THE ABDICATION OF DIOCLETIAN AND THE SUCCESSION
OF CONSTANTINE
On the 1st of May, in the year 305, Diocletian, by an act of unexampled
abnegation, resigned the purple and retired into private life. The
renunciation was publicly performed, not in Rome, for Rome had ceased to
be the centre of the political world, but on a broad plain in Bithynia,
three miles from Nicomedia, which long had been the Emperor’s favourite
residence. In the centre of the plain rose a little hill, upon which
stood a column surmounted by a statue of Jupiter. There, years before,
Diocletian had with his own hands invested Galerius with the symbols of
power; there he was now to perform the last act of a ruler by nominating
those whom he thought most fit to succeed him. A large platform had been
constructed; the soldiers of the legions had been ordered to assemble in
soldier’s meeting and listen to their chief’s farewell. Diocletian took
leave of them in few words. He was old, he said, and infirm. He craved
for rest after a life of toil. The Empire needed stronger and more
youthful hands than his. His work was done. It was time for him to go.
The two Augusti were laying down their powers simultaneously, for
Maximian was performing a similar act of renunciation at Milan. The two
Cæsars, Constantius and Galerius, would thus automatically move up into
the empty places and become Augusti in their stead. It had been
necessary, therefore, to select two new Cæsars, and these Diocletian was
about to present to the loyalty of the legions. We are told that the
secret had been well kept, and that the soldiers waited with suppressed
excitement until Diocletian suddenly announced that his choice had
fallen upon Severus, one of his trusted generals, and upon Maximin Daza,
a nephew of Galerius. Severus had already been sent to Milan to be
invested by Maximian; Maximin was present on the tribunal and was then
and there robed in the purple. The ceremony over, Diocletian—a private
citizen once more, though he still retained the title of Augustus—drove
back to Nicomedia and at once set out for Salona, on the Adriatic, where
he had built a sumptuous palace for his retirement.
[Illustration:
CONSTANTINE THE GREAT.
FROM GROSVENOR’S “CONSTANTINOPLE.”
]
The scene which we have depicted is described most fully and most
graphically by a historian whose testimony, unfortunately, is entirely
suspect in matters of detail. The author of _The Deaths of the
Persecutors_—it is very doubtful whether Lactantius, to whom the work
has long been attributed, really wrote it, but for the sake of
convenience of reference we may credit him with it—is at once the most
untrustworthy and the most vigorous and attractive writer of the period.
His object throughout is to blacken the characters of the Emperors who
persecuted the Christian Church, and he does not scruple to distort
their actions, pervert their motives, and even invent, with well
calculated malice, stories to their discredit. Lactantius knows, or
pretends to know, all that takes place even in the most secret recesses
of the palace; he recounts all that passes at the most confidential
conferences; and with consummate artistry he throws in circumstantial
details and touches of local colour which give an appearance of truth,
but are really the most convincing proofs of falsehood. Lactantius
represents the abdication of Diocletian as the act of an old man,
shattered in health, and even in mind, by a distressing malady sent by
Heaven as the just punishment of his crimes. He depicts him cowering in
tears before the impatient insolence of Galerius, now peremptorily
clamouring for the succession with threats of civil war. They discuss
who shall be the new Cæsars. “Whom shall we appoint?” asks Diocletian.
“Severus,” says Galerius. “What?” says the other, “that drunken sot of a
dancer who turns night into day and day into night?” “He is worthy,”
replies Galerius, “for he has proved a faithful general, and I have sent
him to Maximian to be invested.” “Well, well,” says the old man, “who is
the second choice?” “He is here,” says Galerius, indicating his nephew,
a young semi-barbarian named Maximin Daza. “Why, who is this you offer
me?” “He is my kinsman,” is the reply. Then said Diocletian, with a
groan, “These are not fit men to whom to entrust the care of the State.”
“I have proved them,” said Galerius. “Well, you must look to it,”
rejoins Diocletian, “you who are about to assume the reins of the
Empire. I have toiled enough. While I ruled, I took care that the State
stood safe. If any harm now befalls, the fault is not mine.”[16]
-----
Footnote 16:
Lactant., _De Mort. Persec._, c. 18.
-----
Such is a characteristic specimen of Lactantius’s history, and so, when
he comes to describe the ceremony of abdication, he makes Galerius draw
Maximin Daza to the front of the group of imperial officials by whom
Diocletian is surrounded, and represents the soldiers as staring in
surprise at their new Cæsar, as at one whom they had never seen before.
