A MUCH LATER WRITER, looking back on the last decades of the third century, would write of the emperors who came from central Europe as if they were a coherent group, a school of generals nurtured by Aurelian and his successor Probus. However, the record from 268 to 280 suggests, whatever people might think later, that these officers did not all see themselves as part of a unified group. Rather, each new emperor had to find a way to forge his own governing coalition that reached well outside the group of generals with whom he had associated before taking the throne. If one wished to rule the empire, it was best not to rock the boat too much when taking on the job. Both Claudius and Aurelian shared power, initially, with members of the old aristocracy.1
The situation confronting Aurelian was grave—Claudius had won a big battle in the Balkans, but heavy raids continued to pummel the empire from north of the border; one even penetrated Italy. Aurelian’s strength of character and ability to dominate a situation emerge perhaps most clearly during his first year on the throne: even though he lost a battle to these raiders he does not seem to have faced a serious attempt to unseat him. By the beginning of 272 he had taken sufficient control of the military situation to be able to imagine confronting the Palmyrenes. Just how serious a threat these people posed to his regime at this point is open to question. Zenobia, Odaenathus’ widow and the dominant force behind the throne of her young son, Vabalathus, did not claim the title of emperor for her boy and retained in office many of the officials who controlled Egypt under Claudius. She seems to have created general stability—for instance, a legal case could proceed without interruption; similarly, we may presume that there was no disruption in the annual Egyptian grain shipments that were crucial for the survival of the city of Rome.
Enough evidence survives concerning Aurelian’s war with Palmyra—there is good reason to think that Constantius, Constantine’s father, served in this war—to give us some impression of the complexity of the operation. Aurelian was not simply a superb general; he was also a man with a keen sense of the political and psychological aspects of warfare. At a strategic level, perhaps the most notable aspect of the campaign was Aurelian’s ability to coordinate the reconquest of Egypt with his advance through Asia Minor. Both operations seem to have met with minimal resistance, and diplomacy was a significant feature of the advance. This lesson was not lost on Constantius, and it was a lesson that would be passed on to Constantine, for whom willingness to find a place in his own regime for former enemies was an important quality as he rose to power.
That Aurelian favored diplomacy over fighting might also have been advertised through the work of a contemporary at Athens, Publius Herennius Dexippus. He wrote a history of the wars between Rome and the peoples north of the Danube that includes two great set-pieces in which Aurelian demonstrated that he shared in a Greco-Roman heritage that gave him the strength to resist aggressive barbarians. In the campaign against Palmyra, diplomacy may also have played an important role as the Palmyrene armies offered no serious resistance before Aurelian reached Antioch. Other aspects of surviving narratives stress the favor of the gods shown to Aurelian, manifest through the failure of oracles to support the Palmyrenes as well as in battlefield miracles that helped the Romans. The most important of these allegedly occurred in the final battle outside Emesa, when the Roman line seemed about to give way only to be refreshed by a divine apparition. Upon entering the city’s main temple, Aurelian recognized its god as the one who had saved his army.2
The saving god could only have been Elagabal, but Aurelian presented him to the world as a typical Greco-Roman divinity in human form. He now revealed this god to the world as the Invincible Sun (Sol Invictus) and ordered a massive temple to be constructed in his honor at Rome. The celebration of his cult was accompanied by the creation of a new priesthood into which senior members of the Senate could be (and were) recruited as a sign of imperial favor.
Aurelian’s successful creation of a new cult around Elagabal is especially significant in light of the god’s previous, less fortunate, history in the capital. The cult image of Elagabal—a meteorite—had been brought to Rome when his teenage priest had become emperor in the wake of a civil war in AD 217. The young ruler, who is conventionally referred to as Elagabalus, after his god, constructed a massive temple for his god and insisted on celebrating the god’s original rites, which included orgiastic dancing around the cult image. Members of the Roman aristocracy regarded these rites as distasteful. In this form the cult of Elagabal lasted in Rome only until 222, when the Praetorian Guard murdered the emperor Elagabalus, who had by then offended wide cross-sections of the Roman establishment. It was at this point that Elagabal was sent home to his temple in Emesa. The new and “improved” form of the god introduced by Aurelian was far more palatable and successful.3 Aurelian’s version of Elagabal as Invincible Sun would prove immensely important for both Constantius and Constantine. Constantius, who may well have been at the battle of Emesa, appears to have been devoted to the god, and Aurelian’s example showed Constantine that it would be possible to make a previously unpalatable divinity acceptable in the imperial pantheon—especially if that god was connected with a notable victory.
