I.

THE ORIGINS OF ROMAN IMPERIALISM

 

AT the beginning of the Imperial age Rome had five hundred years of Roman history behind her. Of that history she was the outcome. If she was different from the suetus regibus Oriens, the difference was due to her own political past : if Augustus was proud to have pacified the Alps nulli genti bello per iniuriam inlato, his pride was the expression of an ideal for which Rome had respect enough to claim it as her own. Thanks to Augustus himself the traditions established by the experience of the Roman Republic were applied to the task of governing the united world. They were not, indeed, wholly of Roman origin. From its earliest days the city had been exposed to external influence, and its debt to Etruria, however it may precisely be assessed, was only an anticipation of the much greater obligation soon incurred to Greece. Yet what Rome received she assimilated and embodied in a culture which, wherever the source of its inspiration in this respect or that, remained always one and unmistakably Roman.

When the time came to organize an empire, the element in this culture which mattered most was one for which Rome's debt was least. Her political practice was of her own devising—the creation of her own good sense encouraged by the context of her history. From her earliest days the setting of Roman history had been continental. First in Latium, and then over a steadily increasing part of the Italian peninsula, Rome had grown in an environment where her enemies could unite, where numbers alone gave power, and where one State could control many only by enlisting their good-will. Rome was thus protected from the temptation to which Athenian imperialism had succumbed. Nature gave Athens an opportunity to convert allies into subjects, and her political sense was too feeble to refuse it. Exploitation yielded its brief years of brilliance; but, when Athens fell, her contribution to men's knowledge of imperial government was at most the warning which gives some slight value to even the worst of failures. In 404 BC the Long Walls to the Piraeus were pulled down to the sounds of music and jubilations: when Alaric sacked Rome in AD 410 it seemed to the aged Jerome, even in the remoteness of his cell at Bethlehem, as if the end of civilization were at hand. Between Athens, the ‘tyrant city’, and Rome, communis nostra patria, the difference was great; and some part of the reason for Rome's success is to be found in the circumstances of her early history. In the dynamics of Italy, unlike those of Greece, the dominant moment was centripetal, and this fact combined with native good sense to form the political outlook of the Romans. Living as they did in a world where the trend towards union was strong, they formed ideas markedly different from those which had prevailed elsewhere. They prized libertas as the Greeks had prized eleutheria; yet so different were these two concepts that, when Rome entered the Greek world honestly claiming to preserve the first, she was no less honestly criticized by the Greeks for destroying the second. Libertas was not, like eleutheria according to some accounts', an unfettered freedom, but rather, like principatus which was one of its constitutional counterparts, freedom from arbitrary rules. In particular it did not imply a community’s untrammelled control of its international relations, with the right to declare peace and war at will : whatever may have been sacrificed to the establishment of the Pax Augusta, it was not what the Romans called libertas. For libertas in its wider sense was the foundation of the Imperial structure, and its employment marked the recognition of the fact, soon discovered in Italy by Rome and slowly brought home to the cities of the Greek world by the experience of the Hellenistic age, that the value of free institutions is not seriously impaired by loss of the power to take up arms against one’s neighbor.

In the policy of Republican Rome there is to be seen another principle of the first importance, which again is strange to the history of Greece. Hellas was a world of small communities. When trade, or overpopulation, or the vicissitudes of domestic strife moved part of a city's population to seek new homes abroad, a colony was founded so loosely tied to its metropolis that its members were in fact lost to the place from which they came; and the result of this hiving-off was that, though cities became more numerous, their size was held in check. At Rome, on the other hand, man­power was a primary concern. Roman colonies, since they remained part of the Roman body politic, were not allowed to sap the strength of Rome; and even such Roman citizens as were enrolled in foundations of the Latin type, though they ceased to be Roman, became members of communities which were Rome's effective allies. Nor was this all. Not content with conserving her population, Rome openly sought to increase it by absorbing other peoples in the way typified by the story of Romulus and the Sabines. This concern for man-power is justly claimed by Cicero as a fundamental principle of Roman statecraft, and it was recognized as such by at least one acute observer abroad. When Philip V of Macedon, then at war with Rome, held up as an example the Roman practice of admitting strangers to their citizenship, he paid tribute to the wisdom of his enemies as well as to his own political perception.

Respect for libertas, a sturdy belief that freedom could be preserved even in communities which were parts of a larger whole, and an ideal of inclusiveness which led to the absorption first of Italy and later of the Empire at large into the imperial citizenship of Rome, were three outstanding features of the political technique devised by the Roman Republic. They were principles which determined the design of the administrative machine, and the machine itself ensured their maintenance until, when circumstances led to their abandonment, the machine itself was altered almost beyond recognition. Even in the last century BC, when Italy had been united and provinces stretched from Syria to Spain, so much of the administrative business was left to local authorities that the constitution of the central power remained in essence that of a city-state. That empire should have brought changes so small was not wholly a cause for satisfaction. Not only were there difficulties presented by the armies which empire required, but the administration itself, even when private contractors, like the publicani, were enrolled to make good the dearth of regular officials, was an extemporization too loose in structure and too weak in personnel to be completely adequate. Nevertheless, though a more ample civil service was an urgent need which it was the business of Augustus to meet, even after his salutary reforms the central administration retained the best of the qualities it had developed under the Republic. Despite its expansion, its dimensions remained small, and the Roman power was still prepared to leave a province in the hands of a governor, a few adjutants, a financial officer and a small staff of clerks. With troops to protect the frontiers and to preserve internal order on the rare occasions when disturbance threatened, Rome was satisfied for the rest to receive such taxes as she claimed and to insist, so far as her restricted means allowed, on the observance of her own high standards in the administration of justice. Other business was in general left to the local communities, until in the second century Trajan and his successors, having learned by experience the difference between experts and amateurs in government, allowed themselves to intrude their agents into local affairs and thereby were forced both to enlarge the civil service to the dimensions of a bureaucracy and to begin a process which transformed the relations between Rome and the peoples of the Empire. This change had gone far before the death of Commodus, but its completion was delayed till the fourth century, and throughout the history of the Empire to the end of the Antonine age the character of the Roman control was still under the predominant influence of traditions inherited from the Republic. Lack of officiousness, reluctance to interfere, anxiety that Rome's share of the responsibility for detail should be small and that of local authorities great—such were the most striking expressions of a policy which left the governed free and was content if defence, imperial taxation and the more serious judicial business were reserved for the imperial power.

II.

ROME AND HER PREDECESSORS

 

With ideals so tolerant and with so simple an administrative machine, Rome lacked both the inclination and the means to force uniformity on the varied populations of the empire. Nothing was demanded save abstinence from unauthorized fighting, the payment of taxes and the supply of recruits to the imperial army. For the rest Rome followed the method of laissez-faire, helping the inhabitants, if they cared, to build on foundations laid before the Romans came and offering their own culture as a stock from which peoples in the provinces might draw such ideas as seemed good, but everywhere, except in Egypt, leaving the natives to work out their own futures for themselves. If Rome may be criticized in the first and second centuries, it is for too ready an acceptance of what she found. In Africa, for instance, occasional human sacrifice to the Phoenician Saturnus seems not to have been stamped out till the time of Tertullian’s father, and in Egypt, where a marked revival of prosperity after the Roman conquest was followed by a disastrous decline, early improvement was due to the advent of efficiency, and ultimate failure to the inherent weakness of a system inherited from the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies which was modified, indeed, but which, since it was in existence, it would have been contrary to Roman practice to destroy. Nevertheless Rome was in general justified. Egypt was unique in the hypertrophy of its organization, and elsewhere, among peoples whose institutions were the healthy result of natural growth, tolerance was vindicated by the event.

An empire on which little was imposed by the imperial power retained obvious signs of its varied composition. Gauls and Berbers, polytheists and monotheists, nomads and men whose ancestors for generations had lived in cities, peoples who spoke Latin, others who spoke Greek and those of barbarian tongues—all these, and more, were included in the immensum imperii corpus. In every department of human affairs regional variety was to be seen, and Rome refrained from all attempts to hasten its reduction. Nevertheless, though uniformity was never attained, there were forces at work which tended by degrees to give all parts of the Empire a certain measure of resemblance. While Rome was still a petty State in Latium, the Greeks had forged a link between the two basins into which Italy and Sicily divide the Mediterranean. East and West still remained distinct; but, when Strabo calls Massilia “a school for barbarians”, he rightly commemorates the service of the Greeks in bringing to Western Europe some knowledge of the culture and institutions of Hellas. Such contact, however, was with Hellas in its days of independence, and the West remained strange to the great developments inaugurated by Alexander in the East. Save perhaps for Sicily, the western Mediterranean in general lay outside the region which the Macedonians had veneered with a single culture and marked with signs of incipient unity. Italy in particular had been sheltered from the full force of Hellenism by the exclusive policy of Rome, and it was through Rome herself that the more valuable achievements of the Hellenistic world were slowly passed on to the West.

