Diocletian and the Roman Recovery

Stephen Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9781136611926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Stephen Williams's book is the first biography of Diocletian to appear in English. It combines the historical narrative of his remarkable reign and those of his fellow-emperors, with a chapter-by-chapter study of each of the great problems he faced, the interlocking solutions he evolved to meet them, and the longer term results. It is both a portrait of one of Rome's greatest and most original rulers, and a political study in the emergence of Absolutism. Also includes four maps.

part one
Crisis

chapter one
The Third-Century Collapse

SUCH WERE THE BARBARIANS, AND SUCH THE TYRANTS, WHO, UNDER THE REIGNS OF VALERIAN AND GALLIENUS, DISMEMBERED THE PROVINCES, AND REDUCED THE EMPIRE TO THE LOWEST PITCH OF DISGRACE AND RUIN, FROM WHENCE IT SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE THAT IT SHOULD EVER EMERGE.

GIBBON, CHAPTER X

Rome had long been familiar with its immediate Germanic neighbours, as Tacitus' unrivalled study of them illustrates. But in the recent century, slow but inexorable changes had been at work which made them a very different political entity to that which Tacitus had described. Great population expansions, migrations, displacements and social changes had taken place, originating in remote lands of which the Romans knew nothing. The main migration currents across Eurasia were westward and southward. From Scandinavia the Gothic peoples in their great tribal groupings (Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Heruli) had shifted slowly south down the Vistula and the Russian rivers, pushing into the Ukraine, the lower Danube and the shores of the Black Sea. In South-East Europe they struggled for territory with the Sarmatians, an Iranian plains people who were expanding from the Caucasus westward as far as the Hungarian plain. Two other continuous tides, also from the Silesia—Vistula region, were the Vandals, south-westward to the Carpathians; and the Burgundians, westward to the Elbe and thence to the Main, putting increasing pressure on the indigenous tribes of West and Central Germany.¹

Partly as a result of these pressures the more familiar, sedentary, West German tribes underwent a gradual process of closer federation into much larger units, accompanied by the emergence of a distinct warrior aristocracy. The earlier Germans had been a great collection of relatively small clans, practising a primitive slash-burn agriculture and regular communal allotment of land. The basic political unit was the tribe, based solely on kin ties, in which every free adult male bore arms and participated in the tribal assembly which decided important issues such as peace and war. Apart from priests and certain hereditary offices the leaders were mainly elective and charismatic: they held authority merely through their continuous prowess in war, and had no organised coercive power over the whole people. If the society was 'democratic' it was also semi-anarchic, and unsuited to large planned undertakings demanding authority and direction. Seasonal inter-tribal warfare was a normal, honoured activity, and Roman diplomacy did everything to encourage these rivalries. As Tacitus put it: 'I pray that what continues among the German nations is, if not affection for us, then at least hostility to one another .. . Neither the Samnite, nor Carthagian, nor Spaniard, nor Gaul, nor even the Parthian, have taught us more lessons. The German fighting for his freedom has been a deadlier enemy than the despotism of Arsaces'.²

But the contacts with Rome had also led to expanding trade in the ostentatious luxuries beloved of warrior societies—gold, ornaments, robes, weapons, wine, slaves, silverware—which enhanced the standing of successful war-chiefs and promoted the rise of a nobility. Even more potent in this process was the growth of the war-chiefs retinue—a personal following of warriors recruited from the bravest young men of several different tribes, bound by oath to fight and die with him in return for his gifts and the hospitality of his hall. This became a standing force, no longer confined to seasonal fighting or to a particular tribal territory, bound to one leader, and dedicated to glory and plunder. In it can be discerned the germ of the much later feudal concept of personal loyalty to a lord.

This institution was the main catalyst in the fusion into great tribal confederations in the second century, in response both to the aggression of newer peoples to the east, and to the opportunities of what seemed limitless reserves of booty in the Roman provinces. By the early third century three groupings had emerged. The central German Suevic tribes, with whom Caesar had first made contact and been unnerved by their ferocity,³ had formed into the Alemanni (Aller Manner); the lower Rhineland group into the Franks; and the sea-peoples at the mouth of the Elbe and Weser into the Saxons. Though still of loose internal unity, the scale of military expedition these groupings could now mount was of an entirely new order, beyond what the carefully planned Roman frontier defences had been designed to deal with. These functioned on the assumption that tribal aggression in any particular sector could be anticipated and neutralised outside Roman territory. But when for the first time very large penetrations did occur, then, as Marcus Aurelius had found, the provincial road system gave the barbarians a rapid route into the heart of the Empire. After 30 more years of mounting danger, Rome was forced to recognise that it was confronted by a continuous belt of tribal enemies from the North Sea to the Black Sea: Saxons, Franks, Alemanni, Marcomanni, Quadi, Sarmatians, Jazyges, Goths, Carpi. The old diplomacy, with the threat of force more or less in the background, was now proving ineffective. That force had to be immediately and palpably available in overwhelming concentration. This placed a mounting burden on military resources, since it meant that hardly any stretch of frontier could safely have its garrisons diminished for long.

