Part 28

Thus the East was again tranquillized, the peace with the Persians being secured until the times of Carus, as it seems, by treaties. Aurelian now returned to Europe to reunite the West with the empire; whereupon he was met by Tetricus, who felt that his own life was not safe among the mutinous soldiers, and wished to get himself out of this position: but the soldiers of Tetricus fought with such spirit in the neighbourhood of Chalons, that one may see how national was their cause, and how determined was the wish for separation. It is remarkable that the French historians have never understood nor discerned the national development of France, which always renewed itself from the time of Julius Cæsar; just as they also have ever overlooked the distinctly marked difference between the literature of Northern and Southern France. It cannot be accurately made out, whether it was now, or somewhat sooner or later, that the German tribes broke through the frontier. The Alemanni, Lombards (Juthungi), and Vandals—the first two at least—passed the Po and threatened Rome: they were defeated near Fano (_Fanum Fortunæ_), very nearly in the same neighbourhood where Hasdrubal fell in the second Punic War.

Aurelian, who could not live without war, was on the eve of renewing that against the Persians: but he was murdered while on his march, at the crafty instigation, it is said, of an infamous secretary whose fraud he had found out. This story, however, is perhaps one of the many tales which were devised to screen the guilt of the real perpetrators: another conspiracy had already been discovered once before. The army bewailed him, and determined that none of the leading men who had had a share in his murder should reap any advantage from it. This accounts for the strange demand which the army made to the senate, to appoint the successor of Aurelian. The senate mistrusted this, or it was afraid that the soldiers might repent; but the latter are said to have so steadfastly stood by their declaration, that the empire remained for eight months without an emperor, nor did any one arise in the provinces.

At last,—so we are told,—Tacitus, the _princeps senatus_, was elected, who was distinguished for everything that could at all distinguish a senator,—immense fortune, of which he made a good use; a blameless life; administrative skill; and in his youth, military valour. On his election, he gave the senate the promise that he would look upon himself as its servant; whereupon the senators already began to give themselves up to their daydreams of freedom and power. The emperor was now to be their first servant; all rule and might was to be in the hands of the senate, and the republic was to be restored:—in a word, they expected to be like the senate of Venice. But that dream lasted but a short time. Tacitus went to the army in Asia Minor. The statement of his advanced age rests on the authority of the latest Greeks, and deserves little credit: the earlier writers say nothing about it. How they could then have elected an old man in his seventy-sixth year, is scarcely to be understood, as they needed a military prince. This reminds us of the Roman Cardinals, who elect an aged Pope to have so much more the hope of succeeding him themselves. Although Tacitus carried on the war against the Alans with success, the Romans were not yet rid of their causes for uneasiness in that quarter. When he died at Tarsus, in all likelihood it was quietly in his bed, of illness or exhaustion: murder seems not to be thought of. After his death, the throne was usurped by his brother Quintilius,[64] to whom however the legions refused obedience.

They proclaimed Probus emperor, who is the most excellent of the Cæsars of that age. Quite as great a general as Aurelian, he still at the same time turned his mind to the protection of the empire against foreign foes, and to raising it at home from the wretched condition into which it had fallen. He had many rebellions to put down, but he had especially to wage war against the Alans, the Franks, the Alemanni, and the Sarmatians. The Franks he drove back into the marshes of the Netherlands; and he not only defeated the Alemanni, but he also crossed the Rhine, and regained the Suabian empire: he is likewise said to have repaired the _limes_. We are told that he wanted to form Germany into a province, which at that time was much more feasible than it had been before: for the southern Germans had already become much nearer to the Romans in their manners. Had Diocletian given himself the same trouble, and established a Roman power in the south of Germany, he might perhaps have succeeded.—It would have been possible to collect the Germans into towns, and to accustom them to a regular city life, for in the reign of Valentinian, we find them afterwards on the banks of the Neckar already settled in larger villages and in fortified towns, and no longer in scattered cottages. Probus achieved an incredible number of great undertakings in every quarter, crossing the empire from one frontier to the other with the power and speed of lightning: rest, during the five years of his reign, he never once enjoyed; but, on the other hand, he was unspeakably beloved by his people. Once also he triumphed in Rome, as Aurelian had likewise done: yet his coins not only bear the legend, _Invicto Imperatori Probo_, but also _Bono Imperatori Probo_. The soldiers only became estranged from him, because he made their work too hard, as he exacted from them, besides all their military duty, task-service for the restoration of the provinces. Like Aurelian and Decius, he came from the neighbourhood of the _Limes Illyricus_, being perhaps descended from military settlers; and therefore he wished to revive tillage in the neighbourhood of Sermium, and to drain the fens. To this unwholesome labour he kept the soldiers, employing them in digging the drains. As he did not yield to any representations made to him, the soldiers can scarcely be blamed when in their despair they would bear the heavy yoke no longer. He was murdered in the year 282; yet they still wept over his loss.

