LLTHOUGH IT IS NORMAL, AND INDEED PROEOUNDLY NECESSARY, TO break up the historical past into periods that can be studied in a more or less manageable way, many topics are illuminated by deliberately ignoring traditional historiographical boundaries, opening up a broader comparative analysis by considering them across a wider span of time. Roman imperial history is certainly one such example, not least because the habit of imposing a sharp divide between early and later empires at the accession of Diocletian is so deeply ingrained. One need only scan a few representative titles on a bookshelf to see how pervasive the division is. Yet even a moment’s casual reflection will reveal how many continuities between second and fourth centuries the traditional periodization tends to obscure. In the same way that there is a pressing need to examine the fifth-century West within its narrower context, in order to minimize the distorting effects of past historiography, so too should we examine the fourth-century empire in the perspective of the “longue duree.”436 That is to say, it is sometimes worth considering how the fourth century fits into the sweep of social and political developments that span Roman imperial history, rather than confining oneself to the normal paradigm that sees it as the unique creation of the Tetrarchic and Constantinian periods. It is true that taking too long a view can unnecessarily flatten out large and fundamental differences among different historical periods, but it can also point to genuine trends, whether of continuity or change, that are only visible over centuries.437 Two areas in which taking the long view has demonstrably produced new insights into Roman history are onomastics and the epigraphic habit. In the first case, a survey of the
Evidence for naming patterns has shown that, taken over the long and middle term, the vogue for the tria nomina is a short-lived and historically contingent practice that we, and not the Romans themselves, have elevated to an idealized norm.438 In the same way, the global picture of the epigraphic habit looks very different—and tells a very different story—if one traces it from 50 bc to ad 500 rather than from ad 50 to ad 300.439
None of that is to deny the necessity of periodization, nor to argue that standard periodizations do not often have powerful utility and real justification. Thus, in the present case, there is a real and basic distinction between the post-Tetrarchic period and earlier centuries, in that the section of government that was directly part of an imperial, rather than a local, hierarchy was dramatically larger.440 That brought with it social changes, as did the gradual creation of separate military and civilian hierarchies that had different sets of qualifications for political participation, but an equal share in rank and status, and hence authority.441 Nevertheless, and even given this fundamental distinction, the study of regional aristocracies benefits from the sort of long-term analysis noted previously. That is because at one fundamental level, the fourth-century history of regional aristocracies represents a recognizable stage in a long-standing pattern of assimilation and integration by different provincial societies into the larger imperial system. This pattern—which in the Latin-speaking empire corresponds roughly to the chronology of Roman conquest, and in the Greek-speaking provinces to the chronology of Roman administrative centers—dates back to the very beginning of the imperial period (or even before, as in parts of Spain, Narbonensis, and bits of Asia Minor). A great many regional prosopographical studies illustrate these trends.442 Here, however, it may be useful to reconsider the evidence from a wider perspective. Doing so might make it possible to reveal the structural preconditions for defining and channeling political and social integration into imperial administration during the fourth century. This chapter therefore concentrates on the long-term patterns of integration by regional aristocracies into the orbit of an administration that reached all the way upward to the imperial court, in a way that suggests precisely how fourth-century conditions fitted into the longer patterns of imperial history, and also why that system created so stable a political landscape in the aftermath of the third century’s experience of imperial breakdown.
As just mentioned, it is clear that one key difference between the early and later empires is the proportion of the elite population that took a direct part in imperial administration, or might even expect to have the opportunity to do so. Broadly speaking, the pattern of elite entry into the imperial sphere, as opposed to an essentially local sphere loosely tied to the central administration, corresponds to the date at which a region was conquered by the Roman empire. The process of increasing acculturation, or what is often called Romanization, in regional populations generally coincides with the number of generations that had passed from the initial Roman conquest, though with the caveat that the integrative process seems barely to begin anywhere, Baetica and Narbonensis included, until the first three decades of the last century Bc.443 The only exception to this pattern is where the geography of a region simply defied the integrative process: heavily mountainous regions seem always to fall outside basic norms observable elsewhere.444 Overall, the process of elite integration tracks the progress of transformation from a Roman empire governed by, and exploited for the benefit of, Italians, into a Roman empire made up of provincial Romans. It usually took no more than three generations to render local elites in the West indistinguishable from the municipal elites of Italy, which meant their having both citizenship and the equestrian census.445 In the West, these facts tended to mean that within four or five generations of the Roman conquest, regions might start to show senators; in the East, the same pattern of senatorial adlection can be noted, but with a very different type of concomitant Romanization, political but not meaningfully cultural. If one looks at the prosopography of both the senatorial and equestrian aristocracy of the first century, one finds men whose origins are narrowly class based, and one can watch the gradual admission of municipal elites, then colonial elites from the
Provinces, finally those whose provincial roots are less obviously colonial or Italian.446 The emperors provide a quick chronological shorthand for the process, from the patrician Claudii, to the municipal Flavians, the colonial Trajan, and the provincial Severus. What this imperial shorthand does not show is the distinctions between senators and equestrians.
