I think you got your chronology backwards.
By the time Dio took over, the empire had already been a tyranny guaranteeing the endless revolt of its military leadership, for over a century.
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
By the time Dio took over, the empire had already been a tyranny guaranteeing the endless revolt of its military leadership, for over a century.
Oh boy, fall of the Roman empire and feudalism. Next we'll be saying the dark ages were a thing and that Constantine was a cynical murderer who wasn't even a Christian until his deathbed.
i wouldn't even say it was a tyranny. it was a weird quasi-failed state.
what diocletian did was reform the "constitution" of the roman empire, principate into dominate and all...
Wasn't it Aurelian who did away with the "first among equals" pretense?
1. @soda7777777 Constantine was a cynical murderer, dude like murdered his own family. As I mentioned before I'm ranking these just on leadership ability, not on personal character, cause most of the "best" emperors were monsters.
2. @Taylor No, the principate turned in the dominate was really done under diocletian. Basically he put the whole empire back on a sound administrative footing by changing the forumla of being emperor.
3. @Sabotage13 You're correct. The principate died during the crsis of the 3rd centuy under the barracks emperor. Diocletian actually put a new form of government and claim to legitmacy by the empire that restore governance.
2. @Taylor No, the principate turned in the dominate was really done under diocletian. Basically he put the whole empire back on a sound administrative footing by changing the forumla of being emperor.
3. @Sabotage13 You're correct. The principate died during the crsis of the 3rd centuy under the barracks emperor. Diocletian actually put a new form of government and claim to legitmacy by the empire that restore governance.
Plenty of his predecessors had done away with that already. Basically after the Antonines the Senate had effectively become irrelevant as a political factor in deciding imperial policy. From Commodus' death until after Constantine, that question was decided exclusively by the Legions.
Last edited:
With Caligula it was already "first among equals" only if you talked about a loony bin. Heck, didn't Augustus already send a soldier to the senate who let them knew that what they wouldn't give him, his sword would take or something like that?
Now I am not so sure about the importance of differentiating between the Principate and the Dominate.
Now I am not so sure about the importance of differentiating between the Principate and the Dominate.
There were huge and significant differences between the principate and dominate.
1. The empeor's public image during the principate, even though it was far from the truth, was one of "first citizen" during the principate, where he was a person and fairly accessible (see how a lot of a emperors went around resolving judicial disputes and talking to subjects). The fact that the senate was long-since irrelevant power-wise doesn't make this framing less important as a basis ofr legitimacy.
Whereas under the dominate, a lot of ceremonial and formal barriers to interacting with the Emperor were thrown up, to try and distance the emperor from people, emphasize the pseudo-divine nature of the emperor, and generally re-arrange the legitimacy with a more proto-diving-right sort of notion, rather than ostensible first citizenship.
2. Seconly, the principate ruled in a substantially different manner than the dominate. The principate had an astonishingly small bureacracy for how large the empire was, basically only a bare-handful of people running the emperor's household and not much else, with local elites handling a lot of matters in provincial cities.
The dominate put a much, much more centralized and larger bureacracy, with many, many civil servants, moreso in the east than the west (this is partially why the east kept on chugging while the west collapsed, among 180,000 other reasons) but overall the empire under the dominate relied much less on local elites for administration and was far more centralized. This meant the economy of the late empire was way more integerated, the armies were larger, and the government had more control over affairs throughout the empire, compared with the comparatively (comparatively, mind you) light touch and absolutely tiny ruling bureacrac of the principate.
The problem is that the comparison works if you are comparing say, Augustus to Diocletian, but it wasn't as if Augustus' way of doing things had remained in place for all the intervening time. While Diocletian's reforms were significant, Aurelian, say, probably ruled more like Diocletian than Augustus.
It was definitely a process, not a sharp divide, but you can definitely say there were two different modes of governance in the roman empire, with the crisis of the 3rd century being a rough demarcation, or thereabouts.
