AS WE HAVE SEEN, the traditional forms of communication between emperors and subjects, barring an imperial appearance in their midst, were rescripts and letters responding to particular local complaints. General orders or edicts were rare: the most famous of all edicts in Roman history, the decree that “went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed,” in the Gospel of Luke, was not an edict at all but rather an order for a provincial census to take place in areas administered by Quirinius, governor of Syria, in AD 6. Quirinius’ census formed the basis for the tax regime in Syria for centuries to come, and, as in so many areas of Roman administration at this period, nothing really changed. Orders seeking to innovate were relatively rare. It was mainly a question of making existing practices work better—Diocletian issued a number of such orders in the 290s. Their format was barely different from those of earlier orders. They would be addressed to “all provincials” opening with a preface explaining why the emperor was taking the action he was followed by a series of instructions—for instance, as in the case of Decius’ edict on sacrifices, telling people how they should go about carrying them out.1
The reason edicts were relatively rare is probably that Roman emperors realized they were unlikely to be effective, and because the emperors had a viable, if somewhat clumsy, method of getting their message out through the system of petition and response. The reason that orders delivered this latter way were more likely to be effective than edicts was simply that responses were addressing issues raised at the local level, while edicts expressed concerns arising from the more remote confines of the court. Also, court issues might have less resonance than rescripts, unless the order was for something that people would like (such as ways to become a Roman citizen) because the remit and standing of local administrators like the strategos at Panopolis differed profoundly from those of, for instance, the procurator of the private account in the province of Lower Thebaid.
Imperial administrators, who tended to come from outside the province, were on a ladder of promotion supported by generous exemptions from civic and personal munera, while local administrators were often performing their administrative tasks to satisfy their obligations regarding civic or personal munera. This being the case, if the imperial government was looking for results, persuasion was often a good deal more effective than command. In practical terms, government officials, aside from those managing imperial estates, tended to intervene at the local level only if there had been some spectacular demonstration of local ineptitude, usually involving fiscal mismanagement, the administration of justice in serious cases, and the collection of taxes. In two of these three areas, the role of the imperial administrator was more often that of a referee—albeit a referee who could torture or execute people who annoyed him—than that of a hands-on manager. Radical change, even in the area of taxation, was difficult to implement since the urge for efficiency could be met with passive resistance at the local level, as illustrated by the events around Panopolis in 298. Diocletian’s response to revolt, as it appears in the records of the strategos, ignores the fact that the people he was visiting and the soldiers whose pay records fill a great deal of the strategos’ dossier had all recently been supporting a man who had defied Diocletian’s authority.
Diocletian’s conduct in Egypt shows that he recognized the limitations of imperial power, and the first group of edicts he issued were all linked to reforms in the legal system during the early 290s. Several of his actions over the next decade suggest strongly that he, or those around him, decided to experiment with ways of expanding the reach of the court into the lives of the average Roman. The issues that most concerned the emperor were fiscal and moral reform.
Diocletian’s view that one ought to be a good person to be a Roman emerges with painful clarity in an edict that he issued in 295 on the subject of close-kin marriage. The issue would seem at first glance to be a simple one: essentially, that people should not marry their siblings or children, or their grandmothers (mentioned as a possibility). This was a standard feature of Roman law. The problem was that close-kin marriage was relatively common in some parts of the empire; this was especially true in Egypt, where the law was now declaring as un-Roman something that people who had become Roman citizens after Caracalla’s edict had been doing for centuries. The edict, in declaring such unions null, at least granted amnesty to those who entered into them before the edict’s promulgation. In the strikingly self-righteous preamble the emperor states:
Since to our pious and devout minds those things which were chastely and morally established by Roman laws seem especially worthy of reverence and worthy of devout preservation for all times, we do not think that we should ignore those things done by some persons nefariously and incestuously in the past, and since they are either to be restrained or punished, the discipline of our times encourages us to rise up. There is no doubt but that the immortal gods themselves, favorable as always to the Roman name, will be pleased in the future if we see to it that all those who live under our rule shall be observed by us to live pious, religious, quiet and chaste lives in all matters.
