LECTURE I. The Roman Empire.

In Longfellow’s Golden Legend the following question is asked:—

and this answer given:—

‘The voice of the murmuring of Rome.’ That was indeed a mighty voice; how all-powerful, how nearly equivalent to the voice of the whole civilised human race, is more vividly impressed upon us by every year of deeper study of the history of the world fifteen centuries ago.

Extent of the Roman Empire.

Let us try by a very rapid summary to indicate the meaning which the words ‘Imperium Romanum’ conveyed to him who heard them in the days when the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus was still standing and still thronged with earnest worshippers.

North Britain.

Let us go forth from this city which clusters on its seven hills around the Tomb of St. Cuthbert. Those hills are untrodden forest or undistinguished pasture-ground, and all the glory of architecture and all the wealth of sacred associations which will one day crown them are unknown, for we are now in the second century after Christ, and Durham is neither castra nor mansio nor mutatio in the map of Roman Britain. But if we go a few miles up the Wear, near to that place in ‘the land of Oaks,’ where the Bishop of Durham will one day build his castle, we shall find there, upon a high promontory of table-land overlooking the stream, the spacious camp of Vinovia with its baths and its hypocausts, doubtless also with its temple and its magazines. Here we strike a great Roman road. Follow that road northwards over the hills, and you will come to the camp of Lanchester on the Browney. Another stretch over wild moorlands, and we reach Ebchester, in the pleasant valley of the Derwent. Another, and we strike the Tyne at Corstopitum (Corbridge). And so on by more camps and stations than I need weary you with the names of, till we reach the great camp, or rather series of camps, which surround the high altar-like hill of Birrenswark in Dumfriesshire, overlooking the sandy Solway. Yet still the Roman road is running northwards, till at last it reaches the Wall of Antoninus, somewhere near the Frith of Clyde.

Midland and Southern Britain.

Southwards the same road pursues its course, uncompromising and undeviating, over the great ridge of hills which separates you from the Tees. Across the Swale at Cataractonium it leads us to Isurium, which will one day be represented by the pleasant old-fashioned village of Boroughbridge, and where we see for the first time those pictured floors, the tesselated pavements which are so abundant in Southern Britain and in Gaul. Then it takes us to Eboracum, the great Roman city of the North, the home of the Sixth Legion, the place where the aged Severus will lay down the purple at the bidding of Death, and where the young Constantine will assume it at the bidding of the soldiery. Thence across the country south-westwards, over those hills and dales of Yorkshire and Lancashire, which are now among the poorest and most solitary, as they will one day be among the richest and the most thickly populated portions of the island of the Britons. So we reach Deva, or Chester on the Dee, where the Twentieth Legion have built their stately city, with its temples, its baths, and its spacious praetorium for their commanding officer. And so from thence, through Cheshire and Staffordshire, and on by a route pretty nearly coinciding with that which will, after many centuries, be taken by the North-Western Railway, till at last we reach that city, comparatively unimportant in the official map of Roman Britain, but which the concourse of merchants is even now making important in spite of prefects and procurators, ‘the city formerly known as Londinium, but now named Augusta.’

Existing traces of Roman occupation.

In our own day, at nearly every step of our course along this great highway, which our ancestors named the Watling Street, there is some trace of the Roman legionary and his sojourn in our island. Here the coins of some military treasure chest buried in haste and never reclaimed; there the shells of the oysters or the bones of the beef which the soldiers consumed; here a dedication to some native god bearing an uncouth name, with whom they thought it safer to be on friendly terms; there the pathetic epitaph of a departed wife ‘who lived with her husband xxx years, “sine ulla macula,”’ with no spot upon her goodness; here the walls of a camp turned by centuries into mere grassy mounds, but still by their rectangular shape rounded at the corners, showing the handiwork of the Roman surveyor; there an inscription recording the rebuilding of a bath or a granary, ‘vetustate conlapsum’ (which had fallen in through age), and reminding us how old and venerable the buildings erected by the first conquerors of Britain must have appeared long before the last Roman soldier, standing upon the stern of the departing vessel, waved his sad ‘Vale Britannia’ to our island.

Boundaries of the Roman World.

