Diocletian

At one time scholars believed that the Roman Emperor Diocletian decreed in A.D. 292 that all alchemical books be burned and that the alchemists be expelled from Egypt. But this story is probably apocryphal. At the time, alchemy was unknown in the Roman west. In any case, no decrees were needed. Alexandrian intellectual culture was past its prime by then, and alchemy simply participated in the decline. 

The early center of alchemy was the intellectual capital of ancient Greece, Alexandria. Very little remains of the original alchemical manuscripts from ancient Greece. The rise of Christianity and concerns about disrupting the economy eventually led the Roman Emperor Diocletian to... 

A.D. 300 Emperor Diocletian outlaws chemistry in Roman Empire... 

Daniell, John Fredrick, 180 Davy, Humphrey, 72, 73, 156, 176 de Broglie, Louis, 40 de Buffon, Comte, 72 de Fourcroy, Antoine Francois, 27 de Mestral, George, 299 de Morveau, Guyton, 27 Democritus, 9, 10, 47, 71 Diocletian, 12 Dobereiner, Johann, 61, 62... 

The two manuscripts taken together foi m an interesting collection of laboratory recipes of the kinds which Diocletian ordered destroyed and which apparently were very generally destroyed. The date ascribed to them is about the time of the decree of Diocletian, and it may be presumed that, in the mummy case, they escaped the execution of that decree. 

Pope John was not the only one. As early as 144 BCE, the Chinese Emperor issued an edict forbidding the manufacture of gold. Similar decrees were issued periodically throughout history China banned it again in 60 BCE the Roman Emperor Diocletian in 296 CE while Henry IV made it illegal in England in 1403. 

It is well known that the Emperor Diocletian of the Ancient Rome resigned from power of his own free will, quit for the countyside and was happy to grow cabbage. We believe that it is too early for us (the editors and the authors) to grow cabbage and we will work for the good of science. 

The Romans were thus the first intentional makers of brass, ind coins were made of it even down to the time of Diocletian... 

It is noteworthy that the Roman Emperor Diocletian, who ruled from 285 to 305 A.D., was said to have ordered the destruction of alchemical books and manuscripts throughout the Roman Empire. As the story goes, he feared that transmutation of base metals to silver and gold would devalue the Empire s currency. (However, see the next essay, p. 135). 

The Diocletian story (see p. 106) is a nice one. However, it seems that Arabic alchemy only reached the West (including Rome) around the eleventh century, so the story may be charitably termed legendary. ... 

This era of enlightenment was not to last. Diocletian, Emperor of Rome from 284CE to 305CE, was paranoid about Christianity and the occult. He sought out and burned all Egyptian works that concerned the chemistry of gold and silver. His reason for this was to prevent his... 

Diocletian may have been concerned about rumors of a fearful alchemical secret, that of the legendary Shamir. In Rabbinical tradition, the Shamir was a giant worm that could cut stones. " The secret of the Shamir was probably in the hands of the Essenes in Alexandria. We know from Philo of Alexandria, who lived from 20BCE to 50CE, that the... 

Following the destruction of alchemical works by Diocletian, the famous Library of Alexandria was itself burnt to the ground by a Christian mob in 390CE. This loss of the Library, followed by the gruesome murder of the beautiful mathematician Hypatia by a gang of monks twenty-five years later, ushered in Europe s Dark Ages. 

The third century A.D. seems to have been a period when the science was widely practised, but it was also during this century, in the year 296, that Diocletian sought out and burnt all the Egyptian books on alchemy and the other occult sciences, and in so doing destroyed... 

The final death blow came through fear. The Roman emperor Diocletian actually feared that khemeia might successfully produce cheap gold and destroy the shaky economy of the declining Empire. In Zosimus s time, he ordered writings on khemeia to be destroyed, which is one explanation of why little remains to us. 

Once again, as under Diocletian a thousand years before, the study of alchemy was forbidden, as much in dread of the successful production of gold as in indignation over fakery. Pope John XXII declared such a ban in 1317, and honest alchemists, forced to work underground, became more obscure than ever, while chemical racketeering flourished as always. 

Kaser, Das romische Privatrecht, 2 222, and note 3. Kaser cites Constantine s rules for ending curatorship before age twenty-five (CodTheo, 2.17.1) as evidence that the tutela of adult women was no longer in force. KSser also mentions a law of Diocletian that implies that an adult woman no longer needed a tutor. Apparently no law has survived that formally abrogated the institution of tutela mulierum. 

Despite the wish of many Roman husbands to establish the mothers of their children as guardians and the example of the Greek customs followed in Hellenistic Egypt, the Roman law clung tenaciously to the principle that only men could serve as guardians. As late as 294 A.D., the emperor Diocletian reiterated this view "To take up the de-... 

According to this vita, Clement was born in Ankyra during the reign of Valerian and suffered a martyr s death under Diocletian (284-305). While Clement was still a baby, he had lost his father before reaching maturity (circa 280), he also lost his mother. Thereupon, a wealthy woman named Sophia adopted him and continued his spiritu-... 

One cannot accept the Vita dementis as a truly historical account. Clement was indeed martyred under Diocletian, but many of the details of the vita story are anachronistic. For example, women could not formally adopt children under Roman law until Leo VI issued his Novel 27 at the end of the ninth century, although informal adoptions by Christian women occurred as early as the fourth century. Moreover, the elaborate private orphanage that Sophia and Clement organized would probably have been impossible in the third century. The details of the vita correspond more closely to the conditions of the fourth and fifth centuries when private Christian foundations were becoming common in Asia Minor, though one should not rule out completely a third-century orphan asylum. ... 

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