Success inflamed his desire of conquest, and in the depth of winter he advanced through Thrace and Asia Minor to the confines of Persia. Bahram, the degenerate successor of Artaxerxes and Sapor, endeavoured to avert the storm by negociation; and the account of the audience given by Carus to his envoys forms a striking picture of the soldierlike simplicity restored by a succession of martial princes. "The ambassadors entered the camp about sunset, at the time when the troops were satisfying their hunger with a frugal repast. The Persians expressed their desire of being introduced to the presence of the Roman emperor. They were at length conducted to a soldier who was seated on the grass. A piece of stale bacon and a few hard peas composed his supper. A coarse woollen garment of purple was the only circumstance that announced his dignity. The conference was conducted with the same disregard of courtly elegance. Carus, taking off a cap which he wore to conceal his baldness, assured the ambassadors that unless their master acknowledged the superiority of Rome, he would speedily render Persia as naked of trees as his own head was destitute of hair." So far did he keep his word, that he is said to have taken both Seleucia and Ctesiphon, when a terrible portent cut short his career. On Christmas-day, A.D. 283, a tremendous storm burst over the camp; and, amidst the darkness and confusion, a cry was raised that the emperor was dead, and his tent was seen to be in flames. The manner of his death remained a mystery, but the ancient superstition, that when the prætorium was struck by lightning, the army was doomed to destruction, caused the soldiers to demand that Numerian would lead them back again. Meanwhile Carinus had disgraced his trust by indolence and vices more shameless than those of Commodus, to which, now that his father's restraint was removed, he added the cruelties of a Domitian. The gentle and virtuous Numerian seemed as unfit to control the turbulent soldiers, as Carinus was to win the respect of the citizens; and their joint empire was doomed to speedy dissolution. But before they even met, Numerian, whom weak health had kept for some time invisible in the prætorium, was found dead by the troops, who at length broke into the tent; and his murder was imputed to his father-in-law, the prætorian prefect Aper, who, guilty or not, had concealed the death, while he concerted measures for his own. succession. This event took place at Perinthus, on the very day on which Carinus held a magnificent celebration of the great Roman games at Rome (Sept. 12, A.D. 284). Aper was carried in chains to Chalcedon, where a solemn assembly of the army conferred the purple on C. Valerius DIOCLETIANUS. The new emperor's first act was to sit in judgment on Aper, who no sooner appeared before the tribunal, than Diocletian pronounced him the murderer of Numerian, and prevented a defence which might have been compromising to others by plunging his sword into his breast (Sept. 17). Like most of the soldiers of fortune who attained the honours of the purple, Diocletian was believed to have been long since designated by prophecies and omens; and his motive for killing Aper with his own hand is said by some authorities to have been the hope of thus fulfilling a prediction made to him in his youth by a Gaulish druidess, that he should mount the throne as soon as he had slain the wild boar. The ensuing winter was spent in preparing for the struggle with Carinus, who was still supported by the legions of the West, though hated by the Senate and the people.* The armies met in the spring upon the plains of Margus in Mosia; and the troops of Diocletian, enfeebled by the Eastern climate, were already broken by the fresh legions of the West, when Carinus was slain by a tribune whose wife he had dishonoured, and his fall gave the victory to his rival. The battle was fought early in A.D. 285; and Diocletian was at once acknowledged by the reunited legions, and soon after by the Senate. The years of his reign were dated from his proclamation in September, 284. * On his march to meet Diocletian, Carinus defeated a pretender to the empire, Sabinus Julianus, in Illyricum. CHAPTER XLIII. PERIOD OF REVIVAL. DIOCLETIAN AND HIS COLLEAGUES. A.D. 285 TO A.D. 305. "When Persecution's torrent blaze Wraps the unshrinking Martyr's head, Who owns the Lord of love and power? A wand no human arm may wield, His steps to guide, his soul to shield? EPOCH FORMED BY DIOCLETIAN'S ACCESSION-THE REVIVED EMPIRE BECOMES AN APPOINTMENT OF ORIENTAL MONARCHY-ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF DIOCLETIAN-HIS ASSOCIATION OF ROME still stood erect and apparently victorious, after undergoing every possible form of calamity during the century that followed the death of Marcus Aurelius. Having survived the inroads of barbarians from without, and the cruelties of tyranny and civil war within, the ravages of pestilence and the diminution of population, it was still her destiny to enjoy a time of restoration for nearly another century, from the accession of Diocletian to the decisive victory of the Goths at Adrianople (A.D. 378). That century is mainly occupied with two great experiments, whether the empire could be better and more safely governed from two centres, in the East and West, than from Rome alone; and whether it might even yet recruit its own exhausted vigour, and fulfil the higher purposes of the Divine will, by placing the power Meanwhile the of the Cæsars beneath the