THE RHETORICIAN MAMERTINUS PROVIDES us with a great deal of information about the theory, practice, and challenges of governing the empire in the 280s. Some of what he has to say would scarcely have been news a century before, but other comments point to the evolution of a fresh concept of government. There may have been nothing new in the notion that to be an emperor was to stand on “a lofty pinnacle of human affairs.” But this emperor has a different perspective as he surveys both land and sea to discover which governors are administering his particular form of justice, which generals are successful; he receives correspondence from everywhere, and to everywhere dispatches his instructions.1 He distinguishes between a governor, here called (as would later become typical) a iudex or judge, and a general (a dux or leader), and in so doing introduces a radical change in the governing philosophy of an empire in which, for centuries, military glory had been a defining feature of the ruling aristocracy as a whole and in which a provincial governor had expected to command whatever forces his province possessed. We do not know exactly how or when the change took place, though Mamertinus’ language suggests that this was already the accepted division of authority. If it was not—and there is no obvious reason to think that it was—a development of the new regime, it is most likely a practice that began to be institutionalized in the years after 260.2
Less problematic is the relationship between the two emperors: they are partners in power, each doing what he needs to do to make Rome strong. There is no clear subordination of one to the other—while there can be no doubt that Diocletian is senior, Maximian is a partner rather than a servant. Maximian had hitherto been concentrating his activity in Gaul, while Diocletian had been to the east and back, where “the kingdoms of the Persians had recently surrendered to him.” The “surrender” appears to have consisted of an embassy from King Bahram II guaranteeing the existing frontier, possibly agreeing to a formal peace treaty: this, given the recent Roman assault on Bahram’s homeland, might be regarded as something of a diplomatic coup for Diocletian as well as a sign of the chaos that continued to beset the Persian kingdom. This state of affairs included not simply the struggle between Bahram and his brother, Hormisdas, but also a period of intense religious fanaticism.
Kartir, chief of the Zoroastrian priesthood, with Bahram’s support, was seeking to stamp out other religions throughout the Persian Empire. This equation between religious and imperial authority was far removed from the Roman understanding of civic cult, or even that of the organized worship of the emperors through the imperial cult (a structure that served an important role in propagating imperial propaganda). The desire to impose religious conformity had not even been a feature of Valerian’s persecution, or of Decius’ edict of 250 on sacrifices. Valerian had been interested only in getting Christians to do what he told them to do, not in forcing everyone to worship in the same way, while Decius had been content that everyone just show up to sacrifice once. Aurelian’s patronage of Sol Invictus, Invincible Sun, had served to promote a divine favor, channeled through himself, that was manifestly not open to others. Nonetheless, a desire for a more specific alignment between an improved religious message and imperial power can be read into the equation of Diocletian and Maximian with Jupiter and Hercules. In both Persia and the Roman Empire we sense the government’s growing ambition to centralize its authority on the institutions of imperial rule and to enhance its overall message.3
Diocletian spoke to his subjects more often and more generally than had emperors since the mid-first century AD. Although all emperors might dispatch very long missives to their subjects, before the period we are investigating here the bulk of the evidence for communication of an overtly ideological tone (as opposed to the ideology implicit in pretty much any imperial communication) relates to the first, Julio-Claudian, dynasty that ended with Nero’s suicide in AD 68. There are no documents like Augustus’ monumental autobiography, or the lengthy decree settling the crisis that shook the Roman state with the death of an imperial heir apparent in AD 19–20, surviving from later eras. What we do possess from the later first to the mid-third century are many imperial responses to specific requests for favors, for permission for a given group to assert certain rights, for the resolution of a dispute with neighbors, for recognition of services, for redress of grievances, or for the resolution of internal crises—the longest surviving document of Marcus Aurelius (reigned AD 161–180) is a letter to Athens about a series of disputes among citizens.
Some documents, even if ostensibly sparked by parochial concerns, might also impose new regulations for the empire as a whole, as does a text of the late 170s relating to a request from people about to be saddled with the cost of gladiatorial shows for the imperial cult; they asked the emperor to rescind what was effectively a sales tax on the gladiators whom they would have to purchase. Marcus Aurelius takes advantage of this request to impose an empire-wide price-fixing scheme. It is a sophisticated plan, allowing for different prices for gladiators in places of greater and lesser wealth and providing the mechanism for setting prices in line with local norms where people were not rich enough to afford really good gladiators.
