The New Bureaucracy Was Not Adding Redundant Layers to the Administration of the Empire

Diocletian was, with every fiber of his being, an autocrat. He wanted to control every single little detail of imperial administration and then systematized that control so that it became permanent and unbreakable. To this end he created the largest centralized bureaucracy staffed by career civil servants the western world had ever seen. The new bureaucracy was the flip side of that separation of civilian and military operations we discussed last week.