The further purpose of this edict, it is stated, is to ensure that the good reputation of those seeking marriage be protected and that any children be free from taint (he had recently issued a rescript banning children born of incestuous relationships from holding imperial administrative posts, though not civic munera). The edict notes correctly that marriages between close kin were always forbidden by ancient Roman law, people ought to remember that they live under Roman laws and institutions, that the present ruling contains nothing new and that the Roman Empire only gained its present greatness by safeguarding all its laws and the sanctity of religion. To marry injudiciously would be an act of ignorance and barbarity.
The nature of the document, the fact that it went out to all corners of the empire, makes it extraordinarily improbable that Diocletian did not approve its wording, even if he did not personally draft it. It must surely represent both his feelings about the issue and the role of the gods in the Roman world (which might help explain why he became so angry when a sacrifice went awry).2
A document like this would be received by an assembly of the local people who would listen, heads bowed and bared, as it was read out. Ordinarily a letter would accompany it from the provincial governor explaining what the emperor was saying (a redundant exercise, but useful to us because sometimes due to the vagaries of document preservation, the governor’s letter survives when the edict doesn’t).
The point of any edict was to activate the local bureaucracy to obey the order of the emperor. In the case of the one on close-kin marriage, the relevant officials would be those who worked on the census, keeping detailed records of every household through the house-to-house survey that became the basis for one of the main imperial taxes—the capitation tax, levied in various ways upon humans and animals. It is possible, as we shall see when considering some local officials enforcing a later edict, that such men might not consider the object of imperial displeasure to be as criminal as the emperor himself might think. The process of arousing local authorities to action was often complex, which might well be why in Decius’ edict on sacrifices a clause was inserted saying that the order would have to be carried out by a certain date. In another instance, the edict ordering a new assessment of tax liabilities throughout the empire, it appears to have taken an exceptionally long time, even when there were no rebellions to contend with, to actually complete the required surveys. For the tax edict of 297 we have documents from the archive of the long-suffering Aurelius Isidorus chasing down declarations of olive groves in 298, 299, and 300. In Syria can be seen a series of inscriptions relating to the activities of census-takers in the countryside who were evidently charged with determining village-by-village liabilities. Here, the necessarily thorough surveys of village territory could open up entirely new areas for corruption: another probable reference to the impact of the taxation edict in Isidorus’ dossier points to collusion between local leaders and officials charged with conducting the survey.3
The language of a letter that Diocletian would write a few years later to the governor of Egypt is in many ways similar to that of the edict on close-kin marriage of 295. This time the object of imperial wrath is a religious group devoted to the teachings of the mid-third-century Persian visionary, Mani. Mani’s career provides a remarkable example of the way a missionary faith could spread during that era, and the attraction that new ideas about the divine might have even for eminent persons. Odaenathus’ widow Zenobia, for instance, is said to have met with his missionaries, and Sapor himself appears to have been interested in what Mani had to say. It was Bahram II’s brother, Hormisdas, dominated as he appears to have been by Kartir, the leading light of the Zoroastrian revival that accompanied the rise of the Sasanians, who would execute Mani as a heretic. The teachings of Mani, who appears to have been very widely read in the religions of the period, combined elements of Christianity with Zoroastrianism along with his own powerful imagination to describe the eternal struggle between the forces of Light and Dark. While he was in Alexandria, Diocletian had learned from Julianus, the governor of Africa, that a new sect, which Julianus seems to have researched very carefully, had arisen “from the Persian race which is opposed to us,” and was challenging received doctrine. Diocletian was appalled that anyone should seek to challenge the wisdom received from the ancients: “The immortal gods are disposed to order and arrange matters through their foresight so that those things that are good and true are approved and fixed by the wisdom and constant deliberation of many good, eminent, and the very wisest men.” He had heard that the Manicheans had disturbed people’s calm and upset whole communities. Furthermore he feared lest (as, he felt, often happened) “there should be an attempt, through the execrable customs and savage laws of the Persians, to infect with their malevolent poisons, men of a more innocent nature, the temperate and tranquil Roman people, as well as our entire empire.” Julianus was therefore ordered to arrest all the Manicheans he could find and burn them, along with their books—though if he should find any in the imperial service, he should instead send these individuals to the mines.