Marcus’ action with respect to the gladiators is evocative of the way that one of his predecessors, Hadrian (reigned AD 117–138), used complaints and queries from a number of places to enunciate empire-wide policies relating to public entertainment. In one case, questions had arisen about how to schedule games so that athletes could get to them. To deal with the problem the emperor summons people who have issues to see him at Naples: at the same time he takes the opportunity to issue a new calendar of games. As with Marcus, it is likely that his response goes well beyond any individual request, showing how an astute emperor might make use of the process of “petition and response” to initiate change. In another letter Hadrian responds to some petitions about specific issues that have arisen at various games in such a way as to create a virtual charter of rights for traveling entertainers. In both cases the emperor could have issued an edict telling people what to do. Instead, he chose to adopt a mode conforming to their image of an emperor needing to respond to the complaints of subjects rather than seeming to rock the imperial boat.
Over these centuries the message that people tended to get was that the emperor embodied a group of virtues that essentially defined his job. These were courage (virtus), fairness (aequitas), duty (pietas), foresight (providentia), and generosity (liberalitas). Of these qualities the first was most obviously manifest in war while generosity was shown though lavish entertainments, building projects, distributions of food (usually limited to Rome), and help for those in need. Duty, in the sense of pietas was the duty that one had toward the gods and in maintaining proper relationship with other humans, while foresight increasingly took on an aspect of a nearly divine ability to see into the future. Justice was done every day through the answering of petitions.4
Diocletian and those around him were fully conscious that the age-old system of petition and response was not simply a passive tool of government. A few years after Mamertinus’ speech two major projects were set in motion that would effectively codify Roman legal practice largely on the basis of responses to petitions, or rescripts. The leading actors in this movement were three jurists, Gregorius, Charisius, and Hermogenianus, all of them with established careers before Diocletian’s arrival on the scene. Gregorius had risen, under Carinus, to the immensely important position of magister libellorum (master of petitions), which gave him oversight of responses that the imperial court issued to the literally thousands of petitions with which it was inundated in the course of a year. Charisius may have been with Maximian on the day that Mamertinus spoke. He was the emperor’s magister libellorum in 286–287 and held the same position under Diocletian in 290–291. Hermogenianus was magister libellorum for Diocletian in 295–298, after which he became praetorian prefect, a post that he would keep until 302. While Gregorius and Hermogenianus were responsible for massive new guides to Roman law, Charisius was the author of an important work setting out the way government was supposed to operate; his writings include books on civic munera, witnesses, and the duties of the praetorian prefect.5
The labor of Diocletian’s leading lawyers differed from the legal compilations writing of what is now seen as the “classical period” of Roman jurisprudence in the second and early third centuries AD, which tended to involve extensive commentary on the praetor’s edict. The importance of the praetor’s edict stemmed from much earlier Roman practice in which the praetor urbanus, the senior magistrate at Rome who was in charge of the court system, issued a statement—his edict—of the way the civil law would be administered in his year of office. These edicts of necessity tended to be repetitive, but it was not until the AD 130s, in Hadrian’s reign, that a permanent form was promulgated. This “Perpetual Edict” had four parts and a series of appendices. The first section dictated the procedure for bringing an action, the second and third sections laid out measures for which actions or other forms of intervention would be granted (e.g., the appointment of guardians for minor children or, in the case of a pregnant widow whose child would have a claim on the deceased father’s estate, appropriate supervision of the pregnancy and birth). The fourth section dealt with the way that judgments would be executed. Commentaries on the praetor’s edict tended to include a great deal of input from individual jurists, quotations from the work of jurists of whom they approved, plus the occasional opinion of an emperor who could be shown to have had the wisdom to agree with a given jurist’s views.
FIGURE 4.1
The new college of emperors: Diocletian (a), Maximian (b), Constantius (c), and Galerius (d). Note not only the close resemblance that the four emperors bear to each other, but also the change in the images of Diocletian and Maximian from those used earlier in the realm (see fig. 3.1). Source: Courtesy of Author.
Gregorius and Hermogenianus produced codes that, although organized along the lines of the praetor’s edict, illustrated points of law through quotations from rescripts. Although rescripts were largely composed by jurists they went out under the name of the emperor rather than of a lawyer. The effect of the new codes was to assert that the operation of the law was founded upon actual precedent and the actions of imperial officials. The idea that a code of conduct could be defined by a collection of responses to petitions as in the case of Hadrian’s handling of entertainers and games, had not previously formed a central tenet of legal procedure. One reason for this was that emperors tended to contradict each other: Hadrian in his letter implicitly reverses a decision by his immediate predecessor. In the codes, careful editing removed overt contradiction, and the principle was established that in cases where contradiction was observed the most recent rescript would be the authoritative one. Gregorius’ code, which drew on rescripts from AD 196 to 291 was completed in 292, while Hermogenianus’ Code, based on rescripts from 293–294 appeared in 295.