In the East, however, more had been done to prepare the way towards ecumenical union. Large areas had grown accustomed to the general control of the Successor Kingdoms, and the policies of Alexander and the Seleucids in Asia had been alike in encouraging the population to focus itself round centers which offered at least an introduction to that form of life best found in the cities of Greece and of the Roman Empire, even though they might not all deserve to be called poleis in the strict Greek sense. Many of these places had attained their full development before Rome appeared; but even the more backward held the possibility of growth to municipal stature, and their advance was a process, begun in Seleucid times, which Rome did no more than stimulate. Yet wide as Macedonians had spread Hellenic culture and Hellenic institutions in the East, the hellenization even of the lands with which Rome came to be concerned was far from uniform. Western Asia Minor was part of Hellas; but elsewhere in the peninsula more primitive conditions survived. In the third century BC a large tract in Phrygia had been given to the Gauls, whose institutions were their own, and farther east the inner parts of Pontus remained wild in their isolation, while Cappadocia, touched only lightly by the Seleucids, preserved the ancient culture of Hattic Anatolia, modified only by the influence of Achaemenid Persia. So too in Syria, though the rich lands of the North, the centre of Seleucid power, had become a stronghold of Asiatic Hellenism, the poorer regions had attracted less attention, and not far off were the fringes shared and disputed by the settled population and nomads like the Skenite Arabs whose sheikh St Paul had found in control of Damascus.

Rome’s task in the East was to continue work already well begun. The Hellenistic age had at least proclaimed unity as an ideal. Save in the Egyptian sphere a single monetary standard passed from Bactria to the Adriatic; the Septuagint is a monument of the rise of Greek towards the status of a universal language; and the cities of Asia were active cells whence the Seleucids had hoped to spread Greek ways of life throughout their dominions. Yet the coming of Rome found many problems still unsolved. Beyond the limits of old Hellas Hellenism had struck root only in the cities, and even there its hold was secure on none but the upper classes. Outside lay the vast country regions, where change was slight and fugitive. Though Greek had become the vehicle of culture the masses still used their native tongues, and in Asia, at least, the vitality of languages which Greek attacked in vain is a clue to the strength of the opposition which Hellenism had everywhere to meet. So strong, indeed, did it prove that in the last century BC a momentous fact emerged. Like the earlier attempt of Alexander to blend Greek with Iranian, the efforts of the Seleucids to establish an Hellenic domination had failed before the superior numbers and the steady resistance of Semites and Iranians. Much, indeed, had been gained. The old antinomy between Greek and barbarian had given way to a salutary recognition of the value of humanity as such, the maintenance over wide areas of a stable peace had become something more than a Utopian aspiration, and the world had learnt that freedom might flourish even in communities which formed parts of a larger whole. But Asia had proved the grave of grandiose essays in the manipulation of culture, and the time had come for an imperial method which, whatever the means it might employ to secure the loyalty of the parts, could dispense with cultural uniformity as an essential condition of success.

 

III.

ROME AND ROMANIZATION

 

The famous tribute paid to Rome in the fifth century by Rutilius—that she “made a city what was once a world”—is of value if only as a reminder that, despite the Roman tolerance of variety, forces had been at work to give the Empire a cohesion which was not least among the achievements of which Rome could boast. To produce it three factors had combined. First was the emigration of Italians. Ubicumque vicit Romanus, habitat, says Seneca, and from the second century BC onwards there is evidence to prove him true. Adherbal’s Italian followers massacred by Jugurtha and the thousands in Asia slaughtered at Mithridates' behests are only the most striking illustrations of the readiness with which, even before the Imperial age, Italians spread abroad. Their motives too are known. The inscriptions from the mart which Rome had made at Delos show that there were many whose concern was private trade to reinforce the influence of those engaged on the collection of public revenue. Such traders soon struck root, and before long they were scattering the seeds of the Roman civilization. To them a second class should probably be added. The evidence is admittedly scanty and its meaning a matter of dispute; but the growth of Roman influence in Provence, as in Andalusia and Tunisia, does not admit of easy explanation unless it be supposed that merchants from Italy were followed by peasants whose interest was in the soil. Indications of a readiness to emigrate among the people of the countryside—even before Italian farmers were forced to make way for veterans after the civil wars—are to be found in the history of the military foundations. It was men from the armies of the Scipios—men largely drawn from the peasant class—who settled at Carteia (Algeciras) in such numbers that by 171 BC. the children born to them of Spanish wives presented a legal problem only solved by the grant of Latin rights to the whole community; and it was soldiers again who formed the Roman nucleus in Italica, the home of Trajan and Hadrian. Whatever their respective numbers, traders and peasants should probably be recognized together in the drift of population which had set from Italy towards the West by the beginning of the second century BC. In at least some provincial regions these people were soon numerous enough to make their presence felt, and before long the groups in which they tended to collect became powerful agents in spreading a knowledge of Italian culture and Italian conceptions of society among the natives.

Second to this emigration in point of time, though before it in ultimate importance, must be reckoned the effects produced by the standing army. In Tunisia some small part in the romanization of the country was played by veterans who had fought under Marius himself, and in Gallia Narbonensis far more was due to the military colonies of Caesar and Augustus. One of them, Arelate (Arles), profiting by her position on the Rhone and on the route to Spain, became a great commercial centre in the first century, and in the second deposed Massilia from her control of sea-borne trade. But, potent as was the influence of such a city on the life of its neighbors, the main contribution of the army to the spread of Roman culture was due less to the foundation of colonies for veterans than to the presence of its units in the provinces and to the continuous process of recruitment and discharge. Both in the Julio-Claudian period, when the legions were composed predominantly of Italians, and later when the provincial element steadily increased, time-expired soldiers tended to settle near the camp where they had been stationed; and this practice became normal when Hadrian made it regular for garrisons to get recruits from the districts in which they had their quarters. Even before it became customary to give them Roman citizenship on discharge, the auxiliaries, serving with an army whose language was Latin, whose higher officers were Roman at least in outlook, and whose tone was essentially Italian, had come into contact with the surface of Roman culture; and, as Rome discovered to her cost in AD 69, these men soon carried a knowledge of Roman methods to their brethren at home. This result the legions reinforced, first, when their recruits were drawn from Italy, by transferring a certain number of Italians permanently to the provinces, and later by strengthening the Roman connections of soldiers locally enrolled who in their private lives had ample occasion to spread the language and ideals of the army among the natives of their province.

The effectiveness of the camps as centers of Roman influence was increased by the civilian settlements they provoked. A camp made heavy calls for agricultural produce on the surrounding countryside, of which part was commonly assigned to it as military land; but besides this it had needs only to be met by a mart of considerable dimensions. Such was provided by the canabae—at first the home of traders casually come together, but soon a community with an organization of its own, capable of growth even into a city in the fullest sense. By AD 68 the canabae at Vetera in Lower Germany had become something like a town, and this within half a century had received the status of colonia from Trajan. Civic development was not always so rapid or so great as here. The canabae at Carnuntum, not made a municipium before the time of Hadrian, only gained colonial rights from one of the Severi; a place so important as Moguntiacum made no progress at all until the end of the third century; and Argentorate is one instance of several where the original nature of the cantonment was kept unchanged. Nevertheless, whatever their constitutions, the business of such centers served to draw men from the Mediterranean towards the frontiers, bringing with them a knowledge of that civilization which it was the abiding achievement of Rome to spread from the coasts to the inland zones and to plant throughout Europe west of the Rhine.

A similar effect, weaker perhaps but more widely felt, was produced by groups of Italians who settled in the provinces without military demands to attract them. Wherever they found themselves, Roman citizens resident among provincials regularly formed a small society of their own, with an organization capable of development into a municipal constitution. Such groups were the conventus civium Romanorum—collections of Roman citizens living in a community of lower status, meeting from time to time to deal with their common interests, and having as their head a curator, probably chosen by themselves, if possible from among the Roman citizens who had held office in the place to which the conventus was attached. Besides these there were other types, like the pagi formed in Africa by veterans settled on agricultural lands. Of the latter a familiar example is the town of Thugga (Dougga) in the hills above the valley of the Oued Khalled, where the great Graeco-Punic mausoleum of the second century BC, the winding streets with Roman houses, the theatre, and the Graeco-Roman temple of the Semitic Caelestis (Astarte), form a memorable picture of blended cultures. Its history is its explanation. A native township which flourished in Carthaginian times became a peregrine civitas on the arrival of Rome; but in its neighborhood emigrants from Italy were settled on the land, and they in turn formed a pagus of Roman citizens. The two communities lived side by side, both using Thugga as their social centre and steadily becoming closer in their association. Already by AD 48 the native civitas described its council as a Senate and its people as a plebs, though its highest magistrates at this time still bore the Punic name of suffetes. Then, as more and more of its members received the Roman civitas, its distinction from the became less and less significant until at the beginning of the third century the two were united in a single municipium, which finally received the coveted title of colonia from Valerian or Gallienus.

