Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (6 page)

Religious invasions were equally a threat, especially strange sects from the direction of Persia, Rome's perennial enemy. Given the porosity of the political boundaries of the empire during the period, it is no surprise that the emperors felt the need to reassert traditional Roman religious standards
41 Most notably, there was Christianity. During the period of peace after Valerian's death in Persia, the church grew rapidly. Cities and city cults grew less popular, and Christianity was displaying impressive intellectual leadership, organizational strength, and, in persecution, courage. Christians were increasingly integrated into all aspects of imperial society, and despite disputes over lapsed bishops and monarchianism, the church was resilient. Though only 10 percent of the empire was Christian, by the end of the third century the church was too big and well organized to be safely ignored.42
The problem was not merely that the church was a growing and wellorganized religion; it was the kind of religion that the church was. It is surely an overstatement to say that Roman religion had nothing to do with belief,43
but Roman religion had never confronted anything like Christianity.

The issue was not monotheism. Monotheism, even exclusivist monotheism, was a well-known feature of Judaism, and paganism of the third and fourth century was increasingly monotheistic, or at least henotheistic (believing in a chief, though not exclusive, high God).44
The challenge was more radical than the question of numbering God/gods. It had to do with the very nature of religion. Celsus, like many, was a pagan monotheist, but he could not fathom what Christians were about. For Celsus, religion had to do with cultural and political tradition, with support of the city or the state, and this support was expressed primarily in the act of offering sacrifice. According to Origen, religion was a matter of truth, and the one true sacrifice was the unbloody sacrifice of the Eucharist. For paganism, sacrality was altogether a public matter. "Sacred things are those that have been consecrated publicly, not in private," Marcian wrote in his Institutiones, and he added that if anyone attempted to make something sacred for himself, then "it is not sacred but profane" (sacrum non est, sed profanum)
45 Christianity was certainly a communal religion, but not a civic religion in the Roman sense. It was a religion without sacrifice. Were the church to gain ascendancy, it would be the realization of Diocletian's worst fears. Christianity could not be assimilated into the Roman system without cracking the system wide open. It could not be ignored. Something had to be done. Perhaps, Galerius told Diocletian, Decius and Valerius had not been severe enough. If Christians would not accommodate to the Roman way of life, which is the way of sacrifice, Christianity must be stamped out.

The succession problem, the border problem, and the Christian problem: these were the challenges that faced Diodes when he became emperor, around the age of forty, on November 20, 284, and took the throne name Gains Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus.

THE NEW AENEAS AND THE BOAR

He was born Diocles, probably around 244, in the city of Salonae in Dalmatia; otherwise the emperor's early life is almost completely unknown. He first appears in the historical record as commander of the bodyguard of the emperor Numerian,46
and he must have been a courageous, shrewd and competent soldier and commander to rise to that height.

It is appropriate the Diodes first comes to our attention during a succession crisis. Stopping in Sirmium on his way to fight the Persians in 282, the emperor Probus received news that Carus had been proclaimed emperor back in Rome. The army killed Probus as soon as he got the message, and during the following summer the new emperor Carus continued the Persian campaign accompanied by his younger son Numerian. The unreliable Historia Augusta records that Carus captured Ctesiphon, but other sources say he died when his tent was struck by lightning that "may have come in the form of torches hurled into his tent."47
That left Numer ian in charge, and timid, pleasure-loving Numerian was no general. The army withdrew from Persia and retreated to Nicomedia. Along the way, Numerian was carried in a closed litter, and the story went out that he suffered from eye strain that made it impossible for him to be in sunlight. When the army got to Nicomedia, Numerian failed to appear for several days, and on investigation was found to be dead.

Suspicion was cast on everyone close to the emperor, and in a dramatic move Diocles appeared before the army to swear that he had not killed Numerian. He went on to accuse the emperor's father-in-law, the praetorian prefect Aper, of conspiring to assassinate Numerian and, according to the HistoriaAugusta, topped off the scene by stabbing Aper to death. "My grandfather reported he was among the assembly," the writer claims, "when Aper was killed by Diocletian's hand. He used to say Diocletian said, when he struck Aper, `Boast, Aper, "you fall by great Aeneas's hand!"'
"48

