THE HISTORY OF THE ROMAN DOMINATE

 

When Augustus founded the Principate, he did not formally abolish the Roman Republic, preferring to mask his enormous accumulation of personal power behind a carefully crafted façade of republican government (res publica) and the scrupulous maintenance of ancestral customs (mos maiorum). Most of the emperors of the Principate chose to emulate Augustus's fiction of republican government by modifying the Roman constitution to provide legal rationalizations for the concentration of civil and military offices, honorifics (including post mortem deification), and powers in the hands of one man. In this scheme, the first citizen (princeps civitatis) was officially no more than first among equals (prima inter pares) of the aristocrats of the Roman Senate. This formulation proved amazingly durable, the Roman Principate lasting over three hundred years (27 BCE to 284 CE). However, this system came to a calamitous close with what historians now call the Crisis of the Third Century (235-284 CE). The half-century between the death of Alexander Severus (222-235 CE) and the accession of Diocletian (284-305 CE) was a period of unparalleled catastrophe for the Roman Empire that shook the foundations of the Roman world order. Simultaneous assaults on Rome’s extensive frontiers by Germans, Sarmatians, Moors, Arabs, and Celts had coincided with the resurgence of Persian might under the Sassanian Dynasty (224-651 CE). Mutinous governors had created short-lived secessionist states out of Roman provinces (e.g., the Gallic Empire, 260-274 CE, and the Palmyrene Empire, 270-273 CE), and rebellious Germanic foederati (“treaty people”) had plundered the provincial populations they had been contracted to protect. Earthquakes had leveled cities in the east, and the close companions of war—famine, pestilence, and disease—had ravaged and depopulated large swathes of Roman territory (the Roman population is believed to have been reduced by as much as 30%). The beleaguered Roman people increasingly turned to a series of mystery cults (mystai), looking to find some source of comfort, undermining the integrity of the polytheistic state religion and its institutions. As people cast about them looking for a source of blame for the many calamities, the empire was riven with social discord. At a time when leadership was needed, the authority of the emperors had been undermined by venal usurpers and petty court intrigue, and the Praetorians had repeatedly raised and then destroyed rival claimants to the throne. In the 49 years between the reigns of Alexander Severus and Diocletian, more than seventeen emperors and usurpers had briefly occupied the imperial throne (most of them died violently). Out of this chaos, the durable Roman system of government known as the Principate, and the civilization it governed, emerged transformed.

 

What emerged was an empire with a siege mentality, in which dynamic optimism and faith in Rome's destiny to civilize the world were replaced with an imperial autocracy jealous of its prerogatives, paranoid of its enemies (both real and imagined), and obsessed with the maintenance of domestic order. Social attitudes hardened, Rome's famous tolerance and willingness to assimilate the best features of its subject peoples turning into religious and cultural particularism and ethnic chauvenism. The models for the new Roman order came from the Hellenistic traditions of the eastern Mediterranean and the ascendant Sassanid Persian Empire. This reflected a gradual shift in the center of gravity of the Roman Empire from the Latin-speaking culture of the western half of the empire to the Greek-speaking eastern half of the empire—this situation grew more and more pronounced as the western half of the empire slowly crumbled in the face of onslaughts by the Franks, Burgundians, Lombards, Goths, Vandals, and Huns.

     

The author of governmental transformation at the imperial level, which resulted in the foundation of the Dominate, was Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus, known as Diocletian. Although it is easy to exaggerate the scale of disruption represented by the tumultuous events leading up to the reign of Diocletian, there can be no doubt that when he was raised to the dignity of Augustus ("Majesty," i.e., emperor), he faced a formidable task. Diocletian has been credited with overhauling the military, civil, and judicial bureaucracies of the empire, accelerating and systematizing the policies of his predecessors (especially those of the Severan and Illyrian emperors), as well as developing innovations of his own. Symbolic of the new Roman world order was a change in court ceremonial—the quasi-republican ideals of the Principate were jettisoned, emperors henceforth hailed not as princeps civitatis ("first citizen") but as dominus ("lord" or "master"). New court ceremonies were developed to emphasize the distinction of the emperor as a semi-divine figure. The laurel wreaths of former centuries were replaced with a gold crown and jewels, only emperors had the right to wear the royal color of purple (formerly, all those of Senatorial rank could wear this color), subjects were required to prostrate themselves in an emperor's presence (Greek, adoratio), and only the most fortunate were allowed the privilege of kissing the hem of his robe (Greek, proskynesis). The emperor became a figure of transcendent authority whose every activity was shrouded in ceremony and whose every appearance outside the royal apartments was carefully stage-managed. Even the high officers of the imperial court were mere mortals in the presence of a colossus—the informal imperial consilium ("council"), where advisors sat down with or lounged over dinner with a prima inter pares discussing matters of state, was replaced with a formal ceremony where advisors were allowed to stand beneath the throne (as opposed to abasing themselves) and present formal reports (hence the name of this new council, the consistorium ("those who stand") or Imperial Consistory).

