Galerius and the Will of Diocletian

William Lewis Leadbetter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135261320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Drawing from a variety of sources - literary, visual, archaeological; papyri, inscriptions and coins – the author studies the nature of Diocletian's imperial strategy, his wars, his religious views and his abdication. The author also examines Galerius' endeavour to take control of Diocletian's empire, his failures and successes, against the backdrop of Constantine's remorseless drive to power.

The first comprehensive study of the Emperor Galerius, this book offers an innovative analysis of his reign as both Caesar and Augustus, using his changing relationship with Diocletian as the principal key to unlock the complex imperial politics of the period.

1

DYNASTS AND OLIGARCHS

A democracy cannot rule an empire. Neither can one man, though empire may appear to presuppose monarchy. There is always an oligarchy somewhere, open or concealed.

Ronald Syme¹

When the Emperor Augustus died in AD 14, the Roman world was a bright and confident place. Romans themselves knew what their empire was for. It was to bring peace and prosperity; security and good government; in Vergil's words, “to crush the arrogant and show mercy to the vanquished”.² This Roman world endured and flourished for two centuries. It overcame the incompetence of rulers, the predations of foreign foes; plagues and famines; earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and terrible urban fires. Furthermore, the ideology which underlay Augustus' new empire fed the minds of succeeding generations. As the Empire persisted, and as it encouraged the creativity of artists, and the comfort of municipal aristocracies, the idea of Rome became a powerful and lasting one. By the end of the second century, the Latin word romanitas had been coined, meaning “Roman-ness” — that very quality exemplary of being Roman.³

The tumultuous events often referred to as “the third-century crisis” tried and tested that ideology. Emperors came and went as the empire itself suffered from a series of major miltary defeats and secessions. The Persian king, Shapur the Great, both in a great inscription at Persepolis and in a series of rock reliefs, boasted of having humbled three successive Roman emperors: one slain, one a suppliant; one a captive.⁴ Another emperor, Decius, went down in battle against the Goths, whilst still others fell on the swords of their own rebellious soldiery.

When Galerius was born, in about 258, it was at a time when the idea of Rome presented fewer certainties. His own parents were refugees who had been forced to flee their home in trans-Danubian Dacia because it was no longer secure from a barbarian tribe, the Carpi, which periodically raided the region. They settled on a small farm near to the major centres of Serdica and Naissus, and not all that far from the home which they had lost.⁵ Their status as refugees highlights the change which had taken place in the third century. Unrelenting pressure on the frontiers had taken a toll upon the resources of the empire. The province of Dacia, the conquest of which early in the second century was immortalized in the spiralling reliefs of Trajan's Column, was untenable by the middle of the third century. In the 270s, it was definitively abandoned by Aurelian, but Roman control beyond the Danube was, by then, a tenuous proposition.⁶ Galerius' family, thus, was directly touched by the retreat of Rome.

By the time that Diocletian became emperor in late 284, the need for lasting solutions to the empire's problems had become even more acute. Military and political failure necessitated change. Much of the imperial ideology remained predicated upon peace born of victory. The empire had not seen much of either since the death of Septimius Severus in 211. Instead, it had seen presentiments of failure: not merely defeat, but secessionism; not merely invasion, but collaborationism; not merely the retreat of the imperial cult, but the growth of personal religion.⁷ Documents of dissent were likewise produced, the most celebrated being the “Potter's Oracle” from Egypt, and the Syrian Thirteenth Sibylline Oracle.⁸ These promised the overthrow of foreign rulers through plague, calamity and war. Such documents not merely reflect the desire for security in an insecure world, but also the failure of Rome itself to capture the imagination and loyalty of provincials. They sought their security apart from the empire, whether in the assertion of a narrow ethnicity or in the expectation of a savior-king.

Many, although not all, of the empire's problems can be readily located within its political structure and especially in the relationship between three key institutions: the army, the Senate and the emperor. The army had always had the power to change the emperor. Augustus' position, and that of his successors, was based squarely upon the support of the army. Tacitus noted of the Year of the Four Emperors that it revealed the “secret of the empire”: that emperors could be made in other places than Rome.⁹ For many years, they were not. These were the slow and stable years of the Flavians and Antonines, during which time the army was the passive, mighty and unspeaking ally of the emperor. The emperor, in turn, was made by the Roman aristocracy with the quiet assent of the Praetorian Guard. Revolts were rare and resisted. Only in the principate of Marcus Aurelius was there a serious insurrection, and that was effectively suppressed.¹⁰

But the chaos which followed the death of Commodus saw a return to the uncertainty and instability of 69. The Severi sought to resolve this by allying themselves with the legionary soldiers, over and against potential senatorial rivals. They increased rates of pay and improved conditions of service. As he died, Septimius Severus is said to have told his sons: “agree amongst yourselves, enrich the soldiers, despise everyone else”.¹¹ It was this renewed alliance between emperor and legionary which worked more than any other to destabilize the imperial office. This is precisely because the alliance became institutional rather than personal. Once the successors of Septimius Severus squandered the goodwill established by his dynasty with the legionaries, no individual person was able to establish the same relationship with the soldiers as a group. Rather, individual armies developed loyalty to their respective commanders, and those commanders in turn cultivated the favour of the soldiery. Thus, the allegiance of the soldiery was recaptured by the ambitious who used it to further their own political aspirations.

The commanders of the legions were still invariably senators. The Senate had never had very much power as a body under the principate and, ironically, seems never to have wanted it very seriously. What the Senate, taken collectively, had always wanted was respect and privilege. Emperors had varied in their approach to this, but had never varied in their need to use the senatorial class as a reservoir of talent.¹² This is where the problems generally arose. Even if the Senate as a body no longer sought to govern, it was composed of a class born to power whose individual members could and did exploit their positions and offices in order to defeat rivals and obtain supreme power.

The most straightforward way in which to do this was the capture of an army's loyalty, generally through victory in the field. Victorious generals were proclaimed emperor often enough for incumbents to need to take the field in person. It became a matter of course in the third century that emperors took the field themselves in major campaigns whether offensive or defensive. As a consequence, they became vulnerable both to the vagaries of war and the caprice of their armies. It is no accident that up until the time at least of Gordian III, no emperor had either fallen in battle or been taken by the enemy, yet after that both occurred within a decade of each other.¹³

Roman emperors were particularly vulnerable to overthrow. They were not monarchs in the traditional or tribal sense simply because the empire was never a monarchy of that kind. Rather, they were military dictators: generals or politicians who had achieved power, rather than having been born to it. Thus, the emperors did not in general possess the traditional safeguard of hereditary monarchy: dynastic legitimacy. From time to time, the principate could function dynastically and was at its most stable when it did so; but therein also lay the seed of instability. On more than one occasion the unworthy son of a great father was overthrown, and that overthrow occasioned civil war.

What, then, did the emperor do to justify his position? Fergus Millar once made the famous and thoroughly empirical statement that “the Emperor was what the Emperor did”.¹⁴ But it is not only what the emperor did; it is also what sustained him in doing it. It is crystal c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Roman imperial biographies
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Dynasts and oligarchs
• 2. Iovius and Herculius
• 3. Augustus and Caesar
• 4. Galerius and Diocletian
• 5. Constantius Augustus
• 6. The Iovii and Herculii
• 7. Galerius Augustus
• Appendix: Stemma of the Iovii and Herculii
• Bibliography
• Index