The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  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).

  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.

  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 Sirmium (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 (Trèves). 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.

  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.”40 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.

  VI. THE SOCIALISM OF DIOCLETIAN

  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.41 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.42 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.43 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.44 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.45 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.46 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.”47 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.4
8 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.”49

  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:

  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.V 50

  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,52 riots occurred, and the Edict had to be relaxed to restore production and distribution.53 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.54 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.55 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.56

  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.57 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;58 at last, in the fourth century, thousands of citizens fled over the border to seek refuge among the barbarians.59

  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.60 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.

  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.61 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.62 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.

  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.63

  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.

  * * *

  I He called himself so from the long Gallic tunic that he wore; his real name was Bassianius; as emperor he styled himself Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Caracalla.

  II Wrongly transformed by Latin writers into Heliogabalus—“the sun-god.”

  III The “colonate” probably had a major beginning when Aurelius settled captive Germans on imperial estates (172), and gave them hereditary possession on condition of an annual tax, military service at call, and an agreement not to leave their allotment without permission of the state. Similar conditions were laid upon Roman veterans receiving frontier lands, especially in the agri decumates—“tithe-paying fields”—along the Danube and Rhine.21 A great extension of this imperial colonate occurred under Septimius Severus, who divided the lands he had appropriated into parcels tilled by tenants paying taxes in money or kind. As Septimius imitated the Ptolemies, so private landowners imitated him; the colonate began with monarchs, and produced a feudalism that undermined monarchy.

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sp; IV The oldest mss. assign the essay in one case to “Dionysius Longinus,” in the other to “Dionysius or Longinus,” without further clue. The only literary Longinus known to us from antiquity is Cassius Longinus, Zenobia’s premier. He was famous throughout the Empire for his learning; Eunapius called him “a living library,” and Porphyry ranked him “the first of critics.”36

  V Some of the “ceilings” established in the Edict reveal the level of prices and wages in A.D. 301. Wheat, lentils, peas, $3.50 a bu.; barley, rye, beans, $2.10 a bu.; wine, 21-26 cents a pint; olive oil, 10.5 cents a pint; pork, 10.5 cents a lb., beef or mutton, 7 cents; chickens, 2 for 52.5 cents; dormice, 10 for 35 cents; best cabbage or lettuce, 5 heads for 3.5 cents; green onions, 25 for 3.5 cents; best snails, 20 for 3.5 cents; large apples or peaches, 10 for 3.5 cents; figs, 25 for 3.5 cents; hair, 5 cents a lb.; shoes, 62 cents to $1.38 a pair. Wages of farm labor, 23-46 cents, plus keep, per day; stonemasons, carpenters, blacksmiths, bakers, 46 cents plus keep; barbers, $1.75 cents per man; scribes, 23 cents per 100 lines; elementary teachers, 46 cents per pupil per month; teachers of Greek or Latin literature, or geometry, $1.84 per pupil per month; lawyers for pleading a case, $7.36.51

  CHAPTER XXX

  The Triumph of Christianity

  A.D. 306-325

  I. THE WAR OF CHURCH AND STATE