126 - All The King's Men

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 126, All the Kings Men. As you know, when Diocletian came to power in 284, he inherited an empire that had spent the better part of 50 years getting kicked around the neighborhood. Everywhere he looked, things were in shambles. He wanted to revive and restore the empire he had been taught to revere, and as he took over, he faced no greater roadblock to this goal than the problem of the malfunctioning governmental apparatus he now headed. What had happened was that as the military crisis became worse and worse, the government had basically become nothing more than the supply arm of the army. If civilians entered into the government's calculations at all, it was only to determine what they might have that the army might need. Everything else, by the dire necessities of the times, was considered an unimportant distraction.

But now that the crisis had subsided, it became clear what sorts of really important things had been deemed unimportant distractions, for example, a functioning judicial system. Basically, everything that you would expect a government to do, the imperial government had ceased to do. It was time then to reinvent that government. As we've seen, this reinvention started at the very top with the establishment of co-emperors and then the Tetrarchy, but it would descend all the way down to the localest of local levels, as Diocletian ensured that wherever there were Romans, the Roman government would be there. The big problem, really, was that too much was getting missed. There are multiple reasons for the fracturing of imperial authority, and the military and political rationales cannot be understated. But on an administrative level, the establishment of the Tetrarchy was an extension of Diocletian's desire to get more people focused on fewer things so that all that stuff that was getting missed would stop getting missed.

Had he done nothing else, the simple fact that there were now four emperors spread out across the empire instead of just one meant that already four times as much work was getting done, four times as many letters were being answered, four times as many petitions were being ruled on, four times as many decisions were being made. And as a bonus, each Tetrarch didn't have to worry about what was going on on the other side of the empire, leaving him to focus on the management of his particular domain. Which was nice, because even though it was just a quarter of the empire, those domains were still a pretty huge chunk of land, and millions of people still lived in them. But of course, the division of imperial authority was not the end of Diocletian's reforms, it was just the beginning.

In keeping with the theme of getting more people doing fewer things, Diocletian also set about dividing up the empire into smaller, more manageable provinces. Last week I focused on the military implications of this reformation, so this week I want to focus on the administrative aspects. There were basically three main things here that were of concern, the collection of taxes, the administration of justice, and the maintenance of the infrastructure. All three of these core missions had been more or less abandoned as the crisis years wore on, and even before then the size of an individual province, which was big, and the size of a provincial government, which was small, conspired to make most administrations woefully inadequate with regards to all three anyway. Sure taxes were collected and justice was administered, and the roads were maintained, but not without delays, inefficiencies, and outright failures.

When it came to government, Diocletian didn't want to just set things back to the way they had been, he wanted to make the whole operation better. When Diocletian finished drawing his lines all over the map, and I have posted a map of Diocletian's new provincial alignment at thehistoryofrome.typepad.com, the Romans found that their empire now contained over a hundred provinces. As with the larger division of the Tetrarchy, the proliferation of new provinces meant that, simply put, governors had less to worry about. And it was a good thing that they had less to worry about, because Diocletian was going to expect more of them than any previous emperor had.

For example, he sent out instructions that he expected his governors to be active participants in the judicial system. They were not to ignore petitions or appeals, and they were not to hand them off to subordinates. They had been made the supreme legal authority in their province, and they were damn well going to act like it. It used to be easy to shirk these responsibilities because the absolute flood of plaintiffs and defendants who would come calling made for an easy excuse, but even the most conscientious governor had no hope of dealing with it all himself. So smaller provinces, and voila, a reasonably sized caseload. I don't want to belabor these points because I think you get the general idea, but suffice it to say that smaller provinces also meant that it was easier to track down tax evaders, and it was easier to notice when a dilapidated building needed to be repaired. More people focused on fewer things meant that fewer things were getting missed.

But of course, with all these little provinces running around, coordinating empire-wide initiatives became a major headache. So over and above the provincial governors, Diocletian created a whole new bureaucratic level to help manage macro policy, and these were called the diocese. The hundred-odd provinces were collected into just twelve of these new diocese, and it was at this level that the most basic policies of the Tantrarchy were implemented. A diocese could be made up by as few as four provinces, as in the case of Britain, and as many as sixteen, as in the case of the so-called Diocese of the East, which encompassed the whole of the eastern Mediterranean. Their main function was to help enforce policy that was being handed down by the emperor, and help oversee policy that was being enacted on the local level.

