(back to Flavian Cult)
The Roman world of wisdom and commerce as remembered and cherished by the Flavian cultists was long over and gone. In its place was a desolate land of plague and rampant violence. People turned to mystery cults to help understand this transition, and began to turn to more radical forms of sacrifice and debasement in order to gain the favor of the gods. Starvation and Death became the alderman and priest in every town. The Flavian cult in this environment, with its “Good News” promise of the return of an anointed leader who would bring Rome back into a new golden era, must have seemed like a siren song to many agrarian and underclass Romans.
Rome was saved through a radical transformation driven by an unexpectedly brilliant emperor with a wonkish fascination with bureaucracy named Diocletian. He had risen through the ranks during this chaotic time to become the commander of the Imperial bodyguard, which left him in the peculiar position of being the last man standing after a long period of civil war, at a time when Empire had been failing so long, it was rarely noted or honored except by immigrant Goths who embraced Roman culture as well as they could manage. Diocletian took the opportunity to radically reshape governance, economy, and religion. New state boundaries were drawn, doubling the number of states; a new layer of oversight created and the number of Caesars quadrupled; barter replaced the useless silver currency, and new rules locking families into specific jobs were put in place. In a move that made the East irate, Diocletian changed the Imperial cult, displacing the Invincible Sun in favor of the traditional Jupiter and Heracles. Most of these changes were key in the continued existence of empire, even though many were hugely unpopular at the time.
One of Diocletian’s innovations was dividing the empire into four quadrants, and then establishing a process by which four emperors would rule concurrently, each in their own quadrant. His dream was that each Caesar would rule for ten or so years, then retire, passing off the job to the next guy on the ladder. By dividing up the work, and giving more power to people over smaller areas, Diocletian was able to make the Roman Empire governable. No matter what the problem was, there was someone with enough authority at hand to direct the legions, make treaties, and print money. And when one of these positions opened up, everyone would just shift up as needed without a lot of pesky civil war or revolution.
Imperial coinage, which had up until then generally featured the face of the current emperor, began to feature a new icon – an image of four horsemen (sometimes four men on a single horse), to represent the relative equality in power of the four emperors – whomever they may be. This image was symbolic of the new empire where everything was planned for and well managed. It also became representative of all of the disruptive changes imposed by Diocletian. Constantine the Usurper adopted the Flavian cult and added a new Revelation to their scriptures, naming Diocletian’s executive branch as the “four horsemen of the Apocalypse” and the imposition of his tyrannical changes the “End of the World” and promising to bring a new “Kingdom of God” where he would right all wrongs.
Constantine presented himself as the promised return of Christ, the anointed Flavian Caesar, as a hero to the beleaguered Romans, and in direct opposition to the cultural and political changes inflicted by Diocletian’s regime. Constantine had failed to “shift up” within Constantine’s system fast enough for his ego, so he rejected Diocletian’s system and proceeded to destroy each Caesar militarily until he needed only to capture Diocletian’s East to take full control of empire. Constantine sent his evangelists into Diocletian’s lands to rally people to his side from Flavian cult pulpits, and he used Flavian cult traditions to identify his usurpation as a “revolution of the people”. The stories of Diocletian persecuting Christians were stories of him trying to clamp down on political shenanigans from the Constantinian camp.
After completing his military victory, Constantine restored the Flavian cult as the official Imperial cult, with his own father (who had actually died as Caesar), as “Father in Heaven”. Constantine’s opportunistic embrace of the Flavian cult was problematic for (some elements of?) the existing leadership for whom no further Flavian emperors were truly possible. The old form of the cult became termed “Arian”, after the priest Arius who complained about the changes Constantine was making to the cult. The new form of the cult was called ‘Trinitarian’, and it referenced the complex formula by which the key theological trinity, God the Father in Heaven, the Son of God, and the Spirit of Rome, was interrelated. All of this was defined in the first (of many) ecumenical councils, or meetings between the bishops of Rome.
Nicea hosted the first such council, in which Arianism was officially set aside in favor of the new formulation. However, this didn’t settle the matter, so another ecumenical council was called, then another, then another, sparking what today is called the Heresy Wars. The public manifestation of a cold civil war between the various bishops of the dying empire was a series of conflicting bulls in which the various bishops attempted to determine which among them would rule the empire through increasingly curious philosophical gyrations. Constantine had chosen Byzantium as his ‘New Rome’, but by the time the Heresy Wars had ended, the old Rome retained primacy, and the Flavian branch of the Imperial Cult was now called ‘Christianity’.
Another of Diocletian’s innovations, one that Constantine did not destroy, was the innovation of ‘overseers’, which was a new hierarchical layer of governmental oversight that had responsibility over three or four states of Empire, but with the rights and privileges of an emperor within their realm. The word Diocletian used is today more readily translated as ‘bishop’ in English. The original twelve bishops each had three or four governors that directly reported to them, and every three bishops had a Caesar whom they could call upon to bring military reinforcements. It was a very neat system that worked wonders in terms of keeping the borders secure and rebellions in check.
Constantine did not change the power of the bishops, but he did invite all six of the Eastern bishops together in Nicea to define how his new Imperial cult was going to work. The famous formula of the Trinity was hammered out in the conference, but something else was discovered, too. The bishops discovered that they, as a collective, had far more power than any emperor, and began to work together in opposition to the emperor. All emperors after Constantine, save perhaps for Justinian, were puppets of the bishops. It wasn’t long before they decided they no longer needed an emperor and began to endorse Kings who owed them direct fealty.
Under the bishop-controlled empire, all of the cults began to be pressured to convert to the Imperial cult, and failing that had roving mobs of Christian monastics burn their books and temples, and set upon their membership with acid and/or flames. Great Mother cults quickly converted to churches dedicated to Mary, and many temples to traditional gods became churches dedicated to Mary, Joseph, the apostles, and the saints. Cults that failed to assimilate were edged out politically and economically.
Exclusion became the official policy in 450 when one of the last emperors ruled that Christianity would become the exclusive faith of empire and all others were no longer tolerated. All of the schools and centers of learning were destroyed and the teachers killed or exiled over a span of about twenty years. Within a generation, Rome had illiterate governors and an economy so bad it was improved by plague.
The End.
After the credits roll, the scene opens in an area east of Egypt where the Christian mobs didn’t reach and the wisdom of the ancients was not forgotten, grew an Islamic revolution that snatched away two thirds of the empire’s land holdings in thirty years and within a century threatened to crush the remainder in a pincer move. But then the Islamic tide rolled back, and European Christendom discovered something unexpected left behind in the Muslem cities – the writings of the ancient Greeks, translated into Arabic. This rekindled a love of learning among Europeans after a few centuries of embracing the stupid. With the development of movable type, everyone wanted the ‘new learning’, and the power of the Roman Church finally began to ebb.
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