Rome

However, he was earthbound enough to recognize that the sheer size and complexity of the Roman Empire, and the slow communication this size meant, demanded changes in the administration of its government. He therefore introduced the Tetrarchy, or Rule by Four. It actually began as a diarchy, rule by two. In 285, he designated his lieutenant Maximianus as “Caesar” and put him in charge of the Western half of the Empire, while he kept the East. (Diocletian was worshipped as the earthly incarnation of Jupiter, and now Maximianus became, for religious purposes, Hercules.) In 293, Diocletian appointed two more Caesars: Constantius, father of the future Constantine the Great, who was to rule Britain and Gaul in the West, and Galerius, who got the Balkans in the East. But he had to be sure that ambitious sub-Caesars did not become too powerful, so he split the provinces: divide and rule. There would henceforth be six dioceses in the East and six in the West, divided into about a hundred provinces, each with its own governor. The roster, in its essential features, would last for centuries—it was the basis of most subsequent national divisions.

Inflation was a huge, intractable problem, which Diocletian lacked the economic ingenuity to control. He tried, and failed, to fix prices by issuing edicts limiting both wages and the sale price of every sort of commodity and service. An army modius of ground millet, for instance, would cost 100 denarii; a pound of best-quality pork leg, 20 denarii; oysters, a denarius each; and so on. An arithmetic teacher was to earn 75 denarii per month; a carpenter, 50 per day; a scribe, “for second-quality writing,” 20 denarii per hundred lines; a lawyer, 1,000 denarii for pleading a case; and a checkroom attendant in a bathhouse, 2 denarii per person. None of this worked; it merely produced a runaway black market.

The Empire’s coinage, meanwhile, became so debased as to be almost worthless. Nobody trusted it. There was not enough gold and silver bullion in the Empire to reinstate the currency, and eventually Diocletian was forced to accept tax payments, and to pay his soldiers, in kind rather than in cash. Nevertheless, there were imperial headquarters to be built for the tetrarchs: in the East, at Nicomedia, Antioch, and Thessalonica; in the Balkans, at Sirmium; and in the North, at Milan, Trier, and York.

One might have thought all this would have distracted the god Diocletian from such matters as a small, peripheral Jewish religion, but far from it. For the first two decades of his reign, Diocletian paid no attention to the Christians; but toward 303, he began to worry about the infiltration of their faith into high places, mainly through the conversion of governors’ wives and daughters. It worried him—understandably, in view of his own immense egotism and his piety toward the old gods—that such families were moving away from the imperial cult, especially since some of the more intelligent members of the army high command were becoming Christians, too. This canker had better be excised; even the oracle of Apollo at Didyma, near Miletus, urged the emperor to attack the Church. The result was a fierce renewal of persecution of Christians, designed to force them to accept the imperial cult and worship Diocletian as a god—which, of course, few of them would do. It is not known how many were killed in the “Great Persecution” of 303–13; severe as it was, Christian writers like Lactantius were bound to exaggerate it and to demonize Diocletian, “inventor of wicked deeds and the contriver of evils … ruining everything.” (One should, perhaps, remember that Lactantius had a bit of an ax to grind. He had been summoned from Africa to teach Latin rhetoric in Nicomedia—an extremely important academic post, given that Nicomedia was scheduled to become one of the new Romes. Then, during the Great Persecution, Diocletian fired him. To lose such a job was a very severe blow that demanded literary revenge, which Lactantius certainly exacted with a bloodcurdling text, On the Deaths of the Persecutors.)

There is a temptation—fostered, of course, by pious impulses—to suppose that Christianity had somehow “triumphed” over Roman paganism by the fourth century, completely changing the religious horizon of Rome. Nothing could be further from the truth.