The dates upon which the great works were issued are significant. The year 293 saw a major shift in the structure of government.6 In 293 the empire acquired two more junior emperors.
In the course of his speech of 289, Mamertinus noted a problem that still loomed on the horizon: a “pirate” who threatened the empire’s Atlantic frontier.7 The “pirate” was one Carausius, previously commander of the garrison on the Rhine, who had proclaimed himself emperor at the end of 286 or the beginning of 287, allegedly to protect himself from the charge of peculation. At the time of Mamertinus’ speech, Carausius had just been driven from his bases in Gaul, and it was expected that he would be similarly ousted from his final refuge in Britain during the coming year. That did not happen as a storm seems to have deposited Maximian’s fleet on the rocks. In the wake of this disaster, Carausius regained a foothold on the mainland from which he was driven only with difficulty. In 293 his regime still retained its presence on the mainland, but Maximian was in no position to deliver the final blow. For that he chose Constantius, whom he elevated to the rank of Caesar. A few weeks later, Diocletian did the same for Maximianus Galerius, to whom he married his daughter Valeria.
Exactly what prompted the appointment of Caesars at this particular time or the selection of the one in the west ahead of the one in the east we cannot know. The outcome was that Constantius would always be regarded as having precedence over Galerius, just as Diocletian always had precedence over Maximian. In any event, the war with Carausius was the most important crisis at hand, and Constantius was already an imperial son-in-law. The decision to use him for what could be a risky operation may have reflected a simple recognition that the stability of the realm required that the Augusti stay out of the line of fire in situations where failure would be seriously embarrassing. Constantius, through an adroit combination of military might and diplomatic guile would, after a few years, accomplish the reconquest of Britain. Likewise several years hence Galerius would prove his own very considerable mettle on the battlefield, when he took on a command that might have had fatal consequences for the regime if Diocletian had needed to play an active role.
One result of the expansion of government was that there were now four imperial courts rather than two, and it is perhaps not accidental that the new codes provide coherent guidance about how the imperial courts could interact with their subjects. The legal records of this period suggest that the expansion of the administration to include the two Caesars was the result of a deliberate plan rather than an expedient reaction to a crisis (as some scholars have supposed). The codes also give us a view of the purpose of government, for although some of their documents are memoranda to imperial officials, the vast bulk are responses to people who fall well outside the ranks of the imperial aristocracy. These people are soldiers and members of curial classes at all levels, men of the middling sort, women (about a quarter of those addressed), and even some slaves and freed persons. In a very real sense the individuals who appear in these documents are the emperor’s “public,” the people to whom he addressed himself, and as such the codes mirror an important development in the definition of what it was to be Roman.
Definitions of Romanness, which tended to be both a cultural and a legal phenomenon, had never been straightforward—and if these definitions had been it is unlikely that a man like Constantius, whose family had no ethnic connection with the Romans of earlier times, could have become an emperor.
There was really no way that definitions of Romanness could be simple or consistent; the imperial elite depended for its power on people who were widely dispersed, who largely spoke no Latin, whose lives were shaped by radical differences in climate, history, and class. In one sense, to be Roman meant pursuing a way of life that the elite Romans found acceptable and useful. It might mean learning Latin, it might mean acquiring a taste for aspects of central-Italian life—more often involving wine rather than the pork products in which Romans delighted. Or it might simply mean bloody-minded and brave service in the army. In a famous passage in the sixth book of the Aeneid, Virgil has the specter of Anchises comment that while others might excel at the arts, it was the job of the Roman to rule people with imperium, to humble the proud and spare the weak. The sentiments appealed sufficiently to the emperor Augustus that he alludes to them in the autobiography that he assembled in the last year of his life. At other times he had sought to resist the extension of Roman citizenship through its most obvious means, the freeing of slaves, by limiting the number of slaves that any one person could free and by creating a class of semi-citizenship modeled on the existing concept of partial citizenship known as Latin Rights: such rights enabled a person to receive the protections of full citizenship against arbitrary treatment by magistrates, but not to vote. In the provinces, citizenship tended to be limited at this point to the rich, who could hold high office in places that had been granted municipal rights involving a Roman-style civic constitution and the award of citizenship to those at the top.