If emigration and the army were responsible for carrying the Roman culture abroad, its influence on the provincial populations is not wholly to be explained without reference to a third factor of importance. Though they suppressed what seemed to them barbaric, like the human sacrifice which Claudius attacked in Gaul and Hadrian was forced to deal with elsewhere, the Romans made no attempt to press their institutions on the world. Their own attitude was receptive. They lacked the Greek consciousness of cultural superiority. By assuming this same attitude in the peoples of the Empire, they escaped the failure which awaits the cultural crusade and left those who became their debtors to take what they chose and cherish what they took with the tenacity reserved for a possession freely acquired. But such debts were incurred with increasing readiness, and among their many causes one stands preeminent. This was the prestige of Rome—earned not by the glory of Roman arms but as gratitude to the authors of the Roman peace.

The Augustan Peace had done more than mark the end of the domestic disputes which generated the Civil Wars: it had brought order to a world where war had been almost normal since the beginnings of Greek and Roman history. In earlier times warfare had not, indeed, been continuous, and for a time the Augustan Peace was mistrusted as a passing lull. Men were grateful to Augustus for a respite which soon perhaps promised to cover a human lifetime; but it was only slowly that they came to understand the full magnitude of Rome's achievement. Peace, they discovered at length, was enduring, dependent not on its creator but on Rome, and by the end of the Julio-Claudian period the condition of the new age was recognized for what it was—the abiding Pax Romana. The immensa Romanae pacis maiestas entitled Rome herself to the gratitude of those who enjoyed it, and when the peoples awoke, as from a dream, to knowledge of the new age, their feelings found expression in a devotion to the imperial power whose institutions they were proud to make models for their own. Provincial cities flattered themselves by copying the civic buildings of Rome; they sought colonial rights, not because their privileges would thereby be the greater, but because the title of ‘colony’ suggested closer connection with Rome than any other; men made the Roman civitas the object of ambition; and in the third century their zeal for Roman culture as they conceived it led to consequences which were even embarrassing. Such was the enthusiasm of the Illyrians for the traditions of a city whose past they did not understand that they were led by an imagined duty to defend the Roman gods into persecution of the Christian Church.

Though the glamor of Urbs Roma, the focus of a loyalty which grew stronger even while its administrative importance decreased, was a potent commendation of the Latin culture in the lands to which it was presented, the outward changes which it encouraged were less valuable than the attitude of mind which it implied. That ‘Samian’ ware came into fashion in the western provinces, that architecture fell under the influence of the Mediterranean, that Roman methods were followed in local government, and even the fact that Latin became the common language of the West were achievements of which Rome indeed might boast; but as testimony to her imperial skill they are trivial compared with that pride in membership of the Empire and that staunch fidelity to the whole of which the reverence reserved for the city on the Tiber was an expression. The solidarity of the Roman world and the unity which at first was realized and then, when the reality was destroyed, gave the West an ideal which survived the Empire itself was strengthened and symbolized by the device which was among the most notable of Rome's contributions to the art of government. Neither Semites nor Persians nor the Greeks in Hellenistic times had found an outward sign to mark the common interest of those who owed a single allegiance. Their peoples were united by nothing less precarious than loyalty to the person of the reigning king—a bond of which Rome herself came to learn the value in the first two centuries after Christ, when the ‘worship of the Emperor’ generally had an object worthy of the devotion it assumed. But the unity of Italy after the Social War had been secured without recourse to the popularity of an individual: the Italians had been admitted to the Roman State, and the token of their membership was the civitas Romana. This momentous innovation was made possible by the Republic's discovery that wider and narrower citizenships were not incompatible, and that the people of an Italian town might become citizens of Rome without sacrificing the collective life of their own community. For the first time the world was introduced to the idea of an inclusive imperial citizenship, and this it was the work of the Principate to extend to the provinces at large. Augustus and Tiberius had been chary with their gifts, but with Claudius the policy became more generous, and thenceforward special grants to individuals and communities combined with the regular enfranchisement of peregrine troops on discharge to increase the number of the Roman cives until Caracalla, in AD 212, made at least all but the most backward of the free inhabitants of the Empire ‘citizens of Rome’.

The privileges of citizenship inevitably diminished as its holders grew more numerous, but throughout the second century its distinction remained. The eagerness with which the honor was sought and the care with which it was bestowed are proof enough of its serious significance. It marked more than the mere favor of the central government; for the civitas long implied some knowledge of Roman culture in those who held it, and it was left for Severus Alexander to validate Roman wills written in any other language than Latin. And even when the Constitutio Antoniniana of AD 212 largely deprived the citizenship of legal advantage and economic value, it remained a symbol of imperial unity, with no less, so far as can be seen, of that inestimable power, on which Aristides laid stress, to recall the common interest of government and people.

 

IV.

THE UNITS OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT

 

 

In a world where the central power took so modest a view of its duty and left so large a share of the administration to the inhabitants themselves, the system of local government was necessarily complex; and its complexity was the greater because Rome consistently refrained from wanton interference with the native institutions of her peoples. Development there was, but it was natural and unforced—the result less of Roman orders than of the Roman peace. Peace brought prosperity, prosperity allowed culture to progress, and, when men found themselves at once with new conceptions of a decent life and with the means for their attainment, the outward aspect of society was changed. Though Rome planted colonies even in backward lands where their influence was reflected in villages assigned to their control, and though grants of status were made by governmental acts, the most potent reason for the advance of civilization was that a demand grew up for what Rome had made available among those to whom her ways were new. The result was a movement towards city-life, of the kind familiar in Italy and Greece; but the movement was far from general, and even when begun its pace was determined by local conditions.

Romanization of society in its fullest form meant that the population was incorporated in cities, each with a territorium beyond its walls and each with a council and magistrates of its own. But there were vast regions of the Empire to which life of this kind remained strange, where, as in Thrace and parts of Syria, the rare cities were Roman foundations in a land which retained its village organization, or where again, as in the Tres Galliae, towns had existed even before Roman times but still failed to acquire that predominance over the surrounding country which would make them cities in the fullest constitutional sense. There were great estates too, often attached to no urban unit, belonging either to private individuals, resident or absentee, or to temples, as commonly in Asia Minor, or to the fiscus, which penal expropriation soon made responsible for enormous areas of productive land. On the imperial saltus of Africa, where the survival of inscriptions has preserved some details of their economy, the land was agricultural; but the assets of the State included other forms of wealth which called for varied methods of development. Of these the mines are an instance brilliantly illuminated by the evidence from Aljustrel, where a settlement, apparently of large dimensions but without self-government, was organized and controlled by the agents of the State. But though these local peculiarities all have their place in the economic history of the provinces, their relevance to romanization at large lies only in the reminder they supply of two essential facts. The first is that Rome did not lack the pliancy of method which in an imperial power is the first condition of success; and the second that the city-life wherein ancient culture reached its highest level was a life to which large sections of the people never managed to attain. For the rest, it is the cities themselves which deserve attention; for in them, if anywhere, were realized the ideals of social health and local autonomy which Rome showed to be compatible with her insistence on world-wide peace, and which were the motives of her policy even towards the rudest of the races she controlled.

When a province was formed, arrangements must be made for the permanent administration; and, since much was left to the inhabitants themselves, it was above all things necessary that the officials of Rome should know with whom they had to deal. Accordingly the local units into which the region fell were exhaustively examined, modifications which seemed expedient were made, and the status of each with its rights and obligations was defined in terms which under the Republic had by custom been considered in Rome and embodied in a lex provinciae. The details of these arrangements, made at the opening of the Roman age, in general are irrelevant to the developments which followed; but in one particular their effect was of the first importance. The units which Rome recognized were destined to manage their own affairs, and the vigor of their political life was necessarily determined by its scale. If the value of freedom is to give men that zest for living without which initiative is destroyed and progress ends, and which is only to be secured when they conceive themselves to be masters of their environment, the opportunities afforded by the politics of the parish pump are less fruitful than those where issues are greater and responsibilities more extensive. Thus it is not without significance that the units of local government in the Roman empire tended to be large. Exceptions, of course, were many. In Italy itself, where the population, judged by ancient standards, was dense, and where the old units had been broken up during the Roman conquest to provide alter publicus populi Romani, the area over which a municipality had control was generally not wide : Pompeii, for instance, lay within sight of her neighbor Stabiae and, except to the east, her land seems not to have extended in any direction more than five miles from the walls. But in the north the territories were more impressive. Veleia, in the Apennine near the modern Bobbio, controlled an area which stretched from the frontiers of Placentia to those of Luca; and between Luca and Veleia the distance is over 100 miles. In the provinces, where Rome was not constrained by the legacy of earlier times, territoria often attained the dimensions of a modern English county. The peoples of the Tres Galliae were grouped into sixty-four civitates, each of which, on average, must have covered a rather larger area than a Department under the Third Republic; in Pontus an important town like Amasia had control of a region which ran sixty miles from the city in one direction; and in the fifth century St Augustine was moved to reflect how trivial was the domain of regal Rome, when the frontiers were nowhere more than twenty miles away, compared with the territories of the Gaetulian civitates in his own day. Thus the business of local government was more than trivial, and those at least who controlled it were concerned with affairs which left them with no cause to fall into the lethargy which afflicts men whose opinions are of no account.

