I just completed a quite excellent biography of the Emperor Diocletian, “Diocletian and the Military Restoration of Rome” by Lee Fratantuono. The author tells the story of what had to have been, adjusted for circumstances, one of the most successful emperors in Roman history. 

After the crisis of the 3rd Century, with the empire constantly torn between domestic upheaval, civil war, and foreign invasion, a military commander who was of lowly birth (either a freed slave or a descendant of slaves) named Dioclecian was the most successful of numerous bids to the throne in a time of yet another imperial deposition. The empire having been subjected to generations of turmoil at this point, security and restructuring were in order. Diocletian went on to have a remarkably successful reign as an imperial restorer. Pushing back barbarian tribes, taking Persia down a notch, and restoring stability to the Nubian frontier. 

His domestic record would be more mixed, but still impressive given his difficulties. Understanding, presciently as we know with the benefit of hindsight, that the empire was too large and unwieldy to be ruled by a single emperor and court, Diocletian set up an interesting experiment in government with the Tetrarchy: a division of the empire into four administrative units under two senior emperors more focused on running the state (Augustus) and two junior emperors (Ceasars), one under each of these, handling the field and frontier priorities. 

Diocletian also turned towards the internally divisive rise of Christianity, which he tried to stamp out in the army and public life after multiple public disorders had been caused in its name. Interestingly, his concerns with the religion seemed to be in line with the much later history written by Edward Gibbon, that they were a force disruptive to Roman unity due to their unwillingness to put the interests of society at large over the interests of their ideals. 

20 years of largely successful reign led to Diocletian retiring (the first emperor to voluntarily do so) to his seaside villa (which still exists today) to grow produce and live in post-political quiet. When people would ask him to return to power later he would famously remark: “If you could see the vegetables I grow with my own hands, you wouldn’t talk to me about empire.”

The Tetrarchy worked so long as everyone involved in it knew each other and had worked to save the empire together. Without Diocletian it began to decay, and would fall apart after his death. The experiment had worked in an initial crisis but it had no lasting power. Likewise, Diocletian’s persecutions of Christianity came too late to be effective. Despite their unprecedented size, they could not check the growth of the religion. Ironically, his administrative saving of the empire would facilitate the rise of Constantine and the beginning of the triumph of that religion, fundamentally changing Rome, though not in a way that would ever stop even the long-lived eastern half of it from being in a state of longform decline. Alternatively, it seems quite possible to me if Rome had collapsed during the Crisis of the 3rd Century that the religion would have been far less successful, having no hegemonic power to facilitate its propagation. But the Emperor was a patriot and he probably valued the saving of the state above that of the saving even of Hellenic culture.

I thought of two other historical figures while reading this book as comparison points. One, Tokugawa Iemitsu, I have already sort of written about and likely will write about more next year in a more professional capacity. Another, and one already ancient when Diocletian was reigning, was Horemheb, of New Kingdom Egypt’s 18th Dynasty. 

Like Diocletian, Horemheb was a commoner who had risen up the ranks of the military from a nobody to a scribe and an army commander. He had witnessed the rise of Akhenaten and the attempt by the royal court to impose Atenism, arguably the first known incarnation of monotheism, upon the state. Though the push to convert the kingdom ended after Akhenaten’s death, his possibly sickly son Tutenkhamun, most famous today for being so forgotten about no one even remembered to rob his tomb, did not exactly live long enough to reverse what had happened under his father’s cultural revolution. Replaced by the elderly administrator Ay, who in turn died leaving Horemheb the opportunity to claim the throne as a usurper, it was Horemheb who would complete the counter-revolution against Atenism. In due time he would initiate large scale legal and administrative reforms as well, bringing, as Diocletian would do a millennium and a half later, welcome stability after a time of upheaval. 

But whereas Diocletian’s reforms would bring only temporary reprieve in his various projects, Horemheb’s would lay the groundwork for the eventual greatest height of Egyptian power and prestige- despite the fact that he did not have any living descendants and represented the effective end of the 18th Dynasty. It would be the 19th that would reap most of the long term benefits of his rule. 

The similarities of Horemheb and Diocletian are obvious: both were outsiders who earned their way to power through skill, bravery, and cunning, rather than inheritors. As such, following the Khaldunian (or Howardian) path of an outsider who more clearly sees the problems of a decadent state than its entrenched establishment does. The differences, I would argue, was twofold: 

1. Horemheb reversed top-down changes, Diocletian attempted to reverse changes coming from the bottom up. Though a majority of the Roman population was pagan (and many would remain so for generations after Constantine) it was not yet something affiliated with the dying empire, but rather a response to its many past crisis. The Atenist experiment in Egypt, however, was undeniably tied to the government and its self-creation was a crisis which previously did not exist.

2. The geography of the late Roman Empire was a bloated mess with often hard to defend borders requiring a massive military presence in almost every region. Without the unprecedented regional unipolarity and prosperity of the situation from Octavian through Marcus Aurelius, unified policy on domestic matters was difficult. Egypt was far more rooted in a specific geographic context, even counting the New Kingdom’s expansionism compared to previous eras. To command the religious establishment to revert to more localized cults reflecting thousands of years of polytheism was not only easier, it could be done without fear of splitting the state or creating schism.

When these two differences are noticed, one conclusion jumps out at me; it is easier to renew a society without compromising its identity and cultural legacy if said society is restrained and regional, rather than having pretensions to universalism and perpetual hegemony. The Romans would eventually see in Christianity a continuation of their empire, a single creed to rule over all. The Egyptians, more ancient and secure and never having left the Nile as their core, held on to their already aeons-old sense of self for another 1500 years, only losing out later because it was a province of Rome. The two went down together, but it was Egypt that held the line of continuation far longer. In a world where everything eventually dies, this is all the more impressive.

I was reading this book on Diocletian for my own historical reasons, not for any contemporary reason. And yet the dropping of the White House’s 2025 National Security Strategy coincided with this activity which explicitly talks about the failures of hegemony, idealist interpretation of foreign policy, and the importance of civilizational states. Parts of it read like I could have written it myself. I still have some major disagreements with it, and think the present administration’s idea of what a civilization actually constitutes is undercooked and misguided, but this is a discourse I have been preparing for in the past few years. Rather than chasing a trend, it has been my goal to be ahead of and independent of them and I look forward to more of this. As it is, I am presently at work on a co-authored project for professional release early next year on the geographic nature of civilizational states. As such, it is always worth considering how large unwieldy empires can adapt to a necessary bloat-cutting phase of strategic reappraisal and retrenchment. Understanding why some could and others couldn’t accomplish this in a variety of times and places in history is key to assembling a full picture. 

So expect more on this front in the future. If civilizations are the core of large powerful entities, and there are to be more than one, as there always is, then it is not a famous ‘clash’ of values that should be sought, as the crusader wing of the political right wishes to conceive it, but a Metternichish concert of civilizations who disavow dreams of the universal empire or values for coexistence in balanced polycentrism. It is a future someone like Horemheb would have a better chance at understanding than our current missionary-elites, as he patronised not just temples to Amun, but also to Isis, Horus, and Set. All of whose temples existed at the same time along the ever-flowing Nile River. All of them were already ancient in the time of Akhenaten and had still yet to exist for long after his memory had been erased.