Yet a favourite nephew of Galerius can scarcely have been a stranger to
the troops of Nicomedia. Galerius not only—according to Lactantius—drew
forward Maximin Daza, but at the same time rudely thrust back into the
throng the son of Constantius, the senior of the two new Augusti. This
was young Constantine, the future Emperor, who for some years past had
been living at the Court of Diocletian.
But it was no broken down Emperor in his dotage, passing, according to
the spasms of his malady, from sanity to insanity, who resigned the
throne on the plain of Nicomedia. Diocletian was but fifty-nine years of
age. He had just recovered, it is true, from a very severe illness,
which, even on the testimony of Lactantius, had caused “grief in the
palace, sadness and tears among his guards, and anxious suspense
throughout the whole State.”[17] But his brain was never clearer than
when he took final leave of his troops. His abdication was the
culminating point of his policy. He had planned it twenty years before.
He had kept it before his eyes throughout a long and busy reign. It was
the completion of, the finishing touch to his great political system. It
would have been perfectly easy for Diocletian to forswear himself.
Probably very few of his contemporaries believed that he would fulfil
his promise to abdicate after twenty years of reign. Kings talk of the
allurements of retirement, but they usually cling to power as
tenaciously as to life. The first Augustus had delighted to mystify his
Ministers of State by speaking of restoring the Republic. He died an
Emperor. Diocletian, alone of the Roman Emperors, laid down the sceptre
when he was at the height of his glory. It was a hazardous experiment,
but he was faithful to his principles. He thought it best for the world
that its master should not grow old and feeble on the throne.
-----
Footnote 17:
_De Mort. Persec._, c. 17.
-----
Constantine, of whom we have just caught a glimpse at the abdication of
Diocletian, was born either in 273 or 274. The uncertainty attaching to
the year of his birth attaches even more to its place. No one now
believes that he was born in Britain—a pleasing fiction which was
invented by English monks, who delighted to represent his mother Helena
as the daughter of a British King, though they were quite at a loss
where to locate his kingdom. The only foundation for this was a passage
in one of the Panegyrists, who said that Constantine had bestowed lustre
upon Britain “_illic oriundo_.” But the words are now taken as referring
to his accession and not to his birth. He was certainly proclaimed
Emperor in Britain, and might thus be said to have “sprung thence.”
Constantine’s birth-place seems to have been either Naissus, a city in
Upper Moesia, or Drepanum, a city near Nicomedia. The balance of
evidence, though none of it is very trustworthy, inclines to the former.
His father was Constantius Chlorus, afterwards Cæsar and Augustus, but
at the time of Constantine’s birth merely a promising officer in the
Roman army. Constantius belonged to one of the leading families of
Moesia and his mother was a niece of the capable and soldierly Claudius,
the conqueror of the Goths. Claudius had only been dead four years when
Constantine was born, and we may suppose that it was his influence which
had set Constantius in the way of rapid promotion. He had formed one of
those secondary marriages which were recognised by Roman law, when the
wife was not of the same social standing as the husband. Helena is said
to have been the daughter of an innkeeper of Drepanum, and Constantine’s
enemies lost no opportunity of dwelling upon the obscurity of his
ancestry upon his mother’s side. But that he was born in wedlock is
beyond question. Had the relationship between Constantius and Helena
been an irregular one, there would have been no need for Maximian to
insist on a divorce when he ratified Constantius’s elevation to the
purple by giving him the hand of his daughter, Theodora.
Of Constantine’s early years we know nothing, though we may suppose that
they were spent in the eastern half of the Empire. Constantius served
with the eastern legions in the campaigns which preceded the accession
of Diocletian in 284, and it is as a young officer in the entourage of
that Emperor that Constantine makes his earliest appearance in history.
Eusebius tells us[18] that he first saw the future champion of
Christianity in the train of Diocletian during one of the latter’s
visits to Palestine. He recalls his vivid remembrance of the young
Prince standing at the Emperor’s right hand and attracting the gaze of
all beholders by the beauty of his person and the imposing air which
betokened his consciousness of having been born to rule. Eusebius adds
that while Constantine’s physical strength extorted the respectful
admiration of his younger associates, his remarkable qualities of
prudence and wisdom aroused the jealousy and excited the apprehensions
of his chiefs. However, the recollections of the Bishop of Cæsarea, with
half a century of interval, are somewhat suspect, and we need see no
more than a high-spirited, handsome, and keen-witted Prince in
Eusebius’s “paragon of bodily strength, physical beauty, and mental
distinction.” As for Diocletian’s jealous fears, they are best refuted
by the fact that Constantine was promoted to be a tribune of the first
rank and saw considerable military service. The foolish stories that his
superiors set him to fight a gigantic Sarmatian in single combat, and
dared him to contend against ferocious wild beasts, in the hope that his
pride and courage might be his undoing, may be dismissed as childish. If
Diocletian had feared Constantine, Constantine would never have survived
his residence in the palace.