In a speech that he gave to the Senate, Claudius I (reigned AD 41 to 54) suggested that Roman citizenship could be infinitely extensible as people became more civilized. One popular alternative means of acquiring citizenship was bribery, and Claudius’ wife Messalina, who also attracted scandal in more notorious ways, was allegedly at the center of a palace ring that peddled the franchise to the provinces. This scam is immortalized in the Acts of the Apostles when the Apostle Paul tells a centurion who is intent upon flogging him for fomenting public unrest that he can’t do that because he, Paul, is a citizen. When the centurion asks how Paul acquired that status, he is impressed to discover that he inherited it; he confesses that he paid a lot of money for his own citizenship. And it appears to have been during Claudius’ reign that men retiring from military service were granted formal discharge diplomas on bronze tablets, copies of which were also installed on a temple at Rome, guaranteeing their citizen rights. From the time of Augustus onward there is some evidence to suggest that no one checked very carefully on the citizenship status of men who had been recruited into the legions—you had to be a citizen to be a legionary, and in some cases it is clear that people became citizens immediately upon enlisting.
Another way to become a citizen was to have a powerful friend. The younger Pliny, whose extensive (and carefully edited, by him) correspondence survives, sought citizenship from the early second-century emperor Trajan for the numerous relatives of his doctor, on the grounds that the doctor had saved Pliny in a recent illness. Several decades later Cornelius Fronto, then tutor to the future emperor Marcus Aurelius, sought the franchise for his friend Appian of Alexandria, on the grounds that he was a jolly good chap. This must have seemed more important than the fact that Appian had worked for the imperial treasury and was the author of a major history of the rise of the Roman Empire.8
These cases illustrate various ways in which the “legal” definition of citizenship could be applied. The most fundamental discussion of cultural Romanness appears in the biography, composed at the end of the first century by Tacitus, the greatest historian of the Roman world, of his father-in-law, the general Agricola, who served for many years as governor of Britain:
Since people who are scattered and crude are, from that, inclined to war, while the peaceful are inclined to quiet through pleasures, Agricola began privately to encourage, and publicly to give assistance so that they built temples, marketplaces and houses, by praising the eager and criticizing the slow so that rivalry for honor replaced compulsion. He educated the children of chieftains in the liberal arts and preferred the natural intelligence of Britons to the industry of the Gauls, so that those who had previously refused to learn Latin desired eloquence. In this way there developed an affection for our way of life and the toga was commonplace, and gradually there was a decline to the tools of the vices: porticoes, baths, and the elegance of dining. That which was called civilization amongst the ignorant was part of submission.9
A crucial aspect of what Tacitus observed was that adaptation to Roman ways might make the empire easier to govern, but those who voluntarily took up aspects of Roman life did not automatically achieve the legal status of Romans. Indeed, during the first and second centuries, the socio-urban architecture of the empire became a series of local variations on general themes of Greco-Roman urban life, with Greek styles tending to predominate as the model in the eastern part of the empire, and Italic styles in the west. Places like Trier retained the signs of their origins as the winter encampments of Roman legions, with street systems laid out on the pattern of a camp, while a city like Ephesus retained a decidedly Greek feel even though its main marketplace was entered via a triumphal arch that had been erected by a pair of wealthy freed slaves formerly belonging to Agrippa, Augustus’ right-hand man. Ephesus would have a stadium, for instance, and a theater, but it would not have an amphitheater, the quintessential western venue for gladiatorial combats and beast hunts, although they were extremely popular there. Trier had a large amphitheater that was built through the city’s defensive wall. Byzantium, a very ancient Greek city at this point, had a very Roman circus, but that was because the place had played a major role in supporting a losing cause during the civil wars of Severus’ time and he had rebuilt it incorporating some Roman attractions.
