Rome: An Empire's Story (41 page)

(Zosimus,
New History
1.1.1–2)

Emperors and Christians

The Emperor Diocletian ruled from
AD
284 to 305. Constantine I from 306 to 337. They were not the only emperors who reigned during this half-century, and civil wars characterized the reigns of both. But the length of their reigns is a sure sign of increased imperial stability. Another sign is that the frontiers, although never peaceful, held. The military crisis that had nearly resulted in imperial meltdown seemed to have been averted. It was once common to write about the reigns of these two emperors in terms of transformation, reform, and recovery. But that is too simple. The institutions of the Roman Empire were indeed transformed: but many of their ‘reforms’ were unsuccessful, and the recovery was partial and, in the west, short-lived.

One transformation in particular affects all histories of this period. During the second and early third centuries
AD
the religious diversity of the empire had gradually resolved into a world of competing religions. How that happened is the subject of the next chapter, but its consequences have to be explored here. During the nadir of the military crisis, the 250s, the emperors Decius and Valerian had each tried to use general hostility against Christians to create a wider sense of imperial unity. Diocletian’s response was more extreme. His Great Persecution was a systematic attempt to eliminate Christianity, and it traumatized great swathes of the empire between
AD
303 and 311. Constantine’s tactic was the opposite, to first tolerate the new religion, then protect, sponsor, patronize, and eventually seek to regulate and unify it through an ecumenical council held in 325 at Nicaea. History still remembers Diocletian as the Persecutor, Constantine as the Convert. Greek and Roman historians took radically different views of these events, depending on whether they embraced the new religion (as did the bishop Eusebius of Caesarea who invented a church history and wrote a panegyrical life of Constantine) or whether they deplored the abandonment of the ancestral religion, as did Zosimus whose verdict stands at the head of this chapter.

The divided reaction of historians mirrored the divided response of the empire’s elite. Before the end of the third century
A
D there had been many kinds of historical writing in Greek and in Latin—local and global histories, total histories of Rome, contemporary histories, and histories that were more like a series of imperial biographies placed end to end. Some historians and biographers stressed the mythological and the marvellous, others were closer to satire and scandal-sheets. But all reflected a set of common ideals
about the role of the emperor. Those ideals were a blend of Greek ideologies of kingship, and Roman notions of good citizenship. Good emperors were just, were successful in battle, deferred to tradition, respected the rights (especially the property rights) of the elite, were modest, merciful, and did not raise new taxes. Their sex lives were dull and unimpeachable. Bad emperors had all the opposite vices: think Caligula, Nero, Domitian, or Commodus.
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Now one new criterion trumped all the others. How did he stand with the Church? Was he a persecutor or a protector, and then later was he orthodox or a heretic?

No historian was neutral. Christians celebrated Constantine as a saint and the second founder of the empire, and they savagely condemned those emperors, like Diocletian and Galerius, whom they remembered most of all as persecutors. Perhaps this is understandable for the generation that lived through the Great Persecution and Constantine’s patronage of the Church. Lactantius was an African rhetor, summoned by Diocletian to teach at his eastern capital of Nicomedia and then sacked in the persecution of 303. But he moved west, and survived to tutor the eldest son of Constantine. Towards the end of his life, Lactantius composed the grisly
On the Deaths of the Persecutors
which recounted the gruesome punishments God reserved for Galerius, Diocletian, and the others. Eusebius and Lactantius offered a new vision of imperial history as part of God’s unfolding plan. Conversely, those writers who were not Christians deplored the decreased support for civic cults, the casual licence given to acts of violence against their temples, and what they saw as the ruinous consequences of abandoning the gods.
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But if we set aside—for just a moment—the matter of their contrasting attitudes to the emergence of competing religions, neither Diocletian nor Constantine was entirely unlike the emperors who had preceded them in the last years of the third century
AD
.