All these vestiges of the great world-Empire, when one examines them patiently day after day, as it has often been my privilege to do in travelling along one of the great Roman roads in our own country or abroad, produce an effect upon the mind incomparably stronger and deeper than results from simply reading the story of the conquest of a province in the pages of Caesar or Tacitus. And now multiply this picture at least thirty-fold in order to make it justly represent the whole extent of the Empire. Cross the sea from ‘Londinium, now Augusta,’ to the mouth of the Rhine. Travel for days up that stately river and see the legionaries swarming upon its western, and not unknown upon its eastern bank. Trace the 300 miles of stake-covered rampart which join the Middle Rhine to the Middle Danube, and along every mile of which a Roman soldier is tramping. Descend the Danube from Ratisbon to the Euxine and see every foot of its right bank held by Rome, who for more than a century holds a province on the left bank also (the province of Dacia), and stations her legionaries on the crests of the Carpathian Mountains. Take ship and sail over the foggy Euxine, and there, in its extreme south-eastern corner, near where Jason and his companions sought the Golden Fleece, recognise once more the Roman boundary. Follow that boundary over the mountains of Armenia to the upper waters of the Tigris. Cross ‘the great river, the River Euphrates,’ near the place where Eliezer waited for Rebekah by the well; and then encompassing Damascus and the mysterious cities of Bashan, let the border come down past the Dead Sea, past Mount Pisgah and Mount Sinai, and so overleaping the Red Sea, let it reach the valley of the Nile. Here the frontier towards the barbarism of Ethiopia is the same that the modern protectors of Egypt have drawn close to the city of Syene (now Assouan); leaving 800 miles of the rich Nile valley as the granary of Rome. All along the northern coast of Africa, Cyrene, Tripolis, Carthage, Numidia, Mauretania, whatever there is of civilised, stable, wealth-producing life (and it is a broad enough belt in some places) is all Roman by obedience, and much of it Latin by speech. At last the boundary goes out at the Atlantic Ocean where Hercules once relieved Atlas of his load. Men gazing forth upon the waste of waters, and half discovering, half dreaming, concerning the Fortunate Isles beyond, are constrained at length to admit the fact that the great Empire has found its limit, and that if there be other worlds to the West they are worlds beyond the world of Rome.

The Orbis Romanus nearly coincided with the Orbis Terrarum.

It was an immense extent of territory which the Roman god Terminus thus marked out, and (as has been often pointed out, but is a fact of the greatest importance) it more nearly embraced the whole of the then known and civilised world than any Empire that has since been seen. True, the mysterious river of Asiatic civilisation, as represented by China and India, flowed on, not blending its waters with those which the Tiber ruled. But these countries were practically altogether beyond the horizon of the Empire. During the first three centuries of our era there was only one civilised power of which Rome was conscious as a possible rival to herself, and that was the power of Persia. Her sovereign, whether he were known as Parthian or Persian, as Arsacid or Sassanid, took to himself proud titles, calling himself ‘King of Kings,’ and so forth, and often by his devastating raids inflicted sore disaster on the Eastern provinces of Rome; but the Empire was certainly far the stronger power, and many of the abler Emperors could probably, if they had deemed it wise to make the attempt, have accomplished what Julian so narrowly missed and what Heraclius triumphantly performed, the overthrow of the Persian monarchy.

Government of the Roman State.

Senatus Populus Que Romanus.

This vast territory had been acquired by the municipality of an Italian city under a government which was in some respects the best adapted for gaining and for consolidating dominion that the world has ever seen. S.P.Q.R.: these four letters formed the talisman which floated on the victorious standards of Rome, whether they crowned the misty heights of the Cheviots or were mirrored in the waters of the Orontes. The Senate and the People of Rome: we must pause for a few moments on these words to consider what they implied.

The Roman Senate under the Republic.

(1) The Senate of Rome, in its best days reminding the beholder of an assembly of Kings, debating the affairs of the Republic with a gravity, an earnestness and a conciseness very unlike the showy rhetoric of a Greek Ecclesia or the vapid verbiage of a modern House of Commons or House of Representatives: this was the body which gave coherence and unity to the policy of the great Latin city, which prevented it from being swayed to and fro by such gusts of passion or misplaced sentiment as ruined the Empire of Athens; which caused it to pursue, century after century, the same undeviating course, and to act upon the same maxims of statesmanship—hard maxims often, and inspired by a terrible egotism, but successful. It was the Senate which enabled the Roman State to feel the proud confidence that was expressed with less justice by that patient toiler, Philip of Spain, ‘Time and I against any one else in the world.’

Not a mere hereditary aristocracy.

One source of the Senate’s strength was derived from the fact that it was never in theory and seldom in practice a mere hereditary aristocracy. Election to some one of the great offices of the State into which the kingly power had been divided, Consulship, Praetorship, Quaestorship, was the door by which entrance was gained into the ‘assembly of Kings’—and this election in the better days of the Republic implied a certain amount of popular respect if not of popular favour—but once admitted, the Senator had his seat practically for life, and needed not to tremble at every changing wind of popular opinion, lest the withdrawal of the favour of his constituents should doom him to political annihilation. The chasm which once separated the Patrician from the Plebeian, and which made it impossible for the latter to enter the Senate, had been filled up long before Rome began to play her great part among the nations of the earth: but it is true that a new aristocracy of consular families, partly Patrician and partly Plebeian, had arisen on the ruins of the old. A Terentius Varro, a Marius, a Cicero could by great energy, by military successes, or by surpassing eloquence, break through into the charmed circle, but the outcry that was raised at the presumption of such a novus homo showed that the event was a rare one.

