The Later Roman Empire

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

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).