The Herdsman Made Caesar

With all this settled between them, Diocletian and Galerius went out in procession to announce the new Caesars. Everyone was watching Constantine. No one doubted that the choice would fall on him. The troops on the spot, and the senior officers of the other legions who had been called in for the ceremony, kept their eyes fixed on him, delighted at the promotion they expected, and busy praying for his success. [a]

About three miles outside Nicomedia there is a rise of ground. On its summit Galerius had once received the purple himself, and a pillar had been set up there with a statue of Jupiter on it. The procession went there. The soldiers were called to assembly. Diocletian, in tears, made a speech to them. He said that he had grown weak, that he needed rest after all his labors, that he would hand the empire over to stronger and abler men and appoint new Caesars at the same time. Everyone waited, straining, for the names.

Then, out of nowhere, he announced that the Caesars were Severus and Maximin. The shock was total. Constantine was standing close by, in full view, and men began asking one another whether his name too had been changed to Maximin — until, in front of them all, Galerius reached back with his hand, pushed Constantine aside, and pulled Daia forward. He stripped him of his civilian clothes and set him where everyone could see him. Nobody knew who he was or where he had come from. But no one dared to speak up or raise an objection; their minds were too stunned by the strange, unlooked-for thing they had just watched.

Diocletian took off his purple robe, put it on Daia, and took back his own original name, Diocles. He came down from the platform and rode through Nicomedia in a carriage, and then this old emperor — like a veteran discharged from service — was sent home to his own country. And Daia, who had lately been taken from herding cattle in the forests to serve as a common soldier, was made a bodyguard at once, then a tribune, and the next day a Caesar, with authority to trample and grind down the empire of the East: a man who knew nothing of war and nothing of civil government, a herdsman turned commander of armies.

Having got rid of the two old men, Galerius began to think of himself as the one ruler of the Roman empire. Necessity had put Constantius in the first rank, but Galerius thought little of him. The man was easygoing, and his health was failing and uncertain. Galerius expected him to die soon. And even if he did recover, it looked easy enough to force him to lay the purple down — what else could he do, with three colleagues pressing him to step aside? [e]

Licinius was always at Galerius’ side. They were old friends and had served together from the beginning, and Galerius used his advice in the handling of everything. Yet he would not name Licinius a Caesar, with the title of son. He meant to name him emperor, with the title of brother, in Constantius’ place, while he himself held supreme power and ruled the whole world with nothing to check him. After that he intended to celebrate his twentieth-anniversary festival, make his son Candidianus — then a boy of nine — a Caesar, and finally step down as Diocletian had. Then, with Licinius and Severus as emperors and Maximin and Candidianus in the next rank as Caesars, he imagined himself walled in on every side, growing old in security and peace. Those were his plans. But God, whom he had made his enemy, brought every one of them to nothing.

Now that he had the highest power in his hands, he set his mind to grinding down the empire he had forced his way into. It is the custom and the practice of the Persians that the people make themselves slaves to their kings and the kings treat their people as slaves. Ever since his victories over Persia this shameless man had not been embarrassed to praise that arrangement constantly, and he decided to set it up in Roman territory. He could not do it by open law, so he did it by imitating the Persian kings — stripping men of their freedom in practice. [h]

He would begin by stripping the rank from those he meant to punish, and then it was not only minor officials who were put to the torture, but the leading men of cities and people of the highest standing, and this over trifles and in ordinary civil suits. In capital cases the punishment kept ready was the cross; for lesser offenses, chains. Respectable married women were dragged off to the weaving-houses. When a man was to be flogged, four posts were driven into the ground and he was tied to them — a method not even used on slaves.

And what am I to say about his room for sport and his favorite entertainments? He kept bears, a close match for himself in savagery and bulk, collected over the whole course of his reign. Whenever he felt like indulging himself he would order some particular bear brought in and have men thrown to it — swallowed rather than eaten. When their limbs were pulled apart he laughed with enormous satisfaction, and he never ate dinner without watching human blood spilled.

