See the book at Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n—<\/p>\n
I. A SEMITIC DYNASTY <\/p>\n
ON January 1, 193, a few hours after the assassination of Commodus, the Senate met in a transport of happiness, and chose as emperor one of its most respected members, whose just administration as prefect of the city had continued the finest traditions of the Antonines. Pertinax accepted with reluctance a dignity so exalted that any fall from it must be fatal. He “demeaned himself as an ordinary man,” says Herodian, attended the lectures of the philosophers, encouraged literature, replenished the treasury, reduced taxes, and auctioned off the gold and silver, the embroideries and silks and beautiful slaves, wherewith Commodus had filled the imperial palace; “in fact, he did everything,” says Dio Cassius, “that a good emperor should do.” The freedmen who had lost their perquisites through his economy conspired with the Praetorian Guard, which disliked his restoration of discipline. On March 28, 300 soldiers forced their way into the palace, struck him down, and carried his head upon a spear to their camp. The people and the Senate mourned and hid. The leaders of the Guard announced that they would bestow the crown upon that Roman who should offer them the largest donative. Didius Julianus was persuaded by his wife and daughter to interrupt his meal and enter his bid. Proceeding to the camp, he found a rival offering 5000 drachmas ($3000) to each soldier in return for the throne. The agents of the Guard passed from one millionaire to the other, encouraging higher bids; when Julianus promised each man 6250 drachmas the Guard declared him emperor.<\/p>\n
Aroused by this crowning indignity, the people of Rome appealed to the legions in Britain, Syria, and Pannonia to come and depose Julianus. The legions, angered by exclusion from the donative, hailed their respective generals with the imperial title, and marched toward Rome. The Pannonian commander, Lucius Septimius Severus Geta, gained the Principate by boldness, expedition, and bribery. He pledged himself to give each soldier 12,000 drachmas upon his accession; he led them from the Danube to within seventy miles of Rome in a month; he won over to himself the troops sent to halt him, and subdued the Praetorians by offering them pardon in return for the surrender of their leaders. He violated precedent by entering the capital with all his troops in full armor, but he himself appeased tradition by wearing civilian dress. A tribune found Julianus in tears and terror in the palace, led him into a bathroom, and beheaded him (June 2, 193).<\/p>\n
Africa, which was at this time providing Christianity with its ablest defenders, gave birth (146) and early schooling to Septimius. Brought up in a family of Punic-speaking Phoenicians, he studied literature and philosophy in Athens and practiced law in Rome. Despite the Semitic accent of his Latin, he was among the best-educated Romans of his time, and liked to surround himself with poets and philosophers. But he did not allow philosophy to impede his wars, or poetry to soften his character. He was a man of handsome features, strong physique, and simple dress, hardy in hardship, clever in strategy, fearless in battle, ruthless in victory. He conversed with wit, judged with penetration, lied without scruple, loved money more than honor, and governed with cruelty and competence. The Senate had made the mistake of declaring for his rival Albinus; Septimius, surrounded with 600 guards, persuaded it to confirm his own accession; then he put scores of senators to death, and confiscated so many aristocratic estates that he became landlord to half the peninsula. The decimated Senate was replenished by imperial nomination with new members chiefly from the monarchical East. The great lawyers of the age- Papinian, Paulus, Ulpian- accumulated arguments in defense of absolute power. Septimius ignored the Senate except when he sent it commands; he assumed full control of the various treasuries, based his rule frankly upon the army, and made the Principate an hereditary military monarchy. The army was increased in size; the pay of the soldiers was raised, and became an exhausting drain upon the public purse. Military service was made compulsory, but was forbidden to the inhabitants of Italy; henceforth provincial legions would choose emperors for a Rome that had lost the fortitude to rule.
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\n This realistic warrior believed in astrology, and excelled in the interpretation of portents and dreams. When, six years before his accession, his first wife died, he offered his hand to a rich Syrian whose horoscope had pledged her a throne. Julia Domna was the daughter of a rich priest of the god Elagabal at Emesa. There, long since, a meteorite had fallen, had been enshrined in a gaudy temple, and was worshiped as the symbol, if not the embodiment, of the deity. Julia came, bore Septimius two sons, Caracalla and Geta, and rose to her promised throne. She was too beautiful to be monogamous, but Septimius was too busy to be jealous. She gathered around her a salon of literary men, patronized the arts, and persuaded Philostratus to write and adorn the life of Apollonius of Tyana. Her strong character and influence accelerated that orientation of the monarchy toward Eastern ways which culminated morally under Elagabalus, and politically under Diocletian.<\/p>\n
Of his eighteen years as emperor Septimius gave twelve to war. He destroyed his rivals in swift and savage campaigns; he razed Byzantium after a four years’ siege, thereby lowering a barrier to the spreading Goths; he invaded Parthia, took Ctesiphon, annexed Mesopotamia, and hastened the fall of the Arsacid kings. In his old age, suffering from gout but fretful lest his army deteriorate through five years of peace, he led an expedition into Caledonia. After expensive victories against the Scots he withdrew into Britain, and retired to York to die (211). “I have been everything,” he said, “and it is worth nothing.” Caracalla, says Herodian, “was much vexed that his father’s decease was so lingering… and solicited the physicians to dispatch the old man by any means that might come to hand.” Septimius had blamed Aurelius for yielding the Empire to Commodus; now he bequeathed it to Caracalla and Geta, with cynical advice: “Make your soldiers rich, and do not bother about anything else.” He was the last emperor, for eighty years, who died in bed. Caracalla, like Commodus, seemed made to prove that a man’s quota of energy seldom allows him to be great in both his life and his seed. Attractive and obedient in boyhood, he became in manhood a barbarian infatuated with hunting and war. He captured wild boars, fought a lion singlehanded, kept lions always near him in his palace, and had one as occasional table companion and bedfellow. He particularly enjoyed the company of gladiators and soldiers, and would keep senators cooling their heels in his antechambers while he prepared food and drink for his companions. Unwilling to share the imperial power with his brother, he had Geta assassinated in 212; the youth was slaughtered in his mother’s arms, and covered her garments with his blood. We are told that Caracalla condemned to execution 20,000 of Geta’s following, many citizens, and four Vestal Virgins whom he accused of adultery. When the army murmured at the killing of Geta, he silenced it with a donative equal to all the sums that Septimius had gathered into all the treasuries. He favored the soldiers and the poor against the business classes and the aristocracy; possibly the stories we read about him in Dio Cassius are a senator’s revenge. Anxious to raise more revenue, he doubled the inheritance tax to ten per cent; and noting that the tax applied only to Roman citizens, he extended the Roman franchise to all free male adults in the Empire (212); they achieved citizenship precisely when it brought a maximum of obligations and a minimum of power. He added to the adornment of Rome an arch to Septimius Severus, which still stands, and public baths whose gigantic ruins attest their ancient grandeur. But for the most part he left the civil government to his mother, and absorbed himself in campaigns.<\/p>\n
He had made Julia Domna secretary both a libellis and ab epistulis – of petitions and correspondence. She joined or replaced him in greeting high members of the state or foreign dignitaries. Gossip whispered that she controlled him by incestuous means; the wits of Alexandria maddened him by referring to her and him as Jocasta and Oedipus. Partly in revenge against these insults, partly because he feared that Egypt might revolt while he was fighting Parthia, he visited the city and superintended (we are assured) the massacre of all Alexandrians capable of bearing arms. Nevertheless, the founder of Alexandria was his model and envy. He organized 16,000 troops into what he called “Alexander’s phalanx,” equipped them with ancient Macedonian arms, and dreamed of subduing Parthia as Alexander had conquered Persia. He tried hard to be a good soldier, sharing the food and toil and marches of his army, helping it to dig ditches and build bridges, bearing himself bravely in action, and often challenging the enemy to single combat. But his men were not as eager for the Parthian campaign as he was; they loved spoils more ardently than battle; and at Carrhae, where Crassus had been defeated, they stabbed him to death (217). Macrinus, prefect of the Guard, acclaimed himself emperor, and ordered the reluctant Senate to make Caracalla a god. Julia Domna, banished to Antioch, and bereft, within six years, of empire, husband, and sons, refused food until she died.
