PAUL FREEDMAN: But the
advantage of talking to you, even on an inconvenient day,
is Diocletian. We don't use terms in the
professional world of history like awesome very much. But the guy certainly
deserves that. He rescued the Roman Empire, and
we'll begin by saying what he rescued it from. As a preliminary, the sections
are meeting this week. If you're wait-listed for
a section, just go to it. We will have enough sections for
however many people take this course, right? So there are currently four. The additional ones that were
added since last week are Wednesday at 2:30 and
Thursday at 7:00. And again, if you're
wait-listed, just go. We'll figure this out. There will be enough sections
for everybody. So I referred last time to
the third century crisis. A crisis of the Roman Empire
that preceded the accession of Diocletian, from 235 to 284. And we mentioned several
interrelated weaknesses of the Empire that might be
seen as long-term causes of this crisis. The size of the Empire. It's sheer, massive size. The problem the succession. That is, it was never quite
clear, and we'll talk about this in more detail, how one
emperor succeeded another. The urban-rural imbalance. This was an empire
built on cities. And to some extent, although
heavily debated among historians to what extent, but
to some extent, the cities may be said to have drained off the
energy, or been parasites to the productivity of
the countryside. It was an empire that was,
according to one point of view, more cosmopolitan than
it had been, according to another point of view,
more barbarian. In other words, this was an
empire whose Roman population was less dominant, partly
through its own success in co-opting other peoples. Some of the peoples that it
co-opted we're not actually originally inhabitants
of the Empire. Particularly, this is visible in
the armies, which tended to be staffed by so-called
barbarian tribes. So called by the Romans,
who referred to them as barbarians. Another problem is the East-West
imbalance, where the East tends to do better
economically and demographically than the West,
demographically meaning population. We live in a world where one
of the great threats is over-population. It is therefore not
self-evident, although true, that for most of the time,
historically, most places have trouble reproducing
their population. And indeed, we are starting to
enter into a period of great demographic decline. The infant mortality, the low
life expectancy, the death of women in childbirth, the
prevalence of disease, and to some extent, military threats
of invasion, or if not threats, the reality, made it
hard for one generation to produce children to
replace itself. And this is true up until
the dawn of modernity. So these are fundamental
problems of the Roman Empire. The real question is
why do they explode in the third century? And this is a question, as I
think I said last week, with any great empire. It's easy to point to the flaws
in a complicated system. Often size is one of them. Often bureaucracy. Often overspending
on the military. But some of these go on for a
very long time, more or less success of successfully,
despite the flaws. And the Roman Empire went on
longer than most, as we said. The immediate problems that
explode in the third century are invasions and succession. Invasions by, first
of all, Persia. Persia is the old enemy
of the Roman Empire. Indeed, as many of you know,
the old enemy of the Greek city-states that precede the
Roman Empire as far back as the first historian of the
Western tradition, Herodotus-- first week of directed studies,
for those of you who are nostalgic for that
experience-- Persia is the enemy. Now we never study Persia. It's kind of like offstage
all the time. And that's the great benefit
of the Department of Near Eastern Languages
and Cultures. If you want to learn about
Persia really from within, instead of oh, my god,
the Persians. And it's oh, my god, the
Persians in 370 BC, [correction:470] and it's going to
come to an end. It is going to come to an end
in the seventh century. But that's because of Islam,
just to anticipate. But in the third century, Persia
becomes resurgent. Having been rather passive, it
has this frontier with the Roman Empire in the East. More
or less, buffer states are Mesopotamia, present-day
Iraq, and Armenia. It's not exactly the same as
the present-day state of Armenia, but more like
eastern Turkey. The dynasty that controls
Persia, and that is more aggressive than its predecessor
are the Sassanids, and this appears in
your reading. The Sassanid Dynasty, the rulers
of Persia, just more aggressive and more
adventurous. Beginning in 224, they start to
probe that frontier along the Armenian and Mesopotamian
border, and eventually cross it and start to wreak havoc in