The constitutions of these urban communities and their relations to the provincial government varied in detail according to the status of their inhabitants. The least favored of the cities—those which came into the category of civitates stipendiariae—were the homes of people who, save for individuals personally enfranchised by Rome either after military service or for some other reason, were foreigners (peregrine). Their rights in local administration and their relations with the imperial authorities were determined by the settlement made when they were brought within the Empire, and this settlement was not a negotiated treaty but an arrangement imposed by Rome and revocable by her. The same was also true of a more envied class—those commonly known as civitates liberae, whose position was in fact one of independence, modified perhaps by a few small reserves. The people of Termessus Maior, for instance, whose position is partly known from the extant fragments of a plebiscitum in which it was defined, could make their own laws, administer justice for themselves without interference from the governor, even apparently in cases where Roman citizens were involved, manage their own finances without Roman supervision, and levy customs dues (though Roman tax-collectors could not be charged on goods in transit). Furthermore, Termessus Maior, like most civitates liberae until the last years of the Republic, enjoyed the valuable privilege of exemption from taxation by Rome (immunitas). All that was demanded of the free cities at first was that they should recognize the Roman supremacy and forgo the claim to a foreign policy of their own : for the rest they were virtually outside the provincial system and their independence was left intact, though it rested on the somewhat precarious basis of an arbitrary grant from the Roman People. By imperial times their position had in one respect been changed : perhaps during Pompey's re-organization of the East, libertas and immunitas had been openly divorced, and thenceforward, if immunitas was to be conferred, there was need for a separate concession so rarely made that the majority of cities which called themselves 'free' were nevertheless stipendiary. Libertas itself, however, continued, even in places with Latin or Roman rights, as a privilege which the frequency of its mention proves to have been appreciated by those who held it. It may, indeed, have flattered their conceit more than it increased their actual rights; for it is to be observed that in Cilicia Cicero found a moderate measure of judicial independence, such as even civitates stipendiariae enjoyed, enough to satisfy the people that they were free. But if the differences it made were trivial, the reason is not any lack of reality in libertas but the extent of the freedom enjoyed even by those communities which were not entitled technically to be called civitates liberae. With cities of this class may be closely joined the civitates foederatae, which complete the list of forms taken by urban communities of peregrine status. Civitates foederatae shared the benefits of the ordinary civitates liberae, but in theory their position was more secure because their freedom was conferred, not by revocable grant, but by a bilateral foedus, usually the result of service to Rome in war. The civitates foederatae of the Empire kept alive in their titles the memory of gratitude earned in days when Rome still had need of allies, but as an instrument of international law the foedus in these cases retained little of its significance. As a guarantee it lost its power; for, whatever the method she pursued, Rome on occasion would repudiate its terms if they were made a cover for disturbance or disaffection.

Like civitates stipendiariae and civitates liberae, the civitates foederatae were properly peregrine communities, but it might sometimes happen that an earlier foedus, like a grant of libertas, was recalled in the style of a city even after its people had risen to some higher status of the kind which must next be noticed. Between foreigners and Roman citizens in fact (though in law, like all non-Romans, they were peregrini) stood the Latins—enjoying rights collectively described by a name which had borne many meanings in the troubled course of Rome's constitutional history—ius Latii or Latium. In the West, though not elsewhere, and only to a slight extent in Africa, the more romanized communities were raised to the his Latii as a first step on the way to their final incorporation in the body of Roman citizens. These Latins enjoyed various advantages—many of them included in the ius commercii, which as regards the law of property in Roman territory made them virtually indistinguishable from Romans; but the characteristic feature of the Latin right was that it offered to some of those who held it an avenue to the Roman civitas, and in the first century the conditions of entry were that a man should have held a magistracy in his city. Subject to an uncertain limitation of number, at the end of his year in office the magistrate himself, his parents, his wife, his children and the children of his sons (provided that they were in potestas), all received civitas Romana. The effect of the Latin right was thus slowly to draft members of the local aristocracy into the body of Roman citizens, to be a visible link between Rome and the places where they lived. The success of this device may perhaps explain a later development which, though it may have served other ends as well, undoubtedly increased the speed of this incorporation. Latium maius, which makes its first appearance between AD 100 and the death of Pius, extended to members of the town-council the Roman citizenship which hitherto, by the system now distinguished as Latium minus, had been withheld from all but magistrates. Still it was the local aristocracy which Rome admitted to her franchise; but the rate at which Roman citizens were recruited from towns of Latin right was now notably increased, and the institution of Latium maius may reasonably be said to mark a stage in the progress towards the general enfranchisement of AD.

There remain the communities of highest rank, whose members, by the mere fact of membership, were Roman citizens. The division of these cities into coloniae civium Romanorum and municipia civium Romanorum had its origins in the practice of the Republic, whereby colonia was a term reserved for new foundations while municipium was applied to towns which, after an earlier history of their own, were brought into the Roman system. Thus, when the Social War brought the complete enfranchisement of Italy, in a peninsula of which the whole free population had now become Roman there was no city, except Rome itself, which could not be described as either colonia or municipium; and so, since the colonies abroad were still few enough to be regarded as exceptions, the phrase municipia et coloniae acquired the meaning which it retained even into the first century of the Empire—the country-towns of Italy. With Julius Caesar, however, when the unification of Italy was complete, Rome turned her attention to the problem of the provinces, and the progress of romanization abroad brought developments in the practice and in the terminology of government. Coloniae civium Romanorum in the provinces became more numerous, and at the same time cities of peregrine origin abroad began to receive either the Roman right or, as a step towards final incorporation, the Ius Latii. Though it was an innovation when the term was applied to a Latin community, provincial towns, whether Roman or Latin, began to be known as municipia unless some act of foundation by Rome entitled them to the name of Roman colony; and municipium, used of places outside Italy, thus came to mean a town, once peregrine, whose status had been raised by Rome, whether as yet only to the Latin stage or already to the full Roman civitas. Thus far the meanings of these terms had grown from their earliest sense to connote new forms generated by new needs; but their history was now confused by the fickle influence of fashion. In particular the title colonia was freely given, already in the first century of our era, to places whether of Roman or of Latin right, which had not been founded or refounded by Rome and which sometimes were not even cities at all but merely the centre of a people whose organization remained tribal.

The increasing frequency of these grants, which created what have been justly distinguished as titular colonies, was due in the last resort to the increasing prestige of Rome. Aulus Gellius records a famous occasion on which Hadrian was approached by the people of his native place, Italica, with a request, like one lately come from Utica in Africa, that their city should cease to be a municipium and become a colonia. The choice between these titles had exercised local patriots on many occasions in the past, and preference was determined by the whims of taste which, after some uncertainty, finally fixed upon the colonial status as the more enviable. Since municipia were properly towns of alien origin, whereas coloniae in the strict sense were the creation of Rome, the colonial title suggested the closer connection with the Roman People; and it was for this reason, and for this reason alone, that it was sought with an eagerness which is a clue to the good-will enjoyed by the imperial power. To the legal rights of the inhabitants and to their fiscal obligations the mere change of a city's style from municipium to colonia made no difference at all.

The legal and material advantages which changes of title did nothing to secure were conferred by the government in other ways. The simple practice of the Republic whereby Italy supplied the men, and the provinces the money, had indeed been modified in detail : in Italy while recruitment diminished taxation increased, and the demand for troops was steadily being transferred to the provincials. But the principle that inhabitants of the provinces should pay taxes to Rome had been maintained; and when libertas and immunitas ceased to be inseparable, it was even strengthened. Its maintenance involved the consequence that the fiscal liabilities of provincials were determined not by their status but by their domicile; and so by acquiring the Latin or the Roman right they gained nothing in relief from taxation. Nevertheless, the government did not forgo the right to make exceptions. Immunitas was still occasionally bestowed, though not always in the fullest form; but immunitas itself had ceased to be the most generous concession of which Rome was capable. The highest privilege accessible to provincial cities was the Ius Italicum—a grant of great value to the inhabitants and one which seems to have been strictly reserved for places where circumstances were such as to demand peculiar consideration. In general its effect was to put the territory of a provincial city in the same legal position as Italian soil—to withdraw it from the eminent domain which Rome claimed over solum provinciale from Julio-Claudian times, to make it capable of individual ownership optimo iure Quiritium, to exempt it and its population from direct taxation, and to leave it outside the jurisdiction of the provincial governor. But the sacrifice of revenue thus involved was one which the government made with reluctance. In Dacia, as in the remoter parts of Spain, the grant of the Ins Italicum may be explained by the need to encourage centers of Roman influence in regions where life was dangerous as well as hard; and the favor of Septimius for his native land may account for its gift, by him and Caracalla, to Leptis Magna, Carthage and Utica. To the end, however, the privilege remained so rare that it cannot have been the serious ambition of any ordinary town, and it deserves notice rather as an economic stimulus than as a device to bridge the gap between Italy and the provinces.