 

Under Diocletian's new constitution, power was shared between two emperors called Augusti (singular, Augustus)—the east-west division of the empire now being formalized with the creation of a Western Empire (Patres Occidentis, "Fatherland of the West") and an Eastern Empire (Patres Orientis, "Fatherland of the East"), each with its own parallel civil and military institutions (the bureaucracy was thereby roughly doubled in size). Further, each Augustus adopted a junior partner called a Caesar (plural, Caesares), who both shared his burden of command and prepared to assume the Augustate after his protégé retired (or died). We can see in this a formalization of the adoptive principle of succession from the Principate, although most emperors after Diocletian appointed their own son(s) as Caesar, thus gradually transforming the system from a quasi-meritocracy into an overtly dynastic one. Together, the rulers were known as the Tetrarchae ("Four Commanders") and the system is known as the Tetrarchy. While at first this division of supreme authority may seem contrary to the centralizing tendencies of the late Roman autocracy, in reality the Tetrarchy allowed imperial authority to be present, and thus immediate and effective, in four quadrants of the empire simultaneously. During the Late Principate, the civil administration had gradually withered away and its functions had largely been usurped by the military high command. Diocletian separated the civil and military administrative bureaucracies of the empire in order to mitigate the risk that future generals might attempt to seize the throne through force, then restructured the civil bureaucracy and army to maximize the colleague emperors' ability to exploit the resources of the empire (human and material) and maintain security on the borders, in the provinces, and around the persons of the emperors. While changes were made by subsequent emperors, the basic structure established by Diocletian would govern the empire until the collapse of the Western Empire in the late fifth century CE.

 

The Tetrarchy lasted through the reigns of Diocletian (Eastern Empire, 284-305 CE) and Maximian (Western Empire, 286-305 CE); Galerius (Eastern Empire, 305-311 CE) and Constantius (Western Empire, 305-306 CE); Maxentius (Western Empire, 306-312 CE) and Gaius Galerius (Eastern Empire, 308-324 CE); and the first seventeen years of the reign of Constantine I (Western Empire, 307-324 CE, sole emperor 324-337 CE). During the reigns of Diocletian, Maximian, and Galerius one of the mystery cults had run afoul of the state, and those emperors had carried out a pogrom intended to either wipe out the nascent religion or bring it to heel. Christians refer to this episode as the Great Persecution. As has been mentioned, the events of the Third Century Crisis had undermined the faith of many Romans in the state religion and its institutions (citizenship by this time had been extended to include most free-born people within the empire). The failure of the Roman state apparatus was paralleled by the seeming indifference of the old gods to the fate of mortals, and many turned to mystery cults like Christianity, most of which had an eschatology that emphasized the relative unimportance of this world and suggested that its sufferings could be seen as coin paid to achieve some form of eternal bliss in an afterlife (that is, as long as you were sufficiently indoctrinated with the mysteries of faith—hence the name, "mystery cults," Latin, mystai). Other mystery cults included the cults of Despoina, Attis, Cybele, Isis, Trophonius, Dionysus, Eleusis, Mithras, Orpheus, Sabazios, Serapis, and the Cult of the Great Gods. The problem was that the old polytheistic cults were inextricably intertwined with the state (there was no concept of a separation of temple and state). Every civic act, every element of public life, every level of participation that earned one the right to call oneself a citizen was attached to public rituals that tied every individual to the state through visible and pervasive displays of public piety-as-patriotism. More than this, many Romans (including many emperors) believed fervently that the recovery of security and prosperity, the recovery of the favor and protection of the old gods, was dependent on the full and willing participation of every citizen in public life. Private beliefs were unimportant as long as they did not interfere with one's patriotic duties. One can see how the strategy for recovery of the Roman world order embodied by the institutions and ideologies of the Tetrarchy put the Christian religion on a direct collision course with the Roman state. It is significant that two of the most persistent and serious of the charges leveled against Christians during the Great Persecution were impiety (nefarius) and treason (maiestas).