With the establishment of the Tetrarchy, no emperor spent any length of time in Rome. Once the caput mundi, it was no longer an effective center of power; its monopoly of power was gone. Perhaps because of this, its pagan institutions continued to flourish. The building of its huge defensive bulwark against barbarian invasion, the Aurelian Walls (309–12 and 402–3), with their fifteen-meter height and their 380 towers, created what Richard Krautheimer called “the greatest monument of late antique Rome.” Any list of the pagan enterprises of Rome in the thirty years before the arrival of its first Christian emperor, Constantine, would need to include the Baths of Diocletian, the Senate House on the Forum Romanum (rebuilt after fire in 283), the Basilica Julia (rebuilt after the same fire), the colossal hall of the Basilica Nova (with its three huge barrel-vaulted niches, built by Maxentius in his six-year reign, 306–12), the apsed hall of the Temple of Venus and Cupid, and much more. Fora, temples, sanctuaries, shrines were constantly being repaired and rebuilt. Through the fourth century, Rome seemed to visitors “an essentially classical, secular and pagan city.” The fourth-century gazetteers listed, among its contents, twenty-eight libraries, eleven fora, ten basilicas, eleven public baths, nine circuses and theaters, thirty-six triumphal arches, and forty-six brothels. Even after Constantine’s death, the persistence of pagan memory was strong. There may have been a “new Rome” and Constantine would of course change the city, but not so huge a change that it suddenly rendered old Rome itself irrelevant. Cities didn’t die at the stroke of a pen. The persistence of pagan memory was too strong for that. Rome remained a stronghold of enlightened paganism, drawn from Gnostic and Neoplatonic philosophies, strengthened by some of the greatest art and literature the world had ever seen, and supported by powerful and conservative local aristocrats. In those decades, to be conservative was to be anti-Christian—indeed, to regard Christianity itself as an intrusive lowbrow sect, not worth a civilized person’s attention except as an example of the kind of folly that was coming out of North Africa. If anyone had suggested to such a Roman that, at some future date, this little sect would be larger, richer, and more powerful than any number of Roman Empires, he would have thought the proposal lunatic. And the struggle over that transfer of power would be fierce.

For what could then have been more powerful than Rome? Or richer? The Tetrarchy may have disbanded the central power, but the more wars Rome won, the more its empire expanded, the richer it got: this was inevitable. And the richer it got, the more luxurious its life became. Not everyone’s life, obviously; but for the top 5 percent, life took on a character of manic overindulgence and extravagance, unpleasantly reminiscent of the life of the American super-rich today. “Frangitur ipsa suis Roma superba bonis,” wrote Sextus Propertius: “Proud Rome is now brought low by her wealth.” Pliny the Elder, writing as early as the first century C.E., estimated that at the “lowest reckoning” the expensive imports from India, China, and the Arabian peninsula “drain our empire of 100,000,000 sesterces every year—that is what our luxuries and womenfolk cost us.” Granted, Roman writers (just like American ones two thousand years later) were fond of invoking the good old days of the early Republic, when men were men, life was simple, and morality stricter. Why did frugality prevail in olden times? Because, Tacitus explained, we were once all citizens of one city. “Even when we were masters of Italy alone, we did not have the temptations of today. Victories in foreign wars taught us to devour the substance of others, victories in civil wars, our own.” Inveighing against recent luxury and decadence, Seneca pulled out all the stops:

We think ourselves poor and mean if our walls are not resplendent with large and costly mirrors; if our marbles from Alexandria are not set off by mosaics of Numidian stone, if they are not covered all over with an elaborate coating variegated to look like painting; if our vaulted ceilings are not concealed in glass; if our swimming pools— into which we lower our bodies after they have been drained weak by copious sweating—are not lined with Thasian marble, once a rare sight in a temple, or if the water does not flow from silver spigots.… We have become so luxurious that we will tread upon nothing but precious stones.

In the view of the historian Livy, writing around the same time, the appetite for debilitating luxury came to Rome from its conquests in the East, and was brought back by the military:

It was through the army serving in Asia that the beginnings of foreign luxury were introduced into the city. These men brought into Rome, for the first time, bronze couches, costly coverlets, tapestries, and other fabrics, and—what was at the time considered gorgeous furniture—pedestal tables and silver salvers. Banquets were made more attractive by the presence of girls who played on the harp.… The cook, whom the ancients regarded and