CONCLUSIONS

Although the rescript against the Manichaeans has much in common in tone, intended reach and severity for non-compliance with Diocletian's Prices and Persecution Edicts, the fundamental difference was that the edicts qua edicts were not solicited.

By the time these more interventionist edicts were under consideration or even in place, Diocletian may have been led into assuming that because the codification of rescripts had gone well in the 290s (as evidenced by the codes' republication and expansion) and because the more assertive measure against the Manichaeans had been prosecuted with some energy, he was at liberty to legislate with unprecedented determinaВtion on further matters of public law. To his eyes, the newly expanded legal machinery would have appeared to be functioning smoothly, controlled from the centre and obediently applied on the ground.

This schema makes sense of the question of why Diocletian waited so long after his accession before embarking on the Prices and Persecution Edicts - Corcoran has recently argued that for his formulation of the Edicts, Diocletian depended on the support of his Caesar Galerius.⁴³ The proposal is

43 Corcoran вЂњPublication of LawвЂќ (n 38) 66-70.

based upon the dating and distribution of epigraphic copies of certain Tetrar- chic edicts, and its tenor is corroborated by the antipathy towards Galerius that is so prominent in Lactantius' narrative.^[233] At the same time, before he could proceed with his legislation on prices and against Christians with any realistic hope of success, perhaps Diocletian felt there was necessary legal groundwork to be completed, in the expansion of the judiciary, codification of constitutions and amendment of certain legal procedures. This would all take time and collaboration.

When Diocletian thought, rightly, that the law had been generally interВventionist from the 290s onwards, he underestimated the extent to which the interventions had to be welcome to work.

What he failed to appreciate is that the original motivation for legislation is a decent index of the likely success of its application. Codification of law in the 290s was a decisively proactive project, but it consisted mainly in a collection of rescripts - that is, it was founded on a вЂњpetition and responseвЂќ model. If codification succeeded, it was probably because it dealt in material which had stemmed from petitioners, such as the governors themselves or their predecessors, so the project was likely to meet their concerns. It was a similar case with the measure against the Manichaeans, where the individual charged to apply the law was the man who had petitioned for it, Julian. But the edictal system was qualitaВtively different in that it provided for legislation inspired from the centre. No doubt some zealous governors welcomed the Prices and Persecution Edicts, but many or most would simply not have been interested - they had not petitioned for a ruling, they were not waiting for a rescript, and they were not, in fact, looking to the law to regulate these aspects of their lives. The prefect Maximus is one such reluctant judge when he seems to condemn the veteran Julius to death under the duress of professional obligation rather than out of a deep-seated sense of justice.

The martyr acts, Lactantius and Eusebius provide a legacy of peaceful resistance to the Persecution Edicts, but this dubious Christian record aside, there is nothing in the later fourth century epitomisers or breviarists to suggest that the Prices or Persecution Edicts had any serious impact. Diocletian was an emperor of vision, but, misled by the success of the projects of public law in the 290s which gave the impression that imperial justice was being imitated by judges, he failed to realise that the edicts of 301 and 303 were not sufficiently in the interests of a sufficient number of people to work, subjects and judges alike. According to this argument we should not see Diocletian the way the Christians did, as a fiery-tempered, foolish and irrational despot. Rather, based on his experience before then, in the last years of his reign he believed he had the power to use unsolicited law to regulate both economic and religious activity, to dictate to whom sacrifice should be made or how much could be spent on a loaf of bread. In this he was wrong, but his mistake is understandable.

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Source: Cairns J.W., Plessis P.J. du. (eds.). Beyond Dogmatics: Law and Society in the Roman World. Edinburgh University Press,2007. - 236 p.. 2007

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