Senators are by far the most visible section of the process of regional integration, and their importance cannot be minimized.447 Nevertheless, the development of a separate equestrian elite that was functionally divided from the senate is of increasing significance from the later first century on. Already under Augustus, the foundation had been laid for a functional distinction where there had previously been a very fluid boundary; the first century saw this division harden, so that senatorial and equestrian castes differed not just in their level of political engagement but rather in their whole life cursus. One part of this difference lay in the relationship to the emperor implied by senatorial or equestrian rank. Right through the Antonine period, the accession of families to senatorial rank was usually a matter of introduction to, or acquaintance with, an emperor, personalizing the status in a way that could not help create a senatorial caste. By contrast, the origins of equestrian rank as nothing more than a census category meant that the barriers to entering imperial service as an equestrian were lower, and that entry to an imperial career as an equestrian could take place at a much greater distance, physical or social, from the person of the emperor. As a result, the ordo equester not only became more professionalized, but was also dramatically more diverse geographically than was the senatorial. Whereas senators tend to cluster not just in distinct provinces but also in distinct regions within them, the equestrian order spreads more thickly on the ground, throughout what we might call the “civilized” provinces of the empire and even beyond them. Again, one must emphasize that the explanation for this is that the lower reaches of equestrian service could be reached by census qualification and the vagaries of individual patronage, rather than mainly by direct experience of the emperor and admission to his presence.448
The corollary of this professionalization of equestrian service was an increasing and necessary reliance upon equestrians, as a group within which talent had greater play than birth. It has recently been argued that what separates the Severan empire from the preceding Antonine period is the unembarrassed acknowledgment of an equestrian elite as the main ministers of state, since members of the equestrian order were more numerous and more reliably qualified than senators.'4 It was therefore only a matter of time before equestrians began to look capaces imperii, fit to rule, which happened quite abruptly within the space of a generation. Macrinus was able to claim the purple, but not to hold it, and his equestrian rank was clearly part of the problem.'5 The accession of Philip, by contrast, had no such repercussions.'6 In other words, within a generation, equestrian origins had ceased to be objectionable. The fourth century famously remembered this transformation, if the epitomators are to be trusted, as a ban by the wicked Gallienus on senatorial officeholding.'7 This canard, present in just one strand of fourth-century historiography and clearly misreading third-century rank distinctions as if they were post-Constantinian, nevertheless acknowledges the dominance of the equestrian order in the government of the Severan empire.'8
What I have said hitherto may seem to stand at several removes from the consideration of regional aristocracies in the empire of the fourth century. Nevertheless, the professionalization of the equestrian order and its dominant role in governance of the Severan period is of considerable importance for the development of such aristocracies, in more than one way. For one thing, it was equestrian officialdom that for the most part formed the bridge to local administration, whether that meant at the level of municipal curia or boule, or in interactions with the bailiffs of imperial and senatorial estates. More numerous and less distant than the senatorial elite, they provided the links that gave local aristocracies access to the imperial superstructure above them. Though we can very rarely trace elite families across the poorly documented watershed of the Constantinian period, where we can do so, we find connections back to regional and equestrian elites of the third century. Even more important than that in the long term, however, was the model of government that equestrian elites provided for the third century. By this I mean the famous militarization of the period, which still remains “die Zeit der Soldatenkaiser” for many scholars.'9 One could legitimately argue that we should understand the rising 449 450 451 452 453 454 prominence of military officers of varying ranks more as the acknowledgment of equestrianization than as a distinct, even sinister, phenomenon. That is to say, in the military hierarchy as in the equestrian, it was possible to rise on the basis of merit, competence trumping birth and sometimes even personal connections.455 The grudging, and soon the perfectly natural, acceptance of equestrians at the apex of power went hand in hand with, and helped minimize objections to, the rise of a non-senatorial military elite in the Severan period.456
