Читать книгу The Journey: How an obscure Byzantine Saint became our Santa Claus - David Price Williams - Страница 41

Our newest emperor had only recently been appointed and was yet another soldier who went by the name of Diocletian. It seems he too had risen through the ranks of the legions like all the others and had finally been proclaimed emperor by his own men. I would have thought it was a fairly risky business, accepting such a position after so many years of uprisings and insurrections, however powerful he might have felt. There had been more than twenty of these so-called emperors in just the last few years. But Diocletian had survived almost ten months already, which was longer than most of the others and he was strengthening his grip on power, that’s what everybody who knew the labyrinthine ways of Rome told us.

Interestingly, Diocletian didn’t come from Italy. He was a Dalmatian from the city of Salona, the Roman provincial capital on the Adriatic coast, but he knew how to order his soldiers about so I expect that is how he had survived this far. He was ‘army’ through and through and had made his name in the cavalry, though one or two of the officers who called in at Patara said he wasn’t just a good horseman but a very able and imaginative administrator too. He would need to be, with the empire in such disarray. The Persians, as ever, were threatening its borders in the east, along the valley of the Tigris River. This whole region was always one with which Rome had problems. Only recently, just before Diocletian’s accession, a previous emperor, Aurelian, had granted a city called Palmyra, located

DAVID PRICE WILLIAMS