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\n She had a sister, Julia Maesa, as capable as herself. Returning to Emesa, this second Julia found there two promising grandsons. One, by her daughter Julia Soaemias, was a young priest of Baal; his name was Varius Avitus, and would be Elagabalus- “the creative god.” The other, by Maesa’s daughter Julia Mamaea, was a boy of ten called Alexianus, and would be Alexander Severus. Though Varius was the son of Varius Marcellus, Maesa spread the rumor that he was the natural son of Caracalla, and gave him the name Bassianus; the Empire was worth her daughter’s reputation, and Marcellus was dead. The Roman soldiers in Syria were already half won to Syrian cults, and felt a pious respect for the fourteen-year-old priest; moreover, Maesa suggested that if they would make Elagabalus emperor she would distribute a substantial donative among them. The soldiers were convinced, and complied. Maesa’s gold brought over to her cause the army that Macrinus sent against them. When Macrinus himself appeared with a substantial force, the Syrian mercenaries wavered; but Maesa and Soaemis sprang from their chariots, and led the softened army to victory. The men of Syria were women, and the women were men. In the spring of 219 Elagabalus entered Rome dressed in robes of purple silk embroidered with gold, his cheeks stained with vermilion, his eyes artificially brightened, costly bracelets on his arms, a string of pearls around his neck, a jeweled crown on his pretty head. Beside him his grandmother and his mother rode in state. On his first appearance in the Senate he demanded that his mother should be allowed to sit beside him and attend the deliberations. Soaemias had the sense to withdraw, and contented herself with presiding over that Senaculum, or little Senate, of women, which Hadrian’s Sabina had founded, and which dealt with questions of feminine dress, jewelry, precedence, and etiquette. Grandmother Maesa was left to govern the state. The young emperor had some elements of charm. He made no reprisals against the supporters of Macrinus. He loved music, sang well, played the pipes, the organ, and the horn. Being too young to rule the Empire, he only asked permission to enjoy it. Pleasure, not Baal, was his god, and he was resolved to worship it in all its genders and forms. He invited every class of the free population to visit his palace; at times he would eat and drink and make merry with them; often he would distribute among them lottery prizes ranging from a furnished home to a handful of flies. He loved to play jokes upon his guests: to seat them on inflated cushions that would suddenly burst; to stupefy them with wine and let them wake up amid harmless leopards, bears, and lions. Lampridius assures us that Elagabalus never spent less than 100,000 sesterces ($10,000)- and sometimes 3,000,000- on a banquet to his friends. He would mix gold pieces with peas, onyx with lentils, pearls with rice, amber with beans; he would present horses, or chariots, or eunuchs, as favors; often he bade each guest take home the silver plate and goblets in which the dinner had been served. As for himself, he would have nothing but the best. The water in his swimming pools was perfumed with essence of roses; the fixtures in his bathrooms were of onyx or gold; his food had to be of costly rarities; his dress was studded with jewelry from crown to shoes; and gossip said that he never wore the same rings twice. When he traveled, 600 chariots were needed to carry his baggage and his bawds. Told by a soothsayer that he would die a violent death, he prepared worthy means of suicide if occasion required: cords of purple silk, swords of gold, poisons enclosed in sapphires or emeralds. He was slain in a latrine. Probably his enemies of the Senatorial class invented or exaggerated some of these tales; certainly the stories of his sexual depravity are beyond belief. In any case he perfumed his lust with piety, and schemed to spread among the Romans some worship of his Syrian Baal. He had himself circumcized, and thought of emasculating himself in honor of his god. He brought from Emesa the conical black stone which he worshiped as the emblem of Elagabal; he raised an ornate temple to house it; the stone, encrusted with gems, was carried to it on a chariot drawn by six white horses, while the young emperor walked backward before it in dumb adoration. He was willing to recognize all other religions; he patronized Judaism, and proposed to legalize Christianity. He merely insisted, with admirable loyalty, that his stone was the greatest of gods. His mother, absorbed in amours, looked with indulgence upon this Priapic farce; but Julia Maesa, failing to control it, resolved to forestall a debacle that would end this remarkable dynasty of Syrian women. She persuaded Elagabalus to adopt his cousin Alexander as successor and Caesar. She and Mamaea trained the boy in the duties of his office, and by every art drew the Senate and the people to look upon him as a desirable alternative to the priestly satyr who had offended Rome not by his extravagance or obscenity, but by his subordination of Jupiter to a Syrian Baal. Soaemias discovered the plot, and stirred up the Praetorians against her sister and nephew; Maesa and Mamaea offered richer arguments; and the Guard slew Elagabalus and his mother, dragged his corpse through the streets and around the Circus, and flung it into the Tiber. The Guard proclaimed, the Senate accepted, Alexander as emperor (222). Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander, like his predecessor, mounted the throne at the age of fourteen. His mother had given herself with singular consecration to the training of his body, mind, and character. He strengthened his frame with labor and exercise, swam in a cold pool for an hour every day, drank a pint of water before each meal, ate sparingly and of the simplest foods. He grew into a handsome youth, tall and strong, skilled in every sport and in the arts of war. He studied Greek and Latin literature, and only moderated his love for them on the insistence of Mamaea, who quoted to him those verses of Virgil that called upon Romans to yield the graces of culture to others, and form themselves to organize a world state and rule it in peace. He painted and sang “with distinction,” and played the organ and the lyre, but never allowed any but his own household to witness these performances. He dressed and behaved with modest simplicity, “was temperate in the enjoyment of love, and would have nothing to do with catamites.” He showed high respect for the Senate, treated its members as his equals, entertained them in his palace, and often joined them in their homes. Kindly and affable, he visited the sick without distinction of class, gave ready audience to any citizen of decent repute, quickly forgave opponents, and shed no civilian blood in the fourteen years of his reign. His mother reproved his amiability, saying, “You have made your rule too gentle, and the authority of the Empire less respected”; to which he answered, “Yes, but I have made it more lasting and secure.” He was a man of gold, without the alloy required to withstand the rough usage of this world.