The quotation from the tenth book of Virgil's Aeneid is multiply significant. In the poem, Aeneas has wounded Mezentius, and the latter's brash young son Lausus springs to his father's defense. Aeneas is impressed with the young man's filial pietas but warns him that he has no chance to win. As he deals the inevitable death blow, Aeneas says that the young warrior can find some comfort in the fact that he was felled by Aeneas. It would be surprising if Diocles intended to compliment Aper, whom he had just accused of both regicide and filicide, but perhaps he was mocking Aper as a young upstart with no chance against the new Aeneas. More to the point, Diocles was putting himself in the place of Virgil's protagonist, the founding hero behind all Roman heroes. Diocles named himself a new founder of Rome, and since Virgil's praise of Aeneas is always also praise of Augustus, Diocles named himself a new founder of the empire. He agreed with his panegyrists: he was reviving the golden age. Aper's one dying boast was that he was stabbed to death by a great man.

Aeneas's final act in Virgil's epic is to run his spear through the defeated Turnus, revenge for Turnus's killing of Aeneas's protege Pallas. Generations later, Romulus established the boundary of Rome by a Cainlike foundation murder of his brother Remus, and the empire of Augustus emerged from an ocean of blood-the blood of Pompey, of Julius, of Brutus and Cassius, the blood finally of Mark Antony, defeated by Augustus at Actium in 31 B.c. Diocles proved himself capable of using imperial power, the power of the sword, and his action foretold the character of his empire, an empire defended in war and in sacrificial purgation of Christianity. For Diocles, the event had a further significance. Years before, a Druid priestess had predicted that he would become emperor only after killing a boar, and from that time he had searched for a boar on every hunt. Finally, at Nicomedia on November 20, 284, Diocles found his prey, for the name Aper means "wild boar."a9

GOLDEN AGE

Poets viewed the reign of Augustus as the renewal of the long-lost golden age of human history. Ovid's Metamorphoses ends with the apotheosis of Julius Caesar and the hope that Augustus will also ascend to receive prayers. Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, on which Constantine later mused, foretold a child whose birth would bring in a new age of prosperity, and Virgil no doubt intended to refer to Lord Augustus, not (as Christians later supposed) the Lord Jesus. After the vicious civil wars that had followed the assassination of Julius Caesar, such sentiments were not surprising.

Panegyrists dipped into the rhetoric of the early empire to express their delight in the results of Diocletian's reign. By contrast with the thirdcentury age of defeat, poverty, malaise, and decay, it was morning in Diocletian's Rome.

Peace ruled everywhere. The Rhine, the Danube, and the Euphrates again formed secure frontiers guarded by Roman troops. Defeated barbarians had been assigned to recover deserted farmland for cultivation. Plowed fields replaced forest, the granaries were filled, there was almost too much produce to harvest. Cities long overgrown with vegetation or abandoned to wild animals were being rebuilt, restored, and repopulated. Men lived long and reared more children.... The credit for all this could be assigned to the rulers: forgetful of their own comfort, they surveyed the world to see what needed their attention; they passed their days and nights in incessant concern for the safety of all.so

Diocletian was not, in his own mind, doing anything new. He was the restorer, the rebuilder, the reformer of the ancient order of Rome.51
He was, to Burckhardt, "one of the last and most beneficent" of the Roman emperors.52

Diodes' boast was not wholly unfounded. Changing his name to the more patrician and Roman Diocletian, he quickly got to work restoring the empire's stability. During the early months of his reign, he defeated the remaining Caesar, Numerian's brother Carinus, when the latter was assassinated by one of his own soldiers before a battle at the Margus River in the Balkan province of Moesia.53

Diocletian was not primarily a soldier, but he knew his limitations and delegated military concerns to more skilled men. His genius was for orga
nizing, and that was where he left his mark.54
For all the traditionalism of Diocletian's rhetoric, his reign was innovative on many fronts. In taxation, in religious policy, in administration, he presided over an "activist" government that swept away earlier restraints and inserted state power into the details of daily life.55
He reorganized the empire into nearly ninety provinces-much smaller than earlier provincial regions-and these ninety provinces he grouped into twelve dioceses. At the top of this system was the praetorian prefect, no longer a military figure but now a bureaucrat and judge. With the reorganization came an exponential increase in the personnel of the empire. During the second century, there had been some 150 major provincial administrators, but under Diocletian there were several thousand in the eastern empire alone. Latin inscriptions throughout the east testify to the spread of Roman power.56
Not only did this result in a more intrusive Roman government, but it created a new class of bureaucrats whom Lactantius condemned as "rude and illiterate men" who had none of the eloquence of traditional Roman elites.57