That rise has of course been seen traditionally as a response to military crisis, and there is no doubt that at one level it was precisely that.457 Yet it was also more than just that, because the military crisis cannot be the whole story: as many authors have systematically demonstrated, very large parts of the empire simply did not suffer a military crisis, or even much of a crisis of any sort at all.458 The whole empire, however, experienced the effects of imperial uncertainty and territorial division.459 This experience of division was particularly important in the development of regional elites and for their potential participation in imperial government.460 When the Severan empire broke down into regional blocs, each of them was equally imperial and equally Roman. That is true despite our tendency to privilege the central empire conceptually over other regions and to talk about regional empires as if the multiplication of emperors and centers of imperial government implied a hierarchy among them. Although in constitutional terms the failure of the Roman senate to recognize some of the rivals to Gallienus and his successors did make them usurpers, the principles of legitimation that had previously made an accession acceptable were in flux in this period; we should therefore at least notice that, to choose the obvious examples, all the evidence for Postumus and Vaballathus suggests real ambiguity about their legitimacy, and full acceptance of it in many quarters.461 That regional breakdown of the empire into many equally Roman and equally imperial sections is, one may suggest, essential to understanding what then happened in the fourth century.
The multiplication of emperors and their establishments created the need for more service elites. These had necessarily to be drawn from a smaller geographical base than previously because individual emperors each had access to just some portions of the whole empire. Just as necessarily, the smaller geographical base from which rival emperors had to work meant a need to dig deeper locally for elite populations able to serve. That, in turn, meant the deeper penetration of imperial, as opposed to urban or municipal, service into the life of the provinces. The fact that Roman civil law methods of administration, and the legal procedures that went with them, became so widely diffused in the third century should not surprise. At one level, it was the result of Caracalla’s citizenship edict. The Antonine Constitution may have been no more than the grandiloquent gesture of a megalomaniac princeps, but its consequence was to make imperative the practical working out of what it meant for every inhabitant of the empire to have access to Roman law. The universalism that went with this change was articulated by the philosophical jurists like Ulpian, and that too had consequences for fourth-century government, not least the capacity of emperors from the time of the Decian persecution to aspire to uniformity across the empire in ways that would have been unthinkable a hundred years before. The Decian and Valerianic persecutions, after all, combined an unmistakable message of complete uniformity as legitimizing principle, while assuming that the path to that uniformity was a purely managerial problem. They were the epitome of an equestrian mode of activity, while simultaneously an outgrowth of the universalism encoded in Severan actions and aspirations. But if we can interpret the mid-century persecutions as a surprising, but fairly clear-cut, consequence of Severan aspirations, a rather more immediate consequence of Caracalla’s edict was the necessity to multiply experts, to ensure that the same legal—and hence administrative—norms could operate wherever the emperor’s subjects were subject to Roman law, which was now everywhere. So it is that, already under Severus Alexander, we can see the development of reproducible, universal practices beginning to homogenize vagaries of provincial governance that at times dated back to the moment of a region’s incorporation into the empire.