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\n He recognized the absurdity of his cousin’s effort to replace Jove with Elagabal, and he co-operated with his mother in restoring the Roman temples and ritual. But to his philosophic mind it seemed that all religions were diverse prayers to one supreme power; he wished to honor all honest faiths; and in his private chapel, where he worshiped every morning, he had icons of Jupiter, Orpheus, Apollonius of Tyana, Abraham, and Christ. He quoted frequently the Judaeo-Christian counsel: “What you do not wish a man to do to you, do not do to him”; he had it engraved on the walls of his palace and on many a public building. He recommended the morals of the Jews and the Christians to the Roman people. The unimpressed wits of Antioch and Alexandria referred to him as “Head of the Synagogue.” His mother favored the Christians, protected Origen, and summoned him to explain to her his flexible theology.<\/p>\n
Julia Maesa having died soon after Alexander’s accession, Mamaea, with his tutor Ulpian, determined the policies, and conceived the reforms, of Alexander’s administration. She ruled with wisdom and restraint, caring more for the success of the dynasty than for the pageantry of power; she yielded to the great lawyer and the young emperor the credit for the achievements of his reign. She and Ulpian chose sixteen outstanding senators to serve as an imperial council, without whose approval no major measures were carried out. She could control everything except her love for her son. When he married and showed an affectionate partiality for his wife, Mamaea had her banished, and Alexander, forced to choose, surrendered to his mother. As he grew older he took a more active part in administration. “He would give his attention to public business even before dawn,” says his ancient biographer, “and would continue at it to an advanced hour, never growing weary or irritated, but always cheerful and serene.” <\/p>\n
His basic policy was to weaken the disruptive dominance of the army by restoring the prestige of the Senate and the aristocracy; rule by birth seemed to him the only actual alternative to rule by money, myth, or the sword. With the co-operation of the Senate he effected a hundred economies in administration, dismissed the supernumeraries in his palace, in governmental offices, and in provincial rule. He sold most of the imperial jewelry, and deposited the proceeds in the treasury. Perhaps with less Senatorial approval he legalized. encouraged, and reorganized the workers’ and tradesmen’s associations, and “allowed them to have advocates chosen from their own numbers.” Assuming a severe censorship over public morals, he ordered the arrest of prostitutes and the deportation of homosexuals. While reducing taxes, he restored the Colosseum and the Baths of Caracalla, built a public library, a fourteen-mile aqueduct, and new municipal baths, and financed the construction of baths, aqueducts, bridges, and roads throughout the Empire. To force down interest rates that were harassing debtors, he lent public money at four per cent, and advanced funds to the poor, without any interest charge, for the purchase of agricultural land. All the Empire prospered and applauded; the godly Aurelius, it seemed, had returned to earth and to power.<\/p>\n
But as the Persians and the Germans had taken advantage of the philosopher king, so now they took advantage of the emperor saint. In 230 Ardashir, founder of the Sassanid dynasty in Persia, invaded Mesopotamia and threatened Syria. Alexander sent him a philosophical epistle reproving his violence, and arguing that “everyone ought to rest content with his own domain.” Ardashir judged him a weakling, and replied by demanding all Syria and Asia Minor. Accompanied by his mother, the young emperor took the field, and waged with more courage than subtlety an indecisive campaign. History is obscure as to his victories and defeats; in any case Ardashir withdrew from Mesopotamia, perhaps to meet attacks on his eastern front; and the Roman coins of 233 pictured Alexander crowned by Victory and having the Tigris and Euphrates at his feet. Meanwhile the Alemanni and the Marcomanni, noting that the Rhine and Danube garrisons had been depleted to reinforce the legions in Syria, broke through the Roman limes and ravaged eastern Gaul. After celebrating his Persian triumph, Alexander, again with Mamaea at his side, rejoined his army, and led it to Mainz. On his mother’s advice he negotiated with the enemy, offering them an annual sum to keep the peace. His troops condemned his weakness, and mutinied; they had never forgiven his economy, his discipline, and his subordination of them to the Senate and a woman’s rule. They acclaimed as emperor C. Julius Maximinus, commander of the Pannonian legions. The soldiers of Maximinus forced their way into Alexander’s tent, and slew him, his mother, and his friends (235).
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\nII. ANARCHY <\/p>\n
It was no whim of history that made the army supreme in the third century; internal causes had weakened the state and left it exposed on every front. The cessation of expansion after Trajan, and again after Septimius Severus, was the signal for attack; and as Rome had conquered nations by dividing them, so now the barbarians began to conquer her by uniting in simultaneous assaults. The necessity of defense exalted the power of arms and the prestige of soldiery; generals replaced philosophers on the throne, and the last reign of the aristocracy yielded to the revived rule of force. Maximinus was a good soldier and no more, the robust son of a Thracian peasant; history assures us that he was eight feet tall, and had a thumb of such circumference that he could wear his wife’s bracelet on it as a ring. He had no education, scorned it, and envied it. In his three years as emperor he never visited Rome, but preferred the life of his camp on the Danube or the Rhine. To support his campaigns and appease his troops, he laid such taxes upon the well to do that an upper-class revolt soon formed against his rule. Gordianus, the wealthy and learned proconsul of Africa, accepted the nomination of his army as a rival emperor; being eighty years old, he associated his son with him in the lethal office; they failed to withstand the forces sent against them by Maximinus; the son was killed in battle, the father killed himself. Maximinus revenged himself by proscriptions and confiscations that almost destroyed the aristocracy. “Every day,” says Herodian, “one could see the richest men of yesterday turned beggars today.” The Senate, which had been reconstituted and reinvigorated by Severus, fought back valiantly; it declared Maximinus an outlaw, and chose two of its members, Maximus and Balbinus, as emperors. Maximus led an improvised army to meet Maximinus, who came down across the Alps and besieged Aquileia. Maximinus was the better general, and had the superior forces; the fate of the Senate and the propertied classes seemed sealed; but a group of Maximinus’ soldiers, who had suffered from his savage punishments, killed him in his tent. Maximus returned in triumph to Rome, and was assassinated, along with Balbinus, by the Praetorian Guard. The Praetorians made a third Gordian emperor, and the Senate confirmed the choice. We shall not repeat in bloody detail the names and battles and deaths of these emperors of anarchy. In the thirty-five years between Alexander Severus and Aurelian, thirty-seven men were proclaimed emperors. Gordian III was slain by his troops while fighting the Persians (244); his successor, Philip the Arab, was defeated and killed at Verona by Decius (249), an Illyrian of wealth and culture whose devotion to Rome well deserved a name so honorable in ancient story. Between campaigns against the Goths he laid out an ambitious program for the restoration of Roman religion, morals, and character, and gave orders for the destruction of Christianity; then he returned to the Danube, met the Goths, saw his son slain beside him, told his wavering army that the loss of any one individual was of little importance, pressed on against the enemy, and was himself struck down in one of the worst defeats in Roman history (251). He was succeeded by Gallus, who was murdered by his troops (253), and then by Aemilianus, who was murdered by his troops (253). The new emperor, Valerian, already sixty, and facing war at once with the Franks, the Alemanni, the Marcomanni, the Goths, the Scythians, and the Persians, made his son Gallienus ruler of the Western Empire, kept the East for himself, and led an army into Mesopotamia. He was too old for his tasks, and soon succumbed. Gallienus, now thirty-five, was a man of courage, intelligence, and a culture that seemed almost out of place in this century of barbaric war. He reformed the civilian administration in the West, led his armies to victory against one after another of the Empire’s enemies, and yet found time to enjoy and patronize philosophy and literature, and promote a transient revival of classic art. But even his varied genius was overwhelmed by the accumulating evils of the time.
