After the murder of the emperor Severus Alexander in 235, there befell Rome what would later be called the Crisis of the Third Century. Supreme power became a commodity to be bought and sold by the legions: the throne turned into a prize to be played for by the army. In half a century, from 235 to 284, no fewer than fifty men — by law or by the sword — laid claim to the title of emperor. The purple no longer signified service to the state; it meant only that someone's soldiers had proved, at the decisive hour, stronger than everyone else's.
The idol of power-as-plunder brought everything down upon the empire at once. Usurpations followed one another, generals waged civil wars against each other, and meanwhile the Germans, Goths, and Persians poured across the frontiers. In 260 the unthinkable happened: the Sasanian king Shapur I defeated and captured the Roman emperor Valerian himself, who died in captivity — a humiliation unheard of before. To this were added a devastating epidemic, the collapse of the coinage, and the breakup of the empire into splintered fragments. A world that had seemed eternal was coming apart at every seam.
The captivity here was not the captivity of a people but the paralysis of all life. The economy froze under the debasement of money, society grew militarized, and men were gripped by fear. And that fear gave rise to a dangerous demand — for power without limits, for a firm hand that would restore order at any cost. Those worn out by chaos were ready to give up anything to whoever promised protection.
Deliverance came in 284 with Diocletian — and it proved to be double-edged. He did indeed drag the empire out of the abyss, but at the cost of transforming the princeps into an unrestrained autocrat surrounded by Eastern splendor; thus was born the late, bureaucratic, absolute empire. That same Diocletian unleashed in 303 the last and cruelest persecution of the Christians — churches were torn down, the Scriptures burned, confessors put to death; it lasted until 311. But the fire did not consume the Church; it tempered her — the blood of the martyrs became the seed of her growth. So this century first showed clearly the temptation that would return again and again: the promise of salvation through dictatorship, for which one must always pay with freedom.