Dominate - Transition From The Principate

Transition From The Principate

During the Principate, the formalities of the constitutionally-never-abolished Roman Republic remained very much the "politically correct" image of Imperial government. It has also often been said to have ended after the 235–284 AD Crisis of the Third Century, which concluded when Diocletian established himself as Emperor c. 285. Moving the notion of the Emperor away from the republican forms of the Empire's first three centuries, Diocletian introduced a novel system of joint rule by four monarchs, the Tetrarchy. He and his colleagues and his successors (in two imperial territories, east and west, not four) chose to stop using the title princeps. Instead, they openly displayed the naked face of Imperial power, adopting a Hellenistic style of government more influenced by the veneration of the Eastern potentates of ancient Egypt and Persia than by the heritage of civic collegiality amongst the Roman governing class passed down from the days of the "uncrowned" Roman Republic.

Emperors of the Principate, emulating Augustus in his fiction of a republican government, had created the idea of the Emperor as a concentration of the various civil and military offices upon one individual, nevertheless hiding any autocratic or despotic connotations by the preservation of the Senate and other facets of the Republican period, such as the annual paired consulship. After Diocletian, however, Emperors started to wear jeweled robes and shoes, in contrast with the simple toga praetexta used by Principate Emperors in emulation of Augustus.