 

These may seem like overly subtle distinctions, but I think they strike at the heart of the issue and help provide a basis for an objective explanation of the historical transformation of Roman society that took place during the Dominate. After all, during the height of the Great Persecution (ca. 303-313 CE), no one would have predicted that within a mere 67 years Christianity would become the new state religion of the empire. Indeed, Christianity seemed poised for extinction. But between Constantine's Edict of Milan (Edictum Mediolanense), which effectively ended the Great Persecution in 313 CE, and Theodosius's Edict of Thessalonica (known as the Cunctos Populos, "Unification of the Citizens"), which made Christianity the official state religion in 380 CE, there was a massive sea change in the ideological underpinnings of Roman civilization. I would suggest that this represents not the triumph of Christianity over the Roman state, which would have led to the immediate dissolution of the empire, but instead suggests the triumph of the state in assimilating Christianity, forever changing that religion. Constantine seems to have realized that far from being a threat to the Roman state, Christianity was the perfect ideological tool to use to rebuild the broken sense of common Roman identity and purpose. The old polytheistic state religion had put too great an emphasis on personal liberty—outward displays of public piety and patriotism were sufficient, private beliefs and the search for personal meaning in life were left to the individual. Under the new Christian regime, however, your very inner self needed to be devoted to an ideological framework that all too often included obedience to authority figures cloaked in the resplendent garments of religion (both literally and figuratively). Unfortunately, this fundamentally changed Christianity, too often making it a cipher for political, religious, and social authoritarianism—a perfect match for the Dominate, with its emphasis on the submission of all to a Master of All (Dominus Omnibus). The New Testament Canon reached its official form within the Roman Empire as the result of the work done during the first seven ecumenical councils of the early Christian Church—the First Council of Nicaea (325 CE), the First Council of Constantinople (381 CE), the First Council of Ephesus (431 CE), the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE), the Second Council of Constantinople (553 CE), the Third Council of Constantinople (680-81 CE), and the Second Council of Nicaea (787 CE). The net result of these councils was to try to winnow the many different schools of thought and regional variations of the Christian religion that had developed prior to the fourth century CE and develop an ecumenical (Greek, oicoumene, "universal") doctrine that defined correct belief (Greek, orthodoxia, "right belief") to the exclusion of all other interpretations, which would henceforth be judged as heresy (Greek, airesi, "choice")—making individual choices, whether political, social, or religious, had become unacceptable under the new alliance between Christianity and the Roman Imperium.

 

Although Constantine and his successors did away with the adoptive collegial system of shared power and succession that defined the Tetrarchy and instituted a regnal system based on familial dynasticism, the division of the empire into western and eastern halves remained (excepting the reigns of Constantine I (sole emperor, 324-337 CE), Julian (360-363 CE), Jovian (363-364 CE), and Theodosius I (sole emperor, 394-395 CE)), as did the thorough reorganization of the civil, military, and judicial systems. The Constantinian Dynasty (324-364 CE), the Valentinian Dynasty (364-395), and the Theodosian Dynasty (395-565 CE) take us up to the collapse of the Western Empire circa 476 CE, and the consolidation of the Eastern Empire into the Medieval state known to historians as the Byzantine Empire (ca. 480-1453 CE), so the story of the Dominate is the story of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. I've always loved the opening lines of Samuel Bronston's 1964 epic film, "The Fall of the Roman Empire," which was itself a quote from Will Durant's Caesar and Christ (1944), and I think it's worth quoting at length here:

 

Two of the greatest problems in history are how to account for the rise of Rome and how to account for her fall. We may come nearer to understanding the truth if we remember that the fall of Rome, like her rise, had not one cause but many, and was not an event but a process spread over 300 years. Some nations have not lasted as long as Rome fell.  ...  A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

 

Sorry, folks, but the simple truth is complex—there just isn't a short answer to the famous question, "Why did Rome fall?" The reforms of Diocletian and Constantine provided a sound administrative and military foundation, but they bought a fragile prosperity.