some of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. The climax of this is the
Emperor Valerian was captured by the Persians in 260. Valerian actually one of the
longer-reigning Emperor's of this chaotic period,
253 to 260. They kept him for
a little while. Displayed him in chains,
maybe flayed him. Anyway, he died in captivity. They did a kind of
a job on him. I think maybe he was flayed
after he died, just not to be too gruesome, but I think
they displayed the skin. As I said, I'm not a
Persian specialist. But the second invasion
is across the Danube-Rhine frontier. The Danube and the Rhine form
what the Romans thought of as a natural frontier with
the barbarian states. That didn't mean that they
didn't cross them. In fact, many of their great
fortresses and establishments were on the eastern
side of the Rhine. But they considered those as
bulwarks against a dramatic invasion across the Rhine. The Rhine and the Danube
almost meet-- the Rhine going from modern
Netherlands down to Switzerland, and the Danube
going also from Germany eventually Austria, Hungary,
into the Black Sea. As we'll see, Charlemagne, in
the early ninth century, tried to build a canal between
the two of them. And there are actually traces of
this immense and completely unsuccessful project. And there now is a canal
between them. So this is sort of the frontier
of the Roman Empire, and this is the line above which
wine grapes are grown, [correction: wine grapes
become scarce] no olive oil is pressed. And it's got to be protected,
but not worth conquering. So we have pressure on the
Rhine-Danube frontiers in the third century, and another
Emperor, Decius, died fighting the Goths in 251, Decius. And Valerian dies in 260. So the Emperors are certainly
out there as leaders, but that actually has to do with
the fact that they're military guys. And that is part
of the problem. The major problem besides the
invasions was succession. It depends on how you count-- is someone a real Emperor, or
is he merely a pretender?-- there are at least 30 Emperors
between 235 and 285. Many of them ruling
for months, most of them being killed. They're assassinated by the
Praetorian Guard, that is, by their own troops. They're killed in battle against
foreign enemies, like Decius and Valerian. They're killed in battle against
other people claiming to be Emperors. But the most common thing is
they're assassinated by their own troops. How had Roman Emperors
succeeded each other? There were several ways. One is what you would expect,
and that is dynastic. But that's not all
that common. Dynastic, in other words,
families rule. And the family is recognized
as a ruling family, and therefore it goes from father to
son, or if there's no son, father to person daughter
marries, or father to nephew, something like that. But that was not actually
so common. Sometimes the next Emperor was
chosen by his predecessor. This is characteristic of the
second century AD, the era of the so-called good Emperors. In theory, this is
a great system. You have no family prejudice. You simply, as a good Emperor,
pick someone who looks to you like he's going to be
a good Emperor. So that is another
possibility. Another possibility is some guy
is powerful, and uses his troops to take over. And that's what we see
in the third century. We see not only the
militarization of the Empire, but the interference of the army
in raising successors, in raising new Emperors. The army was able to make
and unmake Emperors. Just as in some countries with
unstable political structures, the military is able to make
and unmake rulers. What is interesting about the
third century is that they're able to do it far from Rome. Some of these armies are
in North Africa. Some of them are
on the frontier fighting the Persians. Rome is becoming less and less
relevant as the dominant city of the Empire. And I mentioned that now,
because we'll see on Wednesday the result of this is will be
the establishment of another capital, a second capital in
the East, in what would be called Constantinople,
modern Istanbul. Rome is fortified for
the first time. There is a wall that you can
still see in many parts of Rome, built by the Emperor
Aurelian in 271. And this is a significant thing,
because until 271 for centuries, Rome had not been
walled, because it was not threatened. And fortification in 271 starts
to indicate things to come, or at least things that
we know are to come. Namely, barbarian invasions,
just as the marginalization of Rome begins at this time. Rome in the third century is
ruled, if one can call it that, by a succession
of generals. Not members of an upper class
elite, but men who have come from the provinces. Men who are not particularly
well-educated, who would have trouble recognizing a tag from
Horace, there being no internet just to look
