Maybe I should do this for all the historical fandoms..
I frequently draw out genealogies by hand so I can keep people straight! I keep telling myself I should look for software so 1) I don't have to strain my back (writing by hand is hard), 2) nobody has to read my handwriting!
Constantine married his aunt-by-marriage? (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)
Hey! Unrelated, does anyone know if the Catholic Church permits that these days? I was researching yesterday for my fanfic if you can marry your late husband's uncle. :P
Is this the second mistake?
Sorry for lack of clarity! The two mistakes are 1) mass persecution of Christians, which created a lot of bad PR (martyrs!) and backfired, 2) almost every single thing he did re the succession, which resulted in civil wars.
I'd forgotten but I'd heard of that before (though I didn't know any of the context of whom he was fighting).
I also learned about that so far back I don't even remember, and then had an "Aha!" moment when I started studying this period.
As Mike Duncan said in the "History of Rome" podcast, "hostage is such an ugly word".
Hee!
And as I stated in my write-up, almost every single thing one historian claims, another historian will contradict. William Leadbetter, author of Galerius and the Will of Diocletian, which I need to read cover-to-cover at some point, argues:
The Origo Constantini Imperatoris, generally an excellent and reliable source, notes that Constantine was "a hostage with Diocletian and Galerius" (obses apud Diocletianum et Galerium). The implication here is that Constantine was kept close to Diocletian, not because he was trusted (as Lactantius implies) but because he was not. That Constantine was a hostage at all, however, is highly implausible. Constantius had many more children who might be "brought up" at the courts of Diocletian and Galerius in order to ensure their father's continued loyalty, or at least, acquiescence. There is no suggestion in the sources that this was the case. Moreover, no equivalent arrangement existed for Maxentius, the son of Maximian.
Now, I could argue against both of those. One, if you assume the father cares about all his children, you only need one hostage. If you assume he treats his children as interchangeable and he has "spares", then, yeah, you need more than one. History shows that how parents react to children being held hostage can vary widely, from "Okay, I'll do anything!" to "I can always make more!" (Though some of the latter are probably apocryphal.) And if Diocletian trusts Maximian without a hostage, I argue that they may have had a special relationship that didn't apply to Constantius, come on. :P
What Leadbetter thinks is really going on:
As a vir militaris of some experience, and the son of a Caesar, he might lgoically have considered himself to be a candidate for the purple. Others did not, Diocletian amongst them...Constantine's position had its own clear explanation. He was a mature man, holding a senior rank. He had served with Diocletian and Galerius in Egypt, Mesopotamia and on the Danube, but was no mere officer cadet, climbing the ranks of the service. He was an imperial bastard, who might reasonably expect responsibility and command. Significantly, his active service was always in the immediate entourage of either Diocletian or Galerius. He never had an independent command: Constantine had entered Palestine in 295 with Diocletian; had served then with Galerius in Armenia and Mesopotamia; thence went to the Danube, again with Galerius; and finally served with Diocletian as a tribune amongst the soldiery of the Nicomedian court. It is, then, plausible to conclude that, if he were obses at all, it was against his own ambition, on the political principle of keeping one's friends close and one's potential enemies even closer.
But Roger Rees has a third take:
It is perhaps less easy to accommodate the virtual house-arrest the Anonymous Valesianus says Constantinue experienced under Diocletian and Galerius, unless we assume that in fact Constantine was being trained for office by Diocletian rather than kept from it.
I could pull out almost any sentence in Selena's primer, or those videos, and do this. We know almost nothing!
Some footnotes:
Lactantius: I notice you asked about him and we haven't covered him yet. Lactantius was a major early Christian writer, a contemporary of Diocletian and Constantine, who wrote works of (Christian) history explaining how persecutors of Christianity (esp. Diocletian and Galerius) came to bad ends because God punished them and emperors who embraced Christianity (Constantine) flourished. He is one of our few sources, one of our most major sources, for Diocletian, and you can see why he's not a source we can take at face value. I can't stress this enough: we can't take any source at face value! It's so bad, it's a million times worse than Fritzian historiography. We have some panegyrics, some Christian polemics, a handful of less contentious narratives, and...detective work.
Diocletian's death: Selena and I talked about this in the thread on her blog, where she mentioned that Duncan thinks Diocletian might have committed suicide after watching his life's work disintegrate before his eyes. Accoridng to Rees, the roughly contemporary sources go like this:
Lactantius claims Diocletian starved himself for grief that his reign had not been appreciated (II 6 42.1-3); the anonymous epitomator speaks of suicide by poison, prompted by fear of Constantine and Licinius (II 4 39.7); Eusebius writes of a fatal condition (II 8 8.Appendix 3); Aurelius Victor makes no mention of Diocletian's end at all; and Eutropius gives no details, but speaks of his death and deification in terms which suggest neither suicide nor illness (II 2 9.238). There can be no compromise between the various sources, and the reliability of each can be challenged on some ground or another (Barnes 1982 31-2); but in particular, if either of the accounts of his suicide were to be favoured, there would be significant implications for appreciation of wider politics.