The Censorship.

One institution, however, which modern aristocracies would do well to copy, tended to save the Senate from the worst perils of a hereditary oligarchy. To be ruled by a proud nobility which respects itself is perhaps not pleasant, but it is endurable. But to be ruled by ‘hereditary legislators’ who do not observe the ordinary decencies of life is an ignominy too galling to be borne. The power of the Censor to degrade from his Senatorial office any man who offended against the strict old-fashioned code of Roman morality, a power which in the best days of the Republic was wielded with merciless severity and without respect of persons, must have largely contributed to that moral ascendency of the Senate which made it for four centuries as supreme in Roman politics as the House of Commons has been for the last two centuries in the politics of Britain.

The People of Rome.

(2) The People of Rome, the Quirites, assembled by their centuries, or their tribes, under an Italian sky, in the Campus Martius or the Forum—these also had their allotted share in the development of the greatness of Rome: these formed the strong steadily beating heart, without which all the accumulated wisdom of the Senate, the brain of the State, would have been of no avail. Questions of peace and war, and questions of political reform, were brought before them, generally, it is true, on the motion of the Senate, but so as to cast the final responsibility on the people; and during the greater part of the lifetime of the Republic those solemn trials of political offenders which correspond most nearly to our own impeachments took place at the bar of the popular assembly.

The Tribunes.

To guard these rights and to secure the meanest citizen of Rome from oppression on the part of some haughty aristocrat, the Tribunes of the Commonalty were called into being, that unique class of magistrates whose power of ‘intercession’ could bring the whole machinery of the State to a deadlock, and upon whose ‘sacro-sanct’ persons the proudest Consul, fresh from victory over the enemies of Rome, might not lay hands without incurring the penalty of outlawry. The office which the Member of Parliament has hitherto discharged when he brings the grievance of a constituent before the House of Commons; the office of redresser of all wrongs and browbeater of all magistrates, which the Public Press has of later time arrogated to itself—these offices were for centuries discharged by the Tribunes of the Commonalty. Upon the whole we may believe that the Tribunician power was a useful counterpoise to the immense authority vested in Consuls and Praetors: but it was always a power which in the hands of a dishonest demagogue might be abused for the purpose of obstruction. It was always useful only as a brake is useful to the driver of a railway train; and in the latter days of the Republic it was a brake suddenly and clumsily applied, by which the Engine of the State was being continually thrown off the line.

Political decline.

B.C. 367-146.

But, such as they were, these two great depositaries of power, the Senate and the People, wrought together in reasonable harmony, and upon the whole for the good of Rome and the fast widening Roman world, during the two centuries which intervened between the admission of Plebeians to the Consulate and the Third Punic War. With the fall of Rome’s old rival, Carthage, a rapid change for the worse manifested itself in the Roman character. Corruption entered the Senate and brutal violence disgraced the Assembly of the People. The young Roman politician half ruined himself over the shows of gladiators and wild beasts that were to purchase from the commonalty his election to the successive offices which were the steps in the ladder of his promotion. The mob cheered and laughed, but the provinces groaned, for out of their plundered cities and beggared agriculture the Propraetor or Proconsul reckoned to recoup himself for the heavy entrance-fees which he had paid to gain admission to the Roman Senate. These abuses became at length too glaring for even the seared consciences of Roman politicians to endure. Laws against official extortion, ‘de repetundis pecuniis,’ were passed by the people—a doubtful boon to the provincials, for now the governor robbed them, not for himself only, but for the rivals and the demagogues whose silence he had to purchase by bribes. In the train of the governor went the usurer, lending money at ruinous rates to the provincial to enable him to pay the clamorous tax-gatherer. Even Brutus, that Puritan among Roman statesmen, sought to compel the inhabitants of Salamis to pay him compound interest at the rate of 48 per cent. per annum. Under these accumulated oppressions the fair countries round the Mediterranean were fast sinking into misery and despair, the very life-blood being drained out of them by the insatiable oligarchs of Rome. And during the greater part of this time, while the Senators were treating the civilised world as their own private farm, and farming it like a tenant who is under notice to quit and will get all he can out of the soil, the so-called People of Rome were every year sinking lower and lower into degradation, becoming a mere mob of freedmen and foreigners, the collected sewage of the world. The Constitution—notwithstanding a temporary reaction under Sulla—was becoming more and more democratic, as the people were becoming more utterly unworthy to be trusted with power. Armed bands of hired bravoes fought with one another in the streets of Rome, and on the day of a hotly-disputed election or the passing of an unpopular law, the statues in the Forum were splashed with the blood of the slain.

Shelley on the decay of Roman freedom.