Paradoxically, the breakdown of imperial government in the middle decades of the century actually encouraged, rather than retarded the universalizing of Roman legal and administrative norms that began with the Severans. This was because emperors and their establishments were physically closer to many more people than before, and that is what is most important for our purposes here. Regional breakdown, regionalization of elites, and the deepening penetration of imperial government went together. In Gaul, the Gallic emperors had to draw upon the talents of men not just from Narbonensis, but from regions north of the Loire that had never contributed much in the way of manpower to imperial as opposed to local government. In the East, the ambivalent role of a man like Vaballathus, and his ability to legitimize himself in Near Eastern as well as Greek terms, did not make his administration less Roman, or retard the process by which Roman law entered Syrian and Levantine practice. Perhaps even more important for the future, the rise of men from the Danubian provinces to dramatic prominence in the latter part of the third century needs to be understood in just this way, and not just, as it often is, in terms of Illyrians making good soldiers; instead, we have to register the pragmatic fact that for more than twenty years—an entire generation’s first steps on the cursus honorum—the central part of the empire was made up of just Italy, Africa, and Illyricum, from which the whole equestrian basis of the governing and officer classes had to be drawn.462 This fragmentation, a historical accident of third-century government, thus had the effect of accentuating what we might have expected anyway, the rise of a Balkan elite in the third and fourth generation after the Balkan provinces ceased to be more than a military backwater and became integrated into the larger empire as a result of Marcus’ Danubian wars.463 When the central imperial government, now dominated by men from the Balkans, reconquered or reintegrated other parts of the empire that had gone their own way for a generation, the Balkan elites remained dominant. But they found, throughout a newly united empire, a whole new set of regions that had developed, in the same way as their own Balkan homelands, the experience of participation in imperial government. The fourth century, as we shall now see, saw the working out of the effects of this change, both in terms of monarchical government and its interaction with newly distinctive regional aristocracies. That is to say, the experience of multiple imperial governments (the “Mehrkaiserherrschaft” of German-language scholarship) both produced the conditions on the ground with which fourth-century emperors had to deal and also gave them the tools they needed to master those conditions and avoid the dislocations of the third century; or to put the same idea slightly differently, fourth-century emperors were able to manage the expectations of newly vigorous regional aristocracies in part by recreating the “Mehrkaiserherrschaft” of the fourth century in a way that did not undermine or compromise the unity of the empire as such.
That solution might well have been impossible if Diocletian had not had the good fortune and skill to hold his throne for more than twenty years, reintegrating the empire’s territory under a single regime, if not under a single emperor.464 It seems reasonable to emphasize the importance of both luck and skill to this achievement: skill in recognizing that late third-century campaign armies themselves expected to be led by an emperor, and would indeed make their own general emperor if this expectation was not met; skill in finding a system of subordinate emperors, an imperial college, that could simultaneously supply a unified front and give the armies the imperial leadership they wanted; and luck in picking the right subordinates. After all, we ought never to forget how extraordinary it was that Maximian, Galerius, and Constantius should have tolerated their lesser status for so many years, or that even when the first Tetrarchy broke down, every rival claimant to the succession accepted the principle that it was the approval of the senior member of the imperial college (i. e., Galerius) that conferred legitimacy.465 Nevertheless, the reintegration that Diocletian imposed militarily before then attempting to create a single governmental style, could not in itself erase or obviate the developments of the previous fifty years. Rather, it acknowledged them and opened the way for them to continue to function. That is to say, as Diocletian and his co-rulers reimposed control on the various corners of the empire, they discovered a situation in which it was simply not possible to restore the proportions of imperial and local government that had existed in the early Severan period. In Britain, in Gaul, in the Spanish provinces and Africa, in Syria and Anatolia and Egypt, not to mention the Balkans, elite populations had come to expect a part in ruling the empire, not merely as subjects of an imperial government but as participants in it.466 Rather than the apex of local hierarchies representing a privileged position as interlocutors with imperial government, those hierarchies continued upward, onto the rungs of an imperial establishment—an imperial establishment which under Diocletian and his co-rulers was no longer as geographically restricted as it had been a decade or two before.
Here is a place where the scholarly habit of separating high and later empires at the accession of Diocletian is fundamentally deceptive. It makes Diocletian—who was undoubtedly a canny and resourceful ruler—into a revolutionary, remaking the empire from first principles.467 That is, his multiplication of provinces and the imperial office, the separation of civilian from military government, and the vast expansion of governmental posts become conscious innovations, conventionally analyzed as part of an effort to prevent the recurrence of third-century problems. That analysis, though no doubt true in part, minimizes or ignores the materials with which Diocletian had to work, which is to say, an array of blocs of regional elites who had had the experience of service in a hierarchy that led at however many removes up to an emperor and his court. The gap between local administration and imperial administration had narrowed, while the number of contact points between the two had multiplied and broadened out. There was no way to avoid taking the newfound expectations of these third-century regional elites into account; to have ignored them would have been to court precisely the sort of regional breakdown that had plagued the third century. It was, incidentally, this reality on the ground that helped precipitate the decline of curial government in the fourth century: what looks from one perspective like flight from the curias, looks from another perspective like a flight toward a new and better form of political activity, within imperial government.468
For these reasons, the machinery of government that began to be put in place under Diocletian and the Tetrarchs, and which was entrenched still more firmly under Constantine and Licinius, should be seen as more than just a response to third-century crisis, however important that response might have been. Rather, it should be seen as the working out of the various trends hitherto discussed: the integration of regional elites into the imperial system on a timeline that corresponds to the larger chronology of imperial conquest and urbanization, but an integration that was accelerated by the regional breakdown of the third century; the rise of an imperial service elite in the form of equestrian professionals that decisively tilted the balance of opportunity for power away from the accident of birth; and the expectation of participation in government which the existence of this service elite brought with it. That these trends continued under Diocletian and his successors is a point of fundamental continuity between earlier and later empires. What is more, the Tetrarchic innovation that split military and civilian cursus apart was an extension of the principle of professionalization that had grown up since Severan times.469 Some of the stages by which the Diocletianic reforms were solidified and formalized are lost in the evidentiary lacunae of the Constantinian period, and especially in the evidentiary void of Licinian government, a memory hole into which the victory of Constantine sank his rivals’ innovations.470 Nevertheless, the new bureaucratic world that emerges in the pages of the Theodosian Code is one whose roots are clearly to be found in the soil of the third century.
