The Diocletianic World

The Roman Empire into which Constantine was born had just been pulled back from the brink by Diocletian, who refounded imperial rule on a college of four emperors — the tetrarchy — and reorganized the army, the provinces, the coinage, and the sacred aura of the throne. Constantine’s father Constantius was one of these four; the young Constantine grew up at the persecuting court of the East. This file sets that world in place.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Third-Century Crisis

The empire of the mid-third century had nearly disintegrated. Between the murder of Severus Alexander in 235 and the accession of Diocletian in 284, some twenty or more men claimed the purple, most of them dying by violence; the frontiers on the Rhine, the Danube, and the Persian border were repeatedly broken; the coinage was debased into near-worthlessness; and the western and eastern provinces spun off into the breakaway Gallic and Palmyrene empires before being reconquered (Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay, AD 180–395, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2014, chs. 5–7; Barnes, The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982, on the chronology). It was into the last years of this recovery that Constantine was born, around 272, at Naissus in the province of Moesia (modern Niš, Serbia) — a region on the militarized Danube frontier that produced a whole line of soldier-emperors (Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, on the birth; Lenski, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, ch. 1). [Disputed: Constantine's year of birth is not recorded; ancient and modern estimates range from c. 271 to c. 285, with most scholars settling on c. 272–273 on the basis of his age at death and the sequence of his career (Barnes, *The New Empire*, 1982; Lenski, *Cambridge Companion*, 2012). The traditional 27 February is his birthday, not the year.]

Diocletian and the Tetrarchy

The recovery was consolidated by Diocletian, an Illyrian officer proclaimed emperor by the army in 284, whose reign (284–305) refounded the Roman state. Recognizing that one man could no longer defend a frontier that ran from Britain to Mesopotamia, Diocletian in 285–286 raised his fellow-officer Maximian to share the rule, and in 293 completed the system historians call the tetrarchy (“rule of four”): two senior emperors styled Augusti (Diocletian in the East, Maximian in the West), each with a junior colleague and designated heir styled Caesar — Galerius under Diocletian, Constantius (called Chlorus, “the pale”) under Maximian (Barnes, The New Empire, 1982, on the tetrarchic structure and dates; Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay, 2014, ch. 9). The four emperors divided the defense of the empire between them while maintaining, in theory, a single collegial imperial will; the arrangement was sealed by dynastic marriages, and its ideology presented the tetrarchs as a divinely sanctioned brotherhood under the patronage of Jupiter (for Diocletian and Galerius, the Iovii) and Hercules (for Maximian and Constantius, the Herculii) (Rees, Diocletian and the Tetrarchy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).

Constantine’s father Constantius thus became, in 293, Caesar of the West, governing Gaul and Britain from Trier. The dynastic logic of the tetrarchy required Constantius to set aside Helena, Constantine’s mother, and marry Maximian’s stepdaughter Theodora — a fact that bears on Helena’s contested status (see The Life of Helena). The young Constantine, meanwhile, was sent east, effectively as a hostage to the loyalty of his father, to be raised at the courts of Diocletian and Galerius at Nicomedia (Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, on Constantine’s years in the East; Lenski, Cambridge Companion, 2012, ch. 3). There he received a Latin and Greek education, served in the imperial guard, and — as Eusebius later stressed — witnessed at first hand the events of the Great Persecution launched from that very court (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 1.19; trans. Cameron and Hall, 1999).

The Reorganized State

Diocletian’s reforms went far beyond the imperial college. He roughly doubled the number of provinces, grouping them into larger dioceses under vicars; separated civil from military commands; enlarged the army; attempted to stabilize prices with the famous Edict on Maximum Prices (301); and reformed the coinage and the tax system onto a new footing (the iugatio–capitatio) (Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay, 2014, ch. 9; Corcoran, The Empire of the Tetrarchs, Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). Above all he transformed the character of the throne itself: the emperor was withdrawn behind an elaborate ceremonial, addressed with the sacred formulae of a semi-divine autocrat, and presented as the earthly agent of the gods whose favor guaranteed the empire’s survival. This sacralized monarchy is the political form Constantine inherited and would turn to Christian use; the symphonia of a Christian emperor and the Church (see The Byzantine Church) is unthinkable without the Diocletianic refounding of the imperial office that preceded it (Dagron, Emperor and Priest, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, on the continuity and transformation).

The Religious Program

The tetrarchy staked its legitimacy on the pax deorum — the peace with the gods secured by proper public cult. Diocletian’s regime accordingly pursued religious conformity with a new intensity: an edict against the Manichaeans (probably 302) treated a foreign cult as a threat to the Roman order, and the same logic turned, in 303, against the Christians, whose refusal of the public sacrifices was read as endangering the divine favor on which the whole restored empire depended (Corcoran, The Empire of the Tetrarchs, 1996; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, ch. 2). The Great Persecution was thus not an aberration but the sharpest expression of the tetrarchic ideology — the demand that the recovered empire be united in the worship of its protecting gods (see The Great Persecution).

Constantine grew up inside this system and at its persecuting center. When he fled Nicomedia in 305–306 to join his father in the West — riding hard, according to Lactantius, and maiming the post-horses behind him to prevent pursuit (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 24; trans. Creed, 1984) — he carried out of the East both a soldier’s training in the Diocletianic art of rule and a first-hand knowledge of what the persecution had cost the Church. The empire he would come to rule alone was Diocletian’s creation; the use he would make of it was his own.

See Also

References

  • Barnes, Timothy D. Constantine and Eusebius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
  • Barnes, Timothy D. The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. (Chronology and prosopography of the tetrarchy.)
  • Corcoran, Simon. The Empire of the Tetrarchs: Imperial Pronouncements and Government, AD 284–324. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
  • Dagron, Gilbert. Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium. Trans. Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
  • Eusebius of Caesarea. Life of Constantine. Trans. Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.
  • Lactantius. De mortibus persecutorum (On the Deaths of the Persecutors). Ed. and trans. J. L. Creed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
  • Lenski, Noel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  • Potter, David S. The Roman Empire at Bay, AD 180–395. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2014.
  • Rees, Roger. Diocletian and the Tetrarchy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.