To carry out the order, Julianus would have to rely on local authorities, and since Diocletian probably relied on him as his source of information on this point, he most likely thought that Julianus’ own province was the only place that Manicheans were to be found. In any event, the Manichean community survived whatever savagery Julianus unleashed upon them to play a powerful role in the intellectual development, later in the fourth century, of the future St. Augustine; and in Egypt, they set up communities off the beaten track in places like Medinet-Madi and Kellis, in which precious Manichean libraries were discovered in the twentieth century.4
If moral reform was one pole of Diocletian’s moral compass—and it seems that it was—another was administrative efficiency as defined by fiscal reform and improved management. A change in census procedure in 297 was one feature of an ongoing reformation of the provincial administration that saw the progressive division of the large provinces of the earlier empire into smaller units. In some cases the change made use of earlier internal divisions within provinces; these tended to be subdivided into smaller districts whose financial affairs were overseen by local procurators who had reported directly to the emperor and were outside the orbit of the governor.5 Elsewhere, new provinces—Lower Thebaid is one—were created as the emperor thought best.
In addition to his growing concern about personal morality, Diocletian seems to have been bothered by the pathetic status of the imperial coinage and aware that there might be substantial regional variation in the prices of basic goods and services; this was only to be expected given the breadth of the Roman Empire, where major ecological differences could not fail to result in widely varying economies.
The first problem Diocletian set out to solve was galloping inflation. Everyday transactions now required massive quantities of the bronze coinage that was the basic medium of exchange. Evidence for reform survives in the coins of the period, which are minted to a new, much heavier standard, and an inscription from Aphrodisias in western Turkey. The inscription comprises an edict and an explanatory letter to or from the local governor: the sum total of the information they offer tells us that the imperial coinage was to be retariffed at double its face value. Debts contracted to the fiscus (the treasury) or to private individuals before September 1, 301, were to be repaid according to the old standards, while those contracted on or after that date were to be paid according to the new regulations.6
It is unlikely that the edict on coinage was conceived in a vacuum: it was probably intended as a prelude to one of the most interventionist acts ever attempted by an ancient government. This was the Edict on Maximum Prices, issued between November 20 and December 10 of 301. Taken together, the edicts look like a prescription for a new fiscal order based on what Diocletian conceived as a fair dispensation across the entire empire. But whereas the edict on coinage appears to have been a reasonable response to the problem of inflation, the price edict was not. It is perhaps significant that Lactantius, in the course of lambasting Diocletian for all manner of woes suffered by the Romans, mentions the price edict, but not the coinage reform.7 Both edicts also involved physical actions that people could not miss. In the case of the coinage edict it meant that people would be carrying around the new, heavier coins. In the case of the edict on prices it meant that there might be a massive new monument erected in their town, or that the wall of a public building might be covered in writing so people could see what things should cost (see figure 8.1). Both are powerful symbolic acts reflecting the new confidence that government had in its own virtue, a confidence seemingly born of success on the battlefield.
The connection between external victory and internal order, at least in the mind of Diocletian, is very evident at the start of the edict:
The memory of the wars that we have fought successfully rightly gives thanks to the Fortuna of our Res publica, together with the immortal gods, for the tranquil state of the world placed in the embrace of the most profound peace, and for the goods of peace, on account of that which was striven for with great sweat; decent public opinion as well as Roman majesty and dignity demand that it be stabilized faithfully and ordained decently so that we who, by the benign favor of the gods, have stifled the seething ravages of barbarian nations in previous years by the slaughter of those nations, will surround the peace founded for eternity with the proper foundations of justice.8
FIGURE 8.1
The Edict on Maximum Prices was a massive document whose inscribed form was a demonstration of the ambition of government. This reconstruction shows how the decree was exhibited in the city of Aphrodisias (western Turkey). Source: Phil Stinson. With permission from the Aphrodisias Excavations, New York University.