 

V.

THE MUNICIPAL CONSTITUTIONS

 

Coloniae and municipia civium Romanorum, cities with the Latin right and those whose people were still peregrini, differed greatly in prestige and self-esteem; but, despite the variety of detail, urban communities of whatever status were markedly alike both in their administrative responsibilities and in the essential features of their civic constitutions. In the simplest form of urban organization all free citizens of a certain area were citizens of the city which formed the centre of its life; and, if those whose work lay in the countryside grouped their homes in villages, these villages were mere social accidents, unrecognized by the public law.

But time brought complications, and contact between cultures increased them.

When a new city was founded in a barbarian land, the previous inhabitants of its territory might still remain, though by culture they were unfit to join the colonists as citizens; and when a city had its territory extended, the people brought under its control might likewise best be left to live as they had lived before. Moreover, when the contrast between urban development and the stagnation of the more distant countryside was so great that peasants who in fact were citizens came near to forgetting their rights, it ill accorded with the Greek conception of citizenship that the mere fact of domicile should be enough to include elements so diverse in a single polity. The problem, recognized already in the days of Greek independence, became more insistent when the conquest of Asia brought Greeks into contact with peoples often far behind them in political development, and its solution produced various features characteristic of the Hellenistic age. None was more notable than the abandonment of the old dichotomy by which every community was either a polis or politically nothing, and the substitution for it of forms in a graded sequence through which a place might rise by stages from village origins to the dignity of a self-governing city, with the result that by imperial times cities are freely found controlling smaller settlements which do not share their own status. In Asia Minor, for instance, the paroeci were a recognized section of the population; and in the West not only are there frequent signs that within the municipal areas the free inhabitants were not all of equal privilege but the need for differentiation was formally recognized by the Roman practice of attributio.

Attributio, which had been adopted as early as the second century BC and which was widely applied in Transpadane Gaul by the Lex Pompeia of 89 BC, was an arrangement whereby less advanced communities were placed under the control of a neighboring city, through which they paid their tributum to Rome and which was immediately responsible for the maintenance of order and the administration of justice. The attributi were in theory a distinct and subordinate society, often with an incipient constitution of their own; and, though the land they used was sometimes included in the territorium of the nearby city, the scanty evidence suggests that it might be left outsides. But the feature of this institution which entitled it to notice in the story of romanization in the West is the readiness with which attributi, though strictly of lower status than the place to which they were attached, could mingle with its population so freely that all distinction disappeared. Doubtless North Italy was a favorable setting for this assimilation, and it cannot be assumed to have happened so soon elsewhere; but even in the remoter provinces, by bringing less favored communities into touch with more advanced, attributio served to spread that knowledge of municipal government which was the necessary condition of its use.

In the municipal constitutions, however, attributi had no proper place, and with them may also go the incolae. Incolae—properly residents who had their origin elsewhere—were indeed called upon to bear their share of civic burdens, just as at times they were allowed to enjoy public benefactions and, where some form of popular assembly survived, even to exercise a restricted right of voting; but in the great days of the municipalities they seem to have been debarred from office unless they had ceased to be incolae by gaining admission to full membership of the community in which they lived. Circumstances, however, made their disabilities slight. With the decay of democracy suffrage ceased to be an effective privilege, and admission to the local citizenship, which opened the way to office, was less difficult than has sometimes been supposed. It had, indeed, once been an axiom of Roman political theory that no man could be a citizen of two places at once; but to maintain this principle in the East after the freedom with which citizenship had been conferred honoris causa and the spread of isopolity in Hellenistic times, would have been impossible, as Trajan found, even if it had not been the outstanding achievement of the Roman Republic to discover that another franchise was compatible with its own. Conservatives, it is true, seemed to have frowned on the combination of local citizenships, but even in the West the practice was not uncommon, and Fronto, whose family came from Cirta, even goes so far as to assume that Cirta would gain a new citizen when his daughter found a husband.

The constitutions of the municipalities in all their variations were developed from that combination of a popular assembly with a council and a magistracy which was common to both Greece and Rome. In the East democracy had been in decline even before Rome came to throw her influence on the side of the more substantial elements, and in Rome itself circumstances had combined to make oligarchy the one possible alternative to monarchy. In the municipalities the same forces were at work. The size of the territoria was often such that distance alone was enough to prevent the citizens from meeting more than rarely; and so, though in towns organized by Rome the people were distributed in voting groups—in tribes at the Colonia Genetiva Julia and in the more frequent curiae at the Latin Municipium Flavium Malacitanum, their part in government was small and dwindling. Rome showed no enthusiasm for democracy, and in the great civitates of the Tres Galliae, where the difficulties of distance were peculiar and where tradition was wholly oligarchical, assemblies make no appearance in States which, though not strictly urban, had constitutions inspired by the urban model.

In the West, where Roman influence was strongest, the assemblies were confined, like those of the Roman Republic, to a simple acceptance or rejection of proposals laid before them and to the voting on candidates for office. At first, indeed, these rights were not to be despised. The graffiti of Pompeii prove the vigor of election campaigns, and in AD 60 the people of Puteoli sent an embassy to Rome with complaints about the local aristocrats. But except in Africa, where constitutional and economic development alike lagged a century or more behind events in other regions of the West, after the time of Trajan the western municipalities seem rapidly to have shed this democratic veneer and to have left everything but formalities, such as honorific decrees, in the hands of the council and magistrates. In Greek lands, however, though the public assemblies had rapidly decayed in the third and second centuries BC, prejudice and long-standing tradition delayed their final disappearance. The judicial functions of the Athenian demos in the second century may owe something to the whims of Hadrian; but Plutarch provides evidence enough that in his time the people were still active in politics, and later records show that it was not till the third century that they followed the assemblies of the West into insignificance.

In the municipalities what was lost by the many was gained by the few, until finally both power and responsibility lay with the councils and magistrates alone. In the East these councils were sometimes large, and in many cases members were elected for limited periods; but the system favored by Rome and predominant in the West was one whereby the ordo consisted of a hundred decuriones, either co-opted or nominated by the highest magistrates on the regular occasions, once every five years, when they were charged with censorial duties, and in practice holding their seats for life. As at Rome, ex-magistrates not already members of the House seem to have had first claim to vacant places, but there is no certain sign in the municipalities of an arrangement like that made by Sulla for recruiting the Roman Senate without the help of censors.

The magistracies which supplied the executive differed widely in name and nature. The Greek cities preserved forms familiar in the age of independence, overlaid with the deposit of Hellenistic times. Archons and strategoi were still common, but at their side appeared great figures of later origin like the permanent town-clerk (grammateus), the agoranomos, whose prominence was a monument of third-century care for the social services, and the guardian of what had come to be the hall-mark of Hellenism—the gymnasiarch. In the West, where the influence of Rome commended the grouping of magistrates into colleges, from the varieties of the Italian constitutions the Romans had evolved a scheme which, in the commonest of its many forms, finally contained duoviri iure dicundo and two aediles, to whom a college of two quaestors might be added. Beside this there appears another arrangement, favored for a time after the enfranchisement of Italy, by which the magistrates were a quattuorvirate, soon distinguished as two quattuorviri iure dicundo and two quattuorviri aediles; but there is evidence enough to show that this refinement, despite its prevalence, could not claim any great significances, and even in its absence duoviri iure dicundo and aediles might be treated as colleagues. The duumvirate, however, though it was highest among the regular offices, was not the final reward of municipal ambition; for every fifth year it became a greater honor, when its holders, charged with various censorial powers, had to perform tasks of special responsibility—such as filling vacancies in the ordo and renewing leases of municipal property—and marked their distinction by adding quinquennalis to their official style.