Both, to begin with, were soldier emperors. Like many of the emperors and would-be emperors who rose and fell during the third century, Diocletian (Diocles by birth) originated in the Balkans. Nothing certain is known about him until his entry into history as the commander of the Emperor Numerianus’ bodyguard in 283. Numerianus’ father Carus was a praetorian prefect who had rebelled against Probus in 282. Carus was killed in 283—we do not know how or by whom—and Numerianus ruled for only one year before being murdered in his turn by his own praetorian prefect, Aper, but it was Diocles whom the army hailed as Augustus. So far, so conventional. Equally conventional was Diocletian’s first campaign,
against Carus’ other son (and Numerianus’ co-emperor) Carinus whom he defeated and killed in 285. For most of the next decade he fought, first on the eastern frontier, then on the upper Danube, then back in the east, while his ally Maximian, who came from a similar lowly background also in the Balkans, served first as his Caesar and then as his fellow Augustus, mostly on the western frontier. The collaboration became formalized and more complex in 293 when the two adopted two younger generals, Galerius and Constantius, as their Caesars. The four emperors (the tetrarchs) successfully worked together until 305 when, on Diocletian’s initiative, the two Augusti stepped down, the two Caesars replaced them, and appointed two new Caesars. For most of Diocletian’s more than twenty-year-long reign he and his fellow emperors moved back and forth between bases along the northern and eastern frontiers, and for most of the time they were at war with the enemies of Rome.

The success of the tetrarchs depended in part on the achievements of earlier soldier emperors like Gallienus and Aurelian. Roman armies were now better adapted to war against the northern barbarians, the cities of the east were now fortified bases, and, unlike the emperors of the mid-third century, Diocletian and Maximian were able to fight most of their wars on the frontier or on foreign territory. The great innovation was solidarity within the imperial college. The succession of coups and failed coups which ultimately brought Diocles to power was largely suppressed, although it took a while to control Britain. Diocletian invested heavily in ceremonial and titles, but perhaps it was his military success that ensured he faced fewer challenges. Once secure it was possible for him to make other changes, building more defences, and increasing the size of the army, while in order to support this he modified its command structure, and the way provinces were governed and taxed. These changes were not the implementation of a grand plan, but the cumulation of pragmatic expedients. Many built on the more successful experiments of earlier emperors, all of them were focused on the needs of the army.

The joint abdication of 305 marked the end of consensus. Even before Diocletian’s death, probably in 312, the carefully plotted succession plan began to unravel. Among the changes were the death of Constantius in 306, only a year after his elevation to the rank of Augustus, and the succession of his son Constantine. Constantine the Great himself died in 337, but he was sole emperor for only the last of his three decades in power. Before then, relations between the emperors shifted back and forth for a decade, a decade
in which Constantine himself campaigned against the Franks. By the end of 312 a new pattern had began to emerge. Galerius was dead (devoured by worms if you believe Lactantius, but not before he had formally ended the Great Persecution with an Edict of Toleration); Constantine had won a decisive victory over his rival Maxentius at the battle of the Milvian Bridge which gave him control of Rome; and he had formed an alliance with Licinius, who was able to eliminate his rival Maximin Dia the next year. The alliance with Licinius was a stormy one, but it was not until 325 that Constantine was able to defeat and execute him and rule alone. By then Constantine had celebrated twenty years in power, and begun the creation of a great new capital on the site of Byzantium, to be called Constantinople. The final decade of his life was divided between wars on the Danube. and trying to create a new college of emperors from his three surviving sons (he had had a fourth, Crispus, executed in 326) and nephews. Like Diocletian he had spent much of his reign engaged in foreign wars.

It is difficult to say whether Diocletian spent more energy trying to suppress Christianity than Constantine expended on trying to reconcile its factions. Early after his public sponsorship of Christianity he was drawn into the bitter Donatist schism in Africa, and one reason for the Council of Nicaea was an attempt to develop a single view on the nature of Christ, a response to what became known as the Arian heresy. Christian writers, Eusebius above all, focused their attention on Constantine’s relations with the Church, his personal journey, his building projects, and the Council. Yet like Diocletian before him, he was also concerned with changing the military and civilian command structure, with raising taxes, and with changes to the coinage. Diocletian and Constantine were both extraordinarily successful members of a new species of emperor, one that had emerged during the third century. It is convenient to call them soldier emperors, but they were also exceptional managers who seem to have thought of the empire first, rather than the city of Rome, let alone the Senate and people. Neither spent much time in the interior of the empire or Rome itself. The old aristocratic orders of senators and equestrians were marginal to their attention. As for religion, perhaps they were motivated by feelings of resentment or passionate conversion. Who can say? But their policies—persecution, toleration, and promotion alike—were all about imperial unity. Constantine in particular had plenty of opportunities to play the zealot, especially against heretics, but he resisted them all. Bishops felt themselves influential at his court—and so some were—but it is difficult to identify any area of policy
where Constantine’s commitment to Christ did not also serve his vision for the empire.

