Rough Roman Memes

A tyrant doesn’t voluntarily devolve there power or retire and refuse to come back even after multiple people beg them to.

Sure they do, if they think they've lost their ability to control events. No tyrant wants to be controlled by the whims of petty politics or public sentiment.

If you’re looking for a tyrant in that era I’d look to the golden boy Constantine. He was the one who seemed more motivated by his own self agrandizement then the well being of the empire.

Don't worry, I hate Constantine plenty.

The tetrarchy didn’t work in the long run but the third century had proven the idea of having one legitimate emperor just leads to civil wars. He overshot it and it turned out the natural state would end up being two emperors but he couldn’t know that, and for someone traumatized by countless invasions from every direction all at once during the third century it seems like a pretty sound idea.

Problem: four Emperors led to civil wars, and two Emperors also led to civil wars.

The problem was never "one legitimate Emperor".

The price controls also are dumb in hindsight but for a society with no concept of inflation and it’s workings it seems like a great idea to help out the people.

It was recognized even at the time by the educated that it was a dumb move. Diocletian passed it because he, like the less flashy barracks Emperors of the 3rd century, had no understanding of economics beyond the point of a sword.

The reforms of the legions and the frontier strategy were sort of necessary at that point and were a large reason the empire maintained some sense of territorial integrity over the next two centuries.

I would have to strongly disagree. The reforms of the legions resulted in a severely degraded military apparatus, and I would argue that this was intentional, as part of Diocletian's broader attempt to neuter all power outside of the centralized bureaucracy that he and his co-emperors directly controlled. When the largest independent units are cut down to a fifth of their previous size and logistics are rerouted through centralized depots, the commanders of those units are no longer in a position to challenge any higher authority - in theory.

Unfortunately, this comes across several problems in practice, including reduced efficacy of the units themselves, the low level of coordination possible by even experienced officers under this system, the inefficiencies of a centralized distribution system across an empire where transportation is still one of the greatest costs of goods (much less the importance of circumstantial resources), and the fact that challengers to higher authority still arose, only now out of the members of the imperial families given power over these units instead of the careerist officer corps.

The Empire retained any sort of territorial integrity over the next century not because of these reforms, but largely in spite of them - the frontier defence strategy did not considerably reduce barbarian incursions into Roman territory (though it did incur regular and severe losses upon the frontier garrisons and provinces), and the degradation of the field armies worsened until only the 'Palatini' grade troops upheld the prior standards - even in the tumultuous Crisis of the Third Century - of prior Roman soldiery. And all this at an increased cost to the national government, a reduced reaction speed to incursions, the destruction of the system of veteran colonization, and a severe manpower shortage as military service lost all appeal to even brutalized subsistence farmers - requiring, then, the additional cost, economic and social, of regular forcible conscriptions.

But it did do what it was meant to - it prevented power from passing outside of the imperial families by military force all the way until Valentinian III. Who, at that point, was ruling over only a husk of the Empire's institutions, military included.