Читать книгу Why Rome Fell - Michael Arnheim - Страница 56

The Emperor Septimius Severus (r. 193–211) is famously said to have advised his two sons, Caracalla and Geta, shortly before his death: “Be harmonious (between yourselves), enrich the soldiers, scorn all others.” (Cassius Dio, 77.15). Caracalla soon got rid of his brother and behaved arrogantly toward most other people though, in 212, by the Constitutio Antoniniana, he extended Roman citizenship to all free male inhabitants of the empire. As his father had advised, his main concern was the army though his extension of citizenship actually had a detrimental effect on military recruitment. The army was made up of legions, recruited from Roman citizens, and auxilia, drawn from peregrini, non-citizen provincials, who became citizens automatically after twenty-five years’ service. After 212, however, there was no longer any incentive for peregrini to enlist, and more “barbarians” were recruited than ever before.

Between Caracalla’s assassination in 217 and the accession of Diocletian in 284, a succession of emperors met a similar fate. The period from 235 to 284 is known as the Crisis of the Third Century when the Roman Empire’s very existence was threatened by a combination of threats, foreign, domestic, military, political, and economic.

Diocletian’s solution stabilized the Empire, at least temporarily. As a military man, his focus was primarily on defense and security. By sharing his power with three other emperors in the so-called tetrarchy (rule of four) and by greatly increasing the number of provinces, and separating military and civil commands, he secured the frontiers while tightening the administration of the Empire. The Christian writer Lactantius (c.250–c. 325) went so far as to claim that, under Diocletian, there were more men on the government’s payroll than taxpayers! (Lactantius, Mort. Pers., 7.3). This was an exaggeration, but modern estimates still suggest that Diocletian doubled the size of the civil service from about 15,000 to 30,000. (Treadgold 1997, p. 19.) On the basis of a population of between 50 and 65 million, this averages out at about one official per 2,000 inhabitants. (Jones 1964, p. 594. Cf. Bagnall 1987, p. 66.)

The corollary to this was the compilation of the Gregorian and Hermogenian Codes under Diocletian’s direction, codification being a novelty at the time, which was to burgeon greatly in the future, right up to the present day. Diocletian took very seriously his responsibility as the fount of all law, and there are about 1,200 rescripts still surviving, probably only a fraction of those issued, chiefly from the period 293–294 alone. (See S. Connolly 2010.) Rescripts are legal responses, probably drafted by professional government lawyers in the scrinium a libellis (imperial secretariat), to petitions from people of varying degrees all around the Empire. (See Honoré 1979, pp. 51–64.)

Men of senatorial origin had a monopoly on provincial governorships under Augustus. This was one of the chief ways that this master politician was able to placate this important class, leading members of which had been responsible for that cataclysmic event on the Ides of March 44 BCE. As time went by, emperor after emperor continued to dilute the senatorial order with men of their own choosing from outside the order and, increasingly, from outside Italy. In the third century, emperors started appointing non-senators to governorships without even bothering to dunk them in the curia (senate-house) first. Diocletian completed this process, largely eliminating members of the senatorial order from positions of any importance.