Lost to the West (3 page)

When the imperial officials showed up to demand a sacrifice to the emperor, most Christians flatly refused. They would gladly pay their taxes and serve in the army or on committees, but (as they would make abundantly clear) Christianity had room in it for only one God. No matter how powerful he might be, the emperor was just a man.

This rejection of Diocletian’s godhood struck at the very basis of imperial authority, and that was one thing the emperor wasn’t prepared to tolerate. These dangerous rebels—godless men who denied all divinity—had to be wiped out. An edict demanding sacrifice to the
emperor on pain of death was proclaimed, and the Roman Empire launched its last serious attempt to suppress Christianity.

The effects were horrendous, especially in the east, where the edict was enforced with a terrible thoroughness. Churches were destroyed, Christian writings were burned, and thousands were imprisoned, tortured, or killed. But despite the fervor with which they were carried out, the persecutions couldn’t hope to be successful. Pagans and Christians had been more or less coexisting for years, and the suffering of the church was met with sympathy. There were the old stories, of course, the whispered tales of cannibalism and immorality, of Christians gathered in secret, eating their master’s flesh and drinking his blood, but nobody really believed them anymore. Most pagans refused to believe that a religion that encouraged payment of taxes, stable families, and honesty in trade could be full of dangerous dissidents, threatening the security of the state. Christians were neighbors and friends, common people like themselves, struggling as best they could to make it in a troubled world. Christianity in any case couldn’t be swept under the rug or persecuted out of existence. It had already spread throughout the empire and was well on its way to transforming the world.

Diocletian was fighting a losing battle against Christianity, and by AD 305 he knew it. A twenty-year reign had left him physically exhausted, and the glittering prestige of office no longer compensated enough. Nearing sixty and in declining health, the emperor had seen his youth slip away in service to the state and had no desire to spend what years remained under such a burden. Stunning his coemperors, he took a step unprecedented in Roman history, and announced his retirement. Typically of Diocletian, however, it was no mere abdication. It was, in its own way, as ambitious as anything he had ever attempted: a stunningly farsighted thrust to reverse the tide of history.

The ancient world never quite figured out the question of succession. The Roman Empire, like most in antiquity, had traditionally passed the throne from father to son, keeping control of the state in the hands of a small group of families. The great weakness of this system
was that if the dynasty failed to produce an heir, the empire would convulse in a bloody struggle until the strongest contender prevailed. Whatever successive emperors might say about their divine right, the truth was that their legitimacy rested on physical strength, superior brains, or a well-placed assassination. Only in the written constitutions of the Enlightenment would political regimes find a solution to this basic instability. Without it, every reign was reduced at its core to the principle of survival of the fittest—or, as Augustus, wrapped up in the cloak of the republic, had more eloquently put it,
“carpe diem”
—seize the day.

Rome never really figured out a stable means of succession, but it did come close. Two centuries before Diocletian, in what must have seemed an idyllic golden age to the war-torn empire of his day, a succession of brilliant, childless rulers had handpicked the most capable of their subjects and adopted them as heirs. For nearly a hundred years, the throne passed from one gifted ruler to the next, overseeing the high-water mark of Roman power and prestige, and offering a glimpse of what could be accomplished when qualifications to high office were based on merit instead of blood. But this oasis of good government was only due to the fact that none of the adoptive emperors had sons of their own, and in the end heredity proved to be its Achilles’ heel. Marcus Aurelius, the last of the “adoptive” emperors, had thirteen children, and when he died he left the empire to his aptly named son Commodus. Drunk with power and completely unfit to rule, the new emperor convinced himself that he was a reincarnation of Hercules, took the title
Pacator Orbis
(pacifier of the world), and renamed Rome and the months of the year in his honor. The Roman people endured their megalomaniacal ruler for twelve long years as his reign descended into depravity, before a senator finally took matters into his own hands and had the emperor strangled in his bath.
^*
Once again, enlightened rule gave way to dynastic chance.

Diocletian’s final announcement, therefore, was a revolution nearly fifteen centuries ahead of its time. This was not simply the abdication of a tired old man; it was a full-blown attempt at a constitutional solution to the question of succession. Both he and Maximian would be stepping down at the same time; their respective Caesars, Galerius and Constantius the Pale, would become the senior emperors, appoint their own Caesars, and complete the smooth transfer of power. Not only would this ensure a clean, orderly succession without the horrors of a civil war, it would also provide the empire with experienced, capable rulers. No man could become Augustus without first having proven himself as a Caesar.

Laying down the crown and scepter, Diocletian renounced his power and happily settled down to plant cabbages at his palatial estate in Salonae, on the Adriatic coast.
^*
His contemporaries hardly knew what to do with a retired god, and history has proved in its own way just as mystified about his legacy. He ended chaos and restored stability—perhaps enough to have earned the title of a second Augustus—but had the misfortune to be eclipsed—in every sense of the word—by the man who nineteen years later rose to power. Diocletian had cut the Roman Empire free from the moorings of its past, but the future lay with Constantine the Great.

^*
Ronald Mellor,
The Historians of Ancient Rome: An Anthology of the Major Writings
(New York: Routledge, 2004).

^*
When the early church was developing a hierarchy, it naturally absorbed that of the empire around it. Thus Diocletian’s reforms are still visible in the Catholic Church, in which bishops oversee a diocese and the pope is referred to as the “Vicar” of Christ.

^*
Senatus Poputusque Romanus
(the Senate and the People of Rome).

^*
Among other depraved acts, Commodus amused himself by clubbing thousands of amputees to death in the arena.

