cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 40

I'm trying to use my other account at least occasionally so I posted about my Yuletide gifts there, including the salon-relevant 12k fic that features Fritz, Heinrich, Voltaire, Fredersdorf, Saint Germain, Caroline Daum (Fredersdorf's wife), and Groundhog Day tropes! (Don't need to know canon.)

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From:

selenak

Mes amies, just a reminder that while we can never be sure, 26h December (i.e. today) in the year 1731 was very likely the day Fritz and Fredersdorf first caught sight of each other if Fredersdorf was indeed part of the Christmas concert organized for Fritz in Frankfurt an der Oder. Kennenlernentag, as we'd call it in German. Here's to them!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Awww. <3 Yeah, I should update the chronology: we have an entry for Fritz's letter of the 27th, but he's reporting events from the night before. That's why we didn't get an email reminder today, but will tomorrow.

Also, I'm delighted that we have both a wonderful fic about said concert and a brand-new Fritz/Fredersdorf fic as of yesterday to celebrate! <3333

ETA: Other things that delight me: We are on post number 40!!! Here's to us and another fabulous year of salon!

Edited Date: 2022-12-26 03:01 pm (UTC)

From:

cahn

Aw, yeah! :D <3

From:

cahn

I was informed when I woke up this morning that there is a Diocletian/Maximian fic in Madness, and I read it and was highly entertained, and also read about the Tetrarchy as directed by the endnote, but I must admit that I still really do not have any idea as to the personalities involved and therefore am clearly missing most of what's going on. (My sole knowledge about this period is that Helena found the True Cross and was Constantine's mom, and Constantine was the first Christian(-ish?) emperor??)

So... O beneficent denizens of salon -- by which I mostly mean

selenak because she's so skilled at this, but

mildred_of_midgard or anyone else with period knowledge, feel free to reply at will -- please synopsize the tetrarchy and the related personalities in ~~amusing~~ simple words for me? :)

(Yes, I know, I should listen to the podcast, but this is going to take a while as I still am figuring out the German History podcast -- the happy thing is that I think listening in the car might work, though very slowly!)

(Also, I tried to at least leave a kudos and it tells me I left one but it's not showing up??)

(Also, would be happy for this to become a more general discussion thread for this fic if people want ~~as mildred_of_midgard has somewhat indicated she would like to happen~~)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

(Also, I tried to at least leave a kudos and it tells me I left one but it's not showing up??)

I had the same experience! I wonder if the AO3 servers are just a bit overwhelmed by the amount of incoming kudos.

Primer: Okay, my Roman history is 10 years rusty, so I'm going to open with a simplified prelude, and then give Selena a chance to say stuff about Diocletian and Maximian proper, and then we can discuss!

The first thing you have to understand about Diocletian and Diocletian/Maximian is that what makes them so impressive is what happened before them. To give a very simplified account:

Phase one, there was the expansionist heyday of the Roman empire with the emperors you've heard of: Augustus, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, etc.

Phase two, the empire reaches its greatest extent in circa 100 CE, and it looks like this That looks really impressive! But. Some problems ensue.

1. The Romans only have the communications and transportation technology of circa 100 CE, which means that even if they're militarily superior to any one of their enemies, that border is way way overextended. Can you imagine living in Rome and trying to administer all those provinces and defend all the outreaches of the that red area?

2. The Roman emperors are really, really bad at founding dynasties. They keep dying without male heirs. They try out adoption, but they don't have a really good stable principle of succession. The major principle of succession ends up being, "If you defeat the rival candidates, you win!"

"If you defeat the rival candidates, you win!" very easily translates into "If you're an army based in Gaul or Illyria or Africa or wherever, you can grab your general, go, 'Our general is emperor!' and fight everyone else to make your guy emperor so he will give you big bonuses."

By the mid 3rd century, you have phase three: anarchy. The main means of becoming emperor is being a general, promising your troops money and favors, and marching on Rome to get acknowledged by the Senate before any other generals who have the same idea get acknowledged by the Senate. Bloodline? Previous ruling experience? What's that?

If you make it, and you have a male heir, you can try to get him on the throne, but it's a tossup whether it works, and it doesn't work for long.

One day, another emperor dies, and this soldier guy who was the son of a slave or freedman from somewhere in the Balkans becomes emperor. We know little to nothing about him before he changed his name from Gaius Valerius Diocles to Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus upon becoming emperor. (It's really incredibly tantalizing: I want backstory!)

And the newly minted Diocletian decides that all this anarchy and chaos has got to go! In a nutshell, phase four of the history of the Roman empire is when Diocletian initiates a bunch of reforms, promotes a strong government, and stabilizes the empire reasonably well (and impressively considering the litany of problems he was facing), but also commits at least two major fuckups, which Selena will tell you about if she has time. :)

And once we've covered that, I will describe what led me to request Diocletian/Maximian in the first place. Diocletian for his (usual) competence, obviously, and Diocletian/Maximian for a loyalty kink that you're going to hear all about. :DD

From:

selenak

I will add comments when I have more time, but for now, have some funny yet educational (and short) vids instead about Diocletian and the rest of the gang:

Introducing Diocletian and his rise to power

Dioclection invents the Tetrachy and stabilizes the Empire (this one also has Maximinian and also Galerius and Constantius Chlorus, Dad of Constantine the future Great)

Diocletian greenlights The Great Persecution (of Christians) and retires from office with some INTERESTING succession arrangements (aka the two fuckups an otherwise super competent man commits)

From:

cahn

See, THIS is what wikipedia needs to give me. If salon and

rheinsberg didn't already exist I'd say there needs to be a place where someone who is starting from basically scratch can get an overview of What The Heck Is Going On.