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\n In 254 the Marcomanni raided Pannonia and north Italy. In 255 the Goths invaded Macedonia and Dalmatia, Scythians and Goths invaded Asia Minor, the Persians invaded Syria. In 257 the Goths captured the fleet of the Bosporan kingdom, ravaged the Greek cities on the Black Sea coasts, burned Trapezus and enslaved its people, and raided Pontus. In 258 they took Chalcedon, Nicomedia, Prusa, Apamea, Nicaea; in the same year the Persians conquered Armenia, and Postumus declared himself the independent ruler of Gaul. In 259 the Alemanni broke into Italy, but were defeated by Gallienus at Milan. In 260 Valerian was overwhelmed by the Persians at Edessa, and died in captivity at a time and place unknown. Shapur I and his clouds of cavalry advanced through Syria to Antioch, surprised the population in the midst of its games, sacked the city, killed thousands, and led more thousands into slavery. Tarsus was taken and devastated, Cilicia and Cappadocia were overrun, and Shapur returned to Persia laden with spoils. Within a decade three ignominious tragedies had overtaken Rome: a Roman emperor had for the first time fallen in defeat, another had been captured by the enemy, and the unity of the Empire had been sacrificed to the necessity of meeting simultaneous attacks on many fronts. Under the force of these blows, and the disorderly elevation and assassination of emperors by troops, the imperial prestige collapsed; those psychological forces which time consecrates into habitual and unquestioned authority lost their hold upon Rome’s enemies, even upon her subjects and citizens. Revolts broke out everywhere: in Sicily and Gaul the oppressed peasantry flared up in wild jacqueries; in Pannonia Ingenuus proclaimed himself sovereign of the eastern provinces. In 263 the Goths sailed down the Ionian coast, sacked Ephesus, and burned down the great Temple of Artemis. All the Hellenistic East was in terror.<\/p>\n
An unexpected ally saved the Empire in Asia. Odenathus, who governed Palmyra as a vassal of Rome, drove the Persians back across Mesopotamia, defeated them at Ctesiphon (261), and declared himself king of Syria, Cilicia, Arabia, Cappadocia, and Armenia. He was assassinated in 266; his youthful son succeeded to his titles, his widow to his power. Like Cleopatra, from whom she claimed descent, Zenobia combined beauty of person with statesmanly capacity and many accomplishments of mind. She studied Greek literature and philosophy, learned Latin, Egyptian, and Syriac, and wrote a history of the East. Apparently connecting chastity with vigor, she allowed herself only such sexual relations as were needed for motherhood. She inured herself to hardship and fatigue, enjoyed the dangers of the chase and marched on foot for miles at the head of her troops. She governed with sternness and wisdom, made the philosopher Longinus her premier, gathered scholars, poets, and artists at her court, and beautified her capital with Greco-Roman-Asiatic palaces whose ruins startle the desert traveler today. Feeling that the Empire was breaking up, she planned a new dynasty and realm, brought Cappadocia, Galatia, and most of Bithynia under her control, fitted out a great army and fleet, conquered Egypt, and took Alexandria after a siege that destroyed half the population. The subtle “Queen of the East” pretended that she was proceeding as the agent of the Roman power; but all the world knew that her victories were an act in the spacious drama of Rome’s collapse.<\/p>\n
Seeing the wealth and weakness of the Empire, the barbarians poured down into the Balkans and Greece. While the Sarmatians pillaged again the cities on the Black Sea, a branch of the Goths sailed in 500 ships through the Hellespont into the Aegean, took isle after isle, anchored in the Piraeus, and sacked Athens, Argos, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes (267). While their navy brought some of the marauders back to the Black Sea, another group fought its way overland towards its Danube home. Gallienus met them at the river Nestus in Thrace, and won a costly victory; but a year later he was murdered by his troops. In 269 another Gothic horde descended into Macedonia, besieged Thessalonica, and pillaged Greece, Rhodes, Cyprus, and the Ionian coast. The Emperor Claudius II rescued Thessalonica, drove the Goths up the Vardar valley, and defeated them with great slaughter at Naissus, the modern Nish (269). If he had lost that battle no army would have intervened between the Goths and Italy.
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\n III. THE ECONOMIC DECLINE <\/p>\n
Political anarchy accelerated economic disintegration, and economic decline promoted political decay; each was the cause and effect of the other. Roman statesmanship had never found a healthy economic life for Italy; and perhaps the narrow plains of the peninsula have never provided an adequate base for the soaring aims of the Italian state. The production of cereals was discouraged by the competition of cheap grains from Sicily, Africa, and Egypt, and the great vineyards were losing their markets to provincial wines. Farmers complained that high taxes consumed their precarious profits and left them too little to keep the drainage and irrigation canals in repair; the canals filled up, the marshes spread, and malaria weakened the population of the Campagna and Rome. Large tracts of fertile land had been withdrawn from cultivation for residential estates. The absentee owners of the latifundia exploited labor and the soil to the limit of tolerance, and absolved themselves by philanthropies in the towns; urban architecture and games profited while the countryside grew desolate. Many peasant proprietors and free rural workers abandoned the farms for the cities, leaving Italian agriculture for the most part to latifundia manned by listless slaves. But the latifundia themselves were ruined by the Pax Romana, the dearth of wars of conquest in the first and second centuries, and the consequent fall in the supply, and rise in the cost, of slaves. Compelled to lure free labor back to the land, the great landlords divided their holdings into units which they leased to coloni, “cultivators”; they required from these tenants a small money rent or a tenth of the produce, and a period of unpaid labor in the owner’s villa or on his private domain. In many cases landlords found it profitable to emancipate their slaves and change them into coloni. In the third century the owners, harassed by invasion and revolution in the cities, took more and more to living in their villas; these were fortified into castles, and were gradually transformed into medieval chateaux. *03130<\/p>\n
The lack of slaves strengthened for a time the position of free labor in industry as well as in agriculture. But while the resources of the rich were consumed by war and government, the poverty of the poor did not decrease. Wages were from six to eleven, prices some thirty-three, per cent of comparative wages and prices in the United States of the early twentieth century. The class struggle was becoming more violent, for the army, recruited from the provincial poor, often joined in the attack upon wealth, and felt that its services to the state justified confiscatory taxation for donatives, or more direct pillaging of the well to do. Industry suffered as commerce declined. The export trade of Italy fell as the provinces graduated from customers to competitors; barbarian raids and piracy made trade routes as unsafe as before Pompey; depreciated currencies and uncertain prices discouraged long-term enterprise. The extension of the frontier having ceased, Italy could no longer prosper by supplying or exploiting an expanding realm. Once Italy had collected the bullion of conquered lands and grown rich on the robbery; now money was migrating to the more industrialized Hellenistic provinces, and Italy grew poorer while the rising wealth of Asia Minor forced the replacement of Rome with an Eastern capital. Italian industry was thrown back upon its domestic market, and found the people too poor to buy the goods they could make. Internal commerce was hampered by brigands, rising taxes, and the deterioration of roads through lack of slaves. The villas became more self-sufficient in industry, and barter competed with money trade. Large-scale production gave way year by year to small shops supplying chiefly a local demand.<\/p>\n
Financial difficulties entered. The precious metals were running low: the gold mines of Thrace and the silver mines of Spain had reduced their yield, and Dacia, with its gold, would soon be surrendered by Aurelian. Much gold and silver had been consumed in art and ornament. Faced with this dearth when war was almost continuous, the emperors from Septimius Severus onward repeatedly debased the currency to pay for state expenses and military supplies. Under Nero the alloy in the denarius was ten per cent, under Commodus thirty, under Septimius fifty. Caracalla replaced it with the antoniniamus, containing fifty per cent silver; by 260 its silver content had sunk to five per cent. The government mints issued unprecedented quantities of cheap coin; in many instances the state compelled the acceptance of these at their face value instead of their actual worth, while it insisted that taxes should be paid in goods or gold. Prices rose rapidly; in Palestine they increased one thousand per cent between the first and third centuries; in Egypt inflation ran out of control, so that a measure of wheat that had cost eight drachmas in the first century cost 120,000 drachmas at the end of the third. Other provinces suffered much less; but in most of them inflation ruined a large part of the middle class, nullified trust funds and charitable foundations, rendered all business discouragingly precarious, and destroyed a considerable portion of the trading and investment capital upon which the economic life of the Empire depended.
