129 - Abdication

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Hello and welcome to the History of Rome. Episode 129 Abdication

Now that we know how everything turned out, I think it's safe to say that 303 AD marked the beginning of the end for Diocletian and his Tetrarchy. Beyond the great persecution and all the long-term ill effects that came with it, 303 also saw Diocletian stricken by an illness that plagued him for so long and was so nearly fatal that calling it a brush with death doesn't quite do it justice. It was more like an extended staring contest. When death finally blinked though, Diocletian did not take it as a sign that he was destined to live and rule forever. Instead, he took it as a reminder that he was mortal, that he was not long for this world, and that it was time to initiate his last and most audacious plan yet.

Despite the unpleasantness of the great persecution, 303 AD was otherwise supposed to be a banner year for the Tetrarchy. The Romans loved their anniversaries, and the year was about to see two big imperial milestones come to pass. In March, the two Caesars, Galerius and Constantius, would celebrate the tenth anniversary of their ascension to the purple, and in November, Diocletian would enter the twentieth year of his reign. The senior Augustus had every intention of celebrating both anniversaries in unprecedented fashion, and so he took this opportunity to play the one card he had thus far kept hidden deep in his hand. After twenty years of neglect and disdain, it was finally time for the Emperor of Rome to visit Rome.

Word went out to the citizens of the Eternal City that they were about to get their first look at Diocletian, and preparations immediately went into overdrive to greet him with all Rome had to offer. The city fathers saw it as an opportunity to fully impress upon Diocletian that whatever his political aims had been in refusing to visit the true capital of the Empire, that Rome could not be denied forever. She was too big, too rich, and too important to simply fade away. Rome's day would come again, and they planned to make sure that Diocletian bore witness to that fact. For the lower classes, the imminent arrival of the Emperor meant only one thing, festivals and games on a massive scale. It was with great anticipation then that the citizens of Rome awaited the Imperial entourage, and when it finally arrived, no one was disappointed. No one, that is, except Diocletian.

On his way to Rome, Diocletian swung through Milan and picked up Maximian, who, apart from a brief campaign in North Africa, had spent the last few years taking it easy in Northern Italy. The two Augusti then entered Rome together in November 303, just in time to welcome Diocletian's 20th anniversary year, and inaugurate games that would simultaneously celebrate that milestone and the decade milestone of the two Caesars. The plan was then for him to remain in the city until January 1, at which point he and Maximian would stand on the Capitoline Hill and be invested with the year's consulships – hey, remember consulships? – just like the Romans of old. But it quickly became apparent that things were not going to go according to plan.

Things started out all right, as Diocletian took a tour of the city to inspect the various building projects he had commissioned over the years. Despite his political disdain for the city, Diocletian had always been conscious of the symbolic importance of the old capital, and felt that it would be in bad taste to let the city fall into disrepair. So when, for example, the Senate House burned down, Diocletian did not hesitate to rebuild it, and the Curia that stands in the Forum today is the ruin of Diocletian's final rebuild. The Emperor also took the opportunity to put his own stamp on the city by building a huge bath complex in the northern quarter that rivaled the Baths of Caracalla in both size and opulence, which were called, obviously, the Baths of Diocletian.

But after satisfying himself that the city was in good shape architecturally, there was nothing left for him to do but enjoy all that Rome had to offer. And unfortunately, Diocletian did not at all enjoy what Rome had to offer. He was immediately put on edge by the attitude of the citizens, who he found himself face to face with for the first time. See, the Romans themselves were not so quick to embrace the notion that their Emperor was a quasi-god who had descended from on high to rule them. That kind of BS might work on the lowly provincials, but in Rome, an Emperor was just a man who had a lot of political power. There was nothing mystical about it. We invented this whole operation for crying out loud, don't try to tell us that you're made of magic. We know that somewhere behind all those curtains is a man just like us.

After almost two decades of being treated with odd reverence wherever he went, it was a bit of a shock to be thrust into a world where the princeps model was still believed to be in effect. Diocletian found himself dealing with familiarity, vulgarity, and disrespect in degrees and quantities he had not experienced in years, and frankly, it put him off. This unpleasantness was then compounded by the behavior of the Romans at the games themselves. Diocletian was a conservative man, and perhaps a bit of a prude, but he was not naive as to the way the world worked, nor to the way that people worked. But still, what he saw in Rome shocked him. The drunkenness, the grubbiness, the licentiousness of it all, contrasted sharply with his mental image of the Romans of old, an image that he himself had been trying to emulate all these years. Here now were the great Romans, crying over a lost chariot race, fighting over women, passing out in the streets from an excess of, well, everything. It was, in a word, disgusting.

