3 - Diocletian and the first tetrarchy, a.d. 284–305

Summary

Capitoline Zeus took pity at last on the human race and gave the lordship of all the earth and the sea to godlike king Diocletian. He extinguished the memory of former griefs for any still suffering in grim bonds in a lightless place. Now a father sees his child, a wife her husband, a brother his brother released, as if coming into the light of the sun a second time from Hades. Gladly Diogenes, saver of cities, received the favour of the good king and swiftly dispatched to the cities the joyful forgetfulness of griefs. The whole land takes delight in its joy as at the light of a golden age, and the iron, drawn back from the slaughter of men, lies bloodlessly in the scabbard. You too have rejoiced to announce the royal gift to all, governor of the Seven Nomes and the Nile has praised your mildness earlier still, when you governed the towns on Nilotic Thebes with care and righteousness.

These translated hexameter verses were perhaps composed for recital at the fourth celebration of the Capitoline games at the town of Oxyrhynchus in middle Egypt which would have fallen in the summer or autumn of a.d. 285, a few months after the accession of the emperor Diocletian. Poems and other pronouncements heralding the arrival of a golden age, either contemporaneously or in retrospect, are neither unique nor particularly surprising. It is perhaps more unusual that the accession of Diocletian has been more or less universally hailed by posterity as one of the most significant watersheds in the history of the Roman empire, marking the transition from the ‘military anarchy’ of a.d. 235–84 to the ‘dominate’ of the later empire.