Can you imagine living in Rome and trying to administer all those provinces and defend all the outreaches of the that red area?

Ha, I remember this was a problem even with the Flavian dynasty, when I read about them this fall -- that they kept having rebellions and things they had to go look after :D

I also am assuming you guys are going to tell me about... Maxentius, Constantine, Theodora (Constantine's evil stepmother??), Chlorus (oh wait, Constantius Chlorus, huh. But I still need to know the gossipy deets!), Maximinus Daza (?), Severus II, Galerius, Lactanius, Fausta, Crispus, and I'm probably forgetting others! :)

From:

cahn

Me: Videos??

selenak: funny yet educational (and short)!
Me: ...it's like Selena knows me or something!!

I've just watched the first one and it is GREAT! I will watch the other two but probably not until tomorrow, thank you!!

From:

selenak

Okay, once you've watched the other two vids, which will have given you the political outline (in a funny way) and the most important events, here are the family footnotes:

1) Diocletian and Maximian: not (originally) related, both of humble Balcan origin, rose through the ranks together, though Maximian, a few years younger and not as brilliant, was always a few steps behind. Diocletian appointing him Co-Emperor wasn't unprecedented - there'd been several throughout the by now centuries of Roman Empire history - but it is worth noting that this was still a risky move, because for every successful combination, there were Co-Emperors turning against each other. As the second vid says, at first Maximian was given the title "Caesar" while Diocletian was "Augustus", Caesar implying junior rank; also, state propaganda referred to them as Jupiter (Diocletian) and Hercules (Maximian), and the god and his loyal (brawny) son (greatest of heroes, but still, the son) also implies a certain rank. However, as the vid points out, the workload was still too much for the two of them, and that's how we end up with Diocletian promoting Maximian to Augustus and each of them getting themselves a Caesar - Constantius Chlorus, who shall be Chlorus in order not to be confused with his more famous son, for Maximian, and Galerius for Dioclectian. Presto, the Tetrarchy. Now, both Dioclectian and Maximian were married and had daughters. Maximian also had a son (Maxentius, more about him in a minute). Practically the moment Galerius and Chlorus were appointed Caesars, they also got married to Dioclectian's and to Maximian's daughter, respectively, in order to strengthen the bonds. What were these particular daughters - (Galeria)Valeria and Theodora - like? We have no idea. Chauvinist sources focus on the men folk and don't say. Usually, the only way you got some Roman historian's attention as a woman was when you (in their eyes) misbehaved, usually by aquiring power for yourself and/or having affairs.

2.) Which brings me to (Constantius) Chlorus. He hadn't been single when becoming Maximian's Caesar. He was either married to or had as a steady concubine Helena, mother of his son Constantine, and an important figure of Christian history. The reason why we don't know whether or not these two were married is of course that Constantine emerged of the Tetrarchy implosion as the last man standing and later as top dog of the Roman Empire had some influence on historians, to put it mildly. Also, because Helena was important to Christian history, even once Constantine was dead, her origins kept being rewritten and enobled, which is how we go from Helena, daughter ofa Balcan tavern keeper, waitress and possibly part time prostitute (as waitresses were forced to be at that ime) to Helena, British princess. The later is what she is both in Evelyn Waugh's novel about her and in Dorothy Sayers' play, not because by the 20th century, people were still ignorant of her "lower" origin, but because these were English writers, and the tradition of basically claiming Constantine as a half Brit through his mother and said mother as a full Brit (and of course a princess, not some lowly waitress) had been going on for more than a millennium in Britain at that point. Anyway, Chlorus dumped Helena the Christian and married Theodora (with whom he had some more kids, including the father of later Emperor Julian the Apostate) the daughter of Maximian, but he did always treat Constantine as his legal first born son. (This is not something Constantine later made up, but documented at the time.) The notions of bastardy were murky in the ancient world anyway, but still, if you want an argument that Chlorus and Helena were married after all, you can always resort to this. Chlorus, btw, comes across in general as both competent (he reconquered Britain for the Tetrarchy after some splitaway wannabe Emperor named Cosaurus had ruled it in the aftermath of Diocletian's ascension to power) and the least ego-driven of the Tetrarchs.

3.) Constantine didn't see much of his father as a kid, though, since after Chlorus' promotion to Caesar he was raised at Diocletian's court. As Mike Duncan said in the "History of Rome" podcast, "hostage is such an ugly word". Diocletian might have correctly trusted that his three co-rulers would all remain loyal to him instead of trying to split from the Roman Empire and/or gun to be sole Emperor, but he didn't rely on trust alone in the case of the younger guys. Anyway, young Constantine clearly learned a lot, including when to shut up and when to sway people, because once Dioclatian had retired, and Galerius had become Augustus in Diocletian's place, Constantine somehow talked him into permitting him, Constantine, to leave (now) Galerius' court and let him join his father Chlorus in Britain. Galerius later claimed he was drunk when giving his permission. (Mike Duncan: He would say that. Imagine how he'd look when saying he was sober.) Once permission was given, Constantine rode day and night and made it to GB to be at his father's side the next few years which was absolutely crucial. Because when Chlorus died at Eboracum (York), his troops supposedly intantly hailed Constantine as his successor and new Emperor, and hey, what's a guy to do if the troops want it? Write to Galerius (who together with Chlorus had been promoted from Caesar to Augustus when Diocletian and Maximian retired) that he's the new Augustus (not Caesar, note) in Dad's place because the troops want it so, that's what. (Galerius was so enraged by this letter that he threatened to burn both the messenger and the message.)