After just a few short weeks, Diocletian had had enough. Far from impressed, the Emperor was now convinced more than ever that Rome was irrelevant. Twentieth anniversary or no, there was a whole empire out there that needed his attention, and he couldn't in good conscience continue to ignore it in favor of this drunken orgy. So he let it be known to everyone's shock and dismay that he was cutting his visit short, and that he would accept his consulship not on the Capitoline Hill, but instead on the road getting him the hell out of Rome. The Romans, commoner and aristocrat alike, were bitterly disappointed, and not a little offended themselves that the Emperor was snubbing them right to their face. In a few years, Maxentius will arrive on the scene and offer them the opportunity to extract a measure of revenge on Diocletian and his carefully laid plans for the empire. It should come as no surprise that they will jump at the chance to upset Diocletian's apple cart.

Now maybe it was just a coincidence, or maybe it was that Diocletian was getting old, but if you're feeling superstitious, there is no misinterpreting what happened next. On his way out of Italy, Diocletian came down with some sort of illness that basically knocked him out of commission for a year and a half. He could do no more than lay in a closed litter as the imperial entourage struggled to make its way back to Nicomedia. I am sure that there were more than a few whispers about whether or not the gods were perhaps a bit annoyed at Diocletian for the way he had just treated Rome. His advisors kept pleading with the Emperor to stop the journey and settle down in any one of the numerous cities they passed so he could recover, but Diocletian ordered them to press on to Nicomedia. If he was going to die, he was going to die in the city that had been his home base all these years. The procession moved so slowly that it wasn't until the summer of 304 that they finally made it back to his capital.

Upon arrival, Diocletian mustered enough energy to dedicate a new circus that had been built in honor of his twentieth anniversary, and then he promptly disappeared into the imperial palace. While it is true that access to the Emperor had always been carefully controlled, for the next nine months or so this control was taken to extreme lengths, and almost no one saw Diocletian in person. He was kept sequestered in his private quarters, suffering from an illness that kept him debilitated while refusing to kill him. On multiple occasions during these nervous months, though, rumors swirled furiously that the Emperor had died, was about to die, had died weeks ago, or had been dead the whole time. At one point he apparently slipped into a coma which sparked rumors even within the imperial household that Diocletian was now, finally, dead. Galerius was alternatively called for or waved off with each cycle of rumor. When he was finally officially summoned in March 305, though, it was not to oversee funeral arrangements, but rather to congratulate Diocletian on his recovery. The Emperor, though pale and gaunt, was not dead yet.

Galerius, who was probably more than ready for Diocletian to die at this point, no doubt issued his congratulation through clenched teeth, but if he was disappointed that his time had not yet come, Diocletian immediately put his junior Emperor's mind at ease. He was alive, yes, but Galerius' time was still at hand. Diocletian told his Caesar that he was going to abdicate the throne.

As with the decision to elevate Galerius and Constantius in the first place, it is difficult to determine when exactly Diocletian decided that he was going to retire and let them take over. Some believe it was his plan all along, and that abdication was at the very heart of what he hoped would be a perpetually stable succession process. Others believe the idea only popped up later, as Diocletian grew older and began to think about how he could best ensure a peaceful transition of power, and still others believe that it was never the plan, but that an overbearing Galerius essentially forced Diocletian to step aside. However long he had been planning eventual abdication, though, the long illness he just endured was the likely catalyst for setting his last plan in motion. Though it is worth noting that the date of abdication was almost twenty years to the day after the Battle of the Margus, so it is entirely possible that the illness was just a coincidental stop on the road to cementing a precedent of twenty-year-long reigns for all future Emperors.

The trick was getting Maximian to go along with the plan. In order to ensure that the balance of power remained intact as authority was handed from one generation to the next, both of the Caesars needed to become Augusti at the same time, and the two new Caesars needed to be appointed at the same time, which meant that the old Augusti, Diocletian and Maximian, needed to abdicate at the same time. And as we will see, Maximian was not nearly as keen to give up on power as Diocletian was.