While Aurelian pressed the claims of his miraculous victory, he seems to have done little to upset the status quo in Syria on his arrival there and similarly in Egypt. When members of the local Christian community of Antioch came to him claiming that the presiding bishop, one Paul of Samosata, was a supporter of the Palmyrene regime, he refused to take on the case and referred the matter to Christian bishops in Italy for a decision. Zenobia was brought to Rome where she was allowed to live out her days in polite society; meanwhile, a local intellectual named Callinicus of Petra who had dedicated a history of Egypt to her as “a new Cleopatra” seems to have been permitted to redeem himself for this faux pas by composing a work on the “Restoration” of the Roman Empire.4
In writing on the restoration of the Empire, Callinicus was picking up a theme that had been in the air for a while. Before leaving Rome, Aurelian had begun to construct a massive circuit wall. While there are many reasons to build a wall, not the least being to create an administrative boundary and control the flow of population, there was no obvious reason that wall-building should suddenly have been a concern at Rome; nor was defense an obvious need. The city had not been approached by a foreign enemy since the third century BC; not even the raiders with whom Aurelian had dealt in northern Italy had posed a threat, and it is unlikely that he would have advertised that he was doubtful whether he could defend his capital. But city walls had long had meanings and purposes that were not purely practical. For a provincial city, an encircling wall indicated importance. But for Rome, whose standing was unimpeachable, walls perhaps had a different meaning. In the rhetoric of the second and third centuries AD, the Roman Empire was a fortress of civilization surrounded by walls that kept the forces of barbarism at bay. Now, as the emperor set out to restore the metaphoric walls to their former extent and grandeur, the city’s new physical circuit could be a symbol of renewal and confidence in the future.5
The initial settlement with Palmyra appears to have been so generous that some failed to understand that they had in fact lost. Leading members of Palmyrene society rebelled as soon as Aurelian headed home and approached the governor of Syria, offering him the throne. He demurred and notified Aurelian, who returned and destroyed the city. In 274 the loyal governor shared the consulship with Aurelian; the consul of the previous year, who had been chief of the watch (a senior equestrian position) under Gallienus was also the praetorian prefect. His consular colleague was a Marcus Claudius Tacitus, who may have been Italian but whose lack of obvious connection with any major aristocratic family makes it likely that he too had played a role in Aurelian’s campaign of “restoring the empire.” Although there was still room at the top for members of the Senate, these appointments by Aurelian, along with keeping an ordinary consulship for himself in four of the six years of his reign, reflect his desire to reward supporters, which is hardly surprising in a time of civil war.6
The empire that Aurelian “restored” would not be the same empire that had existed before 260. Before setting out on the eastern campaign, the emperor had decided that the region of Dacia, north of the Danube, could no longer be defended by walls, symbolic or otherwise, and ordered the abolition of the provinces there. In so doing he evidently inconvenienced the family of a man who might then have been serving in his army, one Maximianus Galerius (another future emperor). More problematic was a decision Aurelian made after his victory in Gaul to “renew” the silver currency of the empire, which had long subsisted on the notional equivalence of twenty-five silver coins—denarii—to one gold coin (aureus), no matter how low the actual silver content of a denarius might be (by this time it was virtually negligible).7
The problem with imperial finance was one that every regime throughout history has had to contend with: namely, that there was an imbalance between income and expenditure. The largest items in the imperial budget were the army and the cost of the subsidized food supply for the population of Rome, a mainstay of government since the time of Augustus. The cost and organization of Rome’s food supply was closely entwined with the overall economy of the empire as the surplus produced by the agricultural lands in Africa and Egypt was siphoned off to Rome through a complex but efficient delivery system. The one emperor who had tried to cut costs by limiting distributions had fallen victim to a revolt in AD 238, a point presumably lost on no one, and it is perhaps significant that despite his financial difficulties, Aurelian saw fit to supplement Rome’s food supply with distributions of pork (a staple of the central Italian diet).