4) Galerius, as Diocletian's Caesar, had been earmarked to succeed him as Augustus from the get go. He was another Balcan origin guy of humble origin with a respectable military career when Diocletian picked him as Caesar and married him to his daughter Valeria, though then Galerius wasn't as successful in his wars with the Persians as Chlorus was in his task to reconquer Britain (see above). Otoh, Galerius was VERY successful in keeping his relationhip with Diocletian smooth. Some later chroniclers blame the Great Persecution (see third vid), the greatest and last of the official anti-Christian measures, solely on Galerius in order to make Diocletian (who when all is said and done even in the Christian era of the Empire was seen as having restored order and being a predecessor of the great Constantine) look better, but to me it looks as if they were both united in their desire to get rid of this weird cult once and for all. By that point, Christianity was already the fasted growing religion within the Empire. Not the only popular and growing faith - see also Sol Invictus, Mithras Cult - but definitely the most popular. The Great Persecution created an according backlash, and this in turn played an important role in Constantine's popular support and success. (Not to mention in a lot of less than forgiving Christians once Constantine had made them the state religion.)

Now, whether or not Galerius was the driver behind the Great Persecution, he definitely was the guy to suggest the two new Caesars once Diocletian prepared for his (and Maximian's) retirement. Because both candidates were Galerius' men through and through - one, (Maximinus) Daza, to be referred to as just Daza in order to avoid confusion with Maximian, was Galerius' nephew, the son of his sister, and the other, Severus, was his bff in the army. (One apparantly with a reputation for hard partying, dancing and drinking, but that might have been slander by Christian writers later.) Now clearly, Diocletian should have seen this would not result in a balanced new Tetrarchy, and that Chlorus would feel ganged up upon, so that even if Chlorus hadn't died and been replaced by his son Endgame!Constantine, it a structure just asking to tear itself apart. But Diocletian still let Galerius get away with this.

5.) Meanwhile, two of the four original Tetrarchs - Maximian and Chlorus - had adult sons ready and more than willing to succeed their fathers, to wit, Maxentius and Constantine, respectively, whom Diocletian pointedly did NOT choose to become Caesars. I've already talked about what Constantine did. Note, however, that having been "forced" by his troops to become an Augustus, Constantine mostly stuck to Britain and Gaul, content to watch everyone else tear themselves apart for a while, until he personally went after the remaining competition. Whereas Maxentius, son of Maximian, didn't wait. Diocletian had pissed off a lot of Romans by his constant disdain for the ancient capital in general and the Senate in particular, and they were more than happy to support young Maxentius in his instant rebellion. Galerius sent Severus to deal with this Italian uprising. Maxentius asked his (retired, but clearly just because Diocletian had asked him to) Dad for help. Maximian obliged. Most of Severus' staff and troops were former Maximian soldiers. The inevitable ensued. After his troops had deserted to Maximian, their old commander, Severus either committed suicide or was killed at Maximian's and Maxentius' orders.

6.) Constantine, while watching all of this from Britain and eating popcorn, had also followed his Dad's footsteps in that upon becoming Emperor, he dumped his either concubine or wife, the mother of his oldest son Crispus (while still keeping Crispus as legit oldest son), and married Maximian's younger daughter Fausta. Of all the wives and daughters, Fausta is one of the few we know a bit more about than their name. And not because she found the True Cross, so imagine ominous music playing here. For now, though, all the action was in Italy, because having defeated Severus, Maxentius wanted Dad to go back to retirement, and Maximian very much wanted to remain Emperor and thought that this had been what their team up had all been about. This resulted in a very unbecoming father/son struggle, allegedly down to literally pulling of the imperial purple cloak. And lo, Maximian's old troops now sided with the younger guy. At this point everyone asked Diocletian to come back and sort out this mess. He did briefly emerge from retirement at an All-Emperor-Meeting to give everyone a stern talking to and managed to talk Maximian into retirement again, plus Constantine while accepted as one of the new Tetrarchy Emperors got booted back to Caesar instead of Augustus, but alas Diocletian also made the same mistake of letting Galerius pick the new Augustus. Who was another bff of his, Licinius. Maxentius (still not regarded as a candidate for official Empordom by anyone) just about exploded, and the long neglected Daza (remember him?), hearing this newbie Licinius had been made Augustus instead of Caesar and that Constantine while booted back to Caesar still had gotten an in, just about had it and rebelled as well. In short, the conference only very temporarily had solved anything, and sure enough, Maximian couldn't resist coming out of retirement again and join the struggle.

7) This is where it starts to get really depressing. Maximian had a fallout with his new son-in-law Constantine, because his way of coming out of retirement for the fatal last time (after having stayed with Constantine and Fausta for a while) was to tell the troops in Gaul that Constantine was dead and promote himself back to Emperor in Constantine's place. This resulted in Constantine (once he heard about this one) showing off his military skills and effortlessly defeat him, and then strongly encouraging his father-in-law to committ suicide. Maximian hanged himself. Much later in Constantine's own reign, this whole story was rewritten into an elaborate plot where Maximian tries to personally assassinate Constantine while staying with him, confiding his intentions to Fausta and Fausta warning her husband, resulting in Maximian being executed, but historians from what I can see go with the less complicated version. Galerius also dies, but of an illness (gleefully reported by Christian writers later to have been extremely painful); his wife, Diocletian's daughter Valeria, and her mother, Diocletian's wife, were with him at the time, which was to prove fatal for the two of them. They went to Daza, who was after all a cousin, but wanted Valeria to marry him. She refused, he confiscated her property, locked her and her mother up, and ignored Diocletian's (still alive) entrities to free them. This happened during the last nine months of Diocletian's life, and then he either died of illness or committed suicide himself. Once Daza himself was dead, Licinius (the last appointed Emperor) ordered both Valeria and her mother, Diocletian's widow, executed in the town square, which they were.

