THE WIFE AND DAUGHTER OF DIOCLETIAN  
ALTHOUGH we have already indicated the fate of Aurelian, we have not yet referred to the woman who shared his Imperial title and his great renown. Her personality is, in fact, entirely unknown; even her name is preserved for us only on the coinage. We may fairly conjecture that she disliked the plebeian ways of her husband, and discharged the duties of a consort without enthusiasm. Daughter of a wealthy and prominent noble, Ulpius Crinitus, she had conferred a useful distinction on the ambitious peasant at a time when he was making his way in the Imperial service, and it is conjectured, on somewhat slender grounds, that she accompanied him on his campaigns. But his life at the palace was short and inglorious. He disliked its pomp and luxury, and found his chief delight in pitting his comedians against each other in eating-contests. He pampered the common citizens by increasing their free ration of bread, and adding pork to it. When he went on to meditate a free distribution of wine, one of his ministers sarcastically suggested that he might add geese and chickens. When the Empress, Ulpia Severina, thought it fitting that she should wear silk mantles, her husband forbade her to indulge in that rare and costly product of a precarious commerce with China.
 
Aurelian was, in fact, essentially a soldier. His manner, and even the reforms which he endeavoured to make, caused grave dissatisfaction at Rome, and a conspiracy251 against him was discovered within a few months of the magnificent triumph he had enjoyed. He crushed it with a fierceness that almost obliterated the memory of his great services, and then returned to Asia to meet the Persians. On his march he was assassinated, in the beginning of the year 275, and the great promise of his reign was unfulfilled. Ulpia Severina seems to have died before him, as the historian speaks only of a daughter who survived him.
Once more we pass swiftly over a number of turbulent years until we come to an Empress of whom we have a comparatively ample knowledge. It is generally admitted, though not entirely beyond doubt, that the throne remained vacant for the greater part of the year 275. The “Historia Augusta,” at least, which was written in the next generation, describes a situation in remarkable contrast to the earlier haste in appointing Emperors. We are asked to believe that the Senate and the army spent many months in a most edifying encounter, each endeavouring to induce the other to choose a ruler. At length the Senators chose one of their number, the aged and upright Tacitus, who set out to take command of the troops in Asia. Within a few weeks, worn by the unwonted fatigue and pained by the unruly behaviour of the soldiers, he passed away. Some of the historians declare that he died of actual violence. There is no trace of an Empress. We read that Tacitus, like Aurelian, forbade his wife to wear sumptuous clothing, but this was probably in earlier days. The absence of coins leads us to think that she had died.
He was succeeded by a young and vigorous officer, of peasant extraction, named Probus, under whom the Empire recovered much of its strength. For six years he laboured successfully to restore the prestige of Rome, but his severity led at length to assassination. During a mutiny of the soldiers, in the year 282, “a thousand swords were plunged at once into the bosom of the unfortunate Probus,” as Gibbon too floridly expresses it.252 From the absence of coins we may almost gather that his wife had died before his accession. Carus, who succeeded him, was an aged general of sixty years. He died after a year of strenuous warfare, and left the Empire to his sons Carinus and Numerianus. The younger Emperor was dispatched to the East, and Carinus virtually reigned alone.
Even the experience of our own time has so frequently taught us to expect a mediocre or effeminate issue from a distinguished and virile stock that we do not wonder at this happening constantly in the history of Rome. We need not refer it to the mystery of heredity. The vigorous sire had developed and enhanced his strength in the laborious climb to the heights of his chosen world. The son, finding the paths to the summit smoothed, and an engaging luxury at his command without exertion, allows it to degenerate. The finest steel and the purest gold yield and crumble in a corroding atmosphere. We cannot, therefore, affect astonishment at the almost invariable failure of the Roman practice of eagerly welcoming a son to the place of his gifted father.
