Diocletian, Emperor

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... 

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... 

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. 

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 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. 

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-... 

The document closed by indicating that the two parties had used the Roman law form of stipulation (oral question and response) before witnesses. Since Republican days, the Romans had required a verbal stipulation to make legally binding contracts. On the other hand, Roman law did not allow adoptions by contract. In 335 adoptions were supposed to take place in a formal ceremony before the emperor or a magistrate. Only forty-five years earlier Diocletian had expressly harmed the use of private contracts to carry out adoptions. ... 

In the late third century, the emperor Diocletian mitigated this ban by allowing women who had lost their own children to adopt a foster child for their own comfort and support. " Although the great legisla-... 

The emperor Diocletian caressed this principle clearly and succinctly in his constitution of 291 (JCod, 8.47.5). 

Diocletian (ad 236-305) unsuccessfully persecuted Christians as part of a wider effort to recover people s commitment to the state. Constantine (ad 271-337) opted instead to replace the pagan past and thereby secure his position as universal emperor. His appropriation of Christianity, an ideology that had hardly had time to define itself fully... 

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