 

The massive expansion of the bureaucracy and military placed a heavy tax burden on the populace, but rampant corruption often meant this burden fell heavily on the shoulders of the middle class and the poor. During the Republic and the Principate, aristocratic men were proud to exert themselves, often at great personal expense, in acts of public euergetism and participation in civic life (the cursus honoram, "race of honor"). During the Dominate, aristocrats increasingly retreated to heavily fortified rural villas, expending incredible efforts to hide their taxable income and avoid civic participation, letting the great cities of the empire slowly crumble. The Christian Church attempted to step in as a font of public munificence, but the simple fact is that it too suffered from rampant bureaucratic corruption, and its tax-free status (granted by Constantine I) meant that it became a kind of massive tax haven that further reduced the tax base, again shifting the lion's share of the tax burden onto those who could least afford it. Unsurprisingly, this led to widespread dissatisfaction, and the empire's cities were often rocked by vicious and destructive riots. Ironically, the classical education system and the philosophical underpinnings of classical Roman culture now came under the same kind of criticism used by the Tetrarchs to justify the Great Persecution (i.e., adherence to Christianity was necessary to show patriotism, and failure to do so was treason). Many of the riots that swept through Roman cities were targeted at libraries, temples (which were often repositories of art and culture), teachers of suspect ideas (like mathematics and science), and public facilities (e.g., the great Roman bath complexes were often viewed by church leaders as dens of iniquity, while amphitheaters and theaters promoted un-Christian values). Once again, the Christian Church attempted to fill the intellectual void, and prominent families that had once formed the backbone of the Roman intelligentsia placed their children in the service of the Church (and often made "donations" that assured a successful career path), but the intellectual rigors of the Church were first and foremost expended on Biblical exegesis and spiritual teachings, not the intellectual achievements of classical Greece and Rome, which had become politically suspect. This meant that the architectural, engineering, and intellectual glories of the past were destroyed and denigrated, and when things stopped working there was no one willing or able to fix it. Finally, at a time when provinces had become depopulated due to famine, disease, and/or war, and thus huge swathes of productive land had fallen into disuse, the hardening of social attitudes prevented the effective social assimilation of new peoples that might have brought these lands back into productive use. In centuries past, foreign tribes had routinely migrated into the Roman Empire and been settled as foederati ("treaty people") on depopulated land that had fallen out of production. While this practice continued, the Germanic, Sarmatian, Moorish, and Arab settlers of the Dominate were often subject to harsh exploitation by the corrupt bureaucracy, they experienced religious persecution (e.g., most of the Germanic peoples had been converted to Arian Christianity, a sect whose beliefs had been declared heretical at the First Council of Nicaea), and failed to achieve citizenship as had earlier generations of Celts, Iberians, Berbers, Greeks, Syrians, and Egyptians. Virtually the only path to citizenship for immigrants was military service, and indeed many men with "barbarian" origins rose to positions in the Roman High Command, but such men were often viewed with suspicion and treated as social inferiors by the Roman aristocracy (Latin, patricius, Greek, patrikios). Taken in conjunction with the indignities often visited on their peoples, including gross treaty violations, it is perhaps unsurprising that when rebellions arose, or when tribes invaded Roman territory, they were often joined by a large number of deserters from the Roman army.

 

By the mid-fifth century CE the Roman Empire was again, as it had been during the Third Century Crisis, faced with an enormous number of social, military, and environmental challenges. The Eastern Empire ultimately adapted and endured—the resulting successor state is usually called the Byzantine Empire by most historians in order to distinguish it from the classical Roman state—and the Byzantine Empire continued the tradition of Roman imperialism for another 1,000 years, until the fall of Constantinople to the Turks on 29 May 1453 CE. But the Western Empire collapsed as various Germanic peoples carved out kingdoms of their own from the increasingly fragmented Roman hegemony. The city of Rome, which had not fallen to an enemy army for over 800 years, was repeatedly stormed and sacked by barbarians (Visigoths in 410, Vandals in 455, Ostrogoths in 546 CE) until the city became a pale shadow of its former glory (the western imperial court was moved to Ravenna in 402 CE, which was smaller and more easily defensible than Rome). It is a testament to the enduring legacy of Rome that even her conquerers at first couldn't believe the empire was gone—many of the Germanic successor states started out as imperial foederati and fought over the right to be considered (ironically) defenders or restorers of the empire. But when one such defender, the Germanic federate chieftain Flavius Odoacer/Odovaker (note the Romanized Germanic name), deposed the last Western Roman emperor (Romulus Augustulus, ironically named after the legendary founder of Rome—Romulus—and the founder of the imperium—Augustus) in 476 CE, and had himself declared King of Italy, the Western Roman Empire was already gone in any meaningful sense.