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\n The emperors after Pertinax were not displeased by this attrition of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. They felt the hostility of the Senatorial class and the great merchants to their alien origin, their martial despotism, and their exactions; the war of Senate and emperor, interrupted from Nerva to Aurelius, was renewed; and by donatives, public works, and doles, the rulers deliberately based their powers upon the favor of the army, the proletariat, and the peasantry.<\/p>\n
The Empire suffered only less than Italy. Carthage and north Africa, farthest from the invaders, flourished; but Egypt decayed under destructive factionalism, Caracalla’s massacre, Zenobia’s conquest, high taxes, listless forced labor, and Rome’s annual exaction of grain. Asia Minor and Syria had borne invasion and pillaging, but their ancient and patient industries had survived all tribulations. Greece, Macedonia, and Thrace had been devastated by the barbarians, and Byzantium had not recovered from Septimius’ siege. As war brought Roman garrisons and supplies to the German frontier new cities rose along the rivers- Vienna, Karlsburg, Strasbourg, Mainz. Gaul had been disordered and discouraged by German attacks; sixty of her cities had been sacked; most of her towns and cities were shrinking within new walls, and were abandoning the broad straight streets of Roman design for the more easily defended irregular alleys of early antiquity and the Middle Ages. In Britain, too, the cities were becoming smaller, the villas larger; class war and high taxation had destroyed wealth or driven it into rural concealment. The Empire had begun with urbanization and civilization; it was ending in reruralization and barbarism.<\/p>\n
IV. THE TWILIGHT OF PAGANISM <\/p>\n
The cultural graph of the third century follows loosely the curve of declining wealth and power. Nevertheless, in these tragic years we have the rise of notational algebra, the highest names in Roman jurisprudence, the finest example of ancient literary criticism, some of Rome’s most majestic architecture, the oldest romantic novels, the greatest of mystic philosophers.<\/p>\n
The Greek Anthology summarizes the life of Diophantus of Alexandria (A.D. 250) with algebraic humor: his boyhood lasted one sixth of his life, his beard grew after one twelfth more, he married after another seventh, his son was born five years later and lived to half his father’s age, and the father died four years after his son- therefore at the age of eighty-four. Of his works the chief survivor is the Arithmetica – a treatise on algebra. It solves determinate equations of the first degree, determinate quadratic equations, and indeterminate equations up to the sixth degree. For the unknown quantity which we denote by x, and which he called arithmos (the number)- he used a Greek sigma; and for the other powers he used the letters of the Greek alphabet. An algebra without symbols had existed before him: Plato had recommended, for training and amusing the youthful mind, such problems as the distribution of apples in certain proportions among several persons; Archimedes had propounded like puzzles in the third century B.C.; and both the Egyptians and the Greeks had solved geometrical problems by algebraic methods without algebraic notation. Probably Diophantus systematized methods already familiar to his contemporaries; the accident of time has preserved him; and to him, through the Arabs, we trace that bold and esoteric symbolism which aspires to formulate all the quantitative relations of the world.
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\n Papinian, Paulus, and Ulpian, the culminating trio of Roman law, all rose to power under Septimius Severus; all, as prefects of the Praetorian Guard, were the prime ministers of the realm; and all justified absolute monarchy on the ground that the people had delegated their sovereignty to the emperor. Papinian’s Quaestiones and Responsa were so distinguished by clarity, humanity, and justice that Justinian’s collections leaned heavily on these works. When Caracalla killed Geta, he bade Papinian write a legal defense of the act; Papinian refused, saying that it was “easier to commit fratricide than to justify it.” Caracalla ordered him beheaded, and a soldier performed the deed with an ax in the presence of the Emperor. Domitius Ulpianus continued Papinian’s labors as jurist and humanitarian. His legal opinions defended slaves as by nature free, and women as endowed with the same rights as men. Like most landmarks in the history of law, his writings were essentially a co-ordination of his predecessors’ work; but his judgments were so definitive that nearly a third of them survive in the Digest of Justinian. “It was because Alexander Severus ruled Chiefly in accord with Ulpian’s advice,” says Lampridius, “that he was so excellent an emperor.” However, Ulpian had had some of his opponents put to death; and in 228 his enemies in the Guard killed him in turn, with less legality and equal effect. Diocletian encouraged and financed schools of law, and commissioned the codification of post-Trajanic legislation in the Codex Gregorianus. Thereafter the science of jurisprudence hibernated till Justinian.<\/p>\n
The third century continued the art of painting on Pompeian and Alexandrian lines; its meager remains are Oriental and crude, and almost effaced by time. Sculpture flourished, for many emperors had to be carved; it stiffened into a primitive frontality, but no later age has surpassed this one in portraits of startling veracity. It is a credit to Caracalla, or a testimony to his dullness, that he allowed a sculptor to transmit him to us as the curly-headed scowling brute of the Naples Museum. Two sculptural colossi date from this period: the Farnese Bull and the Farnese Hercules, both of them exaggerated and unpleasantly tense, but showing undiminished technical mastery. That sculptors could still work in the classic style appears from the chaste reliefs on the sarcophagus of Alexander Severus, and on the Ludovisi Battle Sarcophagus. But the reliefs on the Arch of Septimius Severus at Rome frankly rejected Attic simplicity and grace for a coarse and picturesque virility that almost foreshadowed the rebarbarization of Italy.<\/p>\n
Architecture at Rome now carried to completion the Roman flair for sublimity through size. Septimius raised on the Palatine the last of its imperial palaces, with an eastern wing seven stories high- the “Septizonium.” Julia Domna provided funds for the Atrium Vestae, and the pretty Temple of Vesta that still stands in the Forum. Caracalla built for Isis’ consort Serapis an immense shrine of which some handsome fragments survive. The Baths of Caracalla, finished under Alexander Severus, are among the world’s most impressive ruins. They added nothing to architectural science, following essentially the lines of Trajan’s Baths; but their frowning mass well expressed the murderer of Geta and Papinian. The main block, of brick and concrete, covered 270,000 square feet- more than the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Hall combined. A winding stairway led to the top of the walls; perched there Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound. The interior was garrisoned by a multitude of statues, and upheld by 200 columns of granite, alabaster, and porphyry; the marble floors and walls were inlaid with mosaic scenes; water poured from massive mouths of silver into pools and basins where 1600 persons could bathe at once. Gallienus and Decius raised similar baths; in the latter case the Roman engineers rested a circular dome upon a decagonal edifice, and supported it with buttresses in the angles of the decagon- an expedient with little past and much future. In 295 Maximian began the most enormous of the eleven imperial thermae, and named it with singular modesty the Baths of Diocletian. Here were bathing facilities for 3600 persons at one time, gymnasiums, concert and lecture halls; out of one room, the tepidarium, Michelangelo fashioned Santa Maria degli Angeli- with the exception of St. Peter’s the largest church in Rome. Structures only less monumental rose in the provinces. Diocletian built extensively in Nicomedia, Alexandria, and Antioch; Maximian adorned Milan, Galerius Sirmium, Constantius Treves.
