Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome, Episode 126, All the King's Men.

As you know, when Diocletian came to power in 284, he inherited an empire that had spent

the better part of 50 years getting kicked around the neighborhood, everywhere he looked,

things were in shambles.

He wanted to revive and restore the empire he had been taught to revere, and as he took

over, he faced no greater roadblock to this goal than the problem of the malfunctioning

governmental apparatus he now headed.

What had happened was that as the military crisis became worse and worse, the government

had basically become nothing more than the supply arm of the army.

If civilians entered into the government's calculations at all, it was only to determine

what they might have that the army might need.

Everything else by the dire necessities of the times was considered an unimportant distraction.

But now that the crisis had subsided, it became clear what sorts of really important

things had been deemed unimportant distractions, for example, a functioning judicial system.

Basically, everything that you would expect a government to do, the imperial government

had ceased to do.

It was time then to reinvent that government.

As we've seen, this reinvention started at the very top with the establishment of co-emperors

and then the tetrarchy, but it would descend all the way down to the localist of local

levels, as Diocletian insured that wherever there were Romans, the Roman government would

be there.

The big problem really was that too much was getting missed.

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