by
Damien F. Mackey
If Diocletian, a mirror-image of the emperor
Augustus, was, in fact, said Augustus - whom I had already identified with the
Seleucid tyrant, Antiochus IV ‘Epiphanes’, and with the emperor, Hadrian - then
it would be reasonable to expect a significant census of the kingdom to have
been issued by Diocletian (cf. Luke 2:1).
In my provocative article:
Diocletian
repeating Augustus?
(4) Diocletian
repeating Augustus?
I wrote as follows,
quoting professor Gunnar Heinsohn:
“This
transformation from a more central to a more decentralized administration did
not take place 300 years after these massive internal conflicts, but
during the time that Augustus was still emperor. Diocletian
did not organize decentralization to weaken Rome, but to protect the
capital. Diocletian was not an imitator of Augustus's reforms. He was directly
responsible for their implementation”.
Gunnar
Heinsohn
More on the historical revision of antiquity by
professor Gunnar Heinsohn (RIP):
https://q-mag.org/rome-and-jerusalem-a-stratigraphy-based-chronology-of-the-ancient-world.html
Rome and Jerusalem - a stratigraphy-based
chronology of the Ancient World
Professor Heinsohn’s
parallels between Augustus and Diocletian I find to be most interesting,
indeed, presuming that they are accurate.
So far I have not thoroughly checked all of them:
|
Gunnar Heinsohn (15 June
2019)
AUGUSTUS AND DIOCLETIAN: CONTEMPORARIES OR 300 YEARS APART? |
….
This all becomes
especially intriguing for me in light of my articles of somewhat similar
parallelism between Augustus and Hadrian:
Hadrian a
reincarnation of Augustus
(3) Hadrian a
reincarnation of Augustus
Hadrian was more
than a New Augustus
(3) Hadrian was
more than a New Augustus
….
If, as I was hinting in this article, Diocletian, a mirror-image of the
emperor Augustus, was, in fact, said Augustus - whom I had already identified
with the Seleucid tyrant, Antiochus IV ‘Epiphanes’, and with the emperor,
Hadrian - then it would be reasonable to expect a significant census of the
kingdom to have been issued by Diocletian (cf. Luke 2:1): “Now in those
days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that a census should be taken of
the whole empire”.
My twin identifications of Augustus with Antiochus ‘Epiphanes’, and of the
latter’s foe, Judas Maccabeus with “Judas the Galilean … in the days of the
census” (Acts 5:37), had enabled for a drastically revised scenario of the Seleucid-Maccabean
period according to which king Antiochus and Judas Maccabeus now belonged to
the era of the Nativity of Jesus Christ:
Judas the Galilean vitally links Maccabean era to Daniel
2’s “rock cut out of a mountain”
(5) Judas the
Galilean vitally links Maccabean era to Daniel 2’s “rock cut out of a mountain”
So, as that thought about emperor Diocletian likely issuing a census
came to me today (30th June, 2026), I checked the Internet, and
immediately found this truncated piece:
“The systematic assessment and registration of
people and property by the Roman state. *Diocletian reformed the institution to
provide the basis for his new tax regime, with a new Empire-wide census
probably completed by 296. All evidence suggests that once the Tetrarchic ...”.
“… a new Empire-wide census …”.
Cf. Luke 2:1: “… a census should be
taken of the whole empire”.
Zvi Uri Ma‘oz tells of more than one census from the emperor
Diocletian, and in reference to the governor of Syria (cf. Luke
2:2):
The Civil Reform of
Diocletian in the Southern Levant
Pp. 109-110:
The Land Reform
Along with the administrative changes came a tighter grip on the
economy. It is most evident in the monetary reform and the empire-wide order
regarding maximum price tariffs and salaries. …. The emperor could not much
influence natural factors beyond his control, such as drought and plagues,
other than offering post factum assistance … and consequently he devoted
his efforts to combating inflation (through the list of maximum prices),
reorganizing the monetary/currency systems and attempting to form an equal
basis for agricultural taxation.
Lactantius provides a detailed description of the kind of census
undertaken by Diocletian: ‘Fields were measured out clod by clod, the vines and
trees were counted, every kind of animal was registered, and note taken of
every member of the population’. …. Α later legal textbook describes the
process (emphasis mine):
... at the
time of the assessment there were certain men who were given the authority by
the government; they summoned the other mountain dwellers from other
regions and bade them assess how much land, by their estimate, produces a modius
of wheat or barley in the mountains. In this way they also assessed unsown
land, the pasture land for cattle, as to how much tax it should yield to the
fisc. ….
According to Jones, ‘In the Eastern provinces Diocletian seems to have
registered only the rural population, the rusticana plebs, quae extra muros
posita capitationem suam detulit, as he puts it in a constitution addressed
to the governor of Syria (in other prov- inces urban population was included)’.
…. It is important to emphasize here that the boundary stones operation began
in 295 CE, that is, two years before the general empire-wide census of 297 CE
and seven years after the initial 287 CE census about which we know next to
nothing. ….
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