-----
Footnote 18:
_De Vita Const._, i., 19.
-----
It is certainly remarkable that we should know so little, not only of
the youth but of the early manhood of Constantine, who was at least in
his thirty-first year when Diocletian retired into private life. Why had
he spent all those years in the East instead of sharing with his father
the dangers and glories of his Gallic and British campaigns? The answer
is doubtless to be found in the fact that it was no part of Diocletian’s
system for the son to succeed the father. Constantius’s loyalty was
never in doubt, but Constantine, if Zosimus[19] can be trusted, had
already given evidence of consuming ambition to rule. However that may
be, it is obvious that his position became much more hazardous when
Galerius succeeded Diocletian as supreme ruler in the palace of
Nicomedia. One can understand Galerius wondering whether the capable
young Prince, who slept under his roof, was destined to cross his path,
and the anxiety of Constantius, conscious of declining strength, that
his long-absent son should join him. Constantine himself might well be
uneasy, and scheme to quit a place where he could not hope to satisfy
his natural ambitions. We need not doubt, therefore, that Constantius
repeatedly sent messages to Galerius asking that his son might come to
him, or that the son was eager to comply.
-----
Footnote 19:
Zosimus, ii., 8. περιφανὴς γὰρ ἦν ἤδη πολλοῖς ὁ κατέχων ὰυτὸυ ἔρως τῆς
βασιλέιας.
-----
Lactantius,[20] who does his best to make history romantic and exciting,
describes the eventual escape of Constantine in one of his most graphic
chapters. He shows us Galerius in his palace reluctantly signing an
order which authorised Constantine to travel post across the Continent
of Europe. He only consented to do so, we are told, because he could
find no pretext for further delay, and he gave the order to Constantine
late in the afternoon, on the understanding that he should see him again
in the morning to receive his final instructions. Yet all the time, says
Lactantius, Galerius was scheming to find some excuse for keeping him in
Nicomedia, or contemplated sending a message to Severus, asking him to
delay Constantine when he reached the border of northern Italy. Galerius
then took dinner, retired for the night, and slept so well and
deliberately that he did not wake until the following midday (_Cum
consulto ad medium diem usque dormisset_). He then sent for Constantine
to come to his apartment. But Constantine was already gone, scouring the
roads as fast as the post horses could carry him, and so anxious to
increase the distance between himself and Galerius that he caused the
tired beasts to be hamstrung at every stage. He had waited for Galerius
to retire and had then slipped away, lest the Emperor should change his
mind. Galerius was furious when he found that he had been outwitted. He
ordered pursuit. His servants came back to tell him that the fugitive
had swept the stables clear of horses. And then Galerius could scarce
restrain his tears (_Vix lacrimas tenebat_).
-----
Footnote 20:
_De Mort. Persec._, c. 24.
-----
It is a story which does infinite credit to Lactanius’s feeling for
strong melodramatic situation. No picturesque detail is omitted—the
setting sun, the tyrant plotting vengeance over dinner, his resolve to
sleep long, his baffled triumph, the escaping hero, and the butchery of
the horses. Yet we question if there is more than a shred of truth in
the whole story. Galerius would not have given Constantine the sealed
order overnight had he intended to take it back the next morning. A word
to the officer of the watch in the palace and to the officer on duty at
the city gate would have prevented Constantine from quitting Nicomedia.
The imperial post service must have been very much underhorsed if the
Emperor’s servants could not find mounts for the effective pursuit of a
single fugitive. Galerius may very well have been unwilling for
Constantine to go, and Constantine doubtless covered the early stages of
his long journey at express speed, in order to minimise the chance of
recall, but the lurid details of Lactantius are probably simply the
outcome of his own lively imagination.