8.) Meanwhile, once Maximian had died, Maxentius rediscovered his filial love and declared war on Constantine to avenge his father's honor (and get rid of Constantine). Big mistake. Constantine marched on Rome, famously had a vision telling him to paint the Chi-Ro (aka the cross) on his soldiers' shields "and in this sign you will conquer", and defeated Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge. This, btw, was NOT when Constantine himself became a Christian, or Christianity the state religion. (Constantine still was playing it safe while there were still other emperors around and had coins issued showing him with Sol Invictus, the other popular deity.) During his fight against Maxentius, Constantine had temporarily arranged for a pact with Licinius by marrying him to his sister Constantia (daughter of Theodora, not Helena), but once Maxentius exited the world stage, the Constantine versus Licinius end fight was inevitable. Big spoiler: Constantine won. His oldest son Crispus, btw, distinguished himself greatly as one of the leading commanders and was already very popular with the army.

Edited Date: 2022-12-27 09:42 am (UTC)

From:

selenak

9.) And now it gets gruesome and controversial. Seemingly out of the blue, Constantine (now the last and only Emperor standing; he's already hosted the Council of Nicea and started to move his capital to Byzantium) has his son Crispus executed, and then his wife Fausta, the later in a very brutal way, by having her boiled alive by having her locked in her bath which was then overheated. What happened? Depending on the chronicler and historian, either:

a) Crispus and Fausta had an affair, and Constantine found out

or

b) Fausta, seeing Crispus as competition for her own sons or because she wants him but he doesn't want her, accused him of raping her, and Constantine, never having read any version of the Phaedra myth, it seems, first falls for it and kills his son, then, finding out the truth, orders Fausta dead

or
c) paranoid Constantine was jealous of Crispus' popularity with the troops and suspected him of wanting to topple him.

Now, as much as b) sounds like the plot of Phaedra and thus fake, apparantly one thing historians agree on is that Constantine between the death of Crispus and the death of Fausta met with his mother Helena. In the audio series Caesar!, the Constantine episode, "The Maker of all Things" does have Helena convince Constantine that Crispus was innocent and Fausta is a lying liar, but they also use this last mother-son meeting for another turn, to which, Constantine from using Christianity and Christian support pragmatically (because Christians are a big part of his power base) to, use it to atone for what he did. He needs someone to forgive the unforgivable. The dialogue goes something like this:

C: I want you to go to Jerusalem for me. Go to the place where the Nazarene was executed. I will pay for a church there.

H: It's going to take more than building a church, my son.

C: Christianity will now be not only a legal religion in the Empire, but the only religion. I myself will acknowledge the Christian God not just as God but the only God.

H: When do I start?

The series Caesar! does not use Latin at any point except in this episode at the end, when Constantine, for the rest of the episode a hard nosed pragmatist, after all is said and done and the report of Fausta's death has arrived monologues that he still loves Crispus and Fausta and he only sees one way out to live with himself, and then he starts with: "Pater noster quis est in caelum, sanctificetur nomen tuis" etc, the Our Father in Latin.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Thanks to Selena giving you the who's who rundown, I am now free to give you the fandom primer! I.e. why this is my fandom, and what is fanon and what is canon.

First and foremost, everything derives from a single fact: my fandom source is Gibbon's Decline and Fall.

Gibbon, as you probably know, is 18th century. This means almost everything he says has been challenged or even refuted by modern scholars. Hell, much of what

selenak says has been at least challenged by modern scholars. The sources are so brief, biased (in one direction or the other), and otherwise unreliable that for almost every fact you will find a historian confidently stating, another scholar will claim the opposite, and a third will point out that the so-called "fact" depends on a single unreliable narrative source, or is contradicted by non-narrative sources or archaeological evidence.

For example, did the junior emperors marry the senior emperors' daughters as soon as they were appointed junior emperors, or did the marriages take place several years earlier and the senior emperors appointed their sons-in-law whom they'd had plenty of opportunity to observe at close range? You can make a case either way! Was Diocletian's reign really that sharp of a break with his predecessors? Has the extent of the 3rd century crisis and the extent to which his reign represents a "recovery" been overstated? Whose idea was it to retire, and when? Was there actually a conference at Carnuntum? Did Diocletian actually not like Rome? Was Maximian Caesar before he was Augustus? Did Diocletian divide up the empire amongst the tetrarchs? If so, how and when and how many times? And so on and so forth. For most things, we just don't know! And even where modern scholars have achieved a consensus, it took a lot of work and deciding what evidence to give more weight to.

So if you want to write a primer, you have to pick some things to state as fact (like Selena did), otherwise the summary will be impenetrable, and if you want to write a fanfic, you ~~should go with Gibbon's take~~ actually have a whole lot of flexibility!

The beauty of Gibbon's take is that he will give detailed personality descriptions of the people involved; modern historians correctly state that this is absolutely historically irresponsible. His description of Diocletian, for example:

It would not be easy to persuade us of the cowardice of a soldier of fortune who acquired and preserved the esteem of the legions, as well as the favour of so many warlike princes. Yet even calumny is sagacious enough to discover and to attack the most vulnerable part. The valour of Diocletian was never found inadequate to his duty, or to the occasion; but he appears not to have possessed the daring and generous spirit of a hero, who courts danger and fame, disdains artifice, and boldly challenges the allegiance of his equals. His abilities were useful rather than splendid - a vigorous mind improved by the experience and study of mankind; dexterity and application in business; a judicious mixture of liberality and economy, of mildness and rigour; profound dissimulation under the disguise of military frankness; steadiness to pursue his ends; flexibility to vary his means; and, above all, the great art of submitting his own passions, as well as those of others, to the interest of his ambition, and of colouring his ambition with the most specious pretences of justice and public utility.