Diocletian was wise enough to know that he could not rule the farflung empire alone, and late in 285 he appointed his friend Maximian as Caesar, a second-rank emperor.58
After putting down a revolt, Maximian was elevated to the position of a second Augustus on April 1, 286. Two emperors, however, proved insufficient. A crisis had broken out in Gaul, and Maximian was not able to handle it. Carausius had been placed over the province, but he took more than his share of the trade across the English Channel and eventually got himself proclaimed emperor in Britain. In 290, Maximian lost a fleet of ships in an attempted invasion across the Channel. With the crisis deepening, Maximian crossed the Alps to meet Diocletian in Milan during the winter of 290. There they decided to expand the imperial college. On March 1, 293, Maximian made Constantius his Caesar. Diocletian was not present, but he must have approved of the move, since he took no steps to stop in. A few months later, on May 21, he appointed his own Caesar, Galerius. Diocletian and Maximian took the title Augusti, with Diocletian firmly if unofficially in the position of se nior Augustus. It was the first Tetrarchy, a "rule of four." Two did not quite work; four would do the trick.

The four rulers were known as "tetrarchs," and in some portraits from the period, the Tetrarchs' faces exude stern moral discipline: their wild "burning gaze" communicates their passion for restoring Roman order. In an edict concerning incestuous marriage, Diocletian expresses the hope that the "immortal gods will be ... well-disposed and favourable to the name of Rome, if we scrutinize thoroughly everyone under our rule and see they properly cultivate in every way a pious, observant, peaceful, and chaste life."59
The scrutinizing eyes of the Tetrarchs are the eyes of the tribal fathers, the gods of the past, who ensure conformity with Rome's founding traditions.

More important, Tetrarchan art communicates the union of the four. A corner of St. Mark's, Venice, is now the site of a statuary group in porphyry showing the four original Tetrarchs in groups of two, embracing. The faces are indistinguishable, apart from the fact that two-presumably senior-members are bearded. A porphyry bust of a tetrarch in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, is even more stylized. Large eyes bug out from the stone, staring intensely; the hair and beard are stippled in regular rows; the forehead is furrowed and wrinkled with an imperious intensity. Who is it? No one knows. The point is not to depict a person but a power. The portraits offer a political message: individual tetrarchs are not important but absorbed into the fourfold expression of power. Harmonia and concordia were the mottos of the new order.

At the same time, Diocletian remained the senior figure in the arrangement. According to the emperor Julian's later account, Diocletian "clasped hands" with his colleagues but they "did not walk beside him; instead, they surrounded him like a chorus," a "perfectly harmonious chorus of four."60
As Jupiter's nod determined the course of all things, so Diocletian's. On the arch of Galerius in Thessaloniki, constructed after the Caesar's victory over the Persians, the four Tetrarchs wear the same clothes and are the same size. Yet one-Diocletian-holds a scepter.61

Between them, the two Augusti and the two Caesars divided up the empire and got to work. Constantius organized the subjugation of Britain. Before Constantius could cross the Channel, Carausius was dead, but Constantius successfully defeated his assassin, Allectus, restoring Britain to the Roman orbit. The Western Augustus, Maximian, put down a rebellion in North Africa, while Diocletian, the Eastern Augustus, secured Egypt. After one unsuccessful attempt, Galerius defeated the Persians and secured the eastern border of the empire. Suppressing the threat from Persia and from Eastern Europe was Diocletian's greatest and most lasting achievement. The panegyrist Eumenius referred to a world map painted on a wall at the hall of Autun, where youth could "see how Diocletian's clemency pacifies the wild insurrection of Egypt; how Maximian shatters the Moors; how under your hands, Lord Constantius, Batavians and Britons again raise their sorrowful countenances from their jungles and floods; or how you, Caesar Galerius, tread Persian bows and quivers down to earth." On the whole "painted earth" there was "naught that is not ours."62
By the turn of the century, the Roman Empire was at peace, and the age was described with some justice in the infamous Price Edict of 301 as a "peaceful state of the world seated in the lap of a most profound calm."63