The men in charge of a diocese were called vicars, and they were officially listed as the personal representative of the praetorian prefect, meaning that they were just about as close to the emperor as you could get these days, which helped streamline the process of rolling out new policies. These novel new super-districts were kept around in the east until Justinian decided to abolish them and go back to the more powerful provincial governor model, but in the west the diocese were taken over by the clergy, and form the basis even today of Catholic administration in Europe.

On the subject of macro-policy, I want to insert a small correction for something I said last week with regard to the new military duxes. I said that given the smaller sizes of Diocletian's provinces, that the duxes only commanded small contingents of soldiers, but the opposite was actually true. A dux functioned more like a theater commander, who often oversaw multiple provinces worth of soldiers in order to maintain strategic coordination out on the frontiers. Their ability to revolt was blunted not so much by the fact that they only commanded a small number of troops, some duxes actually controlled 20,000 men or more, but rather by the fact that they had no political powers and no private control over the tax and levy system that they would need if they were going to fund and feed a revolt. So I apologize for having denigrated the rank and dignity of the noble dux.

The point of adding new layers of administration was to try to get everyone on the same page. Diocletian wanted the empire to function as one coordinated mechanism, with all parts working in concert with one another for the betterment of the whole. To this end, he also initiated two highly unpopular shifts, at least in the affected regions, to make sure that no part of the empire thought it was somehow better or different than the rest. I am speaking, of course, of his treatment of two parts of the empire that most definitely considered themselves better and different, Italy and Egypt.

As he was splitting up the provinces and appointing vicars, Diocletian decided that the time for special treatment was over, and that henceforth everyone would be equal within what had become in every single way a multinational empire. The Italians, going back to the very beginning of Rome's expansion, had been exempt from taxation and had always enjoyed certain other little perks that came with being the home base of the empire. But now that was over. Divided into sixteen districts and watched over by a vicar, Italy was now treated just like any other province. Only the city of Rome itself maintained its exemption, one of the few deferential nods Diocletian ever made to the birthplace of his empire.

Egypt, on the other hand, had always paid its taxes, though there was an awful lot of dodging going on. But they had also been granted a degree of autonomy. They were allowed to keep their own records, they ran off their own calendar, and perhaps most importantly, they coined their own money at a mint in Alexandria. All of this too was cancelled by Diocletian as he implemented his nice, clean, rational order, free of exemptions, exceptions, preferential treatment, and special deals. Maybe the empire could afford such things in good times, but the good times were long gone. It was time for everyone to pitch in equally.

For the senatorial aristocracy in Italy, the blows to their status were now coming fast and furious. Their power as a body had of course been stripped away by Augustus a long, long time ago. But the pleasant fictions of the Principate had allowed senators to maintain some dignity over the following centuries. They ran provinces, they ratified decisions, and as individuals they joined in the administrations of just about every emperor. But now that too was all over. Diocletian's vision of an autocratic, centrally planned, and centrally governed empire was absolute, and he had no intention of letting a few wealthy Italians, who used to be somebody we swear, get in his way.

His first and most obvious move towards eradicating the senate from imperial affairs, as we've already seen, was to simply never go to Rome. Power is usually established by proximity to power, and the senate was now, physically, nowhere near power. But Diocletian went further than that. Previous emperors had allowed the senate to continue running the old senatorial provinces of the Augustan constitutional settlements, the most important of these being the provinces of Africa and Asia. They never wielded anything like final authority, but senators were appointed governors of these provinces and the senate as a body still deliberated what to do with them, with the full understanding that any time the emperor wanted to, he could step in and do or undo whatever he wanted. But still, they had a little tiny chip in the game.

When Diocletian reorganized the empire, though, that chip was taken away, as he obliterated the old senatorial-imperial provincial distinction. Plus, almost to a man, Diocletian's new provincial authorities were drawn from the equestrian class. He wanted smart, capable, career-minded men who owed their allegiance fully and completely to the emperor to be the ones out in the field running the show. The old aristocracy in Rome never quite gave up their sense of self-importance when they gave up their power, and Diocletian did not trust them to fall into line without hesitation or reservation. The only notice he took of their feelings is that when he divided up Italy along with the rest of the empire, he did allow senators to govern the individual Italian districts, though they were overseen by an equestrian vicar.