And Maximian:

Maximian was born a peasant, and, like Aurelian, in the territory of Sirmium. Ignorant of Letters, careless of laws, the rusticity of his appearance and manners still betrayed in the most elevated fortune the meanness of his extraction. War was the only art which he professed. In a long course of service he had distinguished himself on every frontier of the empire; and though his military talents were formed to obey rather than to command, though, perhaps, he never attained the skill of a consummate general, he was capable, by his valour, constancy, and experience, of executing the most arduous undertakings. Nor were the vices of Maximian less useful to his benefactor. Insensible to pity, and fearless of consequences, he was the ready instrument of every act of cruelty which the policy of that artful prince might at once suggest and disclaim. As soon as a bloody sacrifice had been offered to prudence or to revenge, Diocletian, by his seasonable intercession, saved the remaining few whom he had never designed to punish, gently censured the severity of his stern colleague, and enjoyed the comparison of a golden and an iron age, which was universally applied to their opposite maxims of government. Notwithstanding the difference of their characters, the two emperors maintained, on the throne, that friendship which they had contracted in a private station. The haughty, turbulent spirit of Maximian, so fatal afterwards to himself and to the public peace, was accustomed to respect the genius of Diocletian, and confessed the ascendant of reason over brutal violence. From a motive either of pride or superstition, the two emperors assumed the titles, the one of Jovius, the other of Herculius. Whilst the motion of the world (such was the language of their venal orators) was maintained by the all-seeing wisdom of Jupiter, the invincible arm of Hercules purged the earth from monsters and tyrants.

For historical purposes, all you can say is, "I mean, maybe?" Some of it might be true, but the level of confidence is just way overstated. For fanfic purposes, however, all I can say is, "Ship them with great shippiness!" :D

Another side-effect of me encountering them via Gibbon is that first I got a description of the lead-up to Diocletian, which meant a whole lot of rival candidates for the purple trying to kill each other. The thing Selena described where Maximian and his son Maxentius allegedly wrestled over the purple cloak? A hundred years earlier, you had two brothers, Caracalla and Geta, being co-emperors and living like this:

On their arrival at Rome, they immediately divided the vast extent of the Imperial palace. No communication was allowed between their apartments: the doors and passages were diligently fortified, and guards posted and relieved with the same strictness as in a besieged place. The emperors met only in public, in the presence of their afflicted mother; and each surrounded by a numerous train of armed followers.

Then Caracalla has his younger brother Geta killed so he can rule alone!

So of *course* when Diocletian appointed Maximian co-emperor, I was yelling, "No, don't do it! Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I'm several hundred pages in, and this never ends well!"

And I read Diocletian's entire reign waiting for Maximian to betray Diocletian...and he...didn't? Despite having the kind of headstrong and domineering personality where you'd totally expect him to? (See what happened post-retirement.)

And then he (somehow) got Maximian to retire! And then, somehow, even though being a retired emperor should make you entirely powerless, and Maximian had everything to lose and nothing to gain by agreeing, he did it again! Despite the fact that it didn't last--even that just proved to me that Diocletian had some kind of in-person influence over Maximian, because Maximian clearly had the kind of personality that did not want to give up power for one minute. Which made it all the more impressive.

Because I was reading, going, "Yeah, okay, I see that on a political level Diocletian did not have the whole going into retirement and smoothing over the succession thing down, but on a personal level he clearly he had some kind of hold over Maximian! Tell me more!"

Because my entire ship here is based on the complementary skills and personalities that allow them to do things together that they couldn't do alone (I loved their good-cop bad-cop act as described by Gibbon), plus the absolute loyalty. It's very much the dynamic of the Duc de Belle-Isle and his brother. In fact, you could call Maximian Diocletian's "other self". ;) A contemporary panegyric pretty much did:

[Your brotherhood] even conquers your difference in age, and with care for each other renders equals the older and younger...For although you are different in age, most sacred emperors, we understand you have a twin accord...Neither of you favours his own nature more; each wishes to be what his brother is.

This is also,

cahn, one of the ships where I have always imagined loyalty gestures like kneeling, swearing, etc. Like even leaving aside the part where Diocletian became emperor and thus everyone was performing gestures of submission, it's impossible for me to believe there weren't some special gestures between those two.

ALSO. From the same panegyric, which focuses on Diocletian and Maximian meeting in Milan after years apart ruling different parts of the empire, describes the end of the meeting where they had to go their separate ways again:

What were your feelings at that time, what were your expressions! How incapable were your eyes of disguising the evidence of emotion! Of course, you looked back frequently, and this is not an empty fiction made up about you--you exchanged such assurances since you intended soon to return to see each other.

Modern scholar Rees describes this as "the presentation of the Dyarchs' meeting in Milan almost as a lovers' tryst."

Note for historiographic purposes, there's no reason (that I know of) to believe this was an eyewitness report, and it was definitely propaganda meant to be over the top. But for fandom purposes, it's catnip!