these quotes up. They hold the traditional
Roman elite in contempt. The Senate of Rome is the
embodiment of that elite. The Roman Senate is a collection
of extremely wealthy people, from good
families, extensive property, and very, very fine education. The people leading in the third
century now are generals raised by their troops. One of the reasons that the
troops both raised up generals, and then killed them,
was that they tended to get a kind of reward from
the new Emperor-- a thing called a donative. A donative is money
that you get when there's a new Emperor. A bad idea from the point of
view of the Emperors, because it encourages double-dipping,
or triple-dipping. OK, now we've gotten our money
from this guy, let's kill him and get money from
another guy. I don't think that's too cynical
to say that that is some of what is going on. Now of all the crises of the
third century, this is the one that leaves the most
visible impression. There's absolutely no doubt that
there are all of these different Emperors, and
that the top of the government is unstable. The question is how much does
that carry over into the lives of ordinary people? One measure of the effectiveness
of a civilization is that is
survives, and even people don't comment very much on
political instability. In a way, we are testing
that now. For many people, the fact that
the government is polarized doesn't really matter, in terms
of their everyday life. How long can that go on? That's partly because all sorts
of institutions are functioning perfectly fine. Here we are. We are meeting. There's no problem of the supply
of water suddenly, or scarce provisioning, or
barbarians massed outside, and we have to sort of protect
against during our class. It hasn't come to that. Yet. But if you look at the lives
of ordinary people in the third century, they are not
saying not another Emperor, I can't take it anymore. The philosopher Plotinus, for
example, one of the great intellectual figures
of this time. Now it's true, he has a very
otherworldly way of thinking about things. He is a follower of Plato, he's
the leading so-called neo-Platonist philosopher,
flourishes during the third century, travels a bit. But we never hear of any
difficulty, any kind of problems raised by these
unstable conditions. The one that might have affected
more people than the instability is inflation. Roman coinage was silver and
bronze, and based on ratios of these metals to gold. The ultimate standard of value
was gold, but bronze and silver had attributed values
in relation to gold. The need to reward the army with
those donatives, and the dislocations of the invasions
led to tremendous government expenditures. And this was a society that did
not have debt financing. There are no bonds. There are no ways of the
government anticipating future revenues and borrowing
money against them. That is actually an invention
of the Middle Ages. This is an example of something
that the Romans didn't have that Medieval cities
in Italy pioneered, debt financing. I don't have to tell
you what that is. And it's a great advantage,
up to a point. Great advantage, because it
gives you leverage, allows you to do things now. So how does a government deal
with problems like this if it can't borrow money? It does what is called
debasing the coinage. To debase, that is degrade,
the coinage means that you just don't put in as much silver
or bronze, let alone gold, and try to get
people to accept it for its value anyway. So up until the 1970s, the
American currency was based on gold, and dollar bills were
called silver certificates. They said that you could hand
this bill in for a dollar's worth of silver. It was, technically speaking,
not currency. It was merely a representative
of currency, which you could trade in. And before that, of course,
the coins were metal. Dollars were both silver and
paper, with the silver one being, in some sense,
the more real. It is in the nature of modern
government financing that, at some point, the government
could just say forget about it. And even long before the
1970s, of course the government didn't have enough
silver for everyone to trade them in, just as it doesn't have
enough gold in Fort Knox to float the entire
world's currency. It has a lot. And that's important that there
be some real kind of value, or bullion, or bottom
line kind of gold bars. But the fact that it's
not enough is not intrinsically a problem. But here, so let's say the
government receives, in the form of taxes and stuff,
a thousand gold units. And it issues two thousand
units using that gold. The coins say they're worth a
unit, but they're actually, in terms of precious metal
value, worth a half. So it pays its expenses
that way. It pays the army. It gets people to accept
this money. But when most people go to buy