I know no words which more vividly bring before our minds the contrast between the Rome of Cincinnatus and the Rome of Clodius than this verse from Shelley’s ‘Ode to Liberty’:—

‘Slaves of one tyrant.’ That was the doom, the righteous doom of the Roman Senate and People. Corruption above and anarchy below had slain that Public Virtue without which a Republic cannot live: and now the only hope of the world lay in the uprising of some one man who should save Rome from herself, and rescue from her Senate and People the provinces which they had won but could no longer govern.

Caesar.

This necessary work was performed by the man who stands head and shoulders above all other statesmen, as Isaiah above all other Prophets, as Shakespeare above all other Dramatists,—the man whose name still means Emperor to more than a hundred millions of mankind, Gaius Julius Caesar. It may be truly said that the further we get away from Caesar the Dictator, the greater his work appears. Superficial students of history used to think of it as only lasting for five centuries (yet five centuries, the interval of time that separates us from Chaucer and Wycliffe, is not a contemptible interval in a nation’s life): but the more scientific school of modern historians rightly claim that the work of Julius Caesar, the organisation of Imperium Romanum, outlived not only the fall of Rome, but the fall of Constantinople also, and was only destroyed by ‘the bastard Caesar,’ Napoleon, in 1806, if indeed it be not, in a sense, living still.

Theory of the Principate.

As the various offices of the Republic had been formed chiefly out of the power of the ancient kings, it might have seemed the obvious course to recombine them into one, and crown Caesar king. Warned by the murmurs of the crowd on the day of the Lupercalia, but also doubtless following his own instinct as a statesman, Julius—and his nephew Augustus after him—chose a wiser course. The name of Republic should still remain: S.P.Q.R. should still be inscribed on the banners of the legions, but the powers of the Republic should all be grasped in a single hand. There had been Dictators created for special emergencies: Julius would be a life-long Dictator. Successful generals had been saluted Imperator by their soldiers on the field of battle: Julius would be emphatically the Imperator. Grave and reverend men, the fathers of the Senate, had been hailed with the title Princeps: Augustus would now in middle life be greeted as Princeps. Above all, the Tribunes of the Commonalty had possessed enormous powers for the prevention of legislation of which they disapproved, and their persons had been invested with especial sanctity. Augustus would now gather into himself all the obstructive powers of the whole College of Tribunes, and his person should be ‘sacro-sanct’ as theirs had been. Special defenders of the Commonalty were now no longer needed. The new Imperator claimed, and not altogether without reason, that he was defender of the people, and therefore each year by a fresh and solemn act he was ‘invested with the Tribunician power.’

A Monarchy under Republican forms.

Deference of the good Emperors to the Senate.

The bad Emperors delighted in degrading it.

Our own Constitutional monarchy is often called ‘a Republic veiled under monarchical forms.’ The Empire of the Caesars was just the reverse: an absolute monarchy veiled under the forms of a Republic. The analogy may be carried a little further. Just as every really great and patriotic Prime Minister, under a Constitutional monarchy like ours, veils somewhat of the power which in fact is his under the forms of deference to the throne, and does this not in servile adoration for rank, but because he knows that in the institution of Monarchy there is a fund of latent power which it were unwise to squander, and which may one day be sorely needed for the defence of the life of the nation against enemies from without or from within, even so the greatest and best of the Roman Emperors, while holding all power in their hands, used that power as much as possible in harmony with the Senate and in conformity with the Senate’s advice; and thus, while preserving the prestige of an ancient and venerable assembly, also retained in the State a force which might operate as a counterpoise, though a feeble one, should the vast powers of the Emperor pass into the keeping of a foolish or wicked successor. But while the good and patriotic Emperors—Augustus, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Claudius Gothicus, Probus—delighted to magnify the moral authority of the Senate, the weak and dissolute Emperors, maddened by the possession of absolute power, delighted to trample upon and insult it. Caligula forced Senators of the highest rank to walk for miles before his chariot, or to wait upon him at table, each clad in the linen girdle of a slave. Nero wrung from the loathing Senate a formal approbation of the murder of his mother, and insisted on 400 of its members performing as gladiators in the Amphitheatre. And Domitian, according to the well-known story in the pages of Juvenal, summoned the trembling Conscript Fathers in the dead of night to deliberate on the best manner of cooking an enormous turbot.

The Provinces were the gainers by the Imperial system.