It has to be stressed that Roman military superiority, such as it was, did not rest on a more advanced technology. Although the Romans were more skilled in building and siege tactics and had better supplies of weapons and armour, both they and the Germans were still essentially Iron Age peoples. Any tempting parallel with modern colonial riflemen facing African nations is quite misleading. Where the Romans scored was not weaponry, but the organisation and method made possible by a more advanced political culture.⁴ Yet this too made their territories vulnerable. The simpler Germans might lack organisation and planning but their whole society was based around war, and every man a warrior: a far higher ratio than Rome with its complex division of labour and large populations of slaves, coloni (tenants), and urban proletariat. For these reasons, in the longer term the Germans could inflict disproportionate damage on the elaborately interdependent urban society and economy of the Empire. With the primitive, wandering farmer-warrior ethos in which each tribe was ready to expand into the space of its nearest neighbour, the Germans could recover quickly from all but the most punitive defeats. Man for man they were physically stronger than the Romans and certainly as brave: their fierce fighting qualities had long compelled admiration: Tacitus, prophetically, saw in their warlike freedom a new reservoir of enormous energies which could have profound consequences for the Roman future.⁵

Independently but simultaneously, a major revolution had come about in Rome's great eastern neighbour, which was to present a far greater military challenge than before. The old Parthian kingdom of the Arsacids had been a quasi-feudal structure of powerful family domains and perpetual internal tensions, whose western regions were considerably influenced by Hellenic culture. Early in the third century the Arsacids were overthrown by a powerful nationalist movement based on the Iranian plateau, led by the house of Sassan and claiming spiritual descent from the ancient Achaemenid Empire of Darius and Xerxes. Having defeated his political enemies in battle, the first Sassanid king, Ardashir, was crowned King of Kings in the old capital of Ctesiphon, near modern Baghdad, in 226. The Sassanids worked to build a strong, centralised Iranian state, purged of all foreign influences and pursuing an expansionist, imperialist policy. The ancient Zoroastrian religion was revived and made state orthodoxy, the Magi organised into a church, fire temples established everywhere and other cults —Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians — suppressed. Militarily, the Sassanids proved more capable and more aggressive than their predecessors. Ardashir launched successful wars of conquest as far east as the Punjab, and soon afterwards attacked the Roman provinces. These new military skills were evident in the Sassanids' corps of heavy mailed shock cavalry, and their greater capacity for siege warfare. In besieging the Roman fortress city of Dura Europos on the Euphrates they used mining for the first time, and the dramatic subsidence of one of the great defensive towers is evident in the ruins today. In 241 Ardashir was succeeded by his equally energetic son Shapur I, who conquered the Kushans, Armenia and Georgia, and made no secret of his ambition to restore the empire of his Achaemenid ancestors, which meant nothing less than conquest of the whole Roman East as far as the Bosporus. His first offensive took several Roman stronghold cities and finally captured Antioch, the great commerical capital of Hellenic Syria, only a short distance inland from the Mediterranean coast. Roman Antioch had never before fallen to an enemy. It was retaken with some difficulty, but henceforth Antioch was to be a piece in the strategic Rome—Persia chessboard that had now shifted alarmingly about 500 miles westward.⁶

By the mid-century, war had become almost continuous along the Rhine, Danube and Euphrates frontiers, at the same time that imperial authority was at its most precarious, being openly fought over by rival generals. The two were of course partly connected. The external threat had brought the real importance of the professional army strikingly to the fore, breaking the restraints of aristocratic civil administration: the soldiers could claim what price they liked, and they knew it. But the generals and Emperors who were caught in the perpetual private wars were obviously thereby hampered in the task of territorial defence, having to guard in at least two directions. In extreme cases a contender for power stripped the frontier of troops for a dash against Rome, letting the barbarians ravage the exposed territories and hoping to expel them once again when his power was secure.

Thus, in 244 the Praetorian Prefect Philip the Arab concluded an unfavourable peace with Persia in order to get back to Rome and seize the purple. Then Decius, commander of the army in Pannonia (Western Hungary) marched into Italy against Philip at a time when the Gothic danger was at its height. He defeated Philip's army at Verona, but behind him the Danube defences broke completely and the invaders poured across the Balkans. Decius spent the next three years trying to expel them, but was himself defeated and killed in battle at the river Dobrudja,⁷ while Trebonianus Gallus, governor of Moesia (Bulgaria) was declared Emperor by the troops. The Goths were eventually expelled, but the victor Aemilianus turned and marched into Italy against Gallus, just as Decius had done. He ruled four months before being assassinated by the army. The near-suicidal pattern had become permanent. It was no longer a case of brief civil war followed by consolidation under a new dynasty, as had happened after Nero, for example. Imperial authority and effective central power were now so weak, so overwhelmed by multiple crises and utterly dependent on the volatile moods of the armies, that this had become impossible. Some imperial candidates were indeed reluctant: but, rather than murder by their unruly troops or execution by a suspicious Emperor they had no choice but to take the hazard of civil war. If they won, they somehow had to raise higher sums of money to buy the loyalty of the troops, throw back the barbarians and put down every new usurper, until at the first setback they were cut down and the cycle began again. In the 50 years from the assassination of Severus Alexander to the coup of Diocletian there were 15 'legitimate' Emperors and many more pretenders, and almost all died violently: an average reign of about three years (see Appendix III). During this time the frontiers were repeatedly overrun and the great Empire split into several pieces.⁸