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\n Literature prospered less, for it could seldom tap the wealth that gathered in imperial hands. Libraries grew in number and size; a third-century physician had a collection of 62,000 volumes, and the Bibliotheca Ulpiana was renowned for its historical archives. Diocletian sent scholars to Alexandria to transcribe classical texts there and bring copies to the libraries of Rome. Scholars were plentiful and popular; Philostratus memorialized them well in his Lives of the Sophists. Porphyry continued Plotinus, attacked Christianity, and called the world to vegetarianism. Iamblichus tried to harmonize Platonism and pagan theology, and succeeded sufficiently to inspire the Emperor Julian. Diogenes Laertius put together the lives and opinions of the philosophers in fascinating excerpt and anecdote. Athenaeus of Naucratis, having consumed the libraries of Alexandria, poured his chyme into the Deipnosophists, or “Sophists of the Dinner Table”- a dreary dialogue on foods, sauces, courtesans, philosophers, and words, brightened here and there by some revelation of ancient custom or some reminiscence of great men. Longinus, perhaps of Palmyra, composed a polished essay Peri hypsus, “On the Sublime”; the peculiar pleasure given by literature (runs the argument) is due to the “lifting up” ( ekstasis ) of the reader by the eloquence that comes to a writer from strength of conviction and sincerity of character. Dio Cassius Cocceianus of Bithynian Nicaea, after a life spent in the cursus honorum , began at fifty-five to write his History of Rome (210?); in his seventy-fourth year he completed it, having carried the story down from Romulus to himself. Of its eighty “books” less than half remain, but they fill eight substantial volumes. It is a work of noble scope rather than high quality. It has vivid narratives, revealing speeches, and philosophical asides that are not always platitudinous and conservative. But, like Livy, it is disfigured with “portents”; like Tacitus it is a long brief for the Senatorial opposition; and like all Roman histories it cleaves narrowly to the vicissitudes of politics and war- as if life for a thousand years had been nothing but taxes and death.<\/p>\n
More significant than these honorable men for the historian of the mind is the appearance, in this century, of the romantic novel. It had had a long preparation in the Cyropaideia of Xenophon, the love poems of Callimachus, the legends that had accumulated about Alexander, and the “Milesian Tales” told by Aristides and others in the second century B.C. and afterward. These stories of adventure and love pleased an Ionian populace so classic in tradition but so Oriental in mood, perhaps now Oriental in blood. Petronius in Rome, Apuleius in Africa, Lucian in Greece, Iamblichus in Syria, developed the picaresque romance in varied ways, with no special accent on love. In the first Christian centuries, possibly responding to an increasing audience of women readers, the novel of adventure merged with the romance of love.<\/p>\n
Our oldest extant example is the Aethiopica, or “Egyptian Tales,” of Heliodorus of Emesa. Of its date there is much dispute, but we may provisionally assign it to the third century. It begins in a style honorable with age:<\/p>\n
The day had begun to smile cheerily, and the sun was already brightening the tops of the hills, when a band of men, in arms and appearance pirates, having ascended the summit of a slope that overlooks the Heracleotic mouth of the Nile, paused and surveyed the sea. Finding no sail there to promise them booty, they turned their eyes to the shore beneath them; and this is what they saw. <\/p>\n
At once we meet the rich and handsome youth Theagenes, and the lovely and tearful princess Chariclea; they have been captured by pirates; and there befalls them such a medley of mishaps, misunderstandings, battles, murders, and reunions as might supply a season’s fiction today. Whereas in Petronius and Apuleius the chastity of maidens is a matter of swiftly passing concern, it is here the essence and pivot of the tale: Heliodorus preserves Chariclea’s virginity through a score of narrow escapes, and writes persuasive homilies on the beauty and necessity of feminine virtue. There may be here some Christian influence; indeed, tradition made the author become the Christian bishop of Thessalonica. The Aethiopica unwittingly fathered an endless chain of imitations: here is the model for Cervantes’ Persiles y Sigismunda, the story of Clorinda in Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, and the vast romances of Mme de Scudery; here are the love potions, signs, moans, faintings, and happy endings of a million pleasant tales; here is Clarissa Harlowe 1500 years before Richardson.
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\n The most famous love story in ancient prose was Daphnis and Chloe. Of its author we know only the name Longus; and we merely guess at the third century as his time. Daphnis is exposed at birth, is rescued and reared by a shepherd, and becomes a shepherd in turn. Excellent passages of rural description suggest that Longus, like his poetic model Theocritus, had discovered the country after long residence in the city. Daphnis falls in love with a peasant girl who has also been rescued from infant exposure; they tend their flocks in charming comradeship, bathe together in innocent nudity, and intoxicate each other with an unprecedented kiss. An old neighbor explains their fever to them, and describes from his own youth the sickness of romantic love. “I thought not of my food, I cared not for my drink. I could take no rest, and sleep deserted me. My soul was heavy with sadness, my heart beat quickly, my limbs felt a deadly chill.” In the end their fathers, now wealthy, discover and enrich them; but they ignore their wealth and return to their modest pastoral life. The tale is told with the simplicity of finished art. Translated into supple French by Amyot (1559), it became the model for Saint-Pierre’s Paul and Virginia, and the inspiration of countless paintings, poems, and musical compositions. Akin to it is a fragment of poetry known as Pervigilium Veneris, “The Eve of Venus.” No one knows who wrote it, or when; probably it belongs to this century. The theme is that of Lucretius’ apostrophe and Longus’ romance- that the goddess of love, by inflaming all living things with reckless desire, is the real creator of the world:<\/p>\n
Tomorrow let him love who never loved; Tomorrow let him love who loved before. Fresh spring has come, and sings her amorous song; The world is born anew, and vernal love Drives birds to mate, and all the waiting woods Unloose their tresses to the showers of spring. Tomorrow let him love who never loved, And let him love who loved before. <\/p>\n
So the limpid verse flows on, finding the work of love in the fertilizing rain, in the forms of flowers, in the songs of merry festivals, in the awkward tentatives of desirous youth, in timid trysts amid woodland haunts; and after each stanza the pithy promise returns: Cras amet qui numquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet. Here, in the last great lyric poem of the pagan soul, we hear the trochaic cadence of medieval hymns, and a melodious premonition of the troubadours.<\/p>\n
V. THE ORIENTAL MONARCHY <\/p>\n
When Claudius II died of a pestilence that was decimating Goths and Romans alike (270), the army chose as his successor the son of an Illyrian peasant. Domitius Aurelianus had risen from the lowest ranks by strength of body and will; his nickname was Manu ad ferrum – “hand on sword.” It was a sign of reawakened good sense in the army that it chose a man who exacted as hard a discipline from others as from himself.<\/p>\n
Under his lead the enemies of Rome were repulsed at every point except the Danube. There Aurelian ceded Dacia to the Goths, hoping that they would stand as a barrier between the Empire and ulterior hordes. Perhaps encouraged by this surrender, the Alemanni and the Vandals invaded Italy; but Aurelian in three battles overcame and dispersed them. Meditating distant campaigns, and fearing an assault upon Rome during his absence, he persuaded the Senate to finance, and the guilds to erect, new walls around the capital. Everywhere in the Empire city walls were being built, signifying the weakening of the imperial power and the end of the Roman peace. Preferring offense to defense, Aurelian determined to restore the Empire by attacking Zenobia in the East, and then Tetricus, who had succeeded Postumus as the usurper of sovereignty in Gaul. While his general Probus recovered Egypt from Zenobia’s son, Aurelian marched through the Balkans, crossed the Hellespont, defeated the Queen’s army at Emesa, and besieged her capital. She tried to escape and enlist Persia’s aid, but was captured; the city surrendered and was spared, but Longinus was put to death (272). While the Emperor was leading his army back to the Hellespont, Palmyra revolted and slew the garrison he had left there. He turned about with the speed of Caesar, again besieged and soon took the city; now he abandoned it to pillage by his troops, razed its walls, rerouted its trade, and let it lapse into the desert village that it had been before and is today. Zenobia graced in golden chains Aurelian’s triumph in Rome, and was allowed to spend her remaining years in comparative freedom at Tibur.