The reign of Carinus affords one of the worst illustrations of the evil. Indolent, insolent, and luxurious, he saw in his Imperial power an opulent ministry to his depraved tastes. He did indeed provide Rome with the most splendid entertainments. The amphitheatre rang once more with the coarse applause of the ninety thousand spectators of its bloody contests; the Circus was transformed into a forest, in which the strange or beautiful beasts of remote lands lived under the eyes of three hundred thousand Romans. But this indulgence of the people’s appetites was held to excuse an unbridled ministry to those of the prince. The whisper went once more through the fetid depths of Roman life that there were rich awards for the ingenious and industrious pandar to a sated voluptuary, and the palace exhibited again the loathsome spectacles that had long been expelled from it.
They have little interest for us, as although Carinus253 made and unmade nine Empresses in little over a year, they are lost in the riot of the time. One poor name, that of Magnia Urbica, has survived on a few coins. She is given by Serviez as the wife of Carus, because she is represented with two children on one of the coins. Cohen points out, however, that the group does not properly consist of a mother and two children, and he concludes that she was one of the nine wives of Carinus. In the number of his consorts Carinus surpassed the high record of Imperial license, and he was not less original in the grounds for his divorces. Sterility has often been pleaded by monarchs as a fit reason for repudiating their wives; it was reserved to Carinus to dismiss them the moment they gave proof of fertility. So the women of Rome succeeded each other rapidly in the dissolute palace, where the Emperor, surrounded by his courtesans, glittering down to his shoes with diamonds and emeralds, sat on rose-strewn couches to his costly banquets.
The new pestilence was blown out of the Imperial city by a storm from the East. The younger Emperor, Numerianus, was a gentle, cultured, and delicate youth. As he led the troops home from the East, he sheltered his eyes from the burning sun by keeping to his tent or his closed litter. At length his complete seclusion gave rise to suspicion, and the soldiers broke into his tent, only to find a mouldering body. The ambition of Aper, his father-in-law, who commanded the guards, fastened the guilt upon him, and a general assembly of the soldiers appointed one of their abler officers, Diocletian, to judge him. Diocletian, possibly with reason, preferred to execute rather than to try Aper, and he was at once saluted as Emperor by the troops. The son of two slaves, he had educated himself and pushed his way to the highest offices and commands; and he now composedly donned the purple mantle which the soldiers offered him, and led the legions toward Rome. Carinus marched out against him, but was assassinated by an officer whose wife he had appropriated, and a new chapter opened in the254 annals of Rome. A strong man and judicious statesman had come to the throne, and he would occupy it for twenty years.
From our point of view it is disappointing that the wife of Diocletian does not come to our notice until his reign is nearly over. Her very name was disputed for ages; even now her personality is only faintly illumined by the adventures of her later years. Her daughter is a more commanding figure, and other Imperial ladies stand out in the chronicle of the times. Some of these, such as the mother and wife of Constantine, we reserve for the next chapter; and we may compress into a few lines the story of the twenty years’ reign of Diocletian.
A year after his accession, which took place in the year 285, Diocletian chose a colleague to share the control of the vast Empire. This friend and partner, Maximian, was the son of peasants, rough, ignorant, and unscrupulous, but an effective commander. He was entrusted with the care of the West, Diocletian passed to the East, and several years were profitably spent in restoring the crumbling frontiers. The task proved so formidable that, in 292, they chose two officers for the inferior dignity of “C?sars”—a title which implied that they would probably one day be Augusti, and should meantime wear the purple, but have no power to make laws or control finance. Of the two, Galerius again was a child of the soil, while Constantius was the son of a provincial noble; and they were compelled to dismiss their humbler wives, and wed the daughters of the Emperors. Four courts were thus set up within the Empire, while Rome found itself coldly neglected, its palace deserted, and its Senate impotent.
To the court of Galerius we shall return presently, while we leave the affairs of Constantius and his wife to the next chapter. The court and the Empress of Maximian need not detain us. He chose Milan as his seat, and began to adorn the northern town with the marble edifices that befitted its new dignity. His wife was a very attractive Syrian woman, Galeria Valeria Eutropia. Her name has255 led some to conjecture that she was related to the father of Constantius, Eutropius, one of the chief nobles of Dardania, though the connexion is feeble. She seems, in any case, to have regarded her uncultivated husband with disdain, and sought more genial company. Her son Maxentius is said by some to have been the issue of a liaison with a compatriot, while others declare that he was a boy substituted for the daughter she bore, because Maximian desired a son. We may leave these disputable scandals and come to the court of Diocletian.