In the first century the annual elections were still generally made by the people, but the decline of the assemblies, hastened by the example of Rome, gradually transferred their choice to the ordo; and as early as the time of Marcus the custom had begun by which decuriones, to whom office was gradually confined, were expected to take magistracies in the order of their appointment to the council. As their title would suggest, the duoviri iure dicundo were largely concerned with the administration of justice, and surviving records of the rules they were required to apply leave no doubt about the burden of their task; but besides these duties, like the consuls at Rome they presided over the council and the assembly, and so were concerned both with the preparation of the most varied business and with the execution of the ultimate decisions. Many of these affairs were trivial, like the constant grants of honors to public benefactors, but, even if not all communities held the power enjoyed by the Colonia Genetiva Julia, to mobilize its citizens against threatened attack, self-government in the cities was not a sham, responsibilities were considerable, sometimes extending to powers of legislations, and the problems of finance, which, particularly in the East, often involved the management of a local currency, demanded competence greater than the local authorities could continuously provide. The routine of administration, especially in the town itself, fell largely to the aediles : it was their business to supervise the streets and public buildings, to control the market and to maintain order—duties for which they were equipped with judicial powers, like the aediles in Rome. Quaestors, where they were found, appear to have stood in the same humble relation to the duoviri as the early Roman quaestors to the consuls, and in some places the quaestorship was not even regarded as a magistracy.

Amid all their varieties the municipal constitutions show a common characteristic which would have been inevitably developed when annual magistrates were called upon to work with a council recruited from their predecessors, even if it had not from the outset been encouraged by Rome—the strict limitation of executive freedom and an oligarchical domination which was marked at the outset and became complete when popular election fell into disuse. Not only were the magistrates subject to the intercessio of their colleagues, but in the Colonia Genetiva Julia they were formally bound, under penalty of 10,000 sesterces for every failure, to obey the decrees of the decuriones. Moreover, the charter of this colony, at least, enumerated the business—some of it trifling like the allocation of seats in the theatre—which could not be decided without reference to the council; and even in the matter of jurisdiction, where the duoviri retained some measure of independence, in the Spanish municipalities given Ius Latii by Vespasian appeal against fines imposed by the duoviri or aediles lay to the decuriones. The strength of the tendency towards oligarchy showed itself again in the development of smaller bodies either within the ordo itself or at its side. By the last century of the Republic leading members of the local aristocracy seem to have gained some kind of recognition in certain towns of Italy and Sicily under names such as decem primi, and these were the forerunners of a class which, though its functions before the end of the second century are ill-recorded, subsequently gained an unenviable prominence, due perhaps in part to the fiscal changes which made the dekaprotoi of the East responsible for the collection of the imperial taxes in their cities. Despite their independent origin, there is little doubt that their emergence in the West was a symptom of that drift towards dependence on the few which in Greek lands was marked by the growth of the gerousia. In origin this institution, which is characteristic of the Roman age, may well have been purely social, but in course of time these secondary senates acquired an undoubted authority, not the less weighty because it was justified more by the reputation of the members than by the law of the constitutions.

The strength of the oligarchies was wealth. In a world where there was no national debt and the opportunities for investment were consequently few, men parted with their money in a way which would be counted prodigal by those who know a Stock Exchange. The letters of the younger Pliny, who was only passing rich according to the standards of his day, are reminder enough that in the first two centuries munificence rose to heights rarely, if ever, attained by later ages. And when generosity is a tradition, the many can scarcely fail to seize their opportunity and become parasites on the few. So there grew up the system whereby the wealth of individuals was invoked to meet an expenditure which had outrun the ordinary public income.

The revenues of a municipality were derived in the first place from rents of assets belonging to the community—assets of which the accumulation was encouraged by Nerva and Hadrian when they gave these bodies the right to take legacies. Land, as always in the ancient world, was the main investment, and cities held estates, sometimes remote from themselves, often of considerable dimensions. There is, indeed, no surviving record of the way in which Arpinum and Atella came to own property in Cisalpine Gaul, but we know that it was Octavian who gave Capua land in Crete at Cnossus, probably worth 1,200,000 sesterces a year. To rents of lands and of buildings owned by the municipality in the city itself there were added miscellaneous receipts from fines, from fees, as for admission to the citizenships, from the lease of fishing rights on inland waters, and in some places at least from tolls and harbor dues. Against the revenue had to be set an expenditure in which the only item balanced by its own returns was the water-supply, for which a rate was charged; and, though the cost of administration was not high, the ever popular games, the public cults, and in some places a food-supply subsidized in Hellenistic style, combined with the demands of local patriotism for costly satisfaction (whether in pretentious buildings or in futile embassies to congratulate the princeps and his agents on the most trivial occasions—and incidentally to give the envoys a holiday at public expense) to raise the outgoings far beyond the limit of the normal revenue. The scale of municipal resources was large, but not large enough to allow a city to spend ten million sesterces, like Nicaea, on a theatre with foundations so waterlogged that it was found unsafe even before it was finished.

The resultant deficit it was the duty of the rich to meet. In places where Roman influence was strong, there did indeed survive the early institution of the corvée by which, at the Colonia Genetiva Julia, all free residents between fourteen and sixty, rich and poor alike, might be called upon for five days’ labor a year; but regular direct taxation was contrary to Roman tradition, and the financial help of the wealthy, strict as its exaction soon became, probably had its origins in voluntary gifts. The drain on a man's purse began even before his entry into public life; for by the second century promises of benefactions to follow a successful candidature had become so common that rules of law were made to enforce performance. There followed the entrance fees—not in themselves excessive, though inevitable and sanctioned by the local constitutions. The qualifications required of candidates for the ordo were so modest as to suggest that great wealth was not regarded as essential to public life: in Pliny’s time a decurio at Comum had to be worth 100,000 sesterces. Again, the fees charged to new members were likewise not unreasonable: Pliny found 2000 sesterces being paid by recipients of super­numerary seats in Bithynia, and even in the West, where such exactions were not at first kept low by the more serious demands like those of liturgies in the East, one Cn. Satrius Rufus paid only 6000 sesterces at Iguvium. The summa honoraria for magistracies grew into a heavier burden. At the Colonia Genetiva Julia magistrates were compelled, as a minimum, to put down 2000 sesterces towards the cost of public shows, to which the city treasury also contributed; but the humble resources of a colony recruited from the Roman proletariate imposed a modesty which is no clue to the practices prevailing elsewhere. In the great cities of the empire local patriotism and personal ambition made public life a continuous competition in extravagant generosity. Even in a second-class town like Turris in Sardinia a man paid 3500 sesterces for election as quinquennalis, and then spent more on a public fountain; and at Massilia an augurate might cost 100,000.

To fees were added other calls. The Greek liturgies, whereby rich men were compelled, without holding office, to make themselves responsible for some public service, had their western parallel in the munera—an institution probably as old as Rome and one which did not become formidable till the third century AD. But the growing interest of the jurists shows that by Antonine times munera had become so essential as to win strict protection from the government, and the legal classification of these burdens is one of the main sources of information about their nature. The great majority of those recorded are of the type called munera personalia, which at first were nothing more than obligations to personal service. So long as a man had merely to give his time and labor to the community, there was no great hardship; but when these tasks involved the handling of public money, the individual was first required to pledge his own property as security against defalcation, and then, when public funds were low, actually to meet the expenditure, wholly or in part, out of his own pocket. In cities which sold corn at a fixed rate to the inhabitants, the duty of buying grain was not onerous when money was available and prices were below the level fixed for sale; but when the treasury was empty or prevailing prices rose, the corn had still to be provided, and what the city could not pay the rich man was expected to find from his own resources. So in their financial effects munera personalia came to be almost indistinguishable from the direct taxes in property known as munera patrimoniorum; and when these contributions took their places as a recognized source of revenue the munera became compulsory levies, necessarily imposed mainly on the rich. Above all it was men in public life who were expected to shoulder such burdens : magistrates bore many charges in addition to their entrance fees, and decuriones, whose business it was to assign the munera, were compelled to accept them in increasing numbers themselves.

How men thought of these inflictions is revealed by the use of their unpopularity to stimulate the birth-rate; for five surviving children brought their parents at least some measure of exemption. Nevertheless, the financial demands of these duties did not become serious everywhere at once, and the system was not fully developed before Severan times. But its coming was not unheralded. Though Hadrian and the Antonines, by proclaiming that mediocritas was no disqualification, still maintained the ancient view that these services were calls upon the persona, Marcus and Verus, despite the relief they gave by ruling that decuriones need not provide corn at less than market prices, were forced to confess that paupertas was a fatal bar. Earlier still Trajan had to admit that men in Bithynia were entering the town-councils against their wills, and Pliny himself had indicated some part of the reason by asking whether, when cities could not lend idle funds in the open market, sums so available should be offered on loan at a rate of interest lower than the normal and, if voluntary borrowers were not forthcoming, decuriones could be compelled to take loans themselves, giving their property as security for repayment. Even the Flavians had been familiar with the growing unpopularity of office. By itself the procedure laid down by the charter of the Municipium Flavium Malacitanum for filling vacancies when voluntary candidates failed gives no clue to the likelihood of such a dearth; but the urgency of the need for such a clause is suggested, and almost proved, by a remark of Javolenus Priscus in his abridgment of Cassius Longinus—that exemption from munera publica does not release a man from his obligation to hold magistracies; for election to a magistracy, as he ominously observes, is still to be regarded as less a munus than an honor.