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\n In 274 Aurelian defeated Tetricus at Chalons, and returned Gaul, Spain, and Britain to the Empire. Happy at the resumption of its mastery, Rome hailed the victor as restitutor orbis, restorer of the world. Turning to the tasks of peace, he re-established some economic order by reforming the Roman coinage; and reorganized the government by applying to it the same severe discipline that had regenerated the army. Ascribing Rome’s moral and political chaos in some degree to religious disunity, and impressed by the political services of religion in the East, he sought to unite old faiths and new in a monotheistic worship of the sun-god, and of the Emperor as the vicar of that deity on earth. He informed a skeptical army and Senate that it was the god, and not their choice or confirmation, that had made him Emperor. He built at Rome a resplendent Temple of the Sun, in which, he hoped, the Baal of Emesa and the god of Mithraism would merge. Monarchy and monotheism were advancing side by side, each seeking to make the other its aide. Aurelian’s religious policy suggested that the power of the state was falling, that of religion rising; kings were now kings by the grace of God. This was the Oriental conception of government, old in Egypt, Persia, and Syria; in accepting it Aurelian advanced that Orientalization of the monarchy which had begun with Elagabalus and would complete itself in Diocletian and Constantine.<\/p>\n
In 275, as Aurelian was leading an army across Thrace to settle matters with Persia, a group of officers, misled into thinking that he planned to execute them, assassinated him. Shocked by its own accumulated crimes, the army asked the Senate to appoint a successor. None wanted an honor that so regularly heralded death; finally Tacitus, being seventy-five years old, consented to serve. He claimed descent from the historian, and illustrated all the virtues preached by that laconic pessimist; but he died of exhaustion six months after taking the crown. The soldiers, repenting their repentance, resumed the prerogative of force, and saluted Probus as emperor (276).<\/p>\n
It was an excellent choice and a merited name, for Probus stood out in courage and integrity. He expelled the Germans from Gaul, cleared the Vandals from Illyricum, built a wall between the Rhine and the Danube, frightened the Persians with a word, and gave peace to the whole Roman realm. Soon, he pledged his people, there would be no arms, no armies, and no wars, and the reign of law would cover the earth. As a prelude to this utopia he compelled his troops to clear wastelands, drain marshes, plant vines, and perform other public works. The army resented this sublimation, murdered him (282), mourned him, and built a monument to his memory.<\/p>\n
It now hailed as imperator one Diocles, the son of a Dalmatian freedman. Diocletian, as he henceforth called himself, had risen by brilliant talents and flexible scruples to the consulate, a proconsulate, and command of the palace guards. He was a man of genius, less skilled in war than in statesmanship. He came to the throne after a period of anarchy worse than that which had prevailed from the Gracchi to Antony; like Augustus, he pacified all parties, protected all frontiers, extended the role of government, and based his rule on the aid and sanction of religion. Augustus had created the Empire, Aurelian had saved it; Diocletian reorganized it. His first vital decision revealed the state of the realm and the waning of Rome. He abandoned the city as a capital, and made his emperial headquarters at Nicomedia in Asia Minor, a few miles south of Byzantium. The Senate still met in Rome, the consuls went through their ritual, the games roared on, the streets still bore the noisome pullulation of humanity; but power and leadership had gone from this center of economic and moral decay. Diocletian based his move on military necessity: Europe and Asia must be defended, and could not be defended from a city so far south of the Alps. Hence he appointed a capable general, Maximian, as his coruler (286), charging him with defense of the West; and Maximian made not Rome but Milan his capital. Six years later, to further facilitate administration and defense, each of the two Augusti chose a “Caesar” as his aide and successor: Diocletian selected Galerius, who made his capital at Sirinium (Mitrovica on the Save), and was responsible for the Danube provinces; and Maximian appointed Constantius Chlorus (the Pale), who made his capital at Augusta Trevirorum (Treves). Each Augustus pledged himself to retire after twenty years in favor of his Caesar, who would then appoint a “Caesar” to aid and succeed him in turn. Each Augustus gave his daughter in marriage to his “Caesar,” adding the ties of blood to those of law. In this way, Diocletian hoped, wars of succession would be avoided, government would recapture continuity and authority, and the Empire would stand on guard at four strategic points against internal rebellion and external attack. It was a brilliant arrangement, which had every virtue but unity and freedom.
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\n The monarchy was divided, but it was absolute. Each law of each ruler was issued in the name of all four, and was valid for the realm. The edict of the rulers became law at once, without the sanction of the Senate at Rome. All governmental officials were appointed by the rulers, and a gigantic bureaucracy spread its coils around the state. To further fortify the system, Diocletian developed the cult of the Emperor’s genius into a personal worship of himself as the earthly embodiment of Jupiter, while Maximian modestly consented to be Hercules; wisdom and force had come down from heaven to restore order and peace on earth. Diocletian assumed a diadem- a broad white fillet set with pearls- and robes of silk and gold; his shoes were studded with precious gems; he kept himself aloof in his palace, and required visitors to pass the gantlet of ceremonious eunuchs and titled chamberlains, and to kneel and kiss the hem of his robe. He was a man of the world, and doubtless smiled in private at these myths and forms; but his throne lacked the legitimacy of time, and he hoped to buttress it, to check the turbulence of the populace and the revolts of the army, by enduing himself with divinity and awe. “He had himself called dominus,” says Aurelius Victor, “but he behaved like a father.” This adoption of Oriental despotism by the son of a slave, this identification of god and king, meant the final failure of republican institutions in antiquity, the surrender of the fruits of Marathon; it was a reversion, like Alexander’s, to the forms and theories of Achaemenid and Egyptian courts, of Ptolemaic, Parthian, and Sassanid kings. From this Orientalized monarchy came the structure of Byzantine and European kingdoms till the French Revolution. All that was needed now was to ally the Oriental monarch in an Oriental capital with an Oriental faith. Byzantinism began with Diocletian. <\/p>\n
VI. THE SOCIALISM OF DIOCLETIAN <\/p>\n
He proceeded with Caesarian energy to remake every branch of the government. He transformed the aristocracy by raising to it many civil or military officials, and making it a hereditary caste with an Oriental gradation of dignities, profusion of titles, and complexity of etiquette. He and his colleagues redivided the Empire into ninety-six provinces grouped into seventy-two dioceses and four prefectures, and appointed civil and military rulers for each division. It was a frankly centralized state, which considered local autonomy, like democracy, a luxury of security and peace, and excused its dictatorship by the needs of actual or imminent war. Wars were waged, and with brilliant success; Constantius recovered revolted Britain, and Galerius defeated the Persians so decisively that they surrendered Mesopotamia and five provinces beyond the Tigris. For a generation Rome’s enemies were held at bay. In years of peace Diocletian, with his aides, faced the problems of economic decay. To overcome depression and prevent revolution he substituted a managed economy for the law of supply and demand. He established a sound currency by guaranteeing to the gold coinage a fixed weight and purity which it retained in the Eastern Empire till 1453. He distributed food to the poor at half the market price or free, and undertook extensive public works to appease the unemployed. To ensure the supply of necessaries for the cities and the armies, he brought many branches of industry under complete state control, beginning with the import of grain; he persuaded the shipowners, merchants, and crews engaged in this trade to accept such control in return for governmental guarantee of security in employment and returns. The state had long since owned most quarries, salt deposits, and mines; now it forbade the export of salt, iron, gold, wine, grain, or oil from Italy, and strictly regulated the importation of these articles. It went on to control establishments producing for the army, the bureaucracy, or the court. In munition factories, textile mills, and bakeries the government required a minimum product, bought this at its own price, and made the associations of manufacturers responsible for carrying out orders and specifications. If this procedure proved inadequate, it completely nationalized these factories, and manned them with labor bound to the job. Gradually, under Aurelian and Diocletian, the majority of industrial establishments and guilds in Italy were brought under the control of the corporate state. Butchers, bakers, masons, builders, glass blowers, ironworkers, engravers, were ruled by detailed governmental regulations. The “various corporations,” says Rostovtzeff, “were more like minor supervisors of their own concerns on behalf of the state than their owners; they were themselves in bondage to the officials of the various departments, and to the commanders of the various military units.” The associations of tradesmen and artisans received various privileges from the government, and often exerted pressure upon its policies; in return they served as organs of national administration, helped to regiment labor, and collected taxes for the state from their membership. Similar methods of governmental control were extended, in the late third and early fourth centuries, to provincial armament, food, and clothing industries. “In every province,” says Paul-Louis, “special procuratores superintended industrial activities. In every large town the state became a powerful employer… standing head and shoulders above the private industrialists, who were in any case crushed by taxation.”
