meted out punishment to any others who were unlucky enough to choose the wrong side, the Third Cyrenaica received the honorific "Severiana". In addition, the governor of Arabia, Publius Aelius Severianus Maximus, was allowed to continue in his post in reward for his loyalty. Syria was later split into two and Arabia was expanded to include the Lajat and Jebel Drūz, rough terrain south of Damascus, and also the birthplace of M. Julius Phillipus, better known as Philip the Arab. Severus had enlarged a province that was already huge. He then proceeded to enlarge the empire through the conquest of Mesopotamia. The transfer of the Leja’ and Jebel Drūz seemed to have been part of a shrewd series of political acts on the emperor's part to consolidate control of the area before this conquest. Arabia became the ideological power base for Septemius Severus in the Roman Near East. The obvious need to mitigate and tame the power of the province of Syria, which had shown itself over and over to be a hotbed of rebellion, was then accomplished in three parts: The reorganization of Syria into two political units, the reduction of its territory in favor of Arabia, and the marriage of the emperor to the shrewd Julia Domna. Arabia became such a symbol of loyalty to Severus and the empire that during his war against Clodius Albinus, in Gaul, Syrian opponents propagated a rumour that the Third Cyrenaica had defected. That it would matter to an issue in Gallia that a single legion in a backwater province on the other side of the empire would rebel indicates the political sway that Arabia had amassed. Not a land of significant population, or resources or even strategic position, it had become a bedrock of Roman culture. That it was an Eastern Roman culture did not seem to dilute this importance in the west. It is precisely because Arabia had so little that it was able to define itself as Roman and that spurred its loyalty to Imperial Rome. With Emperor Diocletian's restructuring of the empire in 284–305, Arabia province was enlarged to include parts of modern-day Israel. Arabia after Diocletian became a part of the Diocese of the East, which was part of the Prefecture of Oriens. Byzantine rule As part of the Diocese of the East, Arabia became a frontline in the Byzantine-Sassanid Wars. In the 5th or 6th century