The emperor Diocletian (245–316) unleashed the final and most violent persecution of the Christians in Roman history. Tens of thousands of individuals may have been killed under the four separate persecution edicts he issued in 303 and 304. Apart from his bloody crackdown on Christians, however, Diocletian’s reign was a relatively peaceful period that temporarily halted the decline of the Roman Empire.
Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus was a soldier and bodyguard who was declared emperor by his troops in 284. He defeated a rival, Carinus, in a brief civil war and assumed undisputed control over the empire in 285.
By the time Diocletian took power, the empire had struggled through a long period of near anarchy. By the third century, there had been dozens of emperors, some of whom had survived only a few months before being assassinated.
As emperor, Diocletian moved to establish order and restore what he viewed as the ancient Roman virtues of military discipline, respect for private property, and worship of the traditional pagan gods. He sharply curtailed the power of the Senate, reformed the civil service, and overhauled the Roman tax code. Militarily, Diocletian crushed opponents in Egypt, Armenia, and Syria.
Christians had been subject to intermittent persecutions since the reign of Nero (37–68), but the first two decades of Diocletian’s rule were marked by relative tolerance. Historians have long puzzled over what caused the emperor’s abrupt reversal in 303, when he announced the first of his persecutions. He may also have come to believe that Christianity posed a threat to the civic unity of the empire.
The persecution began with the torching of churches and expanded into an unprecedented campaign of torture and execution. Christians who refused to make sacrifices to the pagan gods were boiled alive, crucified, or, infamously, fed to the lions in the arena. Many others were sent to work in the mines.
In 305, Diocletian became the first emperor in Roman history to voluntarily abdicate. He retired to his palace on the Adriatic, where he grew vegetables and suffered from increasingly ill health. Diocletian died there in 316—three years after one of his successors, Constantine (c. 272–337), had overturned the ban on Christianity and ended the persecution.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- The triumph held by Diocletian and Maximian (c. 250–310) on November 20, 303, to celebrate their victory over the Persians was the last such parade in the history of Rome.
- Diocletian spent most of his emperorship outside of Rome. He preferred Nicomedia (now Izmit, Turkey) and Antioch (now Antakya, Turkey). His retirement palace in Salonae (now Split, Croatia) is still standing.
- During the persecutions, many Roman Christians took refuge in the catacombs, a network of caves outside the city walls. Many of the catacombs are now open to the public.