But though the Senators groaned under the insults and the cruelty of the bad Emperors (of whom in the first century of the Empire there was undoubtedly a terrible preponderance over the good ones) there can be little doubt that for the Empire at large the change to the Imperial system was an enormous benefit. The populace of Rome had their rations and their gladiatorial exhibitions (panem et circenses) regularly, and what was more important, the police and the water supply of the great City were attended to as they had never been before. The provinces were no longer exposed to the unchecked cupidity of some dissolute aristocrat, eager to suck them dry during his short term of office and then to hurry back to play the great game of politics in Rome. Unjust governors, men like Pontius Pilate and Felix, undoubtedly still bore sway; but at least they had as a rule a longer term of office, and less need therefore to drain the province all at once. And the thought of the terrible Caesar at Rome, who, however cruel and rapacious himself, was generally quick to punish cruelty and rapacity in others, the dread of hearing, after a manifestly unjust sentence, the fateful words pronounced, ‘Provoco ad Caesarem⁠[3]⁠,’ kept many a provincial governor, who may have been at heart no better than Verres or Gabinius, from shearing the helpless sheep before him as closely as they would have been shorn in the later days of the Republic. It is one of the commonplaces of history that even Nero himself was hated only in Rome, and that after his death the story that he still lived and would one day return and resume the purple, was told and lovingly cherished in many of the provinces.

Chief periods of Imperial history.

I. the Julian Dynasty, 99 years. (B.C. 31-A.D. 68.)

The Flavian Dynasty, 27 years. (69-96.)

II. The Antonines, 84 years. (96-180.)

The history of the Empire naturally groups itself into periods, each of about a century in duration. The Julian dynasty, from the battle of Actium (B.C. 31) to the death of Nero (A.D. 68), fills up ninety-nine years. We pass lightly over the twenty-seven years of the Flavian dynasty (69-96), which is in some respects like a copy of the Julian, Vespasian being a somewhat commonplace Augustus and Domitian a vulgar Nero, and we come to the great and glorious age of the Antonines⁠[4]⁠. For eighty-four years (A.D. 96-180) a series of sovereigns, the best, the wisest and the most statesmanlike that the world has ever seen—Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, Marcus—sat upon the throne of the world. What has been already said as to the happiness of the provinces under the Julian dynasty might be said without any qualification, as far as the rulers could bring happiness, of the century of Antonine rule. But according to the trite quotation—

The course of nature seems as if it had been out of joint during that otherwise happy century. Destructive earthquakes, wide-wandering pestilences and grievous famines marked its course; and at the close of it came that terrible irruption of barbarians from the lands of the Middle Danube which is known as the Marcomannic War, and which very nearly brought about the fall of the Roman Empire two centuries too soon.

III. The Age of Anarchy, 105 years. (180-285.)

Debased Coinage.

The stately and philosophic virtue of the Antonine Emperors led to a terrible anti-climax—the mad sensuality and cruelty of the bull-necked Commodus. And now began that terrible third century, in which the great World-Empire seemed perpetually as if it were on the point of going to pieces, through its own weakness and corruption, before the barbarians were ready even to gather up its fragments. It had been discovered ‘that an emperor could be made elsewhere than in Rome,’ and in every province, almost in every legionary camp, there was an upstart General eager to avail himself of this discovery, eager to wrap himself in the purple and to lay hold of what the Greek historians call ἡ τῶν ὅλων ἀρχή, ‘the rule of the universe.’ The strongest memory can hardly retain the names of all the obscure adventurers who thus blossomed into a little temporary notoriety, and who were murdered by a rival or fell on the field of battle before their purple had lost the lustre of its newness. Province thus fighting against province and civil war being the normal condition of the Empire, the misery and poverty which everywhere prevailed can hardly be imagined, and are but scantily pourtrayed for us by the wretched historians of the time. Two things, however, always occur to my mind as typical of this woeful age—its coinage and its camps. Take a coin of one of the earlier Emperors, say a bronze sestertius of Domitian, which lies before me while I write: see the clear bold relief of the laurel-crowned head, the sharp, well-cut letters of the inscription, and then compare it with a (so-called) silver denarius of Valerian or Gallienus—a thin bit of copper with a wash of silver or pewter over it, and upon it the barbarous effigy of a head wearing a radiated crown and surrounded by an almost illegible inscription. From a mere glance at the coins you feel at once that the owner of a sestertius (whose nominal value was twopence-halfpenny) under Domitian was a richer man than the owner of a denarius (the equivalent of four sestertii) under Gallienus.

Degenerate Architecture.

And the camps: go to Housesteads or Chesters and see the splendid blocks of masonry which belong to the age of the Antonines; see the masonry of a very different and far inferior kind, small and mean and easily overthrown, which marks the age of Constantine, after the close of the third century. But in between these two periods of original building and late repair you may often find a mass of confused débris, sometimes with the marks of fire upon them. That shapeless mound tells the story of the third century. While every little Tribune or Centurion was coquetting with the soldiers under his command, relaxing discipline and permitting plunder, in the hope that they might some morning rush to the Praetorium, put on him the purple robe and hail him as Imperator, meantime the Pax Romana was becoming a bitter bye-word over all the Empire, and in our own country the savage Caledonians were breaking down the barrier of Hadrian, setting fire to Cilurnum and Borcovicus, swarming across the Tyne and Tees, and carrying fire and sword far into the heart of Britain.