The only emperor after Constantine who was not a Christian was his nephew Julian, born just six years before Constantine’s death in 337. Julian’s childhood was lived against the background of civil wars conducted among Constantine’s heirs. Within a year of Constantine’s death two of his nephews had been murdered and the empire was divided between Constans, Constantine II, and Constantius II. Constans defeated and killed Constantine II in 340 and for ten years divided the empire with Constantius II. Constans himself was killed by a usurper in 350. By 351 Constantius II was sole Augustus, a position he held until his death in 361. For much of this time Julian was kept out of public life. But when his brother Gallus was made junior emperor, with the title of Caesar, in 351 his own return to public life must have seemed inevitable. Gallus was executed for treachery in 354. The next year Julian was made Caesar in turn and given a command in Gaul. We can only speculate on the effects on Julian of this history of familial murders and intrigue. But we do know that in his twenties, partly as a result of his own reading and partly under the influence of the philosopher Maximus of Ephesus, he rejected the (Arian) Christianity in which he had been brought up and secretly embraced—not too strong a term in his case—a very idiosyncratic and highly intellectualized version of what he regarded as the ancestral religion, a broad polytheism in which the gods of the Romans, the Greeks, and the Jews all had their place. He called this Hellenism. It is difficult for us to avoid the name the Christians gave it, paganism. But the cults of the ancestral gods never formed the kind of connected organized entity we usually mean by religion except in the imagination of Christian writers. It is an irony of Julian’s vision that the nature of the paganism he tried to restore and institutionalize, both its cosmological coherence and the charitable institutions he wished to encourage, is one of the clearest testimonies of his Christian upbringing.

Given the history of Constantine’s family no one can have been surprised that in 361 Julian rebelled against Constantius II. Only the latter’s death prevented another civil war. But when it transpired that Julian was not only not a Christian, but was a passionate advocate of the ancestral religion, the empire went into shock. Along with wars against Persia and hostilities with his brothers, Constantius II had also been embroiled in the great religious controversy of the age, inspired by the teaching of Arius, that Jesus, the Son, was completely subordinated to the Father. Constantine had tried to impose
a compromise at the great council of bishops assembled at Nicaea in 325, but the controversy simmered on. Now, suddenly, all that was swept away. Julian’s court honoured Neoplatonist philosophers, not bishops. During his brief reign he wrote feverishly about his ideas, tried to ban Christians from teaching, restored funding to civic cults, planned to rebuild Jerusalem, and attempted to reorganize the old cults as a kind of counter-church. The opposition he faced from all sides showed the deep penetration of Christian ideology and the empire, especially among the ruling classes. Would Julian have made more progress if he had not died in 363 of a wound sustained in a new Persian war? It is impossible to say. As it was, the memory of ‘the Apostate’ was reviled, and his successors threw themselves enthusiastically back into their struggles with the bishops over orthodoxy.

Did that settle it? The reign of Julian seemed to have showed that although the old gods still had some devotees, Constantine’s transformation of the empire’s institutions had gone too far to be reversed. But proponents of the ancestral religion had one last moment in which to denounce Christ and his followers. For in the century that followed Julian’s death, a slow-moving disaster engulfed the Roman Empire. Diocletian, Constantine, Constantius II, Julian, and his successor Jovian all fought wars against the Persians and these continued into the fifth century. These wars consumed resources and lives without leading to any radical shifts of power between the ‘brother emperors’. Over time the two empires would come to seem more and more alike.
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Conflict between them would continue off and on until the Persian Empire was destroyed by the Arabs in the seventh century, while the Romans narrowly escaped the same fate. But the avalanche fell from the north, not the east. The Roman recovery at the end of the third century had seen Gallienus, Claudius II, Aurelian, Probus, and finally Diocletian campaigning against various northern peoples. The invasions of the empire had been stopped, but at the cost of the surrender of Trajan’s Dacian provinces in what is now Romania. The empire was now bordered by peoples transformed by generations of contact with Rome, contact that included trade and military service as well as war. There were even missionaries operating north of the frontier. The Goths were partly converted to (Arian) Christianity in the middle of the fourth century. But at the end of the century these peoples themselves found themselves under pressure from the north and east.