We don't even know what year he died in. Imagine not knowing what year Fritz died in!
Another thing we don't know: what is up with the Tetrarchy? The word "tetrarch" meant something different in the ancient world, and the word was never used by contemporaries to describe the structure of the Roman empire under Diocletian. It wasn't applied to Diocletian et al. until the 1870s, and its usage didn't take off until the 1930s. At that point, everyone started using it like they knew what it meant and what it meant could definitely be applied to Diocletian's reign. But the structure of the government at the top changed constantly, and what we've done is decide that one period is the "norm" and everything else is a deviation from it. And we've also decided that we know what Diocletian was doing and that that was being radically innovative by creating a tetrarchy along specific lines. Only...it seems to be a whole lot more complicated, and many interpretations can be placed on the evidence.
...You see the theme that is emerging here. This is why I like 18th century history, there's more to work with. And every so often over the last few years, I've fantasized about writing an article on historiography called "What 18th century history can teach us about ancient history" and it will come down to "Stop stating everything as fact!" When we have a plethora of sources, we see that even things that we think are well attested turn out to be wrong. And when we have almost no sources and they're all unreliable, we should stop making statements about things like people's personalities with so much confidence. (This is a huge problem with Alexander the Great, omfg.) I once read an intro to a book on ancient Athens where the author said, "Okay, sure our sources are unreliable, but if they're as bad as some people have argued, then we have no business doing ancient history at all," and I went, "Well, you have no business doing it the way you're doing it!" I am tired of watching ancient history be written like this:
Historian 1: X is true. Historian 2: Historian 1 is an idiot, the opposite of X is true.
when I personally know what the source for each claim is and neither historian has any business being that confident! It's one thing when you have to write an intro to the subject for cahn in 2,000 words or less, but another when you have a whole book at your disposal and are going "Historian 1 is an idiot, because I choose to take everything Plutarch wrote centuries later as gospel!"
Okay, rant over, but the historiographical situation re Diocletian tends to bring out these rants from me.
Re: Who is Who in the Tetrarchy
I frequently draw out genealogies by hand so I can keep people straight! I keep telling myself I should look for software so 1) I don't have to strain my back (writing by hand is hard), 2) nobody has to read my handwriting!
Constantine married his aunt-by-marriage? (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)
Hey! Unrelated, does anyone know if the Catholic Church permits that these days? I was researching yesterday for my fanfic if you can marry your late husband's uncle. :P
Is this the second mistake?
Sorry for lack of clarity! The two mistakes are 1) mass persecution of Christians, which created a lot of bad PR (martyrs!) and backfired, 2) almost every single thing he did re the succession, which resulted in civil wars.
I'd forgotten but I'd heard of that before (though I didn't know any of the context of whom he was fighting).
I also learned about that so far back I don't even remember, and then had an "Aha!" moment when I started studying this period.
As Mike Duncan said in the "History of Rome" podcast, "hostage is such an ugly word".
Hee!
And as I stated in my write-up, almost every single thing one historian claims, another historian will contradict. William Leadbetter, author of Galerius and the Will of Diocletian, which I need to read cover-to-cover at some point, argues:
The Origo Constantini Imperatoris, generally an excellent and reliable source, notes that Constantine was "a hostage with Diocletian and Galerius" (obses apud Diocletianum et Galerium). The implication here is that Constantine was kept close to Diocletian, not because he was trusted (as Lactantius implies) but because he was not. That Constantine was a hostage at all, however, is highly implausible. Constantius had many more children who might be "brought up" at the courts of Diocletian and Galerius in order to ensure their father's continued loyalty, or at least, acquiescence. There is no suggestion in the sources that this was the case. Moreover, no equivalent arrangement existed for Maxentius, the son of Maximian.