stuff, they are going to find that the stuff is 50% more
expensive, because their coins are not actually very good. The governments tend to do this
gradually, hoping the people don't notice in the first
place, or that if the inflation is say, 10%,
it's not so bad. But once having embarked on the
debasement of the coinage, this tends to get out of control
because of the famous Gresham's law-- an 18th
century economist-- that bad money drives
out good. If I have good sestertia, or
Roman currency, with the full measure of silver that they say
they have, one full unit, and I've got other coins that
say one full unit, but only have half, I'm going to try to
get rid of the bad ones and hoard the good ones. And only spend the good ones
if I absolutely have to, or demand a premium on them. So therefore, there are all
these crappy coins circulating like mad, and the good ones
retreat into peoples' wealth-- they don't really have
mattresses then-- but into their store boxes, or under
their beds, creating in itself more and more inflation. So you have a fierce
inflation. Prices go up. People don't know the
value of things. They start bartering. And the Roman economy is very,
very adversely affected, as hyperinflation tends to. And a final problem is the
ruin of the local elite, partly because of this economic
chaos, but partly from deeper causes. The importance of this is
something that I alluded to last time, and that is that the
Empire could not be held together, really, by the
government, however big the government was. It required the cooperation of
wealthy people with ties to their native city. It was these people who
sponsored games, civic improvements, maintained the
temples, and kept a kind of local order. The third century crisis
undermines this elite. This elite is undermined by the
militarization of society. They are, to some extent,
ruined by taxation and increased taxation. They're just powerful enough
to be well-off, but not powerful enough to
evade taxation. But they also tend to be
undermined by an Empire that's more cosmopolitan, where local
elites don't matter as much. Where, for example, military
people who move around a lot, are more important. And I emphasize this, not only
because of these elites themselves and their role in
holding the Empire together, but we're going to talk about
this when we talk about Christianity. Because when the local
elites are ruined, so is local religion. And local religion
means polytheism. If I am of a grand family of,
let's say the city of Sardis in Asia Minor, in modern Turkey,
and I feel that my ancestors have always been
involved in the worship of the goddess Cybele and I am a
votary, or an officer, or like a member of the governing board
of the club, or society that runs the cult of Cybele,
I'm going to feel very loyal to that local deity. But if I come from North Africa,
and I'm in Sardis because that's where my army
is, I'm not going to don't care about some local. No more than you might care
about a club that's important at Yale, if you went to the
University of Illinois. No more important than you might
feel about pizza in New Haven, if you came from
somewhere else and didn't like pizza. It's just like this local cult,
and you don't understand it, and you don't care. So the kind of things you will
care about, we'll see, religiously. But they will tend to be
religions that cross borders, like Christianity. Religions that are not
identified with one place and one god, in the sense of local
god, local temple, my people. So into this mess Diocletian--
because Diocletian defeats his predecessor, Carinus
in battle in 284. Diocletian is a general. In 284, it would have seemed
like more of the same. But Diocletian rules until
305 and he abdicates. He passes the power
to someone else. He is, however, very typical
of the military class of the Empire. He came from nowhere,
socially. He was the son of an ex-slave
from Dalmatia, modern coastal Croatia. You can still see his palace in
the Croatian city of Split on the Adriatic. His retirement palace,
actually. Under his severe guidance,
the Empire was reformed. And the way it was reformed was
that it was, in effect, militarized. Diocletian was not a great
general, but he was a brilliant manager. And he was a brilliant
bureaucratic organizer. I used the term bureaucracy,
not to mean inefficient, useless administration,
but administration. Administration officers of the
state, who are capable of doing their jobs, or maybe not
capable of doing their jobs. But who are nevertheless-- I'm not making a value judgment
with the term bureaucracy-- I simply mean the proliferation
of government and government offices. Diocletian is responsible for
the militarization of society. That is, building society around
the army in order to protect it. And he is responsible for