IV. The Age of Restoration, 93 years. (285-378.)

The deliverer of the world from this tempest of anarchy and disruption, the true Second Founder of the Empire was the son of a Dalmatian slave, Diocletian. As his reign began A.D. 285, as the work of reorganisation which was commenced by him was continued by Constantine (306-337), and as the political system thus inaugurated lasted unimpaired till 378, the date of the battle of Hadrianople, we may call this the fourth century of the Empire, the period of Restoration.

Objects of the Diocletianic reform.

The great objects aimed at and accomplished by Diocletian were the increase of the majesty of the Imperial office, the equable diffusion of defensive power through all parts of the Empire, the welding of a strong chain of rights and responsibilities which should vibrate from the Emperor on his throne to the lowest official in the most distant province.

Increased veneration for the Imperial dignity.

(1) The increased majesty of the Emperor’s office. All pretence of his being only the first citizen in a Republic, only the most eminent member of the Senate, and so on, was now done away with. The Emperor now wore on his head a pearl-bordered diadem, on his feet sandals studded with gems; he was surrounded by a splendid retinue, and the petitioner who approached him—though he were a member of one of the proudest families in the Roman Senate—had to prostrate himself on the ground and adore the Imperial Majesty. Thus at length the Roman Imperator stood fully revealed, a monarch as haughty and as absolute as Darius or Sapor. In all this, censorious critics traced the overweening pride of the Dalmatian slave’s son exalted to the pinnacle of earthly greatness: yet it is probable that policy had as much share as pride in the self-exaltation of Diocletian. During the long troubles of the third century, when every legion was making and unmaking Emperors, the highest office in the State had lost all dignity and all prestige: and if it was really to recover itself and become, as Diocletian would have it, the true centre of gravity of the State, it was necessary that it should once again seem awful and majestic. The same statesmanlike spirit which dictated to Augustus the suppression of the visible signs of regal magnificence, suggested to Diocletian their multiplication and embellishment.

Division of labour.

(2) It had become manifest to a statesman’s eye that the vast Roman world could no longer be ruled from Rome alone. On the Rhine, on the Danube, on the Euphrates, strong armies were required to guard the frontiers: yet it was precisely from these armies, strangers to the Imperial city and to the person of the legitimate Augustus, that the brood of usurpers and tyrants, claimants for the Imperial purple, was being perpetually recruited. Diocletian now carved out the Roman Empire into four great Prefectures, each large enough to satisfy the ambition of a Charles V or a Louis XIV, and gave to each of these Prefectures its own court, its own capital, its own elaborately organised official hierarchy.

The four Prefectures.

I. ‘The Gauls,’ comprising Britain, Gaul, Spain, and part of Morocco, and reaching from the Firth of Clyde to Mount Atlas, had its centre of government at Augusta Trevirorum (Trier on the Moselle).

II. ‘Italy,’ comprising Raetia, Italy, Sicily, and the wealthy provinces of Africa, was still in theory governed from Rome; but practically its Emperor during the whole of the fourth century was generally resident at Mediolanum (Milan).

III. Illyricum, the smallest of the four Prefectures, included the provinces of the Middle Danube, the western portion of the country lately known as Turkey in Europe, and Greece. Sirmium on the Save was generally the residence of its Emperor.

IV. All the rest of the Empire formed the rich and important Prefecture of the East (Oriens). Its Emperor for the most part resided at Antioch, from whence he watched the ever menacing attitude of the Sassanid kings of Persia.

Transmission of the Imperial power.

Abdication of Diocletian, 305.

Death of Constantius. Elevation of Constantine, 25 July, 306.