Historians of the early empire who turn to the fourth century are immediately struck by the existence of recognizable regional groupings of elites that played an active role as regional cliques in imperial politics. This is an absolute novelty, barely comparable to earlier trends, such as that by which certain regions might often begin to produce their first senators simultaneously. That regions, and regional elites, existed under the early empire is obvious, but whatever small percentage of them chose to leave their regions and function in an empire-wide environment, did so in terms of a single, empire-wide government, not merely as products of their local place. That is why we meet Lusius Quietus at court, not in Libya; Cassius Dio in Rome, not Bithynia.471 In the fourth century, by contrast, there existed a greater space for regional behaviors. Joining the structure of empire-wide government brought with it no necessary element of deracination from regional roots. Because the barriers to entry were lower, and also because the proportionate sizes of imperial as opposed to local government were so different, one could be both provincial aristocrat and imperial official simultaneously with much greater ease. The development of regional aristocracies with regional interests that played themselves out at the court of the emperors is a distinctly late imperial phenomenon: the gradual rise in the number of Baeticans and Narbonensians under Nero and the Flavians did not produce regional factions in the same way that we can identify Pannonian, Frankish, Gallic, Cappadocian, or Tarraconensian groupings in the fourth century. One could not attempt a version of Syme’s Roman Revolution for the Constantinian era, because the prosopographical evidence does not exist and the epigraphic base on which it would have to rest is unavailable for the period, but one can do so for the later Constantian period right up through the 420s. If one tries, one finds regional and provincial groupings leading to the same sort of alliances over time and space that Syme and his successors have found for the municipal connections of the last century of the Republic.472
A consideration of fourth-century prosopography not only discloses regional groupings but also suggests that frontier regions—those along the limes but physically beyond its notional line—should be analyzed in the same way as those within the limes, and their regional aristocracies should be understood in the same terms as those within the limes. The Alamanni of the Constantian period are a useful test case, though the same exercise works elsewhere along the limes, on Rhine and Danube, in Armenia and Arabia, and in Africa.473 A close study of the career paths and the prosopographical connections of men from frontier regions, regardless of which side of the limes they came from, demonstrates that these are structurally identical to the sorts of career paths and prosopographical connections that one can trace for members of provincial groups like the Pannonians who came to power with Valentinian or the Gauls who followed Ausonius into office under Gratian.474 The key was not regional origin, but the way that serving as an officer at the imperial court put one into contact both with other officers from distant corners of the empire and also with civilian officials from all over the place.475 Once such contacts were made, individual connections spiraled out into networks linking regional elites to one another, often over long distances and in surprisingly symbiotic ways: Franks and Pannonians, Alamanni and Syrians, for instance.476 Thus the Alamannic careerists like Agilo, Latinus, Scudilo, and Gomoarius whom we meet in Ammianus and elsewhere are in all their behaviors equivalent to members of a provincial aristocracy anywhere in the empire. Agilo’s career looks remarkably like that of Valentinian I or indeed of the historian Ammianus Marcellinus.477 The latter came from a provincial family that had progressed beyond curial status into imperial service. Ammianus, presumably because of a local connection in the imperial court, began his career as a protector domes-ticus, which only the well connected were allowed to do. He was serving as a protector in the same years that Valentinian, Agilo, and many other tribunes and comites were gradually being promoted up the chain of command thanks to connections that Ammianus himself seems to have lacked. In other words, not only are the origins and careers of Agilo and Ammianus fundamentally comparable, but Agilo played the game of fourth-century politics better than did his fellow military careerist from Syria. We are used to bracketing men like Agilo off into a separate narrative of barbarians in Roman service, or “Hofgermanen” slowly taking over the empire. Yet the evidence suggests that, practically speaking, Agile and his compatriots behaved like any other members of a provincial clique and must therefore be analyzed in those terms.