Also, I should point out that, yes, they spent most of their reigns separated by half of Europe and only meeting up a couple of times and they retired separately (Italy for Maximian, modern-day Split, Croatia for Diocletian). So my personal headcanon has always been to ship them non-romantically, but like Karl XII and Görtz, or Belle-Isle and his brother: doing things together that they couldn't do separately, trusting each other, and bringing a lot of intensity to their working relationship, but not having a typical romantic or sexual relationship.

HOWEVER. I am deeply grateful to my mystery author for this line:

When you said we’d retire together, I thought you meant TOGETHER.

Because it is giving me more traditional shippy feelings like whoa! GUH. <3

Also, speaking of retirement, Diocletian's palace still stands! This is where he grew his cabbages in his post-retirement life (again quoting Gibbon):

His answer to Maximian is deservedly celebrated. He was solicited by that restless old man to reassume the reins of government and the Imperial purple. He rejected the temptation with a smile of pity, calmly observing that, if he could show Maximian the cabbages which he had planted with his own hands at Salona, he should no longer be urged to relinquish the enjoyment of happiness for the pursuit of power.

Sadly, when I was in Croatia, I hadn't yet discovered my love for Diocletian, so I did not go to Split. Actually, it was that trip (which was largely to Italy) that caused me to think, "You know, my Roman Empire history is non-existent, I should fix that," and as soon as I came back, or maybe even on the last couple days, I started reading Gibbon. Then I immediately wanted to go back! But of course I haven't.

Edited Date: 2022-12-27 06:32 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

Also, have this pictorial illustration. This sculpture depicting the original Tetrarchy (Dioclectian & Maximian, Galerius & (Constantius) Chlorus) today is in Venice, as medieval crusaders looted it when sacking Constantinople, but it's as near contemporary a depiction of Mildred's OTP as you can get outside of coins:

Edited Date: 2022-12-27 04:03 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

This statue group was my first introduction to Diocletian! Way back in undergrad when I was taking art history. I of course remembered this statue and would have liked to see it when I was in Venice, but by then I had forgotten where it was located, and it wasn't until shortly after I left Venice that I relearned that it was Venice and realized I must have walked right past it without noticing it! But it was too late to go back (on my budget). I am cursed.

(Selena, you will "like" this: the single most incompetent professor (I think he was a postdoc) I had in college was the one for this intro art history class. He called this statue a depiction of four popes. POPES. His entire course was like this.)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

it's as near contemporary a depiction of Mildred's OTP as you can get outside of coins:

And panegyrics! :D

ETA: Unless you meant "visual depiction", in which case yes. :) But the near lovers' tryst is really something.

Edited Date: 2022-12-27 04:51 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Constantine still was playing it safe while there were still other emperors around and had coins issued showing him with Sol Invictus, the other popular deity.

Not a light read, but one of my all-time favorite books of any genre is Jonathan Bardill's Constantine: Divine Emperor of the Christian Golden Age. He argues against the traditional interpretation that Constantine was playing it safe and being accommodating to other emperors' religious sensitivities by keeping Sol Invictus on his coins until Licinius was gone, and then going full-out Christianity. Bardill argues that Constantine saw Sol Invictus (a monotheistic cult) and Christianity as compatible based on Christian solar imagery, and he was trying to syncretize the two. But eventually Constantine supposedly realized a better way of making his imagery acceptable to both pagans and Christians was by not specifying that this was Sol Invictus, because the Christians were not cool with actually *depicting* God, nor with treating monotheistic religions as equivalent. So Constantine gradually dropped the Sol Invictus imagery (even while Licinius was alive), but continued to syncretize pagan and Christian solar imagery even after Licinius' death (e.g. the statue in Constantinople), and Christians were supposedly okay with this as long as he didn't *say* this was the Sol Invictus cult.

I'm not enough of an expert to have an informed opinion beyond what this book has told me, but the book is heavily footnoted and draws heavily on the contemporary iconographical evidence; in fact, it covers a lot of areas but I personally treat it primarily as an art history book. That's why it remains one of the ~40 undigitized books I own in physical form, because it's difficult to digitize all those images and keep the original quality. But given the number of times I've wanted to either reread this book or look something up in it since I lost my ability to read physical books, I should probably acquire a paperback copy, and digitize that one just for the text.

From:

selenak

Oh, no doubt! BTW, the last time I saw that statue in Venice, I had no idea whom it depicted, either, but "popes" definitely would never have been my guess. The swords all four are depicted carrying kind of gives it away.:)

I do think the statue group aesthetically is closer to early medieval sculptures than it is to, say, late Republican/early Empire Roman ones (

cahn, think of the famous and endlessly copied statue of Augustus for a contrast and compare depiction of how the first Roman Emperor wanted to be depicted), and a good reminder that any movie or tv show set in the late Roman Empire which has everyone still looking Augustan is not trying. But like I said - of all the possible guesses, "popes" is.... *headdesk*

From:

mildred_of_midgard

BTW, the last time I saw that statue in Venice, I had no idea whom it depicted, either

I would have recognized it if I had actually stopped and looked at it! Even not knowing that it was in Venice. It was on the exam, and it was one of my favorites from that class! But I must have either not walked too close to it, or just walked right past it without properly seeing it.

But like I said - of all the possible guesses, "popes" is.... *headdesk*

He shouldn't have been guessing! He was supposedly teaching the class, using material he had selected for us to learn! WTF.