The time had yet to come when town-councilors were made personally responsible for the imperial taxes of their cities or even, perhaps, when it was recognized by law that public relief might be given to members of the ordo whose bankruptcy was due to excessive munificence; but increasing burdens clearly produced a situation, in some parts of the empire at least, which engaged the attention of the government from the first century and was met by a steady stream of legislation directed with the best of motives to check an abuse which could not be extinguished. Of such measures it is usual to see the chief in the creation of Latium maius, and there can be no doubt that one effect of this innovation was to make the decurionate more attractive. Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether such was its main intention. Latium maius, yet one more step towards the Roman civitas, was a distinction sought by the municipalities with an eagerness not to be expected if it was no more than a bait to attract men to a distasteful public life, and the enthusiasm it aroused in times and places where financial troubles were still to come must suggest that its encouragement of candidates for the councils was only one among the purposes it served. Nor was indifference to office, with all its burdens, the worst enemy of municipal government: a more formidable menace came from Rome.

 

VI.

IMPERIAL ENCROACHMENT

 

The control of the cities was in the hands of men who, for all their patriotic enthusiasm, were amateurs in administration. Their lack of skill became more and more apparent as the standard of efficiency in the imperial bureaucracy rose; and this happened at a time when the central government showed signs of a growing paternalism. If Trajan could approve of interference with athletic sports in Vienne, it was not surprising that knowledge of the ease with which financial failings could be made good should have tempted him to well-meant intervention in that important field.

Money was being wasted by incompetence, and it seemed as though nothing but good could be done if a city was saved from loss by an expert supervision which would secure, for instance, that more than 3,000,000 sesterces should not be squandered in attempts to build an aqueduct to designs which could never be completed. Nevertheless in this altruism there was danger. The strength of the Empire was the conviction of its inhabitants that their interests demanded its survival; and those who mattered most—the people of the cities where self-government was a tradition—might lose their enthusiasm if encroachment by Rome destroyed all traces of autonomy. Thus, however salutary it might appear at first, interference from the centre would ultimately be condemned unless some stable balance were established between local initiative and bureaucratic control. To create such a balance is difficult, to maintain it harder still; and Rome's failure in a task which the modern world confronts with dubious success was made certain by the unprecedented strain thrown on the imperial finances during the crises of the third century.

Roman interest in the finances of provincial communities was nothing new. From Republican times the governors had exercised a certain supervision over municipal accounts, and their efforts were not without success: when mismanagement attracted general notice towards the end of the first century AD, it was worst in the places normally exempt from interference—in the towns of Italy and the free cities of the provinces. To them Trajan turned his earliest attention. He sent a commissioner to Achaea ad ordinandum statum liberarum civitatium, who took with him impeccable advice from Pliny on the delicacy of his task, and his example was followed by Hadrian both in Achaea and in Asia, where the free cities had Herodes Atticus as their overseer.

Pliny's command in Bithynia had a wider bearing; for, though one of his first instructions was to rescue the municipal finances from the prevailing chaos, which Trajan was determined to end in the free cities no less than elsewhere, his mission was really the first step towards the temporary transference to the princeps of a senatorial province which the foreign policy of the Empire made important and where, not for the first time, there had been grievances which had lately led it twice to prosecute its governor. Bithynia still received special treatment from Hadrian, perhaps because new difficulties had been caused by the recent earthquake, but the exceptional character of the problem which Pliny had been set to solve is proved by the suppression of his post and the return of the province to the Senate in the time of Pius. In Italy, however, where the alimentary foundations may have strengthened the Emperor's concern about the efficiency of local government, Trajan played a foremost part in starting an innovation which endured. Local vanity had long been flattered by imperial attention, and the princeps not only had allowed himself and members of his family to hold nominal office in municipalities as duumviri but at times had exerted a mild influence on the ordinary elections. With the second century, however, interference became more marked: there appeared the curator rei publicae, a representative of the princeps, who was given general supervision over the affairs of one city or more. At first discretion and good taste may have restricted these intruders to friendly advice when the proposals of a town-council seemed rash; but it was inevitable that the imperial authority behind them should command a respect which made it soon difficult and finally impossible for the ordo and the magistrates to take any action without the curator's approval. At times the princeps invaded the municipal field even more forcibly by appointing an official of his own with duties so highly specified that from the outset he was bound to withdraw some branch of business from the control of the municipality. Such was the curator kalendarii, whose business was to keep the public ledger with a vigilance which would see that monies due were promptly collected; and this office again is found filled by imperial nomination under Trajan.

The importance attached to these curae is shown by the choice of senators and equites to hold them, and the fragments preserved from Ulpian's book De officio  curatoris rei publicae are proof enough of the extent to which the institution had developed by the time of Severus Alexander. In some cities, at least, the curatores had become part of the constitution, and the stringency of their instructions even under the Antonines points already to a not distant future when no public expenditure could be incurred without the sanction of the princeps. Nevertheless, curatores were to be found only in a small minority of the cities before the third century, and it was not till the financial crisis broke that their activities increased to a point at which their power for evil became clear. But then at length it was apparent that the efficiency attained by the civil service of Trajan and Hadrian could only be secured in the municipalities at the cost of destroying self-government and transferring their direction to emissaries from Rome. The transference was not, indeed, made by force. Plutarch’s exhortations to self-reliance and his warnings against constant reference to the provincial governors are a reminder that the Greek cities at least were like the Senate at Rome in their readiness “to offer their heads to the halter when they were already tethered by the leg”; but, so far from justifying the imperial experiment, this timid submissiveness made its victims the less suitable objects of so robust a paternalism as that which sent them curatores and may even have moved the honest Pius to countenance breaches of testamentary dispositions to secure its ends.

Over the Empire at large this intrusion was gradual : Africa, though it was a public province, remained free from curatores under the Antonines, and in regions under the emperor's command their appearance was slow. Even when they came, their arrival put no sudden end to municipal autonomy, and they did not prevent the third century from being a time of vigorous activity in the towns of Africa. Yet from the first they were a menace to the vitality of the communities in their charge, and sooner or later circumstances thrust upon them that complete control which meant the end of self-government and changed cities with a healthy interest in life into the homes of a weary and apathetic population under the heel of the central power. Though their method was rash, Trajan and his successors meant well. But the strain of the third century, which made hopeless all attempts to preserve a successful balance between amateur direction and expert control, ruined a plan never free from risk; and in the end, by a tragic frustration of their purpose, the curatores did much to destroy that which they had been sent to save.

 

VII.

GOVERNMENT AND PEOPLE

 

Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan is a monument of the care which a conscientious princeps would devote to the details of administration abroad; and the evidence available does not suggest that diligence like Trajan’s was rare. Yet problems calling for administrative action were not the only aspects of provincial life which could claim the attention of the central government: important as it was that such matters should receive the notice they deserved, it was more important still that Rome should be kept in touch with the general state of provincial opinion. In Roman times' freedom was not, indeed, understood to involve a polity in which the executive could take no major decision without a mandate from the masses : Roman tradition was so far aristocratic that knowledge was held in respect. The value of libertas was rather found, not in any supposed right of the individual to a voice in the guidance of imperial policy, but in that vigorous interest in life which belongs to those who know that some of their affairs are under their own control and that the rest are directed by an authority which, though it may not depend on popular suffrage, is nevertheless ready to take public opinion into account. The provinces neither expected nor received an opportunity to thrust their views on the government whenever an issue of common interest arose: yet it was in the highest degree desirable that responsible officials in Rome should have some means of knowing the state of provincial sentiment.

The arrangements designed to give the views of the provinces an opportunity of expression have often been criticized, and admittedly they were not above reproach; but criticism, to be in point, must not be directed on their failure to secure something at which the Romans never aimed. A widespread franchise could have had no value in the eyes of a people who once had given the vox populi a hearing and then had turned away: the true measure of Roman success in keeping contact with provincial opinion is the strength of the conviction in the provinces that Rome was not beyond the reach of their representations. From Republican times the municipalities had been given means to air their opinions. By a custom of some antiquity the founder of a colony or a general who had received the submission of a conquered state had been expected to represent its interests at Rome', and this practice had grown into the system whereby the cities of the Empire at large chose men of eminence, whether resident in Rome or provincials whose occupations took them frequently to Italy, to be their patroni. While Cicero was her sole patronus, the interests of Capua would not suffer for lack of a weighty word on her behalf in the lobbies of the Senate; and later, when a rising demand caused the distinction of patroni to sink, what individuals might lack in influence was made good by an increase of their numbers. In the time of Severus Alexander the patroni who head the list of the decuriones at Canusium are thirty-nine, and in the fourth century Thamugadi seems to have had five or ten.