The army was another matter, though here too freedom of maneuver was limited. In the first two centuries AD the proportion of the empire’s population under arms had declined as the size of the army had not kept pace with the increase in the population as a whole; but the cost of maintaining the army had continued to occupy a relatively steady proportion of the budget (about 40 percent at the best estimate). Septimius Severus (reigned AD 193–211) shattered this equilibrium when he doubled legionary pay and increased the size of the army by 10 percent, the latter move necessitated by the acquisition of new territory in the east. His successor, Caracalla, made things much worse with a further increase in salaries, which proved impossible to undo. Caracalla’s successor alienated his army when he tried to roll back the increase by introducing differential pay scales for soldiers serving at the time of his accession and new recruits, which opened the door for the rebellion at Emesa, which resulted in his death and Elagabal’s first arrival at Rome. In the time of Philip (the former praetorian prefect who became emperor when his predecessor was murdered after a failed invasion of Persia in 244), there is evidence of an attempt to enhance revenue collection that seems not to have worked. One papyrus contains an appeal for the “divine intelligence of Decius” (reigned AD 249–251) to fix the fiscal problem said to have begun with Severus (the solution was not forthcoming). A secondary problem by the time of Aurelian as the process of “renewal” took place, was concern in some parts of the empire for the legitimacy of the coinage in circulation. In Gaul especially the coinage in circulation for the previous fifteen years had been created by a regime that was officially illegitimate, while in Egypt, in the early 260s a governor had had to order bankers to accept coins with the image of the emperors on them—not something the bankers were keen to do, presumably given that the images were those of two usurpers.8
Although Aurelian was trying to tackle a real problem, his solution was too extreme. The result was the collapse of confidence in the imperial coinage, rampant inflation, and the destruction of the accumulated reserves used as endowments across the empire. A monetary system that had been reasonably stable for centuries was thereby overthrown, and efforts to restore confidence in it would be a source of constant stress over the next several decades.
Aurelian had reunited the empire, but he had not united the general staff behind his vision. In the late summer of 275 a cabal of officers murdered him near Perinthus, close to the city of Byzantium. It would not have been lost on Constantius—or other officers whose careers were now moving forward—that even the most successful Roman emperor in the past half century could not guarantee his personal safety or control the succession.
The succession turned out to be very complicated. A story was told much later about how the general staff deferred to the Senate in the selection of a new emperor, which, after an interregnum of some six months appointed a new ruler; this story has tended to overshadow a far more dramatic sequence of events. It appears that the assassins thought they would be able to determine the succession; but when they failed they fled to Syria, where they seized control of the province from an unpopular governor whom they also murdered. Strikingly, coinage continued to be minted in the name of Salonina, Aurelian’s wife, who seems to have maintained some sort of control over the situation while the army selected Claudius Tacitus as the next emperor.9 Those who supported Tacitus did so on the assumption that he would avenge Aurelian. The assassins, however, proved bolder than could have been expected, penetrating Tacitus’ encampment in central Turkey and killing him. A brief civil war ensued between the army’s new candidate, Marcus Aurelius Probus, and Tacitus’ brother. Probus won, and then invited the assassins to a banquet where he murdered them.10
Probus’ subsequent reign was chaotic. Several military revolts took place in Gaul, there was a war between two Egyptian cities, and a major operation was needed to suppress warlordism in southern Turkey. Probus himself fell victim to a rebellion orchestrated by his own praetorian prefect, Marcus Aurelius Carus, in 282.