a more efficient, and ultimately, burdensome
form of taxation. The two are enlinked because, as
we know, you have to pay to have a large and effective
military. Diocletian did not set out
to be a revolutionary. His aims were conservative. He wanted to save, preserve,
restore, the Roman Empire of the pre-235 era. His methods were radical. He was willing to undertake
radical measures. And the debate among
historians, now somewhat muted. Many historians at one time
felt that he had basically destroyed the Empire. By making it so bureaucratic,
so militarized, so heavy-handed, in terms of
government, it no longer was the Roman Empire. It was something else. Now the reason this is no longer
exactly considered to be a big problem, or a big
controversy, you'll see when we come to read Wickham. The Empire has an impress
on society. There is what he calls the
Burden of Empire, but it is, at the same time, not a
totalitarian empire that controls everything. Society has an identity that's
different from the government. So he has three goals. One, solving this problem of
the imperial succession. Two, stabilizing the economy. Three, protecting
the frontiers. Of these three, he's actually
only really successful in the third, protecting
the frontiers. He devises a system, that we're
going to talk about in a moment, of succession, but
it does not really outlast him very long. The economy does get fixed but,
not exactly because of his policies. What he's really successful
at, and what changes most dramatically, is what
rulership means. That includes the figure of the
Emperor, who becomes more sacred and more powerful, in
terms of imagery, as well as administration. Changes in the administration,
of taxes in particular, and then that goal of his to change
and grow the military. The size of the army grew,
probably doubled. Maybe, just as a ballpark
figure, from 200,000 troops to 400,000 troops. This is a major, major
increase that had to be paid for. And it had to be paid for
by taxation, and from a population not particularly
eager to volunteer to pay more. Ultimately, it looks as if
Diocletian didn't so much increase taxation, as increase
the efficiency of its collection. In order to increase the
efficiency of his collection, he had to increase the
bureaucracy charged with monitoring the taxes. And that means first making an inventory of taxable resources. There is no income tax in this
society because it's an economy based more on land
than on salaries. An income tax is easy because
you can keep records of what people are earning. The government, to this day,
finds it much easier to take a portion of your wages, because
it knows from your company what you're being paid. If you're being paid in some
other form, like you're a waiter, and a lot of your
money is in tips, that's harder for the government. If your wealth is in property,
it's hard to put a value on that. You own estates. You have people who are free
tenants, who rent land from you, and pay you in money,
or produce, or labor. You have some slaves. You have a water mill. How do you pay taxes on
all of this stuff. The opportunities for
evasion are greater. So the first bureaucratic tasks
was just to have a lot of people could value things,
who could come into a territory and say OK, this farm
is worth so much, and it has these many people. They develop a system to
evaluate productive units of things like land, and
population, and to tax them according to a formula. So I have a lot of land, but
it's not very good land. I don't have a lot of people
making a living off it. I will be taxed at a lower rate
than someone was maybe half that land, but twice the
people, better soil, more clearance of forest, whatever
the reason. It changes. So every 15 years, the
government changes its estimation. A second means, once you have
this taxation system in place, of bringing the Empire together
and dominating it more, is to have the army really
have first call on the resources of the state. We now start to have a
state supply system for the army alone. This allows the state to
avoid dealing with that debased currency. So for example, the state just
goes in and takes wheat and gives it to the army, without
taking money, buying wheat, giving that to the army. Diocletian binds the Empire
together, also very effectively, by a
postal system. Post in this case meaning a
system of riders, horses, communications, that allows the
Emperor to go faster than anyone else, to have news
quicker than anyone else, to send orders quicker
than anyone else. And also, more punishment for
things like tax evasion. It's not just that people get
killed for not paying their taxes, or imprisoned, or
tortured, but that groups are responsible. Not only that if I don't pay my
taxes, I get punished, but if you and I live in the same
