Gary said: > It was the belief of the official state religion of a totalitarian > regime that information it disapproved of should be suppressed.
In what sense was the Dominate a "totalitarian regime"? It seems to me that under Diocletian and his successors the Roman Empire became increasingly hard to govern despite (or perhaps because of!) the vast increase in bureaucracy. All the evidence suggests that the Roman state failed miserably to establish a command economy (instituting ever harsher penalties for those selling above the fixed prices was ineffectual, and such punishments were in any case hardly ever carried out). There's also a lot of evidence for rise (or resurgence) of regional cultures and languages in the period, and the thriving of many small towns at the expense of the major cities. If anything, the fourth and fifth centuries were a time during which the centralised state became weaker (and, of course, in the west it entirely ceased to exist in the late fifth century). This certainly wasn't an age of totalitarianism in the modern sense. Rich
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