Private citizens were sentenced to be burned alive. He began this form of execution with his edicts against the Christians, ordering that after torture and sentence they were to be burned over a slow fire. They were tied to a stake, and a moderate flame was first applied to the soles of their feet, until the muscles, shrinking as they burned, pulled away from the bone. Then torches were lit, put out, and held against every part of the body, so that no part was spared. All the while cold water was poured over their faces and their mouths kept wet, so that their throats would not dry out and let them die. They did die at last, after many hours, when the fierce heat had eaten through the skin and reached the organs inside. The bodies were piled on a pyre and burned to nothing; the bones were collected, ground to powder, and thrown into the river or into the sea.

By now the cruelty he had learned in torturing Christians had become second nature, and he practiced it on everyone alike. He never used the lighter penalties — exile, prison, sentencing a criminal to the mines. Burning, crucifixion, throwing men to wild animals: those were done daily, and without a second thought. For small offenses his own household staff and his stewards were beaten with spear-shafts instead of rods. For great ones, beheading was a mercy granted to very few, and being allowed to die the easy way looked like a favor for long service. [k]

But these were small evils in Galerius’ government compared with what came next. Public speaking was stamped out, advocates destroyed, and men learned in the law either exiled or killed. Education came to be looked at the way magic and forbidden arts are looked at, and anyone who had it was trodden down and cursed as an enemy of the government and of the public. Law itself dissolved, and unlimited license was handed to the judges — judges picked out of the army, crude and unlettered men, turned loose on the provinces with no legal advisers to guide or restrain them.

But what brought on general, universal misery was the tax laid at one stroke on every province and every city. Assessors were spread out everywhere, working through a thorough and merciless inspection, and the scenes were horrible — like the outrages of a victorious army and the wretched state of prisoners of war. Every piece of ground was measured. Vines and fruit trees were counted. Lists were taken of livestock of every kind, and a head-count register was drawn up. [l]

In the cities the common people were called in, those living inside the walls and outside them alike. The market squares filled with families, all of them there with their children and their slaves. The noise of torture and of whips rang out. Sons were hung on the rack to make them give up what their fathers owned; the most trusted slaves were forced by pain to testify against their masters, and wives against their husbands. Where there was no other evidence, men were tortured into speaking against themselves — and the moment the agony made them admit to property they did not have, those imaginary holdings were written into the lists. Youth, old age, and sickness bought no exemption. The sick and the frail were carried in. Each person’s age was estimated, and to swell the head tax, years were added to the young and taken off the old. Everywhere there was weeping and grief.

Whatever the laws of war have allowed conquerors to do to the conquered, this man dared to do to Romans and to Rome’s own subjects — because his own ancestors had been made to pay a tax like it by the victorious Trajan, as a penalty on the Dacians for rebelling so often. After the count, money was collected for each head, as though people were paying a price for permission to exist. And even then the same assessors were not trusted: others were sent round after them, and others after those, to find more. So the tribute doubled — not because the new assessors found anything new, but because they added to the old rates as they pleased, so as not to look as though they had been sent for nothing.

Meanwhile the animals died off and the people died, and the taxes were still paid on the dead, so that nobody could live or stop living without paying. The only ones left were the beggars, from whom nothing could be squeezed and whose misery and wretchedness kept them safe from being troubled. But this dutiful man took pity on them. Deciding that they should not stay poor any longer, he had them all rounded up, put on boats, and sunk in the sea. So merciful of him, to see to it that under his rule nobody should be in want! And so, while he was taking effective measures that no one should dodge the tax by pretending to be poor, he killed a crowd of people who were genuinely destitute, in violation of every law of human decency.

By now the judgment of God was coming near him, and the season had arrived when his fortunes began to sag and drain away. All through what I have just described he had not set about overthrowing Constantius or driving him out; he was waiting for him to die, though he had no idea death was so close. Constantius, who had become gravely ill, wrote to Galerius asking that his son Constantine be sent to see him. He had asked the same thing long before, and got nothing; granting it was the last thing Galerius intended. [o]

On the contrary, Galerius laid trap after trap for the young man’s life, because he did not dare use open violence. He was afraid of stirring up civil war against himself and bringing on what he dreaded most, the hatred and anger of the army. Under the pretext of manly exercise and sport, he made Constantine fight wild animals. The scheme failed. The power of God protected Constantine, and at the very moment of danger snatched him out of Galerius’ hands.