(In addition to repeatedly teaching us outstandingly wrong things--thank god for the textbook--he also decided one day that he needed to go, "Do you know what a volcano is?" probably in reference to Pompeii/Herculaneum or Thera/Akrotiri, and waste a few minutes of our lives giving us college students a basic rundown on what a volcano was. *facepalm*)

I do think the statue group aesthetically is closer to early medieval sculptures than it is to, say, late Republican/early Empire Roman ones

Yeah, the interesting thing is that the way I learned it is:

Near Eastern art: You have a powerful monarch who wants to use art as propaganda to reinforce that, so you get very stiff, stocky figures meant to convey intimidating rulers and perpetual reigns. Emperors are depicted bigger than surrounding figures. You get depictions of rulers that look like Rameses.

Classical Greek art: You have the rise of the polis, and sculpture that's borrowed from Egypt and other Near Eastern cultures quickly turns into something that's dynamic and glorifies the individual body and realism, to go with the idea of individual participation in government. People are depicted young even when they're old. You get depictions that look like this in the early, orientalizing period (look how similar that is to Rameses), and this later on (look how completely different that is). This shows the transition of a single generation. Notice that the hair is getting shorter and less stiff--less like a headdress--the interest in anatomical details of the body is deepening, the arms are getting more relaxed, the feet are already moved apart to convey motion, and soon these statutes will be doing all sorts of athletic things to indicate that strong young/middle-aged men are running the show.

Roman republic days: Power tends to concentrate in the hands of patriarchs, so wealthy men have themselves depicted as old and serious looking, even when they're young, to indicate that they're weighed down by responsibilities of government, which they can be trusted with. These depictions are also much less likely to depict the entire body--just the face.

Earlier Roman empire art: Still clinging to propaganda of "the emperor is primus inter pares", "Greek culture + Roman senate = the good old days," etc., so you still have art in the classical Greek style. Emperors and empresses (that's Augustus and Livia) are depicted young even when they're old. And since most of their subjects will never see them in person, in this pre-photographic age, their self-depiction is the only depiction most people see. So they can totally shave off a few decades.

Later Roman empire art: Diocletian, Constantine, etc. start reverting to stiff, stocky figures--with facial hair! probably to indicate maturity--like that porphyry group in Venice, that remind you more of Egyptian art than anything else. This is all part of the emperors' desperate attempt to get some political stability back. Although the classical Greco-Roman style doesn't totally go away either, since, for example, the now lost statue Constantine had commissioned to celebrate the founding of Constantinople is reconstructed to have looked like this.

Now, not that they specifically looked to Egyptian art (although they may have been influenced by it), but that the new Roman rulers independently went, "How can we convey that you should obey us and not think about changing or participating in government?" and came up with similar ideas.

Okay, this is really oversimplified, but it's meant to pull out one single thread, not comprehensively cover art history.

Edited Date: 2022-12-27 09:18 pm (UTC)

From:

cahn

Thank you!! Both the videos and these posts have been amazingly helpful. Also, I am no longer wondering why I couldn't keep track of all these people in an AU, because there are a lot of them! Who are related in unexpected ways! Around point (4) or (5) I started having to draw diagrams with numbers and letters to keep everyone straight, which was very helpful to me (not least because I'd keep realizing I'd put names in the wrong place, so it was useful to fix my comprehension mistakes... Maybe I should do this for all the historical fandoms...)

and in Dorothy Sayers' play

Me: Wait, I own that play! But I can't remember anything about it!
Me: *goes to look, finds it right there on the bookshelf where I thought it was, flips through it*
Me: Apparently I... never read this play? Huh.

Well, I've put it on the very-long queue :P
(I haven't read Waugh's novel either, but that is farther down on the queue...)

As Mike Duncan said in the "History of Rome" podcast, "hostage is such an ugly word".

Hee!

Now clearly, Diocletian should have seen this would not result in a balanced new Tetrarchy, and that Chlorus would feel ganged up upon

So this must be one of the two errors Mildred talks about?

Constantine, while watching all of this from Britain and eating popcorn

I laughed out loud at this!

and married Maximian's younger daughter Fausta. Of all the wives and daughters, Fausta is one of the few we know a bit more about than their name. And not because she found the True Cross, so imagine ominous music playing here.

First, hee!
Second: So... according to my diagram/family tree, Constantine married his aunt-by-marriage? (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)

but alas Diocletian also made the same mistake of letting Galerius pick the new Augustus.

Is this the second mistake?

Maxentius (still not regarded as a candidate for official Empordom by anyone) just about exploded, and the long neglected Daza (remember him?)

Heeee! I only remember him because he was on my diagram and I was like, hey, whatever happened to this guy?

Gosh, that was... something... about Valeria and her mom :(

Constantine marched on Rome, famously had a vision telling him to paint the Chi-Ro (aka the cross) on his soldiers' shields "and in this sign you will conquer", and defeated Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge.

Ah, right! I'd forgotten but I'd heard of that before (though I didn't know any of the context of whom he was fighting).

From:

cahn

WOW. *blinks* I don't even know what to say to that. (Except that I can see how everyone wants to know what his conversation with Helena was like, because I do too! Thanks for the Caesar! version!)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

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.

Edited Date: 2022-12-28 03:20 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

Diocletian, Constantine, etc. start reverting to stiff, stocky figures--with facial hair! probably to indicate maturity-

Hadrian: Excuse you. I had made the beard fashionable for Emperors more than a century before any of these whippersnapers were born. As part of my "Greek style rocks!" campaign. Every Emperor having themselves depicted beardy afterwards was clearly trying to evoke me.

Nero: Say what? I was the original beardy Emperor, going from the classic Augustan look which I had to sport while my Mum was still alive to the neckbeard look emulated by Peter Ustinov and all those other minor actors playing me. I also was the first Emperor to run a "Greek style rocks!" campaign. I adored everything Greek!