Now, I could argue against both of those. One, if you assume the father cares about all his children, you only need one hostage. If you assume he treats his children as interchangeable and he has "spares", then, yeah, you need more than one. History shows that how parents react to children being held hostage can vary widely, from "Okay, I'll do anything!" to "I can always make more!" (Though some of the latter are probably apocryphal.) And if Diocletian trusts Maximian without a hostage, I argue that they may have had a special relationship that didn't apply to Constantius, come on. :P
What Leadbetter thinks is really going on:
As a vir militaris of some experience, and the son of a Caesar, he might lgoically have considered himself to be a candidate for the purple. Others did not, Diocletian amongst them...Constantine's position had its own clear explanation. He was a mature man, holding a senior rank. He had served with Diocletian and Galerius in Egypt, Mesopotamia and on the Danube, but was no mere officer cadet, climbing the ranks of the service. He was an imperial bastard, who might reasonably expect responsibility and command. Significantly, his active service was always in the immediate entourage of either Diocletian or Galerius. He never had an independent command: Constantine had entered Palestine in 295 with Diocletian; had served then with Galerius in Armenia and Mesopotamia; thence went to the Danube, again with Galerius; and finally served with Diocletian as a tribune amongst the soldiery of the Nicomedian court. It is, then, plausible to conclude that, if he were obses at all, it was against his own ambition, on the political principle of keeping one's friends close and one's potential enemies even closer.
But Roger Rees has a third take:
It is perhaps less easy to accommodate the virtual house-arrest the Anonymous Valesianus says Constantinue experienced under Diocletian and Galerius, unless we assume that in fact Constantine was being trained for office by Diocletian rather than kept from it.
I could pull out almost any sentence in Selena's primer, or those videos, and do this. We know almost nothing!
Some footnotes:
Lactantius: I notice you asked about him and we haven't covered him yet. Lactantius was a major early Christian writer, a contemporary of Diocletian and Constantine, who wrote works of (Christian) history explaining how persecutors of Christianity (esp. Diocletian and Galerius) came to bad ends because God punished them and emperors who embraced Christianity (Constantine) flourished. He is one of our few sources, one of our most major sources, for Diocletian, and you can see why he's not a source we can take at face value. I can't stress this enough: we can't take any source at face value! It's so bad, it's a million times worse than Fritzian historiography. We have some panegyrics, some Christian polemics, a handful of less contentious narratives, and...detective work.
Diocletian's death: Selena and I talked about this in the thread on her blog, where she mentioned that Duncan thinks Diocletian might have committed suicide after watching his life's work disintegrate before his eyes. Accoridng to Rees, the roughly contemporary sources go like this:
Lactantius claims Diocletian starved himself for grief that his reign had not been appreciated (II 6 42.1-3); the anonymous epitomator speaks of suicide by poison, prompted by fear of Constantine and Licinius (II 4 39.7); Eusebius writes of a fatal condition (II 8 8.Appendix 3); Aurelius Victor makes no mention of Diocletian's end at all; and Eutropius gives no details, but speaks of his death and deification in terms which suggest neither suicide nor illness (II 2 9.238). There can be no compromise between the various sources, and the reliability of each can be challenged on some ground or another (Barnes 1982 31-2); but in particular, if either of the accounts of his suicide were to be favoured, there would be significant implications for appreciation of wider politics.
We don't even know what year he died in. Imagine not knowing what year Fritz died in!
Another thing we don't know: what is up with the Tetrarchy? The word "tetrarch" meant something different in the ancient world, and the word was never used by contemporaries to describe the structure of the Roman empire under Diocletian. It wasn't applied to Diocletian et al. until the 1870s, and its usage didn't take off until the 1930s. At that point, everyone started using it like they knew what it meant and what it meant could definitely be applied to Diocletian's reign. But the structure of the government at the top changed constantly, and what we've done is decide that one period is the "norm" and everything else is a deviation from it. And we've also decided that we know what Diocletian was doing and that that was being radically innovative by creating a tetrarchy along specific lines. Only...it seems to be a whole lot more complicated, and many interpretations can be placed on the evidence.
...You see the theme that is emerging here. This is why I like 18th century history, there's more to work with. And every so often over the last few years, I've fantasized about writing an article on historiography called "What 18th century history can teach us about ancient history" and it will come down to "Stop stating everything as fact!" When we have a plethora of sources, we see that even things that we think are well attested turn out to be wrong. And when we have almost no sources and they're all unreliable, we should stop making statements about things like people's personalities with so much confidence. (This is a huge problem with Alexander the Great, omfg.) I once read an intro to a book on ancient Athens where the author said, "Okay, sure our sources are unreliable, but if they're as bad as some people have argued, then we have no business doing ancient history at all," and I went, "Well, you have no business doing it the way you're doing it!" I am tired of watching ancient history be written like this:
Historian 1: X is true.
Historian 2: Historian 1 is an idiot, the opposite of X is true.
when I personally know what the source for each claim is and neither historian has any business being that confident! It's one thing when you have to write an intro to the subject for
Okay, rant over, but the historiographical situation re Diocletian tends to bring out these rants from me.