After his death, they raised the _præfectus prætorio_ Carus to the throne. Whether Carus was born at Rome, or in Illyricum, or at Narbonne, we do not know: in a letter which is still extant, he calls himself a Roman senator,—a proof that the _senatus consultum_ in the reign of Gallienus, that no senator should be a general, must have been something different from what is generally believed, and even Gibbon thinks it to have been. Perhaps Gallienus only took away from the senators the government of the provinces with the _imperium_, so that this was put an end to altogether, except in the short time of the reign of Tacitus; but even then, he did not shut them out from every kind of military command. As Carus also was quite in his element when there was a war, he led his soldiers against the Persians with the most signal success; and this was the last war but one in which this was the case: he is said to have retaken Ctesiphon; but this cannot be positively asserted. However this may be, Persia had lost the power which she had in the days of Ardaschir; and the Persian king Bahram, who was paralysed by fear, was quite unable to make head against the Roman army. Carus penetrated very far beyond the Persian frontier. Here he is said to have been struck by lightning in his tent:—whether this be true, or whether he did not rather fall by the hands of assassins, we cannot make out for certain. The soldiers, however, could not be got to advance any further: the omen of the _prætorium_ struck by lightning was too dreadful. Numerian the son of Carus, a well educated and well-bred young man, good-hearted but unwarlike, was in the camp; the other one, Carinus, had remained in Rome: the latter was another Commodus, being a profligate and a tyrant. Numerian died, and the _præfectus prætorio_, Arrius Aper, is said to have concealed his death to found his own dominion on it. But it was detected; and it was laid to the charge of Aper by the Illyrian Diocletian, who was backed by the favour of the army. Being the most distinguished of the generals, he put forth claims to the throne: as for Carinus, he had made himself so hateful by his profligacy, that the army would not hear of him. Diocletian stabbed Aper with his own hands. A female soothsayer had told him that he should ascend the throne, if he killed an _aper_; and therefore in all his hunts, he had tried to kill a wild boar. The oracle now came true. Carinus gathered together the legions of the west, and great battle in Mœsia decided the fate of the throne. For when Carinus was on the point of gaining the victory, he was stabbed by a man whom he had foully wronged; and the soldiers now acknowledged Diocletian, who had been all but beaten, as their emperor, 285.

DIOCLETIAN. LITERATURE AND GENERAL STATE OF THE THEN WORLD. MAXIMIAN. HIS SUCCESSORS. CONSTANTINE.

The reign of Diocletian forms a great epoch in Roman history. He shows himself everywhere a distinguished man: although we may censure many of his plans, yet even to have made an attempt is a proof of that ability which shines forth in everything that he did, and in the whole of his reign. There now follows a time which, when compared with the former ones, is one of recovery, and which lasted about an hundred years, down to the battle of Hadrianople (378). During this period, the government is settled in one dynasty, and the establishment of the Christian religion is greatly facilitated. One great source of relief was, the ceasing of some years, ever since Probus, of the frightful plague which had so long wasted the Roman empire. It had first made its appearance in the reign of M. Antoninus and L. Verus, when, however, it was far from spreading over every part of the world; even in the time of Septimius Severus, as we know from Tertullian, it had not yet visited Africa: about the middle of the third century, until just before the reign of Decius, epidemics are mentioned. The real terrible plague broke out in the days of Decius (249), although I would not take it upon myself to say that it did not exist previously: in the reign of Commodus, and also of Caracalla, there was a very fierce plague at Rome; but in that of Decius it spreads all over the Roman empire, making dreadful ravages even in Africa and Egypt as well. Thus it still continues. Claudius dies at Sirmium of the plague in 270, and in the days of Gallienus and Valerian its fury is unabated: as many as two thousand people are said at times to have died at Rome in one day. Dionysius the bishop tells us that, when the plague had left off in Alexandria, the number of all the grown up persons from fourteen to seventy, was not greater than what had formerly been the number of those who were between forty and seventy; whence it follows, that about the third part only—not, as Gibbon states, one half of the inhabitants had remained alive. From the beginning of this period, date the last writings of Saint Cyprian, and his remarkable treatise against Demetrian, in which this great mortality is distinctly acknowledged: even at that time, people had begun to lay this decrease of the human race to the charge of the Christians. After the black death, as Matteo Villani, a contemporary writer, remarks, when people thought that they should have everything in abundance, just the reverse took place, namely a grievous famine, owing to there not being men enough to till the fields. This also happened now; and it was even yet a great deal worse, as the finest countries were laid waste by the ravages of the barbarians.