Hadrian: My dear fellow, it would be unkind to compare our respective popularities, but if we must:
Granted, by the time I died, not just the Jews hated my guts, the Senate did, too, but in the provinces, my reputation was stellar, and ever since Gibbon, I make the "Five Good Emperors" hit list on a regular basis. This isn't because I also happen to be a gay icon, but because of a lot of hard work. I was the original travelling workoholic micromanager, and this included aranging for a smooth succession where I played four dimensional chess and already had earmarked young Marcus Aurelius for future greatness. Unlike your mother, I however knew giving power to a teenager was bound to have terrible results, and so I adopted the eminently capable Antoninus under the condition he would adopt Marcus. Antoninus not only ensured the Senate, despite hating my guts, would deify me but reigned for two peaceful decades in what is universally regard as Rome's golden age, and handed over the Empire to Marcus Aurelius in peak condition. Meanwhile, you didn't work, didn't care about succession at all, ended up killing yourself while on the run, were of course not made a god and were followed up by three fellows in a row raging bloody civil war againt each other. I therefore rest my case about any subsequent Emperor sporting a beard in their official depicting trying to evoke me.

Edited Date: 2022-12-28 08:42 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Yep, this is why I said "one single thread," because I was hesitating to post this, because there are tons of other threads, like all of the beards that exist for *other* reasons. Greek philosophers and those who followed in their tradition were so big on beards that forcing them to shave was a means of humiliation, and you get philosophers saying they would commit suicide rather than lose their beard! (I forget if anyone actually did--Selena may remember what the source for this is, I'm going from memory.)

By the way, one thing I also meant to add is that in the later empire period, you also start to get the emperors depicted bigger than surrounding figures, as realism becomes less important than "obey us."

(I haven't even talked about Hellenistic trends, but because of the rise of monarchs ruling pieces of Alexander's empire, you get some of the same tendencies, as well as other interesting innovations.)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I should also point out that this means that if I myself say something, anything, like "Diocletian grew cabbages," what I am saying is that this is what historians put in their books based on what the sources say. It's not like saying Fritz grew fruit at Sanssouci, which we can confidently believe. You would have to do a certain amount of research to decide what confidence level to give this. But since this is not the Classics salon (yet), we're just going to tell you things and you're going to understand that each one may or may not be true, even more than usual. I mean, we're kind of used to changing our mind about things in 18th century salon, but here we have to start from the assumption that everything is tentative and most things we will simply never know.

Some things we do know! Like British coinage starts showing a third Augustus around the time sources tell us that Britain revolted and made a local guy, Carausius, emperor. Which tells us *something* was going on politically. But the chronology is uncertain, and so all attempts to reconstruct a military strategy are necessarily hazy.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, haha, here I go again forgetting to spell things out and writing in shorthand, in this because because I had to memorize them for an exam:

cahn, you can't see clearly in that picture of the tetrarchs, but of the two pairs of tetrarchs, one in each pair has a beard and one doesn't, and otherwise they look exactly the same (presumably to signal unity of purpose). This has led some scholars to conclude that the beard signals the senior emperor, the Augustus, and thus that each Augustus is depicted with his respective Caesar. (And thus that Diocletian and Maximian are not hugging each other, alas for my OTP. :P)

But since we don't have the artist's notes on what exactly was intended, we're extrapolating, and...you know the drill here, other scholars have other ideas about what's being depicted here (maybe the Augusti are hugging each other and the Caesars are hugging each other!), and it may not even be the Tetrarchs.

There's also a bust of Diocletian here in Massachusetts! Only it's a bust of "Diocletian (?)" because no one is sure if it was really meant to depict him. And yes, this is why I like the 18th century better.

Side note, I find Roman emperor and empress busts really fascinating and had to stop myself from launching into a full-out description of the evolution of fashions over the history of the empire, but I'll give you a couple of fun tidbits:

1. Women's wigs could be quite entertaining, see also the dome-shaped beehive, the peaked beehive and the helmet styles (all of which involve wigs).

2. There was a brief period, during the reign of Caracalla, where people tend to be depicted frowning, both Caracalla himself and other people. I once turned a corner in a museum (Vienna, I think), was confronted with a frowning bust, and based on that and some stylistic details that told me it probably wasn't Roman Republic, I went, "Reign of Caracalla!" Checked the card on the wall, and laughed hysterically when I was right. Because one time, when I was showing some coworkers around the Getty Villa and explaining Roman busts to them, we joked that everyone was so stressed during Caracalla's reign that their faces froze like that.

3. Marcus Aurelius would like honorary mention for his Greek philosopher style beard.

Basically, if you don't know the evolution of fashions of Roman busts, you walk into a museum and you see like 40 busts that all look the same and have names you don't recognize, and it can get tedious quickly. Once you memorize the cues, you can start going, "Looks stressed, might be Caracalla or one of his subjects!" "Has a fleshy neck, might be the Munich type of Nero!" "Eyes rolled up, might be a Christian in the later period looking toward heaven!" "The peaked beehive was only briefly in fashion*, so I know exactly when this must be from!" And then you can start having a whole lot of fun in museums, highly recommended. :)

* For women who could afford it, obvs. Meaning you had to be able to buy false hair (usually meaning someone else's hair, not your own--blonde German hair was fashionable for a while), have a maid/slave to dress your hair, and have lots of leisure time for the hairdressing. It was a status symbol.

Edited Date: 2022-12-28 04:56 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I was researching yesterday for my fanfic if you can marry your late husband's uncle. :P

Update: As of 1983, you can (without a dispensation)! That's why it was so hard to find: I kept finding sources that were old enough that I wasn't sure the same laws still applied.