The son of a Roman slave had created a glittering court at Nicomedia. His palace, round which the city quickly grew in size and magnificence, was adorned and served with an Oriental pomp. The successive approaches to the chamber of the Emperor were guarded by splendid officials, and when the suppliant or ambassador penetrated at length to the inner apartment, he found the stately Diocletian in purple and gold robes, his brow encircled by a glistening diadem, and was compelled to prostrate himself before the divine majesty. It was not, however, the vanity or folly of a Caligula, but a calculated policy, that had prompted Diocletian to clothe himself with this Olympic dignity. Earlier Emperors, of the same mean extraction, had refused to put a barrier of royal ceremony between themselves and their subjects or soldiers, and had invariably fallen by the hand of the assassin. Diocletian was too shrewd, too much attached to life, and too sensible of his beneficent use of power, to incur the risk. He had restored Egypt to obedience, humiliated the Persians, and devoted an even greater ability to the reform of the administration. Co-operating with his vigorous colleague in the West, he had brought peace and prosperity back to the Empire.
In the settled years of his reign we begin again to recognize the various personalities of the court. The Empress herself is more or less involved in a piquant obscurity. Until the end of the seventeenth century her name was unknown, and a great deal of romantic legend was256 reproduced in regard to her. Cardinal Baronius found in “Acts of St. Susanna” that her name was St. Serena, a martyr for the Christian faith. Other “Acts” of the martyrs furnished a St. Eleuthera and a St. Alexandra as consorts of Diocletian. He seemed to have been an Imperial Bluebeard. But in 1679 the manuscript was found of an early Christian work, “On the Deaths of the Persecutors,” and the earlier writings were proved, in the words of the learned Franciscan, Father Pagi, to be fictitious and full of untruths. The many saintly martyrs gave way to an Empress Prisca, who broke down lamentably at the first test of her faith. It is very curious that we have no coins whatever of Prisca, though she must have lived through the whole reign of Diocletian. This, and the fact that she left him many years before his death, suggest either that she was not married to him at all or that he had little regard for her. She was, in any case, a woman of weak and retiring character, and is mentioned only in association with her daughter.
Valeria was a beautiful, attractive, and spirited young woman, with a good deal of the strength, and not a little of the ambition, of her father. She was married to Galerius, the C?sar whom Diocletian had chosen, and remained with him by the side of the Emperor. Galerius was, as I said, of peasant origin, and never laid aside the uncultivated roughness of his class. Diocletian had, by diligent education, erased the traces of his own lowly origin, but his peasant colleagues had gone straight from the soil to the camp, and the work of a soldier had not given them the least inclination to seek culture. The character of Galerius has been painted in the most lurid colours on account of his persecution of the Christians, but it is significant that both Valeria and Prisca clung to his court when Diocletian retired. His mother, Romula, and other rustic relatives were attracted to his court. There was, it is clear, a most incongruous group of personalities about the court of Diocletian, and in the nineteenth year of his reign they were shaken by a severe storm. The257 great and final struggle began between the old faith and the new, and Prisca and Valeria favoured the latter.
Christianity had not been persecuted for half a century, and had made great progress. The cult of the old gods was palpably insincere, and half-a-dozen Asiatic creeds were steadily supplanting it. On the streets of Nicomedia, as on the streets of Rome or any other large city, one might meet any day the white-robed shaven priests of Isis, the painted and effeminate ministers of Cybele, the Persian representatives of the popular cult of Mithra, and—until they were expelled by Diocletian—the black-garbed clergy of the Manich?ans and the Christians. The Christians were now advancing. There had been some slight and irregular repression of them from time to time since the days of............