village, and you don't pay your taxes, I get punished. Or at the very least, taxed for
the part that you evaded. But the most important change
in government is the establishment of what's
called the Tetrarchy. The Tetrarchy is the
rule of four. Four rulers Diocletian divides
the Empire, first in two-- East, West. A very significant
move that will have consequences for the
next 1,200 years. He then appoints a co-Emporer to
rule in the West, while he rules in the East. And they each
appoint a helper, number three and number four. The two Emperors are called
Augusti, Emperors, and the two helpers are Caesars. So they're subordinate to their
respective Augusti, and they're supposed to help them. Why this system? This is really to overcome
the problems of size, communication, administration. It's a statement that the
Empire is too big for one man to rule. But the chief Emperors
are also exalted now. There's no longer
a pretense that they're just first citizens. or princes. They are clothed in purple. They don't move a lot
in public audiences. We're familiar with this kind
of dichotomy between the political figure as distant
authority, versus the political figure at least
pretending to be just like you and me. We're in the era
of the latter. The Diocletianic period ushers
in a period when the Emperor is distant, glimpsed, product
of ceremonies, wearing a lot of very funny-looking,
but fancy clothes. He doesn't appear
a lot in public. He's a god. You don't go up to him and
shake hands, or say hi. You throw yourself at his feet,
and don't look at him until he tells you to. So the tetrarchy, great idea,
it really doesn't work. Because, first of all,
the Emperors don't necessarily cooperate. The Caesars don't necessarily
cooperate with the Emperors. And so in 285 Diocletian
nominates a Caesar, and then makes him, in 286,
a co-Augustus. And this man is named
Maximian. In 293, Diocletian and Maximian
appoint two Caesars. I think I'm not going to burden
you with the personnel. I will hand out something on
Wednesday that gives you some of this information. Diocletian and Maximian appoint
Galerius in the East and Constantius in the Western--
you don't have to remember who these are-- and each of them marries
a daughter of their respective Augusti. This looks like a
great system. In 305, Diocletian and Maximian
abdicate and then two people become Augusti. The two Caesars rise up to be
Augusti and they appoint their own new Caesars. It breaks down beginning
in 306. One of the sons of one of
these Augusti is not appointed, and he's mad,
and he revolts. And then the Augusti
don't get along. Out of this chaos between 306
and 312 emerges one Emperor. And that is Constantine. And we'll be talking about
Constantine on Wednesday. So the Tetrarchy fails. Diocletian's second big
initiative was over this question of the economy, and
ways of combating inflation. Diocletian issued a so-called
edict on prices. The edict on prices
attempted to set a fixed price for goods. And if you sold them for more
than that, you were to be severely punished. This is the kind of classic
example of the state trying to combat inflation by
dictating prices. Most of you are not familiar
with inflation, because we have lived in an era of
very low interest and fairly stable prices. But if you think of those
commodities whose inflation you are familiar with, like
petroleum, it is very dislocating. It starts to create panics, and
the panics then feed into the inflation. Just as, if people keep on
getting gas because they think that it's going to go up in
price, then there's a greater demand for gasoline, and it
goes up further in price. Eventually, if the thing is
really just speculative, it deflates again. And that's what's happened
with products that we're familiar with in recent times. But there is also a kind of
structural, longer-term inflation such as America
experienced, for example, in the '70s. And in theory, if you have
resource crises and things that are becoming scarcer, then
you ought to have more and more experience
with inflation. The government in the 1970s in
the United States tried also to have an edict on prices. Under President Ford, there was
a kind of administration of maximum prices. The problem with this is that
it creates a temptation for black markets, creates a version
of what we were just talking about with Gresham's
law of coinage. If you say that tomatoes can
only be sold for a dollar a pound, then those tomatoes
that are being sold for a dollar a pound in a climate of
severe inflation will be terrible, will be rotten. If you want to pay $2.00 a pound
in secret, we have some nice tomatoes for you. And if you want to pay $5.00 a
pound, we have some really nice, locally-grown
tomatoes for you. All of which may be illegal, but
the legal market is empty. And this is what happened