What this means is that during the fourth century, regional dynasties from the “wrong side” of the limes could behave identically to those from the “right side” because they represented the final stage in the long-term developments sketched previously. The frontier military regions from which these men came stood, during the fourth century, in the same relationship to the metropolitan centers of empire as the Illyrian and northern Gallic regions had done in the Severan period. Just as the third century, with its regionalized breakdown of administration, witnessed the rise of regional groups that had been practically invisible in the early empire—Danubians most especially—so, in the fourth century, did this process of regional integration into the imperial hierarchy of administration continue, this time to regional elites who lay on the far side of a notional frontier. There were some differences, to be sure, which we cannot afford to minimize—the relative poverty of the infrastructure and the relative absence of a villa culture beyond the Rhine-Danube, for instance, or the impossibility of knowing quite where the limes actually lay in Tingitania, Numidia, or Libya. Yet the empirical evidence of fourth-century careers is equally impossible to ignore. Despite the existence of a rhetoric of civilization and barbarism, which could be used as a weapon in political life, no practical distinction existed between members of regional elites from different sides of the limes. In the end, this fact should not be thought too surprising. Viewed in the perspective of the long-term, the incorporation of men from the very furthest edges of empire— even from regions which in some ways lay beyond that edge—was merely the latest stage in the long-standing process by which regional aristocracies were assimilated and integrated into the administration of a Roman empire.
It was, simultaneously, part of the phenomenon of contested monarchy with which the present volume is mainly concerned. From the perspective of late Roman elites, the opportunities to participate in an imperial system that emerged from the course of the third-century crisis of imperial legitimacy could not be surrendered in the wake of Diocletian’s restoration of imperial power. And that was the case even though the new political dispensation had its own new vocabulary of imperial legitimation, a vocabulary that worked in both directions, both in the new ways by which the emperor legitimated his position, and in the ways that imperial power could authorize or bestow legitimacy on aristocratic groups that had no great claim to antiquity or status of their own.478 Indeed, as the fourth century progressed, and particularly in the
East, a bureaucratic elite wholly dependent on the emperor became ever more entrenched, displacing older polis-centered elites by virtue of its access to both the perquisites that imperial service brought with it and, perhaps most important, to the gold solidi that were the prestige currency in which real wealth circulated from mid-century onward.479
From the imperial point of view, these more thoroughly integrated regional elites provided a basis on which imperial legitimacy itself rested, at least to the extent that it was to a particular emperor to whom the elites turned for the legal basis and symbolic accoutrements of their own power. Perhaps as significantly, this mutually reinforcing system channeled opposition to imperial authority into far more predictable and therefore manageable courses than had been the case during the free-for-all of the third century. The fourth century was just as violent as the third, and though civil wars were less frequent than they had been, they were nevertheless quite commonplace. All the same, this sort of challenge to imperial authority was always very much a challenge to an individual ruler, on grounds—sometimes presumably local or sectional grounds—that are only rarely visible to us. They were conducted in a way that was fundamentally centripetal, unlike the centrifugal warfare of the third century. That is, fourth-century civil wars were conducted within a fundamentally stable system, one in which regime change at one or another imperial court neither necessarily implied the breakup of the empire into component regions, nor even the dissolution of the imperial college, since the possibility of cooptation was always quite real. Neither armies nor bureaucracies had to be purged, nor did any but the most senior or the most culpable supporters need be suppressed along with their emperor, unless doing so would serve some particular exemplary purpose. That fact reveals something quite meaningful about the fourth century: for nearly a hundred years, the basically equestrian solution to problems of imperial legitimacy which Diocletian put in place held strong. It was a solution that noticed and made use of the depth of elite talent across a very large empire in ways that the Augustan and Antonine regimes had never so much as contemplated, but that also increased the scope of that large empire’s regionalization. And it succeeded in maintaining unified, indeed bureaucratic, government across that vast empire, in large part by channeling any contestation of the imperial monarchy in ways that allowed for such challenges to be controlled.
World History