The great scheme of Imperial government matured by the brain of Diocletian, provided not only for the exercise but also for the transmission of power. The adoptive system, which had given to the Empire all the noblest sovereigns of the Antonine period, was to be revived in all its vigour. Two Emperors ruling as Augusti were to adopt two younger colleagues as their sons, who were to bear the humbler title of Caesar, and were to administer those Prefectures in which the danger of war was the keenest, and the labour of ruling the most severe. As in the course of nature the two senior partners, the Augusti, moved off the scene, the Caesars were to take their place and adopt two new Caesars to ease them of their burden, and one day inherit their dignity. An elaborate and ingenious scheme, and one which might conceivably have preserved the Empire from civil war at least for two or three generations, but which in fact was broken to pieces by that longing after the hereditary transmission of power and wealth which is one of the deepest instincts of humanity. Diocletian and Maximian (a brave, uncultivated soldier) were the two first Augusti: Constantius and Galerius the two first Caesars. After a prosperous reign of twenty years, enfeebled health and perhaps a desire to see with his own eyes the success of his great design, induced Diocletian voluntarily to resign the purple, and Maximian, who had no such philosophical inclinations and who was still in the lusty vigour of middle life, was compelled to follow the example of his patron. Thus did Constantius and Galerius become the two new Augusti, but Galerius, who was the son-in-law and special confidant of Diocletian, had the choice of the two new Caesars, and chose a nephew and a dependent of his own, Maximin Daza and Severus, neither of them really fitted for ‘the rule of all things.’ Constantius, a man of mild and gentle temper, away in distant Britain and already smitten by disease, acquiesced in the nominations of his self-seeking partner; but the offspring and the soldiers of Constantius rebelled against an arrangement so one-sided and inequitable. Constantine, the brave young son of Constantius by his concubine Helena, now in his thirty-second year, was at Nicomedia in Bithynia when Diocletian’s abdication threw the direction of the affairs of the Imperial partnership into the hands of Galerius, who viewed him with no friendly eye, and would fain have kept him in honourable captivity in Asia. Repeated letters from his colleague Constantius at length wrung from him the required permission for the young man’s departure, and Constantine, according to a well-known story, starting on the long journey across Thrace by the Danube and the Rhine, caused the horses at the first few Imperial post-stations to be hamstrung, in order to prevent any courier from overtaking him with a revocation of the order. He reached York in safety; he made a successful campaign in Caledonia under his father’s auspices, and when that father returned to York to die, the legionaries, led by a Teutonic chief Crocus, king of the Alamanni, who held high command among them, insisted with one voice, that the diadem and the purple of the deceased Emperor should adorn his noble son, and that whatever the new-fangled constitution of Diocletian might prescribe, his title should be not Caesar but Augustus. Of the myriads of travellers who hurry to and fro through the magnificent railway station of York, how few find time to visit the admirable museum of Roman antiquities which is within a few hundred yards of the station, to gaze upon the ‘multangular tower’ with its courses of square Roman bricks, and in thought to retrace the history of York, Eoforwic, Eboracum, up to that day when the shouting soldiery, enraptured with the donative which each man had received, acclaimed the young hero ‘Constantine Imperator tu vincas.’ Strange is it to reflect that then what we call ‘the Eternal Eastern Question’ had no existence, since he who was to give his name to Constantinople was only setting his foot on the first rung of the ladder of power, and the Bosphorus, with the inconsiderable city of Byzantium on its shores, was still a silent and solitary water-way, while Eboracum was making and unmaking Emperors.

Confusion and Civil War.

Suicide of Diocletian, 313.

By the elevation of Constantine to the Imperial dignity—an elevation which Galerius found himself eventually forced to consent to—the whole of Diocletian’s elaborate scheme of adoption, partnership and succession was shattered into atoms. The son of Maximian, Maxentius, followed the example of the son of Constantius and declared himself Augustus. Then old Maximian himself resumed the purple. In the year 308 there were six Emperors reigning at once, all styling themselves Augusti. Civil war in such conditions as these became the chronic condition of the Empire. The fable of the armed men who sprang from the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus, and who fought with one another all the long summer’s day till only five were left, became a terrible truth. Such was the scene, such the utter failure of his grand project for promoting the peace of the Empire upon which the weary eyes of Diocletian closed, when, seeking refuge in death from the indignities which his young successors would have put upon him, he passed away from earth in his stately palace by the Adriatic, that palace which in the Middle Ages became a city⁠[5]⁠.

Constantine and Licinius, 315.

Constantine sole ruler, 323.

Of the dragon’s brood of combatants, at the time of the death of Diocletian only two were left, Constantine in the West and Licinius in the East. A short civil war was terminated by an apparent reconciliation between the two kinsmen (Licinius had married the sister of Constantine), and for eight years Licinius seemed to be satisfied with an arrangement which left him only the Eastern quarter of the Roman world, while the Gauls, Italy and Illyricum obeyed his more fortunate and far abler rival. But

The terrible loneliness of those who climb to the high places of power, their incapacity of tolerating a rival near the throne produced the usual results, and in 323 the second civil war broke out. Over land and sea the two mighty storm-clouds moved with terrific momentum against one another. Thirty-four thousand men fell on the hardly-contested field of Hadrianople. Crispus, the brave young son of Constantine, forced the passage of the Dardanelles and laid siege to Byzantium. The final battle was fought in September, 323, at Chrysopolis in Bithynia. Licinius was defeated after a most bloody encounter, in which 25,000 of his followers were slain. He implored and seemed to receive the pardon of his ‘Emperor and Master’ Constantine, but in the following year, on some suspicion of conspiracy, was put to death. Seventeen years after his being proclaimed at York, Constantine was sole and absolute master of the Roman world.

Christianity and the Empire. (303-313.)

