The Roman World by Wacher John;

Author:Wacher, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1474892
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

CHAPTER 17

* * *

·GOVERNMENT ·

· AND · ADMINISTRATION·

· IN · THE · LATE · EMPIRE ·

· (TO · AD 476)

* * *

J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz

When Diocletian and Constantine rebuilt the structure of the Empire shattered by the events of the third century they were faced with many problems that had not existed during the Principate (Rostovtzeff, 1957; Cook, Adcock et al., 1939; Walser and Pekáry, 1962; Alföldy, 1979, 139–64). The Empire was now under more or less continuous attack, often at more than one frontier at a time. The needs of defence impelled the government to make much greater and inevitably more unpopular demands on the manpower and resources of the Empire than ever before. At the same time it had lost cohesion. The army, once the great romanizer, had become regionalized, and the soldiers' concern for their native province, and often their attachment to particular generals had become stronger than their loyalty to the Empire as a whole. The economic ties linking frontier areas with the central provinces had grown weaker as the provinces had become self-sufficient in many of the items that they had previously imported from Mediterranean areas. There was thus less need for traders and shippers. The need had been further reduced by the fact that armies and civil servants had come to be paid in produce, raised and distributed by compulsory transport duties (MacMullen, 1976, 173ff.; Hopkins, 1980, 106 and 123–5). As the economy had become more localized the Roman way of life had lost some of its appeal. Even under the most favourable conditions romanization ceased to advance; in the north-western provinces it went into retreat.

From the point of view of administration the most harmful aspect was the weakening of city organization in Britain and parts of Spain and Gaul as well as the Balkan provinces. By leaving most administrative tasks to city authorities the Empire had been able to manage with a very small staff of officials of its own. This would no longer be possible after the third century. Another damaging development was that the patriotic pride of the ruling and privileged Roman nation which had once held together the empire had been diluted out of existence with the conferment of citizenship on all free inhabitants of the empire by Caracalla (AD 212). More damaging still, privilege of citizenship had been progressively replaced by privilege of class, the division of the inhabitants of the empire into honestiores (soldiers, decurions, equestrians and senators) and humiliores (everybody else, including the peasants), with the inevitable long term result that those without privilege became completely alienated from the Empire (Garnsey, 1970; de Ste Croix, 1981, 474ff.).

The circumstances required a thorough reform of the administration. Diocletian, a very great emperor, seems to have grasped the scale of the problem quite early in his reign, and the reforms introduced by him and carried further in some important respects by Constantine, succeeded in giving the Empire a second lease of life. Diocletian saw that the Empire would henceforth

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