From this point on, we see a shift in Roman politics. Deprived of any role to play in the empire they had created, the senators in Rome fell back into a merely local brand of politics. No longer was the pinnacle of a senator's career the consulship, the governorship, or the emperorship. It was, instead, the city prefecture, the mayor of Rome. Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

This was all undertaken, I think, not so much because Diocletian despised the senate, as his attitude is sometimes reduced to, but instead because he disliked the untidiness of the old Augustan pseudo-partnership with him. Diocletian was, with every fiber of his being, an autocrat. He was not the type of man, like, say, Trajan had been, who encouraged his subordinates to figure it out for themselves. Diocletian wanted to control every single little detail of imperial administration, and then systematize that control so that it became permanent and unbreakable. To this end, he created the largest centralized bureaucracy staffed by career civil servants the Western world had ever seen, and then let it run the empire.

In a later denunciation of Diocletian's policies, the bitterly hostile Christian writer Lactantius, who, as we will soon see, had some very good reasons for being bitterly hostile, describes the enlargement of the imperial bureaucracy as creating a situation where the number of men being paid by the state was greater than the number of taxpayers paying into the state. This is, of course, a gross exaggeration, but there is no denying that Diocletian effectively doubled the number of civil servants over the course of his reign. But that doubling was from around 15,000 to maybe 30,000, in an empire with a total population of 20 to 50 million. So no, there were not more bureaucrats than taxpayers. But yes, there were a lot more salary men running around today than there were yesterday, and that did have a negative impact on the economy.

The other thing to keep in mind, though, is that the new bureaucracy was not necessarily adding redundant layers to the administration of the empire. During the crisis years, a local civic government had essentially ceased all operations. All those town and city councils that had previously administered daily life had shuttered their doors, and someone had to step into the void. So enter the imperial bureaucrat. The new bureaucracy was the flip side of that separation of civilian and military operations we talked about last week. Just as generals had gradually taken over the provincial governorships, the daily minutia of governance was taken over by career soldiers on their staffs as well. Diocletian wanted to get the soldiers back to doing what they did best, and bring in trained professionals to do the work the military had by necessity taken over.

But as he considered how the new administrative system was going to function, Diocletian decided that the one thing he liked about the military being in charge was the clear chains of command, the clear hierarchy of authority, and the clear specialization of function. So when he kicked the soldiers back to the frontiers, he essentially kept the structure of the military in place for his new bureaucracy, even as he staffed it with civilians. Bureaucrats were grouped into cohorts, just like in the legions, made answerable to senior officials, who were in turn grouped together and made answerable to another senior official, all the way up to the praetorian prefect and the emperor. To make sure that no one missed the point, Diocletian even made the official uniform of his civil service a military cloak, rather than a civilian toga.

Most of these officials served out in the provinces collecting taxes, maintaining the public infrastructure, assessing property values, and so on and so on. But everyone was angling for a promotion to where the action and money really was, working directly for one of the emperors in one of the imperial capitals. Where once a few informal advisors had helped the emperor shape policy and make decisions, there was now a staff of literally thousands, carefully regimented into different departments, all scurrying to and fro, issuing memoranda, making recommendations, and implementing policy. These departments became known as scrinia, named after the boxes the officials used to hold all of their paperwork in while traveling with the emperor. And there was a scrinia for everything, foreign affairs, protocol, correspondence in Latin, correspondence in Greek, petitions, favors, law, finance, on and on.

Each scrinia had a department head, the equivalent of a cabinet minister or cabinet secretary, who when grouped together, became known as the consistory, the permanent body of advisors who surrounded the emperor. The most important of all of these officials, and the one who was really in charge of running the show on a day-to-day basis, was the praetorian prefect, who in terms of power, both de facto and du jour, was second only to the emperor.

The office of praetorian prefect had, over the years, evolved well beyond simply being the captain of the imperial bodyguard. Lucius Sejanus had been the first to assume administrative and political functions, and for the next century and a half, the trajectory of the office had been consistently away from its old military functions and towards an exclusively political one. When Septimius Severus disbanded and then reformed the praetorians, though, the prefects once again wielded real military authority. But when Diocletian took power, the praetorians were reformed once more, this time reduced to simply serving as the local city garrison of Rome, which, as you will recall, put them nowhere near the emperor or power. But the office of praetorian prefect was maintained, for, I guess, sentimental reasons, and Diocletian placed the prefect squarely at the top of his new bureaucracy.