The generation which witnessed the break-down of Diocletian’s scheme of adoptive succession witnessed also the final triumph of Christianity over its persecutors. By a somewhat undeserved fate, the name of the great restorer of the Empire has been handed down to after ages as that of the fiercest and most cruel of the oppressors of the Church. The persecution of the Christians which was commenced under Diocletian, and which continued, with some intermission, for the two last years of his reign and till the eighth year after his abdication, was not apparently originated by him, but by his younger and infinitely less statesmanlike colleague Galerius, who obtained the sanction indeed, but not the hearty co-operation of the aged and now valetudinarian Emperor. Still it must be admitted that Diocletian, though no fanatical adorer of the Olympian gods, believed in the necessity, on political grounds, of one great and relentless struggle for the suppression of the ‘new and illicit religion’ which had grown up in the bosom of the Roman State, and which, as all men of clear insight perceived, must either conquer it or be conquered by it.

Constantine’s attitude towards Christianity.

The same purely political instinct which made Diocletian persecute, led Constantine to foster and favour the Christian Church. Could we penetrate the secrets of the hearts of these two men, we might find that their religious convictions were not very dissimilar. Both were probably at heart Monotheists, both had that belief in a just and overruling Providence, which comes to most men who are in authority, and who, seeing the endless labour and contrivance which is needed in an earthly ruler to keep his world in any degree of order and peace, cannot easily persuade themselves that the whole of this fair system of things which we see around us came by chance. It may be doubted whether, in his heart of hearts, Diocletian went much beyond this position in his worship of Jupiter, or Constantine—at any rate till near the close of his life—in his belief in Christ. But the younger Emperor saw clearly that no fresh attempt to extirpate Christianity by force could succeed when Diocletian had failed; that the new religion made of its votaries not only better men, but, upon the whole, better citizens and more loyal subjects; that it possessed a force which, wisely guided, might be used for the preservation and not for the disruption of the Empire; above all, that the zealous partisanship of Christian bishops and priests would be a far more valuable ally to him in the desperate strife with his competitors—first with Maxentius and then with Licinius—than the languid half-hearted acquiescence of the Pagans in the religion which was a fashion rather than a faith, handed down to them from their forefathers.

Thus, then, the alliance of Constantine with the Christian Church was formed, that alliance of which the imposing Council of Nicaea, consisting of 318 bishops, presided over by the great Augustus himself, glorious in purple and gold, was the most conspicuous seal and symbol. But though Constantine fostered, and, if I may so say, petted the Christian Church, he did not bring about that complete and intimate union of the State and the Church which was to be the distinguishing mark of the later, and pre-eminently of the Eastern Empire. Christian ideas indeed coloured much of his legislation. An edict was passed for the observance of ‘the Saviour’s day, the day of Light and of the Sun;’ and the soldiers, even those who did not profess Christianity, were enjoined to meet on that day in some open space near the city in which they were quartered and to lift up their hands to heaven thanking God for past victories, and imploring Him long to preserve in safety and triumph their Emperor Constantine and his pious sons. Every attempt to compel Christians to be present at idolatrous sacrifices was rigorously forbidden. The more licentious of the heathen orgies were forcibly suppressed. Many idol temples were thrown open to the gaze of the vulgar, and some were stripped of their treasures and their revenues for the benefit of the Imperial Treasury.

Still there was no formal renunciation of the worship of the gods of the Capitol—no formal recognition of Christianity as the religion of the Empire. The temples, though in some cases robbed of their gold and silver ornaments, remained standing; nay, even in the new and Christian capital, in Constantinople itself, new temples were erected, of course not without the Emperor’s cognisance, to Rhea, to the Great Twin Brethren, to the Fortune of the New Rome.

Religious policy of Constantine’s successors.

Two generations passed after the foundation of Constantinople, during which the relation of the Empire to the Christian Church was the central question of all politics. These were the years during which the strife between Athanasian and Arian was being waged in all its bitterness, and the influence of Constantius, the survivor of the sons of Constantine, and eventually the sole ruler of the Roman Empire, was thrown with passionate earnestness on the side of the Arians, on whose behalf he exerted a severity which sometimes amounted to actual persecution of their opponents. Then came the short and fruitless attempt of Julian to restore the worship of the old gods. After his death followed some further struggles with Arianism, which could again boast the protection of an Eastern Emperor⁠[6]⁠. All these events tended to bring the supreme civil power more and more deeply into the innermost circle of ecclesiastical politics. Men’s minds became familiarised with the idea of one supreme and triumphant form of the Christian faith, professed by the Emperor, inscribed on the forefront of the State, and rigorously imposed on all citizens as an essential condition of their citizenship. This consummation was reached under that Emperor whose fortunes I shall before long have to describe to you, under Theodosius, who proclaimed the final triumph of the Athanasian faith, commanded all his subjects to adhere to it, prohibited the meetings of heretics, destroyed the temples of the gods, and made orthodox Christianity, what it continued for more than a thousand years, the State religion of the Roman Empire.