bringing total troops strengths up to over 450,000 or so. From the late 2nd and early 3rd century onwards, increasing numbers of soldiers were stationed in guard-posts along highways to maintain internal security and police the countryside.48 Later, from the time of Gallienus in the 260’s onwards, crack field armies were increasingly redeployed in depth behind the imperial frontiers for greater mobility against external attacks, leaving second-class limitanei units to guard the outer perimeter of the Empire. Large numbers of barbarian volunteers were incorporated into the Army, henceforward providing many of its elite regiments. More important, all top military commands were now entrusted to men of equestrian rank only; the senatorial aristocracy was thereby displaced from its traditionally pivotal role in the political system, as supreme imperial power increasingly passed to the professional officer corps of the army. Diocletian himself also systematically shut senators out of the civil administration.49 Provinces multiplied twice over, as they were divided into smaller and more manageable units, and the officialdom set over them was increased proportionately, to create closer bureaucratic control. A new fiscal system was established, after the debacle of the mid century, fusing the principles of a land and poll tax into a single unit, calculated on the basis of new and comprehensive censuses. Annual budgetary estimates were introduced for the first time in the Ancient World, which could adjust tax levels to current expenditures – that predictably moved steeply upwards. The formidable material expansion of the State machine that was the result of all these measures inevitably contradicted the ideological attempts of Diocletian and his successors to stabilize the social structure of the later Empire beneath it. Decrees penning large groups of the population into caste-like hereditary guilds after the turbulence of the past half century can have had little practical efficacy;50 social mobility probably increased somewhat, because of the enlargement of new military and bureaucratic avenues of promotion within the State.51 Transient efforts to fix administrative prices and wages throughout the Empire were even less realistic. On the other hand, the imperial autocracy itself successfully prised away all traditional restraints imposed by senatorial opinion and custom on the exercise of personal power. The ‘Principate’ gave way to the ‘Dominate’, as Emperors from Aurelian onwards styled themselves dominus et deus and enforced the Oriental ceremonial of full-length abasement before the royal presence, the proskynesis with which Alexander had once inaugurated the Hellenistic Empires of the Near East.
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