In the end Galerius could put the request off no longer. One evening he gave Constantine a written pass to leave and ordered him to set out the next morning with the imperial dispatches. He meant either to find some excuse for holding him back or to send orders ahead to Severus to arrest him on the road. Constantine saw what he was doing. So after dinner, once the emperor had gone to bed, he hurried away, and at every main relay station he carried off the horses kept there at public expense, and got clear.

The next day the emperor deliberately stayed in his bedroom until noon, then ordered Constantine brought in — and learned that Constantine had left right after dinner. Wild with rage, he ordered horses got ready so that Constantine could be chased down and hauled back. When he heard that every horse on the main road had been taken, he could hardly keep from crying. Constantine meanwhile traveled at an unbelievable pace and reached his father, who was already at the point of death. Constantius commended his son to the soldiers, handed supreme authority over into his hands, and then died, as he had long wanted to die: quietly and at peace.

Constantine Augustus, once he had taken up the government, made it his first business to give the Christians back their worship and their God. This was how he opened his reign — by restoring the holy religion.

A few days later Constantine’s portrait, wreathed in laurel, was brought to that pestilent beast, so that by accepting the token he would acknowledge Constantine as emperor. He hesitated a long time over whether to take it. He was on the point of throwing both the portrait and the man who carried it into the fire, but his confidants talked him out of anything so insane. They warned him of the danger. If Constantine came with an armed force, they said, all the soldiers — who had never wanted these obscure and unknown Caesars made in the first place — would acknowledge him and rush eagerly to join him. [q]

So Galerius accepted the portrait, with the greatest unwillingness, and sent Constantine the imperial purple, so that it would look as though he had taken the man into partnership of his own accord. That wrecked his plans. He could not now bring Licinius in, as he had meant to before, without going past the fixed number of emperors. So he devised this instead. Severus, the older man, was to be named emperor; and Constantine, instead of the title of emperor he had been given, was to receive the title of Caesar, sharing it with Maximin Daia — and so drop from second place to fourth.

Things looked as though they had been arranged more or less to Galerius’ satisfaction when another alarm came: his son-in-law Maxentius had been declared emperor at Rome. This is how it happened. Galerius, having settled on devouring the empire with permanent taxes, soared so far into folly that he would not exempt even the Roman people from that servitude. So tax collectors were appointed to go to Rome and draw up lists of the citizens. [s]

At about the same time Galerius had cut down the Praetorian Guard. A few soldiers of that corps were still at Rome, and they took their chance: they put several magistrates to death and, with the unruly crowd going along with it, dressed Maxentius in the imperial purple. When the news reached Galerius he was disturbed at how strange it was, but not much dismayed. He hated Maxentius. He could not give him the rank of Caesar, since two men already held it — Daia and Constantine — and besides, he thought it was enough to have handed that rank out once against his will. So he sent for Severus, urged him to go and win back his rule and his sovereignty, and put under his command the army that Maximian Herculius had commanded before, so that he could attack Maxentius at Rome. Maximian’s soldiers had often been quartered in the city with every kind of luxury, so that they not only had an interest in sparing it — they wanted to settle there.

Maxentius knew perfectly well how enormous his own offenses were. He had what amounted to a hereditary claim on his father’s army and might have hoped to draw it over to himself, but it occurred to him that Galerius could think of that too, and might leave Severus in Illyricum and march on Rome in person with his own army. With that hanging over him, Maxentius looked for protection against the danger. He sent the purple to his father, who had been living in Campania since he abdicated, and hailed him Augustus again. Maximian, always ready for a change, eagerly put back on the purple he had taken off unwillingly.

Meanwhile Severus marched on and brought his troops up to the walls of the city. Almost at once the soldiers raised their standards, abandoned Severus, and gave themselves up to Maxentius, whom they had come to fight. What was left for Severus, deserted like that, but flight? Maximian, who had resumed the imperial dignity, met him on the way. So he took refuge in Ravenna and shut himself up there with a few soldiers. But when he saw that he was about to be handed over, he surrendered of his own accord and gave the purple back to the man he had received it from. After that he was granted no other favor than an easy death: he was made to open his veins, and died in that gentle way.