^*
When begged to return as emperor, Diocletian responded wryly that the temptations of power couldn’t compete with the enjoyment of farming. The modern city of Split in Croatia is enclosed within the walls of his palace.

2

C
ONSTANTINE AND THE
C
HURCH
A
SCENDANT

Seneca saepe noster.
[Seneca is often one of us.]
—TERTULLIAN

T
he tetrarchy deserved to survive a good deal longer than it did. There was, however, a rich historical irony in the way it collapsed, since Diocletian had gotten the idea from Roman history itself.

Longing for the stability of those golden years before the Roman juggernaut began to wobble, Diocletian had resurrected the adoptive system, but he should have known better than to pick two men with grown sons. Maximian and Constantius the Pale’s sons, Maxentius and Constantine, considered the throne their birthright and eagerly expected a share of imperial power. But when Maximian reluctantly followed Diocletian into retirement, both boys were left with nothing. Once the sons of living gods, Constantine and Maxentius were left as nothing more than private citizens, feeling bitterly betrayed.

Determined not to let events pass him by, Constantine joined his father’s campaign in Britain against the Picts. Easily subduing the barbarians, they both retired to York, where it became apparent that Constantius was pale because he was dying of leukemia. He’d been the most modest of the tetrarchs, largely ignoring the religious persecution of his more zealous eastern colleagues, and was wildly popular with the army, whose ranks included many Christians and sun worshippers.
When he died on July 25, 306, an ambassador informed his heartbroken men that a distant Caesar named Severus would take his place. But the soldiers in the field had no intention of listening to some court bureaucrat. Most of them had never heard of Severus and didn’t care to find out who he was. They had a younger, more vibrant version of their beloved leader much closer at hand. Raising Constantine up on their shields, the army hailed him as Augustus, and plunged the Roman world into war.

The island of Britain had not often intruded itself on the imperial consciousness, but Constantine’s elevation was a shout heard in the empire’s remotest corners, undoing at a stroke everything that Diocletian had been trying to establish about the succession. Encouraged by the way he had claimed power, others started to push against the limits forced upon them by Diocletian, eager to seize by force what was denied by law. Maxentius, still smarting from being passed over, seized Rome, tempting his father out of retirement to bolster his credibility, and successfully fought off every attempt to oust him. To the bewilderment of contemporaries and the annoyance of students studying the period ever since, there were soon six men claiming to be Augustus.

Mercifully, the confusion didn’t last for long. As vast as the empire was, it wasn’t large enough for six rulers, and the multiplying emperors helpfully started to kill one another off. By 312, there were only four of them left, and Constantine decided that the moment was right to strike. He had largely held his peace while the empire imploded, and now the tetrarchy was in hopeless shambles, both emperors in the West had seized power illegally, and the East was distracted with its own affairs. There was little possibility of outside interference, and only Maxentius was standing between him and complete control of the West. Carrying the standards of his patron god Sol Invictus (“unconquerable sun”) before him, Constantine assembled forty thousand men, crossed the Alps, and descended on Italy.

As usual with great men, Constantine had both impeccable timing and remarkable luck. Maxentius’s popularity was at an all-time
low. Claiming that he was seriously short of money, he had ruthlessly taxed the Roman population, but then had used the funds to build a massive basilica in the Forum complete with a monumental statue of himself, provoking the exasperated citizens to revolt.
^*
Order was finally restored by the slaughter of several thousand civilians, but Max-entius’s popularity never recovered. When he heard of Constantine’s approach, the frightened emperor was no longer sure of the city’s loyalty, so he left the safety of Rome’s walls and crossed the Tiber River by the old Milvian Bridge. Setting up camp a few miles away from the city, Maxentius consulted his soothsayers to see what the omens were and was assured that they were favorable. The next day would be his
dies imperii
—the six-year anniversary of his assumption of power. There could be no more auspicious time to attack.

Across the plain, Constantine, waiting with his army, also searched for signs of divine favor. The soothsayers and magicians thronging around Maxentius’s camp unnerved him, and he was uncertain of how he should negate their influence. Priests representing every god in the pantheon had stared at the entrails of animals or the flights of birds and assured him that he would receive the blessings of divine favor, but surely his enemy was hearing the same lofty promises.

There in the dust of an army camp, with the bustle of military life swirling around him, Constantine knelt down and said a prayer that would change the course of history. As he himself would tell the story years later, he looked up at the sky and begged that a true God would reveal himself. Before his astonished eyes, a great cross of light appeared, superimposed over the sun that he had previously worshipped, bearing the inscription
IN HOC SIGNO VINCES
—“conquer by this sign.” Stunned by this vision, the emperor wasn’t quite sure of how to proceed, but when night fell, it was all helpfully explained in a dream. Christ himself appeared, showing the same sign, and
instructed the emperor to carry it before him as divine protection. When he woke up, Constantine dutifully created new banners, replacing the traditional pagan standards with ones displaying a cross, topped with a wreath and the first two letters of Christ’s name. Carrying them confidently before them, his outnumbered troops smashed their way to a complete victory. Maxentius’s army fled back to Rome, but most of them drowned while trying to cross the old Milvian Bridge. Somewhere in the chaos, Maxentius, weighed down with armor, met a similar fate, falling into a river already choked with the dead and dying. His corpse was found the next day washed up on the shore, and Constantine proudly entered the city carrying his rival’s head on a spear. Hailed by the Senate when he entered the Forum, the emperor conspicuously refused to offer the traditional sacrifice to the pagan god of victory. The tyrant was dead, he proclaimed, and a new age had begun.