The cultural dynamic of theme and variation would continue throughout the empire, even though questions about who should be a citizen largely ended when Caracalla’s grant of the franchise in AD 212 made Roman citizens of the vast majority of people, whether they would ever have dreamed of wearing a toga or could speak a word of Greek or Latin. The main consequence of Caracalla’s action, as it appears in Diocletian’s codes, was to enhance the importance of status definitions based on immunity from public services.10
The Diocletianic codes thus came into being at a point when Roman society was in flux, when there were new priorities and perhaps all the more need to interact with government, which now played a greater role in defining people’s relationships with each other. It is therefore not surprising that the people we encounter in the codes have a wide range of problems with which they were seeking the emperor’s help through a rescript. Although given legal authority as a precedent when included in the code, a rescript did not have quite the same standing when simply issued to the individual. Essentially it stated that if the situation was as the petitioner described, a magistrate should decide the case in his favor. Inevitably it was possible for both sides in a legal action to obtain favorable rulings that would then have to be adjudicated by the presiding magistrate. The sheer volume of work that went into answering the masses of petitions that flowed into an imperial palace was such that it was quite possible that the staff would not notice that they were issuing rulings that might be contradictory.
Among the 942 people that we meet through petitions preserved from the Codex Hermogenianus are Lucius Cornelius, Macedonius, Platonianus, and Zoilus, all of whom received rescripts on December 16, 294, at Nicomedia, the city that was rapidly emerging as Diocletian’s preferred residence. Lucius Cornelius, who has a difficulty with a debt, is told that if his creditor will not accept the payment of what he owes after he has made any offsetting payments, he can bring an action. Zoilus’ problem is that a man who was indebted to him has assigned the payment of the debt to a third party who owes him money. It appears that the third party is unwilling to pay and Zoilus is told to sue him. Macedonius’ problem, involving pledges of property to repay debts, occupied the lawyers a good deal during this year (there are sixteen surviving rescripts on the subject from 293 to 294). Macedonius seems to have acquired some property in payment, then finds that a third party is trying to claim it on the grounds that it is actually his, possibly after having renounced possession at some earlier point. Macedonius is reassured that if the third party, who is twenty years old, has earlier given up claim to the property, he has no business claiming it back.
Platonianus’ case is particularly interesting. He appears to have gone blind and, because of this, someone has tried to remove him from his seat on the town council, possibly claiming that a blind man is incapable of participating in public life. The ruling is that blindness is different from loss of civil rights for disgraceful conduct, which would indeed have necessitated giving up his seat. The decision that disability should not prevent an otherwise qualified individual from participating in public life is in line with a ruling the previous year stating that illiteracy didn’t disqualify a person from being on the town council. Similarly it was ruled that “persons afflicted with public disgrace (infamia) may hold no offices that would have been given them if they were of intact dignity, but they may have no excuse from curial or civic munera and it is necessary for them to pay customary levies for public defense.”11 Clearly the authorities were concerned that some people might try to avoid tiresome responsibilities by getting themselves into trouble.
The matters decided on 16 December, while no doubt important to those concerned, were relatively routine to the lawyers. Their responses appear to have been brief (they certainly are as they have come down to us). The requests do not seem to have offended their sensitivities; and neither, for instance, did a freedman named Lucillus, clearly a person of some means, who tried to use his status to excuse himself from civic munera only to be told quite matter-of-factly that “the condition of being a freedman cannot provide an excuse from munera or offices in the city in which the freedman is resident.” The tone of the response could, however, be very much harsher as a man named Polymnestor found when he claimed that his profession as a philosopher merited a grant of immunity from service on a city council. He was told in no uncertain terms: “Your profession and your desire disagree with each other, for although you claim to be a philosopher, you are overcome with the blindness of avarice and you only wish to evade the burdens that are linked to your patrimony. Because you have tried this in vain you will be able to teach others by your example.”12 Similarly, someone on the legal staff was plainly appalled by Bithus, who had tried to sell his wife as a prostitute and was complaining that he had not been paid:
You say that you put your wife up for sale: you therefore understand that your petition contains confession of your being a pimp and there is no place for an action on the secured amount because of the shameful reason for taking the payment. Although the shameful action was engaged in by both sides and the action would cease with payment of the claim, nevertheless, since it arose from a stipulation made against good morals it is shown that the action must be denied through the intervening authority of the law.13
Bithus’ wife was clearly in a dreadful situation, like many others who figure among the petitioners here. For instance, a man named Olympius is so poor that he had sold his son into slavery; in another case a woman named Aurelia Euodia, forbidden by law to act for her underage son, seeks redress because she feels that he was forced to sell property at what she regards as an unfair price. Then, another woman is told that it is for the provincial governor to decide whether the offense committed against her is awful enough for her, as a woman, to bring suit, while a woman named Dionysia is told that “it is established that it is a male responsibility to undertake the defense of another and that is beyond the female sex.”14
