Dr. David Gwynn

If you've got so many provinces, there'll be some issues that it shouldn't go to the emperor.

They should just go to one person who's dealing with four or five provinces.

So it's going to have more of a bureaucracy, which obviously means more officials to pay.

But on the other hand, it will be more efficient at a local level, easier to control, but also actually better for tax revenue.

The old Roman model, which emerges with Augustus, the first emperor, in the first two centuries AD, is indeed that people should be able to send petitions through to the emperor.

So Pliny the Younger famously does under the emperor Trajan, including Pliny's letter saying, I've met Christians, what do I do now?

Hadrian, who traveled the entire empire, received petitions wherever he went.

And when things are stable, that model could still potentially work.

The problem is, of course, the third century crisis has destroyed that stability.

And yes, you now have a more organized process.

It doesn't actually stop petitions reaching the emperor, but they're going to have to go through multiple stages.

So one of our greatest legal collections for the later Roman Empire is the Theodosian Code, named after Theodosius II because it was compiled in the early 5th century.

But it contains laws from 306 onwards, so unfortunately not much help with Diocletian, but does cover Constantine.

At least some of those laws are quite clearly responses to somebody raised a question with a provincial governor who passed it to the vicar, who passed it to the praetorian prefect, the highest level of the administration, who took it to the emperor.

The emperor replied to the Praetorian prefect, and that's the law that's in the Theodosian Code.

But some of them, like a tax break for someone with 14 children,

That can't have been a matter of imperial policy.

So the petition system is still functional.

But yes, it is much more restricted.

In that sense, it's more autocratic.