Dominate
[6] Domitian encouraged its use,[7] but none of the emperors used the term in any semi-official capacity until the reign of Aurelian in AD 274, where coins were issued bearing the inscription deus et dominus natus ('born god and master').
[9] In broad terms, it saw the gradual exclusion of the senatorial elite from high military commands and the parallel elevation of the equestrian orders, the reorganisation of the armed forces and the creation of mobile field armies, changes in imperial dress and ceremonial displays, a religious policy aiming at religious unity, large scale monetary reforms, and the creation of an empire-wide civil bureaucracy.
[10] Although Diocletian is commonly thought of as creator of the Dominate, its origins lie in the innovations of earlier emperors, principally those undertaken by Aurelian (AD 270–275).
To govern a large state by two independent but perfectly similar machines, controlled not from one centre but from two foci, without sacrificing its unity was an interesting and entirely new experiment.
[16] Augustus and his successors usually took great care to disguise the autocratic nature of the office by hiding behind the institutions of the Roman Republic and the fiction that the emperor was simply the princeps or first citizen, whose authority was granted by the Senate.
It was Diocletian who introduced this form of government, under a system called the Tetrarchy, which originally consisted of two co-emperors (augusti) and two respectively subordinate junior emperors (caesars), each of whom shared in the imperial power.
[21] Consequently, the high regard placed upon the ordinary consulate remained intact, as it was one of the few offices that one could share with the emperor, and during this period it was filled mostly by patricians or by individuals who had consular ancestors.
[23] This had the effect of seeing a suffect consulship granted at an earlier age, to the point that by the 4th century, it was being held by men in their early twenties, and possibly younger.
[23] One of the key changes in the management of the empire during the Dominate was the large scale removal of old-style senatorial participation in administrative and military functions.
[27] The most prestigious post that a senator could hold under the Dominate was that of Praefectus urbi; during this period the office gained in effective power, as the imperial court was removed from the city of Rome, meaning that the prefects were no longer under the emperor's direct supervision.
The most significant change was the return of provincial government to the senatorial order, with the larger or more important provinces handed over to those senators who had held an ordinary consulship.
[31] This figure did not include the staff of the military commanders, or the financial and other central ministries, and contrasts with the estimated 300 state bureaucrats that were employed across all the provinces during the period of the Julio-Claudian emperors.
All the higher officials in the imperial bureaucracy belonged to one of the three classes or ranks introduced by Constantine I – the illustres, spectabiles and clarissimi, all of whom were automatically members of the senatorial order.
The heads of the great central civil ministries, the magistri militum and other high level military commanders as well as the Praepositus sacri cubiculi were all graded as illustres, the highest of the new senatorial ranks.
The second class (spectabiles) was assigned to a large group of civil servants, including the Proconsuls, vicarii, the military governors in the provinces and the magistri scriniorum.
), during the course of the Dominate the Prefects gradually had portions of their authority stripped from them and given to other offices: the Masters of the Soldiers for military affairs and the Imperial Chancellor for central civilian administration.
Recruited from the ranks of the Field Armies were the Palace Troops units ("Palatini"), who accompanied the Emperor as he travelled around the Empire, functioning as the successor to the Principate's Praetorian Guard.
According to John Bagnall Bury while in all ancient monarchies religion and sacerdotalism were a political as well as a social power, the position of the Christian Church in the Roman Empire was a new thing in the world, presenting problems of a kind with which no ruler had hitherto been confronted and to which no past experience offered a key.
[11] Although the worship of Sol Invictus did not remove the veneration towards the traditional Roman gods, it was seen as a mark of imperial favouritism, and the emperors linked his cult to the well-being of the state and on-going military victories of the empire.
Living emperors had been worshiped as gods in the eastern half of the empire since the time of Augustus, but this was not officially encouraged during the Principate, and it was not introduced into Italy.
[50] In an attempt to appeal to both Christians and pagans, Constantine adopted two new religious symbols into the imperial iconography, in the form of the Chi Rho and the Labarum.
This precedent had already been established by Gallienus in 260, who moved the imperial court to Mediolanum in response to a suspected future attack by the usurper Postumus as well as defending Italy from the ravages of the Alamanni.
In the west, Mediolanum continued to be the imperial residence until the repeated invasions by Alaric I forced the western emperor Honorius to relocate to the strongly fortified city of Ravenna in 402.
They ceased using the more modest title of princeps; they adopted the veneration of the potentates of ancient Egypt and Persia; and, they started wearing jeweled robes and shoes in contrast to the simple toga praetexta used by Emperors of the Principate.
[62] In contrast to the situation in the Principate, however, emperors in the Dominate could not be deified as it was, excepting the two initial decades and the reign of Julian, the Christian period of the Roman Empire.
Another clear symptom of the upgrading of the imperial status was the notion of the emperor as an incarnation of the majesty of Rome; thus lèse majesté became high treason.
[citation needed] The historian Jochen Bleicken credited Theodor Mommsen with introducing the concepts of Principate and Dominate into the literature to periodise the Roman Imperial era.
[64] Historians described the Dominate as the foundation of the Pan-European government of bureaucratic absolute monarchy, in stark contrast to the laissez-faire and economic self-determination of the individual under the republic and the Principate.
[65] In 1978, Bleicken disputed this interpretation and calls the division of imperial rule between principate and dominate as not based on any constitutional change, and that both terms are unsuitable for periodisation.
Markéta Melounová's analysis of judicial trials in 2012, specifically the punishment of religious and political crimes, found that they did not differ much in the periods of the Dominate and the Principate.