banner of the Cross. accession of Diocletian formed a new and important epoch in the development of the imperial system. The restoration of Roman greatness for a time was purchased at the cost of the last semblance of liberty; and the government, originally modelled on the forms of the Republic, assumed the undisguised character of an Eastern monarchy. The period of revival had begun from the accession of Claudius; and the sixteen years spent in reuniting the severed empire, and repelling the attacks of Goths and Sarmatians, Franks and Alemanni, had been fruitful in military experience. "Carus, Diocletian, Maximian, Constantius, Galerius, and a crowd of other chiefs, who afterwards ascended or supported the throne, were trained to arms in the severe school of Aurelian and Probus." Constantius, who was destined to found the dynasty under which the revived empire reached its highest pitch of greatness, is said to have been already chosen for an associate by Carus, when that emperor's sudden death prevented the fulfilment of his design; and the accident of Diocletian's presence with the army, at the death of Numerian, caused the preference to be given to him, of whom the historian says that, "as his reign was more illustrious than that of any of his predecessors, so was his birth more abject and obscure." That he was not himself a slave, as is often asserted,* may be inferred from his enlistment in a legion; and Niebuhr inclines to interpret the statement, that his father was a slave or a freedman, as signifying a colonus or serf on the Dalmatian frontier. At all events, the serf does not even appear to have had a client's title to the proud patrician name of Valerius, which he assumed as emperor, at the same time that he Romanized into Diocletianus the altogether foreign name of Diocles. Nor had even this name any connection with the Greeks among whom it had become illustrious; for it was probably derived from his native village of Doclea or Dioclea, in Dalmatia, near the capital Salona, which was afterwards honoured with the emperor's residence. We need not trace the steps through which the soldier of fortune rose by his own merit, and encouraged by favourable oracles, to the eminence which caused him to be unanimously hailed as the * Gibbon, just after stating that the father was probably a freedman, proceeds, for the sake of rhetoric, to call the son a slave. + Among the famous Greeks who bore it, was the Attic exile Diocles, who was honoured as a hero at Megara, in the feast of the Diocleia; and the popular leader and legislator of Syracuse, in B.C. 412. successor and avenger of Numerian. That he was not free from the cruelty which we have already seen attaching to the rude Illyrian nature in Aurelian and Probus, is proved by his terrible persecution of the Christians; but the imputation of personal cowardice, at least in the common sense of the word, is declared unjust by the calm judgment of Niebuhr, as well as by the historian who imputes it to "the malice of religious zeal! " * "Yet," adds the same writer, "even calumny is sagacious enough to discover and to attack the most vulnerable part. The valour of Diocletian was never found inadequate to his duty, or to the occasion; but he appears not to have possessed the daring and generous spirit of a hero who courts danger and fame, disdains artifice, and boldly challenges the allegiance of his equals. His abilities were useful rather than splendid-a vigorous mind, improved by the experience and study of mankind; dexterity and application in business; a judicious mixture of liberality and economy, of mildness and vigour; profound dissimulation, under the disguise of military frankness; steadiness to pursue his ends; flexibility to vary his means; and, above all, the great art of submitting his own passions, as well as those of others, to the interest of his ambition, and of colouring his ambition with the most specious pretences of justice and public utility. Like Augustus, Diocletian may be considered as the founder of a new empire. Like the adopted son of Cæsar, he was distinguished as a statesman rather than as a warrior; nor did either of those princes employ force, whenever their purpose could be effected by policy." Such are the lofty principles in which only Christian calumny would dare to detect a flaw! Diocletian was in his fortieth year when he began his long reign of more than twenty years. He at once proved that he understood his true position as the most successful among a band of generals who might have aspired to the purple, and whom it was his policy to attach to himself. His victory over Carinus was sullied by no acts of vengeance; and one of his first acts was to associate his most dangerous rival in the honours of the empire. M. Aurelius For higher purposes than a mere question of one prince's character, it is worth while to quote the words that roused Gibbon's spleen. The Christian orator, Lactantius, or whoever wrote the treatise ascribed to him, On the Deaths of Persecutors, besides making the imputation in two other passages (c. 7, 8), says of Diocletian (c. 9): "Erat in omni tumultu meticulosus et animi disjectus." The question between the admirers and detractors of great men upon this ground often turns solely upon what sort of courage is meant, to say nothing of the vulgar error which regards nervous susceptibility as the opposite of that courageous resolve which it frequently proves, just as the recoil of the gun proves the force it is exerting. |