in response to the edict of prices. This doesn't mean that the
government cannot-- I mean it still remains
debatable, obviously, the degree to which government
can or cannot intervene in such things-- but certainly, in the case of
the Roman Empire, this failed. What did bring back a measure
of economic stability is the reform of the taxation. The fact that the state simply
started getting in more resources, that less was being
withheld by private people, and so the state could
actually pay for its administrative and
military costs. So Diocletian succeeded in
abdicating peacefully, spent his retirement in Split in his
palace, and lived to see the breakdown, or the partial
breakdown of the Tetrarchy. And in certain respects, his
policies clearly failed. The edict on prices had to be
abandoned, the Tetrarchy did not work, and Diocletian failed
in trying to suppress Christianity. We'll talk about this some more,
but Diocletian, in the late part of his reign, a couple
animals were split open to see what the future
would be. Right? Isn't that what we all do if you
want to figure out what's going to happen? You slaughter an animal and
check out its liver. Maybe its kidneys
and spleen, too. But the liver is really what
you want to look at. And I don't exactly know what
the animal was, what the organs were, and why they didn't
splay out right, but the liver told Diocletian
that the Christians were responsible for this, and that
he'd better go after them. So there is this big persecution
of Christians in the first part of the
fourth century. And he certainly didn't
succeed in that. Not only did the Christians
not crumble, but of course Diocletian's most effective
successor, six years after he abdicated, would convert
to Christianity. But Diocletian is extremely
important, and in many respects, extremely
successful. He did more than prop up
a tottering Empire. He did more than just transform
a tottering Empire into a kind of tottering
tyranny. He saved the Roman Empire. He saved the Roman Empire
for 100 years. When you take a course like this
that goes for 700, 800 years, you start to hurl
centuries around and get confused among them. But any polity that exists
for 100 years is fairly impressive. Or a polity that looks like it's
about to collapse, and then is restored
for 100 years. The Roman Empire, conventionally
speaking, is thought to have collapsed
in the West in the late fifth century. In the East however, arguably,
Diocletian's reforms last for more on the order
of 1,200 years. The Eastern Empire, the
Byzantine Empire would fall in 1453. And to its last day, it was
modeled on Diocletianic administrative and
military forms. People at the time clearly
thought that they'd been saved from disaster. If you look at fourth century
artifacts, things like mosaics on the floors of dining rooms,
people often put mottos there. And their mottos are things
like "Joyful times everywhere." or "A world
restored." The fourth century is interpretable as an era of
increasing gloom, because we know that in the fifth century
things are going to collapse. But people in the fourth century
are not saying to each other, I'm so glad I'm alive in
the fourth century, because I don't want to see what's going
to happen in the fifth. They are just happy that the
barbarians are back across the Danube and the Rhine, the
Persians are more or less controlled along the frontier. Yes, taxes are high. Yes, the elite is some sort of
riff-raff, and not as well educated, and they're
military people. But basically, things are
working, prosperity is restored to the people who had
been prosperous before, the local elites have declined,
but it's not so visible as it had been. But there are some changes. Changes that we can, with the
proverbial benefit of hindsight, see. Changes in the center
of gravity. The dominant places are
now places that are military bases. They are great cities, with
all the amenities of Rome. That is, stadiums, gateways. One of the best-preserved
of these to this day is Trier in Germany. Trier, on the Moselle behind
[correction: west of] the Rhine, has a wonderful
collection of Roman ruins. A gateway, the Porta Nigra, a
theater, a sports arena, a basilica, a law court turned
into a church. The reason trier was great was
because of the frontier. It was one of the most important
cities in the Empire because of the military, because
of its strategic importance. And there are other cities
that are like. Milan, for example, becomes
more important than Rome. Because Milan is further north,
it's a good place to get to the Danube and to the
Rhine quickly, whereas Rome is buried in the Mediterranean. So we're in a new world. We'll discuss more of the
new world on Wednesday. And we will see that
Constantine, in some cases, completely revolutionizes
things. And in other cases, continues
Diocletian's work.