The justification for the edict derives from the “excesses perpetrated by persons of unlimited and frenzied avarice” that were not checked by self-restraint, from the action of individuals who “have no thought for the common need.”9 The emperors are acting in accord with their subjects, who can no longer ignore what is happening; hence “we hasten to apply these remedies long demanded by the situation, satisfied that no one can complain that our intervention against evil-doers is untimely or unnecessary, trivial or unimportant.” In so doing they “exhort the loyalty of all, so that the regulation for the common good may be observed with willing obedience and due scruple.”10 Moreover, the particular victims of high prices are the very agents through whose efforts the security of the state has been won—the soldiers.
In practical terms, the Edict on Maximum Prices was an act of economic lunacy. Price controls had long been part of civic life, and it may be that Diocletian did not realize that a policy that might have short-term benefits in times of food shortage could not be translated to an empire-wide level with any hope of success.11 In simplest possible terms, the edict ignored the law of supply and demand, the fact that prices were set by the availability of goods, and that the cost of goods was affected by the cost of transport. It could be objected that the prices in the edict—which were set for an enormous range of goods and services—were intended as maximums and thus that the numbers appearing in the edict are in fact unrealistically high for many parts of the empire. But this doesn’t seem to be so.
The driving force behind the edict was a desire to set maximum prices for the goods and services listed, but the state too would have to pay those prices, and it is inconceivable that the fiscus would willingly overcharge itself across the length and breadth of the empire. In fact, except for the price of wheat, which does appear to be set near a maximum rate of one hundred denarii per modius (the customary wheat measure, about two gallons), prices generally appear to have been below the going rate in Egypt at the time the edict was issued.12 Moreover, while the edict includes differential prices for some goods in different stages of production, as well as transport costs, it does not appear to recognize that those transport costs needed to be added to production costs in the computation of a fair price. This omission cannot be taken as evidence that every community in the empire was essentially self-supporting, for in the computation of transport costs the edict demonstrates awareness that every kind of transport needed to be factored into the structure of the economy. What happened was simply that it factored these costs in inadequately, and this may well reflect the way the court paid for things. It is quite likely that someone at court would pay 1,200 denarii for a hundred pounds of pork sausage and then 25 denarii to a camel driver to move it to where it was needed. One of the problems faced by the procurator of Upper Thebaid in 298 was that he had to arrange both to collect the food for the imperial visit and, separately, to make sure that it got moved to the right place.
A further problem with the edict was the mechanism of enforcement. Earlier edicts could rely on the structures of the existing imperial institutions—the mints, the financial organizations including the banks that changed money, and the officials who made lists of people for the capitation tax. In this case, those responsible for enforcing the edict would have been local market officials (this task was yet another personal munus). These were individuals who had minimal connection with the organs of imperial government and, if Lactantius is to be believed, showed minimal competence in handling the situation so that prices skyrocketed, blood was shed, and goods were ultimately driven off the market.13
Despite Lactantius’ vehemence, the impact of the prices law cannot be traced in any other source no matter how hostile to Diocletian (it is not even mentioned by Eusebius). This might suggest that the edict was repealed within a short time of being issued, possibly because it was seen to be a massive failure. Another possibility is that people very soon started to ignore it. The inscriptions containing the tariffs survive from more than forty places, and if the edict had been repealed, it is likely that the stones containing it would have been destroyed. Lactantius states that “the law dissolved through its own necessity,” which could support either repeal or irrelevance.14 It is notable that these inscriptions come only from a part of the empire where Galerius too was active, so it would seem plausible that the sudden interest in the widespread inscription of a Latin edict had something to do with his own tastes and his own notion of what it was to be Roman, for this edict too reflects something of the imperial sense of appropriate Romanness. The surviving record of Latin inscription from these years is abnormally weighted away from the western emperors in favor of the eastern—Diocletian, Galerius, and their successors.
