Diocletian lived two more years, long enough to see his tetrarchy system begin to unravel. But he had established some vitally important changes in the Empire. If he could be succeeded by another skilled man, his reforms had a chance to become permanent. For this reason he is regarded as one of the greatest of Roman emperors, worthy of consideration with Caesar Augustus.