Even during the Principate, the emperors' public image in the province while playing up their supposed divinity in the provinces, complete with an imperial cult to go along. Whereas one of the reasons why Diocletian avoided residing in Rome (apart from the obvious military ones) was that the Senate treated him as little more than a jumped-up general rather than the divine figure that the dominus styled himself as. So there was always a pretty stark contrast between how the emperors presented themselves to the Roman citizens, and how they allowed their image to be propagandized in the provinces.
The imperial cult was also established in Rome itself from day one of the Principate. For a visual proof, you can still visit in the Roman Forum the remains of the Temple of the Deified Vespasian and the Temple of the Deified Antonine and Faustina. To the southeast of the Palatine Hill stood the Temple of the Deified Claudius and in the Campus Martius stood the Temple of the Deified Hadrian. Exactly as it would have happened in provincial cities. The only particularity was that in some areas of the East the ruling augustus was venerated as a deity while still alive (in Egypt, for example), while in the West the emperors were only deified after passing away.
Yes, it was limited to emperors who had died and had been then deified by the Senate (this body kept the prerogative of deifying deceased emperors until the reign of Constantine the Great), except in some parts of the eastern provinces, where already Augustus allowed the provincials to venerate him as a god while still alive. And this was still the way things worked under the barracks emperors like Aurelian and under the Tetrarchy. Diocletian was not officially venerated as a god while still alive, he merely adopted a series of new titles that reinforced the divine "aura" that the emperors had projected to their "subjects" since Augustus’ lifetime (the very term augustus was initially used only in relation to the divine). As for Diocletian’s association with Jupiter (and Maximian’s with Hercules) it also had clear precedents; Augustus had associated himself to Apollo and Venus, Commodus to Hercules, etc.
Last edited:
Exactly, the divinity of the emperor was changed and pushed harder during the Dominate especially the tetrarchy. The imperial cult under Augustus was much more linked to the senate as a legitimating force.
What exactly did it mean to be a 'god' in the Roman imagination? The people in the east praying to the living emperor as a god believed they would receive his divine favour by doing so?
In the classical world, gods were not omnipotent. And they were not equals among themselves. In classical imagination, the living beings were divided into three groups:
- Animals, who were mortal and could not speak.
- Humans, who were mortal and could speak.
- Gods, who were immortal and could speak.
Also, in the classical pantheon, there were already deified humans, like Hercules or the divine twins Castor and Pollux. So, the idea that somebody born human could become a god was not as outrageous as it could seem to the believer of an Abrahamic religion. Alexander the Great was undisputedly believed to be a god (in Egypt, already during his lifetime) across the East, and nobody disputed it; after all he'd achieved such feats in his short reign that even Hercules' tasks paled in comparison. In Abrahamic religions, God is an entity which is so transcendent and so removed from tangible reality (we have grown up used to the notion of an Abrahamic God as being the "normal" way to understand the divine) that it's difficult for us to understand how different the concept of classical "pagan" gods was from our own understanding.
Last edited:
The Emperor was viewed as divine and praying to him could indeed win his divine favour. He was seen in a way somewhat analogous to saints or Mary in traditional Catholicism - as a divine human with the ability to directly commune with the gods and intercede on a petitioner's behalf. Viewing an emperor as a god is also not as odd as it sounds to the modern person. From the perspective of an Egyptian peasant the Emperor was a distant figure, he would likely never see the Emperor, who none the less had the ability to transform the peasant's life for better or for worse. Functionally, he had a level of power over the peasant that was indistinguishable from the gods.
Constantine the Great 10
Trajan 9
Hadrian 8
Aurelian 7
Diocletian 6
Augustus 5
Claudius 4
Marcus Aurelius 3
Septimus Severus 2
Constantine III 1
Tiberius -1
Valerian -2
Pupienus -3
Balbinus -4
Nero -5
Caracalla -6
Petronius Maximus -7
Gratian -8
Elagabalius -9
Caligula -10
Trajan 9
Hadrian 8
Aurelian 7
Diocletian 6
Augustus 5
Claudius 4
Marcus Aurelius 3
Septimus Severus 2
Constantine III 1
Tiberius -1
Valerian -2
Pupienus -3
Balbinus -4
Nero -5
Caracalla -6
Petronius Maximus -7
Gratian -8
Elagabalius -9
Caligula -10