Does the prevalence of inscribed versions of an imperial edict in one part of the empire as opposed to another reflect the way that an edict was actually enforced? It is quite possible that there was a connection and there is certainly some reason to think that the next of Diocletian’s edicts was unevenly enforced throughout the empire. This edict, aimed at forcing Christians to conform to what Diocletian felt to be the norms of Roman life, was issued in February 303 after the emperor had arrived at Nicomedia and settled into his palace after many years on the road. It is not at all clear why he should suddenly have decided to pursue the Christians, who were by this time an established group within the empire and could not readily be associated with “barbarian habits.” Lactantius’ suggestion that the edict stemmed from the incident of the failed sacrifice in 302 seems unlikely given the length of time separating the two, though other incidents involving Christians refusing to sacrifice might have aggravated the situation.15 But Lactantius’ suggestion that Galerius played a role in the decision to go after the Christians does seem believable as he would show himself to be an implacable foe of the Christian community right up until the last year of his life. According to this version, Galerius saw the persecution as a way of arranging the succession in his own interests, and, despite Lactantius’ obvious prejudice, there might well be an element of truth in what he says: the events of the next couple of years worked entirely to Galerius’ advantage. It was his aim not to be disadvantaged if Diocletian should predecease Maximian. He may well have had a particularly strong dislike for Christians and have sensed that Constantius was, if anything, well disposed to them.16 By supporting Diocletian’s new antipathy, he could convince the aging emperor that his own interests needed to be protected if the system of the tetrarchy was to endure. Still, Diocletian may have hesitated; both Lactantius and Constantine himself, who was at court at the time, report that he made no decision about what to do until he had consulted the oracle of Apollo at Didyma (a famous oracular site on the west coast of Turkey). The final decision rested with Diocletian alone, and when he made his decision he stressed that people who did not worship the gods as he thought right were offending the very beings whose good favor had restored the state.17
What we do know is that the edict was promulgated at Nicomedia on February 24, 303, then in Palestine by March, and that local officials in North Africa were trying to enforce it in a somewhat desultory way in mid-May.18 The terms of the edict were that churches should be destroyed and Christian scriptures should be burned; that Christians in the imperial service were to lose their rank, or, if they were freedmen, be reduced to slavery; and that all were to be deprived of the right to answer legal actions against them or to file complaints against people who assaulted them. The last two provisions are of particular interest in that they constituted an open invitation for the people of the empire to join with the emperors in “purifying” Roman society of what Diocletian took to be the evil of Christianity. In this way the edict colluded in the assumption of central government that Roman citizens shared with the court a basic interest in defending society against those regarded as malefactors.19
Events were to move very fast in the next twelve months. Shortly after the promulgation of the edict, a fire broke out in the palace at Nicomedia that would be blamed on the Christians, resulting in numerous executions; and rebellions occurred in Commagene and Syria (though this last had nothing to do with religion as it was a military mutiny involving the local aristocracy). Constantine later recalled that Diocletian had been terrified by the fire, which he said had been caused by a lightning strike. He does not mention another event, one that seems to have infuriated Diocletian: this concerned a Christian who tore down a copy of the edict and abused the emperors as barbarians. This person was incinerated by imperial command. A second edict ordered the arrest of Christian leaders.20
The flow of the edicts down the chain of command is illustrated by a declaration made by a lector to a local financial official at Oxyrhynchus, showing us how a local official would transmit a report of what was in a church to senior officials in charge of imperial finance. Concluding with the statement that he has done his duty “in accordance with what was written by our most illustrious prefect Clodius Culcianus, I also swear by the genius of our lords the emperors Diocletian and Maximian, the Augusti, and Constantius and Galerius, the most noble Caesars, that these things are so and that I have falsified nothing, or may I be liable to the divine oath.”21
Despite formal involvement of senior imperial officials who received the report, the final responsibility for making sure that edicts were observed lay with the local authorities. The lector is making his declaration to them because they are responsible for ensuring that he delivers church property to a person who plainly knows him. In the record of the persecuting activities of Munatius Felix, the flamen perpetuus and curator of Cirta (a major city in what is now Algeria) on May 19, 303, we see the official, who knows several leading Christians by sight, scouring the town for someone who may have a copy of the scriptures that he can confiscate, a quest that speeds up after he arrests a couple of more recalcitrant types. In the end, Munatius seems a most unwilling persecutor, taking it on trust that whatever is handed over to him is a book of scripture.22 Our evidence for his actions, the written record of his search, adduced years later during the investigation of a controversy within the Christian Church arising out of the persecution, shows many signs of having been composed to prove to his superiors that he was taking their instructions seriously. Here we may see the typical local bureaucrat going about his business:
When Diocletian for the eighth time and Maximian for the seventh time were consuls, 14 days before the calends of June (19 May), from the records of Munatius Felix the perpetual priest of the imperial cult [flamen] and curator of the colony of Cirta. When he arrived at the house in which the Christians met, Felix the perpetual priest of the imperial cult and curator said to Paul the bishop: bring out the writings of the law, and anything else you have here, as it is written so that you will be able to obey the order.