To be effective as well as authoritative, rescripts asserting moral positions such as denying the ability of women to act as tutors or expressing disgust at the appalling behavior of Bithus, needed to be locatable within the broader moral compass of the Roman people. Much of our evidence for the orientation of this compass comes from collections of proverbs, fables, and wise sayings. These varied sources of wisdom suggest that there were some general patterns of behavior that many people might agree were right or, on the other hand, worrisome (even if that sense might not stop a man negotiating with a person who was pimping his wife). In the realm of “wise sayings” or “gnomic literature,” it might well be possible to find support for the belief that women should stay at home or that they were dangerous to deal with. Even though Roman law gave them control of property, and although well-to-do women could be highly visible in civic life and female entertainers could be phenomenally successful, there remained a very strong negative view against women, reinforced with batteries of misogynistic quotation from the literature—centuries old by the time of Diocletian—that were still central to school curricula. These “wise sayings” imply that women’s role is to ensure the biological security of their society and if they aren’t having babies they aren’t doing their job. This view is less pronounced in fables and proverbs, which may reflect the tastes of less exalted members of society who were less concerned with these issues, but it remains true that the animals of Aesop’s fables tend to be male, that the slave experience chronicled in the anonymous Life of Aesop is exclusively that of male slaves, and viewpoints that might be identified as specifically feminine are missing.15
In a world of limited literacy—and the Roman Empire was one in which full command of letters was restricted to the few—storytelling was an essential way of passing on received wisdom, and handbooks were widely used to shape all manner of communication. Although most people would need some knowledge of letters, since they had to deal with a government obsessed with documentation, few had much more literacy than being able to make sense of their tax records. Even if they had, they still might have preferred to use the services of a professional writer who could turn their words into the kind of language that an imperial official was accustomed to and would know how to make use of standard letters to shape a client’s concerns. The dependence on “writing professionals” can also explain why people could be in reasonably responsible positions—for example, eligible for civic munera—and yet claim to be illiterate, or “slow writers.”16
A great deal of communication in the Roman Empire seems to have followed a conventional pattern, suggesting that there was a premium on sounding like everyone else. And similarly with much of the thinking that prevails in both popular and educational literature, this is invaluable in offering some sense of what people thought was right and wrong and what constituted their basic concerns. Many stories and sayings focus on power relationships: how slaves could deal with their masters, how the poor could deal with the rich, what the obligations of those with money were to those less fortunate. Envy, for instance, was something judged best avoided, a lesson that may initially have been lost on the young boy who had to copy out eleven times “Do not be eager to be rich lest envy cause you misfortune.” The poor could take comfort—if it can be described as such—in the fact that they have not far to fall whereas the wealthy should beware that the higher they stand the more vulnerable they are to the caprices of fate.17
Friendship is always important, but that too is something one must be careful about: one’s friends should be like oneself—it’s no good to make friends with people who are very different from yourself, as anyone knows who is familiar with the story of the bull who goes to dinner with the lion, only to flee when he discovers that he’s the main course.18 Likewise you have to be cautious about whom you laugh at, because if you laugh at a joke in the presence of the person who is the object of that joke, he will hate you: “Untimely laughter leads to weeping.”19 Anger is always a bad thing—the rich, especially, have to be wary since their anger can threaten serious harm to those around them. The story of Hadrian hitting his secretary and blinding him in one eye is a case in point. The emperor suffered great remorse, asking the man what he could do in recompense, to which the secretary replied that he could not return his eye. Indeed, wisdom could well be equated with caution and one needed to be aware that the gods were watching. One should be able to identify disgraceful conduct and should always seek to do the honorable, or so the literature suggests.20 There is a fascinating collection of oracular texts, predictions obtained either by casting knucklebones or by selecting a letter that correlates with a divine saying. The seekers of these oracles trusted in a traditional religion based on faith in the gods’ beneficences and believed implicitly that the gods took care of people.21 They also inclined to the view that the gods helped those who helped themselves.
The language of Mamertinus, and of others whose words survive from this period, echo the feelings of popular literature in describing the deeds of Maximian and Diocletian, especially in presenting them as striving tirelessly to do right and defend the state. Distant as the two emperors must seem, they had to be in touch with the values of the society they led. This was a lesson that Constantine would learn as he was growing up, and it is one that he would never forget. In his years of power, Constantine will often seem to be responding to precisely the sorts of concerns that are raised in the literature of popular morality.