The thing that has always stuck in my craw about the alleged necessity of everyone shifting places at the same time, though, is that when we look back on it, the only version of the Tetrarchy that ever worked was the one in which there was very clearly a senior Augustus who outranked the others. For all the outward professions of equality, Diocletian had always been the head cheese, and when we analyze the stability of the Tetrarchic system, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that it was Diocletian's extra level of influence over his colleagues more than anything else that kept them working as partners rather than rivals. Is it possible that things would not have gone so horribly awry if only Diocletian abdicated while Maximian remained in place, leaving a clearly senior Augustus around to keep everyone towing the line? It is a question with so many moving parts that it's hard to figure what the end result would have been, but since things so quickly went to hell in a handbasket anyway, it is worth ruminating on.

The answer, of course, is that it probably would have been even more disastrous for the Empire, not because the system didn't need a senior Augustus to function properly, it probably did, but because the new senior Augustus would have been Maximian, and I can't imagine a single scenario where Maximian handles his colleagues with anything resembling the deafness that Diocletian had. Civil War probably would have broken out the first time any one of them disagreed about anything, because Maximian did not massage egos, he punched them in the face. His temperament was not at all suited for the job, which Diocletian thoroughly understood, and was as likely a reason for simultaneous abdication as any abstract notions of equality of rank among the future emperors. Plus, and this is the last thing I'll say about it, following the untimely death of Constantius, the Tetrarchy will revert back to a model where one Augustus, Galerius, was clearly senior to his colleagues, and the system went ahead and collapsed anyway. So it is then really hard not to come to the conclusion that the Tetrarchy didn't just need a senior Augustus, it needed Diocletian. He was the quintessential element, the ether within which the Tetrarchy swam, and when he was gone, there was nothing for it to do but die.

So getting back to the matter at hand, the trick was getting Maximian on board, and we have to believe that this was a project Diocletian had been working on for a while, planting little seeds in Maximian's head, so that when the day finally came to give up power, it would not come completely out of left field. You want me to do what? Give up absolute power? Have you gone stark raving mad? That is a conversation you really need to lay some groundwork for. So if you believe that he had in fact been planning abdication for a while, we can point to the joint trip to Rome as the time Diocletian probably began to really press the issue hard with Maximian, switching from, you know, someday we're going to have to jointly abdicate for the good of the Empire, to please get your affairs in order because we're going to do this thing pretty soon. A short while later, when Diocletian was recovering from his illness, his tact switched again to pack your bags, we're stepping down on May the 1st.

Given every single thing he did after resigning though, it is clear that Maximian was not at all interested in abdication. But to his credit, his loyalty to Diocletian never wavered, and when the time came, he did what so few men in his place could have done, and what he himself so did not want to do. He gave up absolute power.

On May the 1st, 305 AD, in simultaneous ceremonies in Nicomedia and Milan, Diocletian and Maximian became the first emperors in Roman history to voluntarily give up the throne. Diocletian speaking to his soldiers announced that he was tired, he was weak, and that the Empire needed to always have a strong hand guiding the ship of state, and that he could no longer be that strong hand. That Galerius and Constantius would be the new strong hands was a foregone conclusion, though the only drama left to play out on that spring day was who would be the new Caesars, and it was in this drama that the Tetrarchy found the root of its eventual ruin.

Once upon a time, I made the point that the five good emperors are often praised for having adopted qualified men of merit to be their heirs, rather than relying on their own blood sons, even though the whole reason they had to adopt outside their family in the first place was because between the lot of them there was nary a blood son to be found. It was no enlightened decision they were making, it was something that was forced on them by circumstance. In attempting to secure the future of his Tetrarchy, though, Diocletian very clearly stepped in the direction of that enlightened choice that had supposedly been made during the age of the Antonines. The emperors should be the best men in the empire, regardless of family relations. To cement what he hoped would be a binding precedent then, Diocletian intentionally skipped over the two men who at any other point in history would have so obviously been chosen the new Caesars that their ascension would have been as drama free as the elevation of Galerius and Constantius to the rank of Augustus. Those two men were Maxentius, the son of Maximian, and Constantine, the son of Constantius. Instead, Diocletian went ahead and picked two established generals who were the sons of no one, Gaius Maximinus Dia and Flavius Severus.

