Diocletian

Diocletian (born 245 ce, Salonae?, Dalmatia [now Solin, Croatia]—died 316, Salonae) was a Roman emperor (284–305 ce) who restored efficient government to the empire after the near anarchy of the 3rd century. His reorganization of the fiscal, administrative, and military machinery of the empire laid the foundation for the Byzantine Empire in the East and temporarily shored up the decaying empire in the West. The last major persecution of Christians occurred during his reign.

Life

Diocletian’s biography has been obscured by legends, rhetoric, the dubiousness of documents, and the hostility of his adversaries. Little is known of his origins. His father was a scribe or the emancipated slave of a senator called Anullinus. Diocletian’s complete name, found in official inscriptions, is given as Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus. He received the name Diocles first, then the name Valerius, after the name of his daughter, Valeria, who married Galerius in 293. The gens name Aurelius did not appear until March 1, 286—that is, until after his accession. Nothing is known of his wife, Prisca, other than what the contemporary Latin Christian writer Lactantius Firmianus says in his De mortibus persecutorum, which is of debatable veracity. Diocles, having adopted the name Diocletianus, entered history like so many of those emperors who emerged from the shadows through force of arms, brought to power by the army. What is known of his appearance is based on coin effigies and on sculptures. From these it appears that he was tall and thin, with a large forehead, a short, strong nose, a hard mouth, and a determined chin.

Rise to power

Up to the time of his accession, Diocletian had lived most of his life in military camps. These may have been either in Gaul, as reported in the Historia Augusta, or in Moesia. Or he may have been a member of the Roman emperor Carinus’s bodyguard. The only definite fact known about Diocletian during this period is that he was among those army chiefs whom Carinus gathered, together with the Illyrians, to fight against the Persians. In 284, during that campaign, Numerian, Carinus’s brother and coemperor, was found dead in his litter, and his adoptive father, the praetorian prefect Aper, was accused of having killed him in order to seize power. When Diocletian, acclaimed as emperor by his soldiers, appeared for the first time in public dressed in the imperial purple, he declared himself innocent of Numerian’s murder. He designated Aper as the criminal and killed him personally. Here again, rhetoric has obscured the real events. Aper’s guilt was accepted by contemporaries, but it was also true that a prediction had been made to Diocletian previously, telling him that he would become emperor on the day he killed a boar (Latin: aper). And it was true, too, that he did not wish to wait much longer for the boar to come. In reality, Numerian had died either a natural death or from a stroke of lightning. With the death of Aper, however, Diocletian was relieved of an eventual competitor and, retroactively, his act had been granted sacred meaning.

Acclaimed emperor on November 17, 284, Diocletian possessed real power only in those countries that were dominated by his army (i.e., in Asia Minor and possibly Syria). The rest of the empire was obedient to Numerian’s brother Carinus. After having put down a revolt by Julianus, a troop commander in Pannonia, whom he attacked and killed near Verona, Carinus proceeded to attack Diocletian. An indecisive battle near the confluence of the Margus (modern Morava) and Danube rivers, not far from present-day Belgrade, would have been a defeat for Diocletian had Carinus not been assassinated by a group of soldiers. Thus, in midsummer of 285, Diocletian became master of the empire.