Diocletian will rue the day he let Galerius Valerius Maximianus get a foot in the door,” Marios said dourly. “It was bad enough when he gave half of the Empire to Maximian. Now he must needs divide it into four parts for his generals to squabble over, when your father could have held everything together himself.”
Constantine was fairly bursting with questions, but they had reached the small villa where he and his mother lived with only a pair of servants. Helena came to the door to greet them and when he saw the light in the eyes of his tall and beautiful mother at the sight of his father and the way Constantius went to take her in his arms for the kiss of greeting, some of the vague feeling of apprehension that had disturbed the boy during the brief conversation with his father began to fade.
Even here at Naissus, a good week’s journey on horseback from Diocletian’s eastern capital of Nicomedia in Bithynia and, it seemed to the boy, half the world away from storied Rome news came quickly. Constantine was quite familiar with the plan of succession devised by Diocletian, when he had become Augustus a little over six years earlier.
Equally militant Sassanid kings in Persia
The shrewd peasant brain of Diocletian had seen that a division of both power and responsibility was necessary if he were to maintain peace from the district of the often rebellious Piets in northern Britain to the domain of the equally militant Sassanid kings in Persia.
Characteristically his solution had been simple. By sharing rule of the Empire’s western half with another general named Maximian who took the surname Herculius to please the soldier s god that was also patron deity of Rome Diocletian hoped to remove the temptation of ambition which had caused so much turmoil over the past century.
But he had strengthened the ambitious plan by retaining final control, as Senior Augustus, while at the same time taking a completely unheardof further step in announcing his intention to rule only for twenty years and forcing his CoEmperor Maximian to agree to relinquish the title of Augustus at the end of a similar period. Completing the plan, Diocletian had also promised to name, well before the end of his twentyyear reign, the two Caesars who would eventually succeed to the title of Augustus. The Emperor had been as good as his word, too, by designating Constantius and Galerius Caesars and, as Filii Augusti, Emperorsto be.
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