The Historians' History of the World 06 [The Early Roman Empire]

Meanwhile the officers at Chalcedon, taking into consideration the profligate and disgraceful conduct of the youthful cæsar, Carinus, at Rome, proclaimed Diocles, the commander of the imperial bodyguard, emperor on September 17th, 284.

This general, who was at that time thirty-nine years of age, was born in 245, at Doclea or Dioclea, near Scodra, in Dalmatia, of humble parents. He owed his promotion to his extraordinary ability and exceptional intellectual gifts. Though addicted, like all his comrades, to the superstition of the age, he was superior to them all in administrative capacity, as in penetration, discretion, and resolution. Having slain Aper before his tribunal—whether from motives purely superstitious or, as the pessimistic criticism of our day would have it, as an accomplice in his own designs, he took up the dynastic war against Carinus, under the name of Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus. It ended in favour of Diocletian, after a somewhat protracted struggle, by a battle on the lower Margus (Morava), in which, while the fortune of the day hung yet undecided, an officer whose wife had been seduced by the Roman débauché, struck Carinus down in the thick of the fray (summer of 285).b

FOOTNOTES

[47] Zonaras,e xii. He says the Alamanni were 300,000, the Romans only 10,000 strong.

[48] [Zosimus writes in the first half of the fifth century, A.D. It is interesting to observe that he thus looks back upon the time of Aurelian as an “age of felicity.” To some minds the past is always glorious.]

[49] [Zosimus d gives the following brief account of this emperor, with, it will be observed, a different version of the end of Tacitus: “Upon Aurelian’s death the empire fell into the hands of Tacitus, in whose time the Scythians crossed the Palus Mæotis, and made incursions through Pontus even into Cilicia, until he opposed them. Partly in person and partly by Florianus, prefect of the court, whom he left in commission for that purpose, this emperor completely routed and destroyed them. He himself was going into Europe, but was thus circumvented and killed. He had committed the government of Syria to his cousin Maximinus, who treated the nobility of that country with such austerity that he caused them both to hate and fear him. Their hatred became so excessive that at length, conspiring with the murderers of Aurelianus, they assaulted Maximinus; and having killed him, fell on and slew Tacitus also as he was upon his departure.”]

[50] [Zosimusd calmly tells the following tale, as to the manner in which Probus was enabled to defeat the Germans: “When the war began there, a grievous famine prevailed throughout the surrounding country; but a heavy shower of rain and corn fell together, so that in some places were great heaps of it made by its own descent. At this prodigy, all were so astonished that at first they dared not touch the corn to satisfy their hunger, but being at length forced to it by necessity, which expels all fear, they made bread of it, which not only allayed their hunger, but enabled them to gain the victory with great ease.” Zosimus, it will be recalled, was a pagan; but obviously the Christians had no monopoly of the belief in miracles, in the fifth century A.D.]

[51] This people inhabited the mountains between Upper Egypt and the Red Sea.