In the same proportion as the world was made desolate, did intellect also decay. Until the middle of the third century, the western world was very civilized; we still meet with distinguished poetical talent, and jurisprudence reached its highest state of development: but after that time, down to the days of Constantine, we already find throughout it the most downright barbarism: in the plastic arts, the decline begins even as early as in the times of Septimius Severus, the busts alone being still somewhat tolerable. As for poems, that of Nemesian on the chase, and the eclogues of Calpurnius in the reign of Carinus, are very characteristic of the age: it is sheer verse-making. Prose is no longer to be met with. There is indeed not one writer of it worth mentioning, except Lactantius the contemporary of Constantine, who has made the style of Cicero quite his own: even as Curtius is a reproduction of Livy, so is Lactantius of Cicero. Yet the man himself is also interesting: in his seventh book, he shows real imagination. Before him lived Arnobius, who is instructive and useful, his erudition being of great value to us; but he is without originality.

In the East, a different class of writers had arisen. Instead of people trying, as in the second and third centuries, to reproduce the ancient Attic, the language of Plato and Demosthenes, which Dio Chrysostom and several others after him had done; there sprang up in the third century, from the times of Ammonius in Syria, the so-called New-Platonism, a system which aimed at higher things, and from the intellect which there was in it, was widely different from the rhetorical school before it. But it became thoroughly unreal, inasmuch as its votaries tampered with the hallowed mysteries of former times, being ashamed of them in their old form, and had foisted in what was altogether foreign to it.

Of the events which now follow, I can give you but an outline, such as every one ought to know by heart. Too great a stress was formerly laid on such a chronological skeleton of history; yet it ought not to be altogether neglected: the succession of the Roman emperors, with the dates of their reigns, is what every one ought to have in his memory. Diocletian had reigned for about a year, when, without any external cause, he took his countryman Maximian as his colleague. Of Diocletian we have many hostile accounts; but they are very much exaggerated, nor are they the only ones. It is said that his father had been a slave, or at best a freedman; by this, however, a _colonus_, perhaps is meant, that is to say, a serf from the Dalmatian frontier. He cannot himself have been a slave, as slaves were not yet at that time received in the legions: the derivation of his name from Doclea, a town on the Dalmatian frontier, is a very likely one indeed. Diocletian had risen in the army by his own merit, a fact which sufficiently refutes the charge of cowardice brought against him as well as many other great generals, such as Napoleon. Against the latter also this charge is highly unjust. He often wanted moral courage, as, for instance, on the 19th of Brumaire; but the courage of a general he had. He is taxed with cowardice in cases when he did not choose to place himself in a position in which he could neither see nor hear, and thus neglect his duties as a general; but in so doing he was perfectly justified. Only he ought to have died at Waterloo: his leaving that battlefield can never be excused.—Diocletian was, on the whole, a mild man. On two occasions only, he laid himself open to the charge of cruelty,—in his chastisement of the rebels at Alexandria, and in his persecution of the Christians, to the latter of which he was beguiled in his old age by Galerius. Maximian, on the contrary, was a coarse and cruel man, who murdered the Roman nobles to get held of their treasures; or because he had been offended; or else because their very rank annoyed him: for the senate seems now to have become more and more hereditary.

Diocletian, who was a man of uncommon shrewdness, could not disguise from himself, how highly dangerous it was to keep jarring elements together by force. He therefore bethought himself of what would seem the strange plan of healing the many splits between the East and the West by a distinct government for each under different princes, they being, however, so united by one common centre, as still to form one whole. This worked well so long as he reigned himself. The legislative power, the consulship, and the high offices were to be in common: but in both parts of the empire there was to be a distinct _Augustus_; and by the side of every Augustus a _Cæsar_ as his coadjutor, who was to succeed to the throne after his death. The latter clause was to prevent the throne from being kept vacant, or being given away by the soldiers. It would seem that the senior Augustus had the right of naming the Cæsars. The _Præfectura Galliarum_ (which consisted of Gaul, Britain, and Spain), together with Mauretania, was to have a Cæsar; Italy and Africa were placed under the immediate rule of the Augustus. The countries on the Danube, Pannonia and Mœsia (afterwards the _præfectura_ of Illyria), were likewise under a Cæsar: the other Augustus had the whole of the East. All these were ingenious combinations: but they showed by their result, what such combinations will generally lead to.