Constantine seems to have found his father at the port of Gessoriacum
(Boulogne), just waiting for a favourable wind to carry him across the
Channel into Britain. Constantius was ill, and welcomed with great joy
the son whom he had not seen for many years. We do not know what time
elapsed before Constantius died at York,—apparently it was after the
conclusion of a campaign in Scotland,—but before he died he commended to
Constantine the welfare of his young half-brothers and half-sisters, the
eldest of whom was no more than thirteen years of age, and he also
evidently commended Constantine himself to the loyalty of his legions.
The Emperor, we are informed both by Lactantius and by the author of the
Seventh Panegyric, died with a mind at rest because he was sure of his
heir and successor—Jupiter himself, says the pagan orator,[21] stretched
out his right hand and welcomed him among the gods. Clearly, the ground
had been well prepared, for no sooner was the breath out of
Constantius’s body than the troops saluted Constantine with the title of
Augustus. Aurelius Victor adds the interesting detail that he had no
stouter supporter than Erocus, a Germanic King, who was serving as an
auxiliary in the Roman army. Constantine was nothing loth, though, as
usual in such circumstances, he may have feigned a reluctance which he
did not feel. His panegyrist, indeed, represents him as putting spurs to
his horse to enable him to shake off the robe which the soldiers sought
to throw over his shoulders, and suggests that it had been Constantine’s
intention to write “to the senior Princes” and consult their wishes as
to the choice of a successor. Had he done so, he knew very well that
Galerius would have sent over to Britain some trusted lieutenant of his
own to take command and Constantine would have received peremptory
orders to return. Instead of that, Constantine assumed the insignia of
an Emperor, and wrote to Galerius announcing his elevation. Galerius, it
is said, hesitated long as to the course he should adopt. That the news
angered him we may be sure. Apart from all personal considerations, this
choice of an Emperor by an army on active service was a return to the
bad old days of military rule, from which Diocletian had rescued the
Empire, and was a clear warning that the new system had not been
established on a permanent basis. The only alternative, however, before
Galerius was acceptance or war. For the latter he was hardly prepared,
and moreover, there was no reply to the argument that Constantius had
been senior Augustus, and, therefore, had been fully entitled to have
his word in the appointment of a successor. Galerius gave way. He
accepted the laurelled bust which Constantine had sent to him and,
instead of throwing it into the fire with the officer who had brought
it—which, according to Lactantius, had been his first impulse,--he sent
the messenger back with a purple robe to his master as a sign that he
frankly admitted his claims to partnership in the Empire.
-----
Footnote 21:
_Pan. Vet._, vii., 7.
-----
But while he acknowledged Constantine as Cæsar, he refused him the full
title of Augustus, which he bestowed upon the Cæsar Severus. This has
been represented as an act of petty spite. In reality, it was simply the
automatic working of the system of Diocletian. The latest winner of
imperial dignity naturally took the fourth place. Constantine accepted
the check without demur. He had not spent so many years by the side of
Diocletian and Galerius without discovering that if it came to war, it
was the master of the best army who was sure to be the winner and
survivor, whether his title were Cæsar or Augustus. Thus, in July, 306,
Constantine commenced his eventful reign as the Cæsar of the West,
overlord of Gaul, Spain, and Britain, and commander of the Army of the
Rhine, and, for the next six years, down to his invasion of Italy in
312, he spent most of his time in the Gallic provinces, where he gained
the reputation of being a capable soldier and a generous Prince.
Gaul was slowly recovering from chaos and ruin. During the anarchy which
had preceded the accession of Diocletian, she had lain at the mercy of
the Germanic tribes across the Rhine. The Roman watch on the river had
been almost abandoned; the legions and the garrisons had been so
weakened as to be powerless to keep the invader in check. The Gallic
provinces were, in the striking words of the Panegyrist, “maddened by
their injuries of the years gone by.”[22] The result had been the
peasant rising of the Bagaudæ, ruthlessly suppressed by Maximian in 285,
but the desperate condition of the country may be inferred from the fact
that Diocletian and Maximian felt compelled to recognise the pretensions
of Carausius in the province of Britain, which, for some years, was
practically severed from the Empire. And, moreover, the peace of Gaul,
which Maximian laboriously restored, was punctuated by invasion from the
Germans across the Rhine. In the Panegyric of Mamertinus there occurs a
curious passage, which shows with what eyes the Romans regarded that
river. The orator is eulogising Maximian in his most fulsome strain for
restoring tranquillity, and then says: “Was there ever an Emperor before
our day who did not congratulate himself that the Gallic provinces were
protected by the Rhine? When did the Rhine shrink in its channel after a
long spell of fine weather without making us shiver with fear? When did
it ever swell to a flood without giving us an extra sense of
security?”[23] In other words, the danger of invasion rose and fell with
the rising and falling of the Rhine. But now, continues the Panegyrist,
“thanks thanks to Maximian, all our fears are gone. The Rhine may dry up
and shrink until it can scarce roll the smooth pebbles in its limpid
shallows, and none will be afraid. As far as I can see beyond the Rhine,
all is Roman” (_Quicquid ultra Rhenum prospicio, Romanum est_). Rarely
has a court rhetorician uttered a more audacious lie.
