Such is a brief sketch of the ordeal through which the Roman world passed in the one hundred and five years from the death of Marcus Aurelius to the accession of Diocletion. Mere words can scarcely convey the agony through which the inhabitants of that world passed. There was murder, rape, and pillage. What the soldiers or the barbarians spared, the agents of the emperors took for taxes. The old bureaucracy of senators and knights was pretty well exterminated. In its place came a military hegemony of soldiers who had risen from the ranks. Both the army which maw included many barbarians, and the senate were equalized and, in consequence, barbarized. It was the members of the military who formed the new landed aristocracy. The middle-class and labor bad both become serfs of the state. Increasing taxation and paternalism meant, inevitably, regimentation.
Such was the situation when in 285 AD Diocletion took charge, He drove back the barbarians and reconstituted the empire. but it was anew type of Roman empire, one which was ruled by an Oriental despotism. No one could approach Diocletion without prostrating himself on the ground and kissing the hem of his garment. Furthermore, he appointed three other caesars and divided the empire prefectures. His own capital was not at Rome but at Nicomedia in Asia Minor. The army was reformed and enlarged; and was composed chiefly of Germans and Sarmations or else of the sons of veterans. A mobile force of infantry was supplemented by a powerful cavalry. For the foot-soldiers of the legions could no longer be trained in the old Roman way.
But there was no escape from the relentless regimentation which pervaded all aspects of life. For regimentation was the end-result of the abdication of political freedom and of the pursuit of materialism. The welfare state had become a despotism. This new and dreary type of empire still possessed sufficient power to hold the frontiers against the barbarians for another century.
In 324 AD Constantine the Great won the purple under the sign of the Cross. Hence came an edict of toleration for Christianity. But the despotism was tightened rather than eased; and it is an interesting note on the morals of the age that within three years of his championship of orthodox Christianity at the Council of Nicaea, Constantine put a nephew to death, drowned his wife in a bath, and murdered a son. Constantine put his capital in Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople. Thus Rome was now no longer the center of the empire.
Finally, in 395 Ad, the former Roman world was formally divided into an Empire of the East and an Empire of the West. The eastern empire survived until the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 AD. In the west, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Franks, and Huns burst over the frontiers and the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons planted themselves in Britain. In 410 AD Alaric and his Goths sacked Rome. Then, in 476 AD, the last of the Caesars, Romulus Augustulus, was dethroned. The Germanic kingdoms took the place of the Imperium Romanum.