Diocletian reigned for twenty years (from 285 to 305), and then by his paramount influence, he got Maximian to resign his dignity at the same time with him (May 1st, 305); so that, while he was yet living, the machine might be set up anew. The Cæsar in the East, Galerius, and his colleague Constantius, were both of them Illyrians. The former was a common soldier who had gotten the surname of _Armentarius_ from having been a drover; the other (to whom we do not give the name of Chlorus, as it is only to be found in Byzantine writers, and not even in the earlier ones, nor on coins; and as we are not able to make out its derivation) was of high birth, his father being a man of rank in the diocese of Illyricum, and his mother a niece of the Emperor Claudius Gothicus. The two were of a very different stamp. Constantius was an accomplished and well educated gentleman; Galerius was a rough fellow: both of them, however, were distinguished generals, though indeed Galerius was the bolder of the two. This division led afterwards to that of the empire into prefectures: not only every Augustus, but also every Cæsar had his _præfectus prætorio_; whence arose the four dioceses, each of which had a _præfectus_, as we see at a later period, there being traces of it even in the times of Justinian. Of the other measures of Diocletian, we shall mention here but the following. He transplanted the ceremonial of the East into his court: neither of the two emperors, however, resided at Rome; Maximian lived at Milan; Diocletian, in Nicomedia. Whatever may be said of Constantine, he was a great man: one of the many traits which mark him as such, is his not overlooking the situation of Byzantium. If those who founded Chalcedon were called blind by the oracle, Diocletian also is among the blind. In those eastern parts therefore, in which Asiatic manners spread more and more, Diocletian completely adopted the etiquette of the East.

The most important events in this reign, are the revolt of Britain under Carausius; a rising in Egypt; and the Persian war, the most glorious for a long time which the Romans had waged, and even the last glorious war of all.

Carausius—the admiral of a fleet stationed at Bononia (Boulogne) to keep in check the Franks and other tribes in the Netherlands, who had already begun to carry on piracy—revolted; made himself master of Britain; and assumed the title of Augustus. After having once been even acknowledged by Diocletian and Maximian, he was murdered by his own soldiers: his successor Allectus, who seized the reins of government after him, was overpowered by Constantius.—The reduction of Egypt was achieved by Diocletian himself: after a long siege, Alexandria had to surrender at discretion, and was severely punished.—Against Persia, Galerius had the command for two campaigns; and though, at first, he suffered a defeat, he afterwards gained a decided victory, routing and scattering the Persians, whose king was obliged to make peace. Armenia was recognised as a tributary dependency of Rome; Aderbidjan, with Tauris its capital, was given up by Persia to Armenia; Rome likewise gained the countries south of Lake Van as far as Mosul to the east, that is to say the countries on the Euphrates and Tigris, even beyond the eastern banks of the latter river. This happened A. D. 296, four years after the appointment of the _Cæsares_. Time hinders me from dwelling on the persecutions of the Christians by Diocletian; so that I shall only remark that Diocletian and his counsellors, going against the stream, and quite heedless of the wants of the age (even looking upon the matter in a worldly point of view), sought to crush the Christian religion. This led them to that shocking persecution, which, however, was not so frightful as we are wont to believe it to have been. Dodwell is right in saying that it was nothing to what the Duke of Alva did in the Netherlands. Yet it was after all a struggle against the tide: for whenever a people wills a thing in good earnest, it does not allow itself to be kept back. Annihilation or slavery alone are able to stop its onward march.

The results of the new measures were like those which we have seen during the last forty years in Europe, where constitutions have been drawn up, which when brought to bear on life and its real business, have worked quite differently from what had been expected. After Diocletian and Maximian’s resignation, Constantius and Galerius succeeded as _Augusti_, and the places of the Cæsars became vacant. As the _Augusti_ were bound to make Milan or Nicomedia their abode, Constantius remained in Gaul, where his court was generally at Treves. In his stead, a Cæsar was to be appointed, who had to rule over Africa and Italy; and Galerius, claiming the right of nomination, made choice of another Illyrian named Severus: over the East he set his own nephew Maximinus Daza, a common soldier, to whom he gave the administration of Syria and Egypt, while he himself remained in Nicomedia, and kept Illyricum, Greece, and Asia Minor. The persecution of the Christians went on at a fearful rate, but without any effect; so that at last it was even obliged to slacken.