Paul the bishop said: the readers have the scriptures, but we will give you what we have.
Felix … said: Point out the readers or send for them.
Paul the bishop said: you know who they are.
Felix … said: I don’t know them.
Paul the bishop said: the public records office knows them, the clerks Edusius and Junius.23
In the face of this sort of marginally vigorous action, one North African bishop wrote that Christians should simply hand over the works of heretics instead of scripture so that the authorities would have something to burn and they should make no effort to provoke them.
The question of how to respond to the edict would create horrendous problems within the Christian community. Many people followed the example of Bishop Paul in Cirta who appears to have been no more than marginally uncooperative with the authorities, while others objected strongly; and in some places the persecuting authorities were more vigorous than in others. One of the latter areas was Egypt, where the prefect Culcianus—mentioned in the text from Oxyrhynchus—appears to have been a relentless enemy of the Christian community. A contemporary pagan grammarian who lived in Alexandria may be expressing his disgust at Culcianus’ activities in a poem in which he wrote that it was not surprising that the murderer flourished since Zeus would have killed his own father (any reference to Zeus in this way must have made an audience think of Diocletian’s adoption of the title Jovius, as Jove/Jupiter was the Roman version of the Greek Zeus). More often, it appears that officials were reluctant to push the persecution to the limits of their authority. In the eight years after the first edict was issued, records in the Balkan provinces where Galerius—arguably the most hostile of the original members of the imperial college—resided most often, forty-two executions are attested, while in Palestine, also home to some active enemies of the church (as well as to a large Christian community), there were seven executions under the original edict and perhaps as many as 200 in later years.24
The death toll in the great persecution, although insignificant by the standards of twentieth-century bigotry, is a very poor guide to the total impact of the edict on the Christian community, whose members were subjected to constant harassment from their neighbors and whose relationships with each other were profoundly altered. The psychological impact of the edicts was intense on those who were uprooted or whose lives were ruined and on those who felt they must keep their community together. At the root of the discussions and quarrels that would continue for decades was whether one should resist, and by defying the authorities risk bringing destruction upon one’s fellows, or find ways to accommodate the authorities while continuing to practice one’s faith. The question was especially acute for those in positions of leadership whose authority might be ruined in the eyes of one or the other faction for years to come.
Within a year of the second edict, in preparation for the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Diocletian’s accession—and now of Maximian’s, as by historical sleight of hand his regnal years had been equated with Diocletian’s—a third edict proclaimed a general amnesty, though it seems that there was a qualification in the case of the Christian clergy who were required to sacrifice (in some cases their jailers were willing to say that they had sacrificed when they had not and seem not to have been eager to continue their incarceration).25
The “great persecution” ended some eighteen months after it had begun; in some parts of the empire its repercussions would continue to haunt the church for more than a century. Lost in these dates is the question of what Constantine thought and did as the edicts were issued. Later he would react against this sort of government, but what did he think and how did he act in 303? He was a visible member of the court; many years later he would feel the need to reintroduce himself at length to the Christian community at Nicomedia.26 Did he then have a guilty conscience, a memory of things that he had not done, people he had not protected? He would also later say that he recognized in himself things that were in need of improvement; did some of these things involve a display of moral courage?
Perhaps matters of conscience were not so important to him in 303; he was a new father, a member of the court, and loyal servant of the state. It was a good idea then to follow orders and go with the flow. More than twenty years later, when he was ruler of the world, the events of these years were still fresh in his mind. He would never forget, and there is no reason to think that he was proud of the man he had been in 303.