-----
Footnote 22:
_Gallias priorum temporum injuriis efferatas_, _Pan._, vi., 8.
Footnote 23:
_Pan. Vet._, ii., 7.
-----
There was no quality of permanence in the Gallic peace. Constantius took
advantage of a temporary lull to recover Britain, but in 301 he was
again fighting the invading Germans and Franks, winning victories which
had to be repeated in the following summer, and making good the dearth
of labourers on the devastated lands of Gaul by the captives he had
taken in battle. There is a remarkable passage in the Fifth Panegyric in
which the author refers to the long columns of captives which he had
seen on the march in Gaul, men, women, and children on their way to the
desert regions assigned to them, there to bring back to fertility by
their labour as slaves the very countryside which in their freedom they
had pillaged and laid waste. He recalled the familiar sight of these
savage barbarians tamed to surprising quiescence, and waiting in the
public places of the Æduan cities until they were told off to their new
masters. Gaul had suffered so long from these roving ruffians from over
the Rhine that the orator broke out into a pæan of exultation at the
thought that the once dreaded Chamavan or Frisian now tilled his estates
for him, and that the vagabond freebooter had become an agricultural
labourer, who drove his stock to the Gallic markets and cheapened the
price of commodities by increasing the sources of supply.
Full allowance must be made for exaggeration. The tribes, which are
described as having been extirpated, reappear later on in the same
numbers as before, and there was security only so long as the Emperor
and his legions were on the spot. When Constantius crossed to Britain on
the expedition which terminated with his death, the Franks took
advantage of his absence to “violate the peace.”[24] The words would
seem to imply that there had been a treaty between Constantius and the
Kings Ascaricus and Regaisus. They crossed the Rhine and Constantine,
the new Cæsar, hastened back from Britain to confront them. Where the
battle took place is not known, but both Kings were captured and,
together with a multitude of their followers, flung to the wild beasts
in the amphitheatre at Treves. Constantine, who prided himself upon his
clemency to a Roman foe, whose sensitive soul was harrowed when even a
wicked enemy perished,[25] inflicted a fearful punishment.
“Those slain in battle were beyond numbers; very many more were taken
prisoners. All their flocks were carried off or butchered; all their
villages burnt with fire; all their young men, who were too
treacherous to be admitted into the Roman army, and too brutal to act
as slaves, were thrown to the wild beasts, and fatigued the ravening
creatures because there were so many of them to kill.”[26]
-----
Footnote 24:
_Pan._, vii., 10.
Footnote 25:
_Gravate apud animum tuum etiam mali pereunt._—_Pan._, x., 8.
Footnote 26:
_Pan._, vii., 12.
-----
Those atrocious sentences—written in praise, not in
condemnation—assuredly throw some light upon the “perpetual hatreds and
inextinguishable rage”[27] of the Franks. The common herd, says the
rhetorician, may be slaughtered by the hundred without their becoming
aware of the slaughter; it saves time and trouble to slay the leaders of
an enemy whom you wish to conquer.[28] The effect for the moment was
decisive, even if we refuse to believe that the castles and strong
places, set at intervals along the banks of the Rhine, were henceforth
regarded rather as ornaments to the frontier than as a source of
protection. The bridge, too, which Constantine built at Cologne, was
likewise built for business and not, as the orator suggests, for the
glory of the Empire and the beauty of the landscape. When we read of the
war galleys, which ceaselessly patrolled the waters of the Rhine, and of
the soldiery stationed along its banks from source to mouth,[29] we may
judge how anxiously the watch was kept, how nervously alert the Cæsar or
Augustus of the West required to be to guard the frontier, and how
profound a respect he entertained for the free German whom he called
barbarian.
-----
Footnote 27:
_Odia perpetua et inexpiabiles iras._
Footnote 28:
_Compendium est devincendorum hostium duces sustulisse._—_Pan._, vii.,
11.
Footnote 29:
_Pan._, vii., 13.
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