An unchanging element in the disintegration was of course the distances themselves. To move an army from the Rhine frontier to Rome took eight or nine weeks: to the Euphrates frontier, six months. Dispatches and orders still had to travel at the speed of a horseman. With interrupted communications and the continually changing military situations on distant fronts, no Emperor could gain a very reliable overall picture of events, let alone impose his direct control on them. Of necessity, military power was localised on the frontiers and the main decisions were made by the commander in that region: in beleagured conditions of poor information and disputed authority, they were the effective power centres whether they wished it or not. Once again, the system of communications and military administration had worked adequately only so long as serious external threats did not occur simultaneously; when they did, it seized, then broke down.

One great barbarian war, however costly, need not have had irreversible effects on society and economy. The Empire had recovered from this scale of war many times before. But the repeated shocks of invasions, year after year for generations, and getting tangibly worse, were ruinous to civil life. Agriculture, population, cities, and trade all suffered progressively in the chronic insecurity. Lands in the exposed frontier provinces were abandoned, cities sacked and pillaged, at the same time that Emperors had to raise ever new armies, equip them, pay them and transport them thousands of miles. If, owing to military diversions, they could not immediately resist the invaders, they tried to bribe them into keeping quiet—an expedient that soon proved mountingly expensive and, like all appeasement, merely advertised Roman weakness and raised German appetites.

From this shrinking, dislocated economic base the State had to wring unheard-of levels of taxes: and in concrete terms 'the State' increasingly meant the armed soldiery. Emperors debased the coinage again and again, resulting in uncontrolled inflation which naturally drove up army pay demands. To supply and placate the troops, compulsory purchase at the outdated prices soon became outright requisition, then arbitrary military plundering. As the currency became so worthless that the soldiers would not accept it as pay, and the State in turn would not accept it as taxes, requisition of supplies became a barely disguised taxation in kind, the annona militaris. The propertied classes who had once eagerly sought the honours and financial responsibilities of city magistracies to which their wealth entitled them, now did everything to avoid such expenses, which had grown into unsupportable burdens. There are records of men offering two-thirds of their estates to escape the obligations of a magistracy.⁹ The rapid rise in status of the military man thus occurred in the most brutal ways. When soldier could plunder civilian, when property rights counted for little compared with the one great difference between the armed and the unarmed, when the Emperors could not be relied on to protect one's villa or estates, or did so only at the price of bankruptcy, what help was one's social position? One could and did petition governors and Emperors, but beyond empty promises they did little. Where adminstration was functioning again, the governorship itself would often be filled by a half-educated military man who doubtless did his best, but was desperately preoccupied with other matters.¹⁰

Increasingly, those who could had to fend for themselves, and the immediate result, like that of the haphazardly oppressive taxation and seizures, was to compound the crisis. Add to these miseries the fact that throughout the 250s a great epidemic of plague moved across North Africa and the Balkans, assisted by the famines following the invasions, and it is little wonder men believed apocalyptic visions of the End of the World. ('Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be plagues, earthquakes and famines . . .')¹¹ Christian sources painted the most lurid pictures of the coming end of Rome: Nero raised from Hell coming out of the East, Satan at the head of a Gothic horde, and so on. It is impossible to quantify the sufferings of the Empire's populations with any accuracy, and ancient sources are notoriously unreliable with statistics. The plague was sufficently widespread for at least two rulers, Timethesius and Claudius, to succumb to it.¹² Famine must have accounted for many more. The physical area of towns shrank dramatically (Paris, for example, was reduced simply to the Ile de la Cité),¹³ and the endlessly reiterated concern with deserted agricultural land leaves no doubt that the total population of the Empire fell measurably, as did the living standards of every class.

The most common response of the civil populations to these calamities could almost be summed up in one word: flight. Flight from the barbarians, from the plague, from the clash of armies, from tax extortion, from plundering soldiers and officials, from forced labour duties - the list reads like a monotonous prayer for deliverance. Archaeological evidence tells a grim and uniform tale: charred foundations of houses and villas, and hoard after hoard of buried coins which...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Part One Crisis
• Part Two Emergence
• Part Three The New Order
• Part Four Triumphs and Defeats
• Part Five Aftermath
• Appendix I Diocletian's Provincial Reorganisation
• Appendix II Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices
• Appendix III Roman Emperors from Marcus Aurelius to Theodosius
• Appendix IV Biographical Notes
• Bibliography
• References
• Index