THE BIRTH OF CHRISTENDOM
Rescue – and rescue again
At two critical points in its history, the Roman Empire was given an outstanding pair of leaders, one effectively succeeding the other in each case. The first of these leaders was Julius Caesar. As the Roman Republic was disintegrating, he overcame rivals such as Pompey to become dictator in 48 BC. More than just an inspired general, he could see how to restore Rome and take her on to greatness. Lacking the requisite wisdom for the task, though, he was assassinated (44 BC), before he’d had time to put his plans into effect. After another struggle for power, his nephew and heir, Octavian – Caesar Augustus – became the first official Emperor. An extraordinary man with a wide range of gifts, Octavian held sole power from 31 BC to AD 14. Julius Caesar’s vision – supplemented by his own – Caesar Augustus turned into reality, and in his time Rome became almost as extensive an empire as it ever would be.
By the later 200s the Empire was close to collapse, both economically and militarily. Economically, tax revenue was insufficient for vital military expenditure, and inflation out of control. Militarily, external pressure along much of the Empire’s too-extensive borders was matched by internal uprisings. If anything was going to be done, it would have to be the army that did it. But, by now, the army was largely composed of, and led by, ‘barbarians’ – very capable ‘barbarians’, as it turned out. And the centre of real (i.e. military) power in the Empire had shifted to Illyricum (modern Yugoslavia). In 284, a revolutionary officers’ council elected one of their number, Diocletian, commander of the imperial bodyguard, to build a renewed Empire out of the chaos left by fifty years of near anarchy. John Holland Smith in Constantine the Great says of Diocletian’s predecessors, and about the man himself and his co-leaders: ‘the majority were little better than bandits whose terrorism had been legalised by the grant of military commissions and whose survival depended on their forcefulness, not their blood’. Yet Diocletian had a great sense of duty, as well as considerable ability; and he chose a highly competent team. He ruled the Empire with the help of three friends, military colleagues, dividing it into East and West, each part being divided into two regions. Diocletian himself was the senior Caesar Augustus of two, and based himself in Asia Minor (modern western Turkey). His counterpart in the West was Maximian, whose capital was at Milan. Responsibility for the Eastern Empire Diocletian shared with a most unpleasant character, Galerius, who ruled as a junior Caesar from what is now Mitrovica in Yugoslavia. Finally, the junior Caesar in the West, Constantius, operated out of Trier (in Germany, near Luxembourg).