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in the middle of the Syrian Desert between the Orontes and the Euphrates, a favoured status with Rome. They were considered to be the most powerful ally the armies had in the east and they had acted as a buffer against the Persians.
Even they had rebelled against Rome and Palmyra’s warrior queen Zenobia and her family actually had created their own ‘empire’ by declaring independence and seizing Egypt and its riches as their own. Aurelian swiftly and brutally dealt with the uprising and with Zenobia, who was captured and ignominiously dragged off the Rome, some said in golden chains. Alas that left the empire’s eastern flank directly exposed to the rapacious appetites of Persia again and upon Diocletian’s accession it was once more a major problem he had to try to alleviate. There were other rebellions too. Peoples from beyond the Rhine in the west to the Lower Danube on the borders of Dacia and from the Nile Valley in the south to Pontus, north of Asia Minor, were becoming restive, eager to rid themselves of what they considered the dead hand of Roman rule, not to mention wanting to be relieved of the taxes that they were all paying to Rome. You could fully understand their point of view. Tax collectors were forcibly levying dues on people which were ostensibly to pay for the Roman army to protect them, when in point of fact the legions were there to keep them in check in the first place. It must all have been very provoking.
THE JOURNEY
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
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part took his legions and set off to quell rebellions along the Rhine whilst Diocletian, with only the east to worry about, turned his attention again to the ever present problems of the eastern frontier in Mesopotamia and the preying ambitions of the egregious Persians again.
His military grasp of the problems of ruling such a disparate group of people was without doubt his strong point. Rome had endured the indignity of their so-styled favoured ally, Palmyra, turning coat on the arrangement, declaring independence from Rome and taking control of all the trade routes which crossed the Syrian Desert from the Euphrates River to the Great Sea. Although Aurelian had quashed that ambition and left Palmyra virtually paralyzed, Diocletian could see the sense in re-establishing good relations with Palmyra’s desert city dwellers. They were Arabs basically and certainly it seems they had no love of the Persians and their duplicitous subterfuge, so it was not difficult to bring them back under a Roman banner of friendship again.
Palmyra was once described to me as a great city. It was a thriving caravanserai on the road across the desert, but it was also a classical wonder, with long colonnaded streets, theatres and temples. It sat right in the middle of a never-ending, parched plain, but it was built around a large perennial spring surrounded by palm groves. It apparently looked very striking, as you came upon it with your caravan after several days in
THE JOURNEY
the aridity and bleakness of the trade route up from Babylonia. Quite suddenly you reached Palmyra’s green oasis surrounded by the ultra-sophistication of an eastern Roman metropolis. I’ve heard people say it’s an incredible experience. The people are in no way Romans and nor are they even Greeks. They have eccentric traditions and worship a variety of strange gods. Their chief one is called “Bel” for instance.
Diocletian reopened negotiations with them and re-established political ties with the population there, but to make sure there was no back-sliding or any return to secessionist ambitions, he built a large military camp right on the edge of the city so that the Palmyrenes might feel safe on the one hand and on the other to ensured that there was an army presence embedded among the population so that they couldn’t break away again even if they wanted to. It was a clever ploy. The military movements in and around Palmyra also had the effect of intimidating the Persians from trying any under-hand anti-Roman negotiations with the population there.
So, that was where we were by the time I reached my early thirties; the empire had re-stabilized. Rome was in control, though in two halves. Actually, shortly after that Diocletian went one stage further in his reorganisation. He appointed two sub-emperors as understudies to his diarchy, two figures to whom he gave the title “Caesar.” In the west, the emperor Maximian was understudied by the Caesar Constantius
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Chlorus, Constantius the Pale, whilst in the east, he appointed Galerius as his own Caesar. The result was the tetrarchy, the rule by four. I would have thought this would have been disastrous for the future of the empire, ambition being what it was, but strangely it worked, for a few years anyway.
There was an innate logic in his division. I suppose you could say the western half of the Roman Empire was more Latin in its thinking and the eastern half, where we lived, was more Greek. Patara had always been a Greek city really, although deep down we thought of ourselves as Lycians. The Greek way of life had spread all over the east after Alexander had destroyed Cyrus’ and Darius’ old Persian empire some six hundred years ago and I imagine you could consider us the remnant of that empire and by now we were Greek in every aspect of our way of life and we were very proud of it too.
And it was into that Greek half of the Roman Empire that a new religion had appeared, one which believed in one God and in the son of God, Jesus. It was a religion based on kindness and comradeship, on love and togetherness and especially on forgiveness and salvation. It was called Christianity and although Diocletian was to try desperately to destroy it and its adherents, in the end it was to change our established world mightily and for ever and no-one was more affected by that change than me.
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