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\n Such a system could not work without price control. In 301 Diocletian and his colleagues issued an Edictum de pretiis, dictating maximum legal prices or wages for all important articles or services in the Empire. Its preamble attacks monopolists who, in an “economy of scarcity,” had kept goods from the market to raise prices: <\/p>\n
Who is… so devoid of human feeling as not to see that immoderate prices are widespread in the markets of our cities, and that the passion for gain is lessened neither by plentiful supplies nor by fruitful years?- so that… evil men reckon it their loss if abundance comes. There are men whose aim it is to restrain general prosperity… to seek usurious and ruinous returns…. Avarice rages throughout the world…. Wherever our armies are compelled to go for the common safety, profiteers extort prices not merely four or eight times the normal, but beyond any words to describe. Sometimes the soldier must exhaust his salary and his bonus in one purchase, so that the contributions of the whole world to support the armies fall to the abominable profits of thieves. <\/p>\n
The Edict was until our time the most famous example of an attempt to replace economic laws by governmental decrees. Its failure was rapid and complete. Tradesmen concealed their commodities, scarcities became more acute than before, Diocletian himself was accused of conniving at a rise in prices, riots occurred, and the Edict had to be relaxed to restore production and distribution. it was finally revoked by Constantine. The weakness of this managed economy lay in its administrative cost. The required bureaucracy was so extensive that Lactantius, doubtless with political license, estimated it at half the population. The bureaucrats found their task too great for human integrity, their surveillance too sporadic for the evasive ingenuity of men. To support the bureaucracy, the court, the army, the building program, and the dole, taxation rose to unprecedented peaks of ubiquitous continuity. As the state had not yet discovered the plan of public borrowing to conceal its wastefulness and postpone its reckoning, the cost of each year’s operations had to be met from each year’s revenue. To avoid returns in depreciating currencies, Diocletian directed that, where possible, taxes should be collected in kind: taxpayers were required to transport their tax quotas to governmental warehouses, and a laborious organization was built up to get the goods thence to their final destination. In each municipality the decuriones or municipal officials were held financially responsible for any shortage in the payment of the taxes assessed upon their communities. Since every taxpayer sought to evade taxes, the state organized a special force of revenue police to examine every man’s property and income; torture was used upon wives, children, and slaves to make them reveal the hidden wealth or earnings of the household; and severe penalties were enacted for evasion. Towards the end of the third century, and still more in the fourth, flight from taxes became almost epidemic in the Empire. The well to do concealed their riches, local aristocrats had themselves reclassified as humiliores to escape election to municipal office, artisans deserted their trades, peasant proprietors left their overtaxed holdings to become hired men, many villages and some towns (e.g., Tiberias in Palestine) were abandoned because of high assessments; at last, in the fourth century, thousands of citizens fled over the border to seek refuge among the barbarians. It was probably to check this costly mobility, to ensure a proper flow of food to armies and cities, and of taxes to the state, that Diocletian resorted to measures that in effect established serfdom in fields, factories, and guilds. Having made the landowner responsible, through tax quotas in kind, for the productivity of his tenants, the government ruled that a tenant must remain on his land till his arrears of debt or tithes should be paid. We do not know the date of this historic decree; but in 332 a law of Constantine assumed and confirmed it, and made the tenant adscriptitius, “bound in writing” to the soil he tilled; he could not leave it without the consent of the owner; and when it was sold, he and his household were sold with it.” He made no protest that has come down to us; perhaps the law was presented to him as a guarantee of security, as in Germany today. In this and other ways agriculture passed in the third century from slavery through freedom to serfdom, and entered the Middle Ages.<\/p>\n
Similar means of compelling stability were used in industry. Labor was “frozen” to its job, forbidden to pass from one shop to another without governmental consent. Each collegium or guild was bound to its trade and its assigned task, and no man might leave the guild in which he had been enrolled. Membership in one guild or another was made compulsory on all persons engaged in commerce and industry; and the son was required to follow the trade of his father. When any man wished to leave his place or occupation for another, the state reminded him that Italy was in a state of siege by the barbarians, and that every man must stay at his post.<\/p>\n
In the year 305, in impressive ceremonies at Nicomedia and Milan, Diocletian and Maximian abdicated their power, and Galerius and Constantius Chlorus became Augusti, emperors respectively of the East and the West. Diocletian, still but fifty-five years of age, lost himself in his immense palace at Spalato, spent there the remaining eight years of his life, and saw without interference the breakdown of his tetrarchy in civil war. When Maximian urged him to return to power and end the strife, he replied that if Maximian could see the excellent cabbages he was growing in his garden he would not ask him to sacrifice such content for the pursuit and cares of power. He deserved his cabbages and his rest. He had ended a half century of anarchy, had re-established government and law, had restored stability to industry and security to trade, had tamed Persia and stilled the barbarians, and, despite a few murders, had been, all in all, a sincere legislator and a just judge. It is true that he had established an expensive bureaucracy, had ended local autonomy, had punished opposition harshly, had persecuted the church that might have been a helpful ally in his healing work, and had turned the population of the Empire into a caste society with an unlettered peasantry at one end and an absolute monarch at the other. But the conditions that Rome faced would not permit liberal policies; Marcus Aurelius and Alexander Severus had tried these and failed. Confronted by enemies on every side, the Roman state did what all nations must do in crucial wars; it accepted the dictatorship of a strong leader, taxed itself beyond tolerance, and put individual liberty aside until collective liberty was secured. Diocletian had, with more cost but under harder circumstances, repeated the achievement of Augustus. His contemporaries and his posterity, mindful of what they had escaped, called him the “Father of the Golden Age.” Constantine entered the house that Diocletian built.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CHAPTER XXIX, from the third volume of the Story of Civilization: Caesar and Christ, A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from their beginnings to A.D. 325 Copyright by Will Durant. See the book at Amazon — I. A SEMITIC DYNASTY ON January 1, 193, a few hours after the assassination of Commodus, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6702,6707],"tags":[7803,7650,7804,7770,7651,7805,7683,7806,7807,7808,7809,7810,7811,7812,7813,7654,7656],"class_list":["post-3519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thechrist","category-studies-thechristcontents","tag-antonines","tag-caesar-and-christ","tag-dio-cassius","tag-drachmas","tag-durant","tag-embroideries","tag-freedmen","tag-gold-and-silver","tag-imperial-palace","tag-indignity","tag-legions","tag-ordinary-man","tag-pannonia","tag-praetorian-guard","tag-prefect","tag-roman-civilization","tag-will-durant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3519\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}