In effect, the prefect became a vice-emperor, and it was his job to make sure that the vast new bureaucracy, including the hundreds of staffers that he personally employed, ran as smoothly as it could. But even more than that, his job was to share in the emperor's workload. For most agenda items, the signature of the prefect was just as good as the signature of the emperor, which meant that twice as much could now be done in the same amount of time. In the later part of his reign, Diocletian even went so far as to issue an edict stating that judicial decisions issued by the prefect were no longer appealable to the emperor. You could appeal to the emperor, or you could appeal to the prefect, but you couldn't do both. The prefect was, in short, a really, really powerful guy, and not at all someone you wanted to mess with.

So those are the basics of the bureaucracy. Provincial agents out in the field were answerable to the officials who ran the regional offices, who were answerable to their superiors in the cabinet ministries, who were answerable to the department heads, who were answerable to the praetorian prefect, who was answerable to the emperor. Throw in the parallel and sometimes intertwined tracts that introduced provincial governors and vicars of the diocese, and what you get is a hugely expanded, centrally run civil service that now governed the whole empire with its own code of ethics, standards, and loyalties. The famously ritualized and labyrinth administrations that came to define the Byzantine empire, and indeed gave rise to the adjective Byzantine to describe something so multi-layered, overly complicated and self-perpetuating that it confounds the mind, found its first form back here in the years of the Tetrarchy, as Diocletian sought to bring back adequate governance to the empire.

The one thing we haven't really talked about though, is perhaps Diocletian's most famous reform of all, the nature of the imperial office itself. I mentioned something about it when I was discussing Diocletian's desire to rest his legitimacy on divine authority, rather than the approval of the legions or the consent of the senate, but I didn't really talk about how it worked in practice, how Diocletian on a daily basis transformed the principate into the dominant. At its most basic level, the transformation took place on a physical level, and it was from these physical changes that Diocletian expected the psychology of his subjects to shift.

First and foremost, access to the emperor was severely restricted. He was kept secluded behind doors and officials and guards and more doors and more officials and more guards and then long hallways and more doors, until by the time you actually got to the emperor, it was like you were setting foot in some holy inner sanctum. The principate had been predicated on a calculated intimacy, with emperors going out of their way to show that they were just one of the guys, whether inviting senators over for dinner or sharing in the hardships of the soldiers. Now it was the exact opposite, with calculated aloofness creating the impression that the emperor was a near mythical figure. Gibbon remarked that Augustus' model sought to conceal the real power of the emperors, while Diocletian's sought to display it. And by keeping the emperor hidden from view, the people's imaginations, with regards to the extent of his almost supernatural powers, began to run freely.

Beyond this, there were dozens of subtle shifts. When the consistory met, all the ministers stood while the emperor remained seated. You'll recall that Julius Caesar's fate was practically sealed when he failed to rise to meet a delegation from the senate, so this was actually a pretty big deal. Upon meeting with the emperor, it was expected that you kiss his robe as a sign of submission, something that would have been absolutely offensive to the Romans of old. But even more offensive might have been the reappearance of that universal symbol of royal authority, the diadem, which he took to wearing along with rich and bejeweled royal robes.

The point of all this, as I mentioned before, was not so that Diocletian could indulge his vanity or his megalomania, but so that he could impress upon his subjects that the emperor was indeed above and beyond them. He literally shimmered in the light, never rising from his throne as supplicants cautiously approached to kiss his robes. The empire needed a strong authority figure to reassert order over an empire that had nearly come crashing down, and Diocletian aimed to give it to them in spades. The emperor was no longer princeps, the first citizen. He was dominus, the lord of the empire, and there would be no going back.

Taken together, Diocletian's reordering of the governmental apparatus ushered in a whole new era for the Roman empire, and did nothing less than set the stage for the Byzantine empire that would carry on Rome's legacy into the Middle Ages. All pretense of public government had now been cast aside, all claims of regional autonomy had now been cast aside, and any hint that the emperor might not be some sort of demigod ruling from a divine palace in the sky had definitely been cast aside. Perhaps, most importantly, by abandoning Rome as the capital and reorganizing Italy as just another province, the Roman empire was finally cut adrift from its Roman heritage. Which is, incidentally, how the East was able to keep right on going even after Rome itself had fallen into barbarism.

The empire was now, more than ever, a single unit commanded from the center and functioning for the betterment of the whole without regard to tradition, feelings, or even private interest. No more was it first citizen and fellow citizens, it was now ruler and ruled, plain, simple, and laid bare for all to see. Next week, we will see how much this new dynamic of ruler and ruled came to alter the daily lives of the citizens, as Diocletian will seek to control not just the apparatus that governed them, but the economy that they swam in. And it was here that he finally met his match, because if there was one field Diocletian failed to master, it was economics.