Читать книгу The Journey: How an obscure Byzantine Saint became our Santa Claus - David Price Williams - Страница 43

I’m told that it slowly became clear to Diocletian that the essence of the problem was that the empire was too unwieldy for one man to rule. It had been running now for some three hundred years and had grown into a vast hydra, a multi-headed monster. Too many people, too many languages, too many different tribes and far too much taxation! Everybody was ready to complain about that part of the Roman administration. Being a tax collector in one of these outlandish areas can’t have been a happy experience, with local people ready to do away with you as soon as they were able. Diocletian’s solution to this problem of far flung peoples and restive tribes was incredible in some ways. He decided to divide the empire into two and his way of doing it was to appoint an emperor of the west, someone called Maximian, while he himself remaining emperor of the east. He had thus created what I suppose you could call a diarchy, a rule by two monarchs, in the hope that each side could bring their own sphere of influence into line. It wasn’t hard to see the risks inherent in this kind of thinking, namely that the empire could so easily just split in two, or worse, that a civil war would break out and countless innocent people would be caught up in the ensuing catastrophe.

On the other hand, you had to admire Diocletian for trying to stabilize the empire after decades of what most people had come to regard as virtual anarchy. From that perspective, it was a very bold move. And it seemed to work. Maximian for his

DAVID PRICE WILLIAMS