Why Diocletian Retired Here

In the course of our excursion today our guide Sasha asked us if we knew why Diocletian retired here. There were several guesses: that Croatia has great natural beauty, that the Roman province of Dalmatia was rural and isolated, that the weather here is nice, and so on. But then she corrected these guesses and told us that the Roman emperor retired here because this had been his childhood home. Diocletian was born here and as an old man wanted to live his remaining days in this beautiful seaside sanctuary.

Diocletian is not remembered fondly by history. He is called the enemy of the Christians because he carried out the most sustained persecution of the Christian Church. However, I can’t shake the idea that history is always written by the victors. The story of the losers isn’t remembered, or at least it is not told in a favorable light.

Diocletian was followed by Constantine. He gets all the credit for first legalizing Christianity in 313 AD, and then for making it the official religion of the Roman Empire two years later. Yes, I know the story of his vision at the Milvian Bridge—“In hoc signo vinces.” But I also know that his mother Helena was a devout Christian and that her son was not baptized until he lay dying. I also know that successful politicians note which way the wind is blowing. By 315 AD one could see that the Christians’ endurance was winning many converts amid a moribund Roman religion riddled with cruelty and immorality. And Constantine, whatever else he may have been, was an astute politician. Even so, compared to Constantine’s beatific PR, Diocletian was a monster.

But I wonder.

As Diocletian lived out his days here, what thoughts did he have? Did he believe that he had merely attempted to preserve the civility of the old ways? Did he think that he had only sought to bring back the honor and dignity of Rome’s founding fathers? Did he believe that he had done his duty to preserve the integrity of society against an onslaught by a rabble of religious extremists?

As I stood in the shadow of the home he built for his retirement, I wondered if there might be another side to the story we all learned at church and in school about Diocletian. Perhaps he was only doing what he thought was right. We can ridicule the cruelty of those who persecuted witches because we see them as fools. But this is because nowadays we don’t generally believe there are evil witches around every corner. But those people did, and they genuinely believed that serious measures must be brought against serious evil. Perhaps Diocletian thought serious measures were needed to combat these new ideas that he saw as a mortal threat to the empire. But then again, that’s not how Diocletian’s story is told. Because his side lost. And history is always written by the side that won.Read more