Ronald Syme, the author of the magisterial and aptly named The Roman Revolution on Augustus’s rise to power, was well aware that the new regime was a monarchy, but his focus on the prosopography of the senatorial aristocracy led him into a blind alley: “A monarchy rules through an oligarchy.” (Syme 1939, p. 8.) He continues: “In all ages, whatever the form and name of government or whatever may be the name and theory of the constitution, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the façade.” (Syme 1939, 7, 15.) Identifying monarchy with its diametric opposite, oligarchy, in this sweeping assertion is a serious logical category error.
“The First Emperor”
The section in Mary Beard’s SPQR headed “The first emperor” is not about Augustus or even Julius Caesar, but Pompey. “Pompey,” we read, “…has a good claim to be called the first Roman emperor.” (Beard 2016, p. 273.) We are then treated to a catalogue of the honors and accolades showered upon Pompey. By the middle of the first century BCE, we are told, the stakes and “…the resources of cash and manpower available (were) so much larger that the rise of men such as Pompey was more or less unstoppable.” (Ibid., p. 277.) Beard seems to assume that, had Julius Caesar not got the better of Pompey, he might have ended up in a monarchical role himself. There is very little evidence to back up this assumption. Unlike Caesar, Pompey certainly never identified with any particular political tendency. He was essentially a military man and a very good one too, it would seem. He was essentially an equal opportunity narcissist, happy to accept triumphs, honors, and kudos from any source. But did he really want to rule over Rome as a monarch, and would he even have known what to do had he been placed in that position? Elected consul in 70 BCE, Pompey promised to disband his army after his second triumph, and he kept his word though he could have seized power instead had he so wished. And, when as consul he had to preside over the Senate, such was his ignorance of the procedure that he had to ask a friend to jot down some pointers for his benefit. Much later, in 52 BCE, when he was made sole consul in the Optimate interest, Pompey asked the arch-conservative Cato the Younger to share power with him and advise him, which Cato agreed to do, but only in a private capacity (Plutarch, Pompey, 54; Cato the Younger, 47–49). And Pompey then brought his father-in-law in as his colleague for the last five months of his consulship.
In short, there is really no reason to believe that Pompey was aiming to become the first emperor. But it is not surprising that writers of largely narrative history, with inevitable concentration on individuals, should place undue emphasis on them at the expense of the bigger picture.
An even more egregious example of this tendency than in regard to Pompey is Mary Beard’s similar assumption about the coins issued by the conspirator Marcus Brutus: “The portrayal of a living person on a Roman coin was taken as a sign of autocratic power.” (Beard, p. 295.) In fact, however, as pointed out above, Brutus’s coinage was so replete with traditional republican, aristocratic, and anti-monarchical symbolism as to make it inconceivable that he was aiming at “autocratic power” for himself.
2 Diocletian Hammer of the Aristocracy
The Emperor Septimius Severus (r. 193–211) is famously said to have advised his two sons, Caracalla and Geta, shortly before his death: “Be harmonious (between yourselves), enrich the soldiers, scorn all others.” (Cassius Dio, 77.15). Caracalla soon got rid of his brother and behaved arrogantly toward most other people though, in 212, by the Constitutio Antoniniana, he extended Roman citizenship to all free male inhabitants of the empire. As his father had advised, his main concern was the army though his extension of citizenship actually had a detrimental effect on military recruitment. The army was made up of legions, recruited from Roman citizens, and auxilia, drawn from peregrini, non-citizen provincials, who became citizens automatically after twenty-five years’ service. After 212, however, there was no longer any incentive for peregrini to enlist, and more “barbarians” were recruited than ever before.
Between Caracalla’s assassination in 217 and the accession of Diocletian in 284, a succession of emperors met a similar fate. The period from 235 to 284 is known as the Crisis of the Third Century when the Roman Empire’s very existence was threatened by a combination of threats, foreign, domestic, military, political, and economic.
Diocletian’s solution stabilized the Empire, at least temporarily. As a military man, his focus was primarily on defense and security. By sharing his power with three other emperors in the so-called tetrarchy (rule of four) and by greatly increasing the number of provinces, and separating military and civil commands, he secured the frontiers while tightening the administration of the Empire. The Christian writer Lactantius (c.250–c. 325) went so far as to claim that, under Diocletian, there were more men on the government’s payroll than taxpayers! (Lactantius, Mort. Pers., 7.3). This was an exaggeration, but modern estimates still suggest that Diocletian doubled the size of the civil service from about 15,000 to 30,000. (Treadgold 1997, p. 19.) On the basis of a population of between 50 and 65 million, this averages out at about one official per 2,000 inhabitants. (Jones 1964, p. 594. Cf. Bagnall 1987, p. 66.)
The corollary to this was the compilation of the Gregorian and Hermogenian Codes under Diocletian’s direction, codification being a novelty at the time, which was to burgeon greatly in the future, right up to the present day. Diocletian took very seriously his responsibility as the fount of all law, and there are about 1,200 rescripts still surviving, probably only a fraction of those issued, chiefly from the period 293–294 alone. (See S. Connolly 2010.) Rescripts are legal responses, probably drafted by professional government lawyers in the scrinium a libellis (imperial secretariat), to petitions from people of varying degrees all around the Empire. (See Honoré 1979, pp. 51–64.)
Men of senatorial origin had a monopoly on provincial governorships under Augustus. This was one of the chief ways that this master politician was able to placate this important class, leading members of which had been responsible for that cataclysmic event on the Ides of March 44 BCE. As time went by, emperor after emperor continued to dilute the senatorial order with men of their own choosing from outside the order and, increasingly, from outside Italy. In the third century, emperors started appointing non-senators to governorships without even bothering to dunk them in the curia (senate-house) first. Diocletian completed this process, largely eliminating members of the senatorial order from positions of any importance.
Principate to Dominate
Diocletian’s accession to power in 284 is an important watershed in the conventional chronology of the Roman Empire, marking the end of the Augustan Principate and the beginning of a new form of autocratic monarchy labeled by modern historians the Dominate, or simply as the beginning of the Later Roman Empire, or in French, as the transition from Le Haut-Empire to Le Bas-Empire. Adherents of the “World of Late Antiquity” school trace Late Antiquity as far back as to the period around the year 150. Oxford University in its wisdom also used to designate 284 as marking the beginning of its “Modern History Schools” syllabus!
My own view is that, though Diocletian’s rule marks an important break with the past, it also represents the culmination of trends that can be traced back to the beginning of the Principate, including the sidelining of the senatorial aristocracy, which, however, was reversed in the West under Constantine, as is shown in Chapter 3.
Pomp and Ceremony
The pomp and ceremony associated with Diocletian’s court are among the main reasons for the image of autocracy conjured up by his name. Here, for example, is a quotation from Sextus Aurelius Victor, writing in 361, stressing the outward trappings of Diocletian’s rule that supposedly differentiated it from those of his predecessors: “He was the first to seek a robe made of gold and desired a large amount of silk, purple dye, and