Now the later Christian writer Lactantius describes a scene in which the troops in Nicomedia ripple with shock when they learn that the handsome, popular, and wonderful Constantine has been bypassed, but it is more likely that everyone knew what the score was going into the ceremony itself. Whatever their level of surprise was when they first heard the news, when Diocletian formally introduced the new Caesars, the choices were already known, so the probability that there were audible gasps and unhappy rabble-rabble-rabbling is low. That being said, there was definitely a faction within the army that was not at all happy Constantine and to a lesser extent Maxentius had been cast aside.

The man who was probably least happy of all was Constantius, the new Augustus of the West. Sure he had just been elevated to the highest rank in the empire, but oddly enough the future did not look too bright for him, because he was not just dealing with the fact that his son had not been named Caesar, but also with the fact that Maximinus and Severus had been. This gets into one of the other big mistakes Diocletian appears to have made before stepping down. Weakened physically and exhausted mentally, there is no doubt that by the end of his reign Diocletian was allowing Galerius to take a lead on many imperial issues. We saw last week how this new dynamic likely led to the Great Persecution, as the fervently anti-Christian Galerius pushed for the persecution to be continually widened and deepened. We see it again now in the choice of Caesars. Maximinus, who would be Galerius' deputy in the East, was Galerius' nephew, and I should mention as staunchly anti-Christian as his uncle. And Severus was a friend of Galerius', who had served alongside the new Augustus during his wars in Parthia. In other words, both of the new deputy emperors were Galerius' men through and through.

Unfortunately it seems that Diocletian simply did not take Constantius' feelings into account when he allowed Galerius to impose his own candidates on the Tetrarchy. And I don't mean that Constantius' feelings were hurt in a touchy-feely kind of way. I mean that the balance of power within the Tetrarchy was immediately thrown out of whack. The Augustus of the West was now isolated and without allies. This did not bode well for the future stability of the system.

It might not have been a big deal had Constantius and Galerius gotten along, but unfortunately it was the other thing. They did not like each other personally, and they did not get along professionally. Which is no doubt why Galerius was keen to make sure he controlled both of the new Caesars. The issue of the Christian persecution amply demonstrates how opposite the two new brother Augusti were. On the one hand you have Galerius, widely seen as the driving force behind the persecution and certainly its most zealous advocate, and on the other you have Constantius, who did his level best to just ignore the whole thing as a disruptive exercise in pointless cruelty. With Diocletian and Maximian standing above them, the two Caesars could pull in these opposite directions and the center would hold. But now that Galerius and Constantius were the Augusti, well, pulling in opposite directions meant that the center would be ripped in half. Or as Galerius no doubt hoped, ripped into his three quarters to Constantius' one quarter.

In a number of fundamental ways then, Diocletian's dream of a permanent Tetrarchy was doomed the minute he abdicated. Not only was the new foursome of Tetrarchs disunited, but there were two men standing outside the system, Constantine and Maxentius, who felt they had every right to be inside of it and were prepared to fight for their inheritance. On top of that, Maximian was still hanging around on the edges in his forced retirement, just itching to get back in the game. This was not a recipe for success, and on more than one occasion the various players begged Diocletian, the indispensable man of his age, to come out of retirement. But once gone, Diocletian insisted that he was going to stay gone. They would have to work it out for themselves.

Sadly for Diocletian though, they did not, and even more sadly, he lived to see it all, as he did not have the good sense to die quickly after abdicating, like Sulla had done. Instead, Diocletian would live long enough to see the empire sucked back into exactly the kind of running civil war he thought he had put a stop to way back in 285. And by the very end, he would live long enough to see his own personal influence count for nothing, as he would be forced to use go-betweens in an attempt to secure the safety of his own wife and daughter, who were trapped in the court of the new Augustus Maximinus Dia, who appeared to have no interest at all in granting the requests of some irrelevant cabbage farmer.

I want to close this week by making a brief and sad foray into current events. As you probably know, an earthquake ripped through Christchurch, New Zealand on February 22, leaving the city devastated, many of its residents homeless, and basic services like water, power, and sewage severely disrupted. The History of Rome community includes listeners from all over the world, and I have gotten many an email with the .nz tag. In fact, one of the questions I answered during the 100th episode came from a Christchurch resident who recently got in touch with me to say that 1. he is okay, and 2. that the city is in pretty bad shape. So attached to this week's post at thehistoryofrome.typepad.com is a link to the Red Cross New Zealand Earthquake Appeal site. If you were thinking about donating to the show in appreciation for my efforts this week, just go ahead and pass it on over to the Red Cross. Right now, I think the good people of Christchurch need it more than I do.