Notably absent from the narrative of these years is any reference to the Persians. Sapor had died in 270, and the revolutionary and religious fervor that had ignited his regime (as it had that of his father)—the desire to serve the god Ahura Mazda and stamp out his enemies—faded as the regime faced severe internal problems. Marcus Aurelius Carus proposed to take advantage of these weaknesses by launching an invasion of Persian territory, which he did during the summer of 283. The Persian defense appears to have been utterly uncoordinated and the Roman army may have captured Ctesiphon, the capital of the Persian Empire. At that point Carus died, probably of unnatural causes as he is said to have been struck by lightning. His younger son Numerian was made co-emperor with his older brother Carinus, who had remained in the west, and the Roman army withdrew to its own territory. What happened next remains both profoundly important and profoundly obscure.11
Numerian appears to have survived his father by only a few months. We find him responding to a petition at Emesa on April 5, 284. His response is a detailed discussion of what should happen if a person whose property has been administered for him during his youth wishes to sue his guardians once he has attained majority; it addresses a significant point of law and is surely the work of the legal staff that traveled with every emperor. On 20 November the army proclaimed a new emperor at Nicomedia in northwestern Turkey (modern Izmit). Somehow and somewhere between these points Numerian had died. Tradition (admittedly highly serviceable to the reputation of the new emperor) held that Numerian’s father-in-law, the praetorian prefect Aper, had him murdered and concealed his death: this he achieved by transporting the body in a closed litter, explaining it away by pretending that Numerian was suffering from an eye ailment that necessitated keeping out of the light. The fact of death was only admitted when the body began to produce olfactory evidence of decomposition.
At this point it seems to have been generally agreed that the army was not going to serve the co-emperor Carinus and would need a new emperor of its own. So the general staff met and announced to the army that the new ruler would be Gaius Valerius Diocles, until then a relatively junior officer in command of a guard unit. According to tradition, Diocles’ first act was to swear to the army that he had not murdered Numerian; his second was to draw his sword and skewer Aper, who was standing nearby on the platform from which he was addressing the soldiers. The last part of the story, at least, may be open to some doubt since the most hostile contemporary witness—Lactantius—does not mention it, and it seems unlikely that he would omit a tale implying that the emperor he despised began his reign in a fit of homicidal fury.12
Even without Aper’s dramatic end, there are signs that the situation in Nicomedia was getting complicated. Diocletian—as Diocles, highly conscious of the symbolic power of nomenclature, soon called himself so that he would seem more “aristocratic”—was not obvious emperor material. His family originated at Doclea in the Balkans, though it is likely that he grew up near Split, where he would later construct a large retirement palace for himself. Although stories about his being the son of a scribe or a freedman of a powerful senatorial clan are either impossible to prove or inherently improbable, they may reflect the perception that Diocletian was the tool of the aristocracy. He would share the consulship in the year of his accession with the illustrious aristocrat Pomponius Bassus, who must have been with the army in order to figure as Diocletian’s colleague in the first place.13
News of the eastern army’s selection of a new emperor was greeted in the west with a rebellion against Carinus, who may have been as deeply dislikable as later tradition makes him out to have been. Carinus crushed this revolt as he made his way east, and according to one tradition was murdered by an officer whose wife he had raped. This account reads like a confused version of another story about Carinus’ death: namely, that he was killed by the aggrieved officer in the battle he fought against Diocletian at Margus in the Balkans just as his army was on the point of victory. According to another version, Carinus fled to the west after losing to Diocletian and was killed in Italy.
There can be little doubt that Diocletian’s triumph was achieved amid a welter of betrayal and deceit, and that good traitors knew how to cover up their actions. Still, it is telling that his consular colleague in 285 was a man who had begun the year as Carinus’ colleague and praetorian prefect, Titus Claudius Aurelius Aristobulus, who would go on to be prefect of Rome in 295–296.
There is also a story, possibly not totally fictional, that Constantius, then serving as governor of Dalmatia, on learning that Carinus planned to kill him, changed sides to aid Diocletian. The reason for supposing Constantius was in the Balkans at this time is that Constantine, the subject of this story, had recently been born at Naissus, the modern Nis in Serbia—the date is probably February 27, 282. Constantine’s mother, Helena, whom later tradition variously describes as a woman of very low standing (or the daughter of a British king), most likely belonged to a respectable family from Drepanum in Bithynia, a district of what is now northwestern Turkey.14 The city believed to be her home would be renamed Helenopolis in her honor, probably by her son when he became emperor. We cannot now know how or where Helena met her husband, but we can be reasonably certain that Constantius’ actions in 284–285 drew favorable attention from members of the victorious faction, for he was soon moving in exalted circles. What better way to secure the potential of a brilliant career for his young son?