The Splitting of the World

 

In 284 AD—and you have to understand that numbers like that, years scratched into the long bone of history, carry a weight that most of us can barely feel, like putting your hand on a wall and sensing the cold of a thousand winters on the other side—Diocletian did something that no man had done before, and perhaps no man should have done at all. He split the world.

Oh, not literally. The world didn’t crack like a dropped plate, didn’t shudder or bleed, didn’t do any of the dramatic things that a story like this deserves. It just changed. Quietly. The way your house changes while you’re asleep, while some essential thing rearranges itself in the dark, and you wake up in the morning feeling different without knowing why.

His reasoning was sensible enough—sensible in that flat, practical way that the most consequential decisions always are, the ones that look perfectly ordinary right up until the moment they don’t. The empire had grown too massive, you see. It stretched like a drunk man with his arms flung wide, all the way from the gray mists of northern Britain to the baking dust of Syria. One man couldn’t hold all of that. One man could barely imagine all of that, could sit on his throne in Rome and close his eyes and try to picture a province at the far end of his domain and find only a dim sort of blankness, the mind’s inability to truly care about what it cannot see or touch or smell.

So Diocletian did what a sensible man does when the thing he is carrying becomes too heavy. He set part of it down.

He called it the Tetrarchy—a Greek word, because Romans loved to dress their innovations in borrowed clothes—and it was, in its way, genuinely brilliant. Four men to rule one empire. Two senior emperors, the Augusti, like two load-bearing pillars in a house that had grown too wide for three. And beneath them, two junior emperors, the Caesars, who were something between sons and students and hostages to the future. Galerius in the East. Constantius Chlorus in the West. Diocletian himself took the Eastern half—the rich half, the part that smelled of spices and old money—while his old comrade Maximian got the West, the younger son’s inheritance, all that cold wind and those restless Germanic tribes pressing at the borders like something that wants very badly to get inside.

Here is what was remarkable about it, the thing that historians note with a kind of admiring disbelief: Diocletian shared. He parceled out his absolute power and gave chunks of it to other men, the way you might tear off pieces of bread for hungry strangers. For a ruler in that age—hell, for a ruler in most ages—this was so unusual as to seem almost pathological, like a wolf deciding to let the other wolves eat first.

And yet it worked. God help us, it worked.

The borders held. The little fires of rebellion—and there were plenty, sprouting up like weeds all through the provinces, Bagaudae bandits in Gaul and native tribes making trouble in Asia Minor, the endless grinding resistance of people who resented being part of something so vast and so indifferent to their suffering—these were stamped out, or mostly stamped out, which in those days amounted to the same thing. In 298, Diocletian’s forces crushed an uprising in Egypt. Galerius pushed the Sassanids back in Mesopotamia. Maximian reclaimed Mauretania from the Berber tribes in Africa. Constantius sorted out Britain and the upper Rhine, which was apparently a full-time occupation all by itself.

Diocletian himself had stopped caring about the old throne in Rome. He governed from Nicomedia—a city in what we’d now call Turkey—because that was where the real power was, where the real money was, where the real future was. Rome was the past dressed up in marble and nostalgia. The East was where the story was going next.

He knew that. He knew a lot of things. But even men who know a lot of things miss certain details.

The thing he missed—or perhaps refused to see, because some truths are easier to look past than to look at directly—was what was growing in the dark corners of his eastern domain. The Christians. The ones he had spent years trying to eradicate with a thoroughness and a fury that left a stain on his legacy that time has never quite managed to wash away.

He called it the Great Persecution, and great was not an exaggeration. He believed, with the deep bone-certainty of a man who had clawed his way up from a peasant’s hut in Dalmatia to the throne of the world, that Rome’s gods were its protection, that the old pagan rites were the mortar holding the empire together. The Christians, with their one God and their refusal to burn incense at the altars, were termites in the wall. He could see them destroying something essential, something structural, and he did what frightened powerful men have always done when they see destruction they cannot stop.

He tried to destroy it first.

It didn’t work. It never works. That’s the thing about persecution—it’s a fire that thinks it’s putting itself out.

And then Diocletian did the thing that genuinely made him unlike any ruler before or since. In 305 AD, with the empire still standing and the Tetrarchy still functioning and his own power still more or less intact, he walked away. He abdicated. He went home to Dalmatia, to the great stone palace he’d had built for himself on the Adriatic coast, and he grew cabbages.

Cabbages.

The man who had ruled the known world sat in his garden and grew cabbages, and when the other rulers—the men who came after, the scrambling violent inheritors of his careful system—begged him to come back, to fix the chaos they’d made of his Tetrarchy, he reportedly told them that if they could see what beautiful cabbages he was growing, they wouldn’t ask him such a foolish question.

Maybe he was joking. Maybe he had simply seen enough of what large ambitions do to men, and to the people unlucky enough to be governed by them, and had decided that a good cabbage was worth more than all of it.

He left the world fractured, even if he thought he’d left it repaired. His successors would take the two-halves system and push it further, and further, and further still—Constantine moving the capital east to the city that would bear his name, Constantinople, that gleaming new Rome on the Bosphorus—until in 395 AD the split became permanent, as permanent as things ever get in history, which is to say it lasted until it didn’t.

The Western Empire would fall first. It always seems to be the younger son who goes first. Germanic tribes—Visigoths, Vandals, men with axes and hunger and legitimate grievances, men who had sometimes even served in Rome’s own armies—dismantled it piece by piece over the long twilight of the fifth century. In 476, a man named Odoacer, who had once been a Roman officer and apparently remembered the password to all the doors, deposed the last Western emperor, a boy with the almost offensively symbolic name of Romulus Augustulus. Romulus. Augustus. The founder and the first emperor, all rolled into one last sad puppet.

The Eastern Empire kept going. It kept going for another thousand years, which is either a testament to the fundamental soundness of Diocletian’s original idea or proof that some things survive simply because they can’t figure out how to stop.

It changed, of course. Everything changes, given enough time. The Latin language gave way to Greek. The gladiatorial games and the great bath-houses and the pagan festivals faded, replaced by the sound of church bells and the smell of incense—Christian incense now, the same religion Diocletian had tried to burn out of the world. Byzantine scholars kept the old books, copied the old texts, held them like something precious against the coming dark. The Iliad. The Odyssey. The accumulated weight of centuries of human thought, wrapped in vellum and preserved in cold libraries while the world outside tore itself apart.

Justinian tried to put it all back together in the sixth century. Tried to reunite East and West, to close the wound that Diocletian had first opened and the centuries had ripped wide. His generals won battles. His lawyers codified the law. His architects built the Hagia Sophia, that impossible dome floating in the Istanbul sky, which seems like it should fall but doesn’t, has never fallen, stands there still today like an argument that some things are built to last.

But his conquests didn’t hold. They never do, the conquests of men who want to reverse what history has decided. The West stayed lost.

The East, that old survivor, kept going until 1453, when the Ottomans came with their cannons and finished what Odoacer had started nearly a millennium before.

One empire. Split in two. And between Diocletian walking away to grow his cabbages and the last moment of Byzantium, a thousand years of human life, human hope, human cruelty, human beauty.

History is like that sometimes. You think you’re watching the end of something, and it turns out you’re only watching the end of the first half.