Patroni could voice the requests of separate communities. The state of the provinces in general, which it was the business of their governors to know, was a matter on which independent reports might be expected from senators of provincial origin. When Claudius so far broke with the Augustan practice as to suggest that the Senate would be the better for a ponderable admixture of provincials, whatever may have been his purpose at the moment he modified the composition of the House in a way which made it another link between Rome and the Empire at large. But the most formal and the best assured channel of communication between the provincial populations and the centre was provided by those Provincial Councils whose usefulness in the first three centuries AD has been disputed, but whose value was proved in the fourth, when in a modified form they did something to fill the gap left by the moribund municipalities as the seats of such limited self-government as the conditions of the age allowed. In the Greek world the regional leagues of pre-Roman times were models which could be adapted with ease to the needs of a Roman province, and in the case of Lycia the Koinon which in the second century attracted some part of the munificence lavished on the neighborhood by Opramoas was a direct continuation of the league which Rome found existing when the provincialization of the country was begun by Claudius. But in the West, though federal tendencies had been strong in Italy from the beginnings of Roman history, the Concilia, which were the counterparts of the Koina in the eastern provinces, were less deeply rooted in native institutions and owed more to their fostering by Rome. 

One of the principal occupations of these Councils during the early Empire was the Imperial cult, but the easy conjecture that the maintenance of this rite was the purpose for which they were formed does not grow more plausible with inspection. In the East, the Koina of pre-Roman times, though their unity was regularly marked by some common worship, were primarily concerned with secular affairs; and, though it cannot be held that these eastern Koina directly inspired the Concilia of the West, there are signs that in the West as well the provincial Councils could claim an origin not wholly due to the demands of the official cult. In the western extension of the Empire the central episode is the conquest of Gallia Comata, and it is perhaps significant that it was Caesar's habit during his Gallic campaigns to hold an annual convention of notables from the friendly States. This concilium Galliarum, as he called it, served no religious end. Its purpose was merely to keep him abreast of local opinion, and also, it may be supposed, to convince men whose friendship was an asset that Rome had not come to inflict a rule which would ignore the views of the native population. Such too may have been the function for which the Councils in Imperial times were designed; and if religious occupations gradually absorbed more and more of their attention, the development may have been as little intended at the outset as was the similar process experienced by the vici of Augustan Rome.

When the institution had developed, Councils of this sort were to be found throughout the provinces, of which it was usual for each to have its own, though there were occasional exceptions when a single assembly served several provinces, as in the Tres Galliae, and in the Tres Daciae after Marcus, or when circumstances demanded two assemblies for a single administrative unit, as in Crete and Cyrene. The members of a Council were nominated, probably for a year, by the cities or civitates of the region which it served, and there are signs that the number of delegates sent by each was roughly determined by the size and importance of the community. Its president, who with its other officers was chosen by the Council itself, after matters of cult had come to be its chief concern was called flamen, or sacerdos, Romae et Augusti in the West, and the like in the East possibly recall a time when in Greek lands the chief official was not primarily religious. Besides this officer the Council employed functionaries with duties wholly secular, such as the iudex, and the allectus, arcae in the Three Gauls. These titles are not, indeed, known elsewhere, but the financial business which they imply was so indispensable to the performance of elaborate ritual that every provincial Council may be assumed to have needed at least some rudimentary staff to collect its revenues and supervise its disbursements, if not to control a coinage like those long issued by certain of the Koina in the East. Its income was derived partly from such property as it might have acquired, partly from the generosity of individuals, but chiefly from the regular contributions paid by the constituent communities; and its expenditure was incurred mainly in the upkeep of its religious establishment and the annual celebration of the festival, often accompanied by games, in honor of Rome and the Emperor, which became the central feature of the Councils' routine.

There was, however, another charge on the communal ex­chequer : the cost of embassies; and it is their use of such ambassadors to lay business before the authorities in Rome which gave the Councils a place in the political structure of the Empire. Though in the time of Augustus they had already begun to pass votes of thanks to the princeps for the excellence of his officials in a way which was found embarrassing, the discouragement of this practice had implied no indifference on the part of Augustus to the legitimate needs of the provincial populations. The arrival of their complaints soon became a rare but recognized incident in the work of administration; the concilia seem even to have formally appointed inquisitores to investigate grievances alleged; and one not infrequent result of their activities was the trial of peccant officers, generally on a charge of extortion, with representatives of the Council instructing the prosecution. Votes of gratitude to popular officials remained common, despite attempts to stop them, but testimonials to the honest were less salutary than denunciations of the knaves; for it was their power to arraign corruption which made the Councils a potent check on governors and a reminder to the provinces themselves that oppression was so far from being part of Roman policy that Rome would welcome help in making an example of offenders. This, however, was not all. The Councils could approach the central authorities with representations on any subject in which they wished action taken, and when Pius sent a favorable reply ad desideria Asianorum he gave the clearest indication of the service these bodies could render in strengthening the impression that the government of Rome was not unresponsive to the requests of the local populations. The subject of Pius' rescript to Asia was, indeed, trivial; but Asia had approached Domitian on a more serious issue when it asked for relief from his prohibition against the planting of vines, the local Koinon of Thessaly had received rulings from Hadrian or Pius on judicial procedure, and even the backward Thrace had been in communication with Pius about appeals to the central government.

Recorded incidents of this kind are not numerous, but they appear throughout the history of the first two centuries freely enough to show that cult was not the only business of the provincial councils. The great religious celebrations in honor of Rome and the princeps were not, indeed, without powerful effects. The whole elaborate ceremony focused local interest on the glory of the imperial power and thereby did something to encourage the sentiment which made the Empire one. Yet such unity was not promoted at the expense of local differences : it is hard to suppose that in the Tres Galliae the Ara ad Confluentes failed in some degree to foster that Gallic individuality which found open expression in AD 70 and still in the time of Gallienus was strong enough to launch the Gauls on a line of action of their own. But behind this religious façade lay machinery capable of another useful function. Rarely as they may have been employed, the means whereby provincials could lay their views before the government in Rome were a valuable element in the imperial scheme; for, so long as they remained available, the provinces might continue to believe that their hopes and desires could be brought direct to the highest authorities in the Empire, and that the government which controlled their destinies, because it was accessible to their representations, was one which left them, even outside the limits of single cities and civitates, with what the Roman world knew as libertas.

 

VIII.

CONCLUSION

 

Unity of sentiment was what Rome attained; and it was the only unity worth attainment. Uniformity was neither sought nor secured. Believing as she did in local autonomy and claiming nothing for herself but the right and the means to preserve an ordered peace, Rome could dispense with attempts to justify her imperial work by the superiority of the culture which she could offer to her peoples and be content with the knowledge that the Pax Romana enabled them the better to live lives of the kinds which were their own.

The Empire had developed its essential character, and its solidity had been achieved, before a strain of paternalism became evident enough to invite reproachful reminders that good government is no substitute for self-government. Indeed Rome erred, if at all, rather on the side of remissness towards her responsibilities. It was laudable, perhaps, to leave the cities of Asia a large share in the task of maintaining public order, and in the system finally adopted, which makes its appearance in the second century, the suppression of brigandage seems still to have been entrusted jointly to local and imperial police. Yet highwaymen continued to ply their trade with a persistence which would have excused far more drastic intervention by the imperial power. Nevertheless, Rome's self-restraint was proved good by the result. If it encouraged local patriotism and, in the West, even tolerated that regional spirit which was the nearest approach to a sense of nationality on its modern scale to be found in the ancient world, minor loyalties did not conflict with allegiance to the Empire, since that allegiance did not demand their sacrifice. Over all the differences of race and culture, which in the Empire were many and great, there supervened a unity, not of language or religion or material civilization, but of common interest in the welfare of the whole.

Remarkable as was Rome's success in consolidating the world behind her, and notable as was the determination with which her road-builders overcame the formidable obstacle of distance, from the outset she had been exempt from at least one baffling complication. Though throughout this period the West retained a certain prejudice against the Greek-speaking peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean, there was no need to evolve an imperial method of the kind which can unite races whose differences extend to color. The color-bar can scarcely be said to have been known in Roman times, because its conditions did not exist. Where they were present in some slight degree, ethnic divisions were generally ignored; and in Western Europe, where Rome did her finest work, the predominant populations were close akin to some of the most numerous in the Italian peninsula. Indeed, it was the closeness of this connection which explains the readiness with which the Celts received not merely Roman rule but many elements in the Latin civilization, and gives its significance to the day of Actium when victory went to the side whose leader would proclaim the Latin culture, which Western Europe could accept, as the culture of the Roman power.

Though Rome asked for no uniformity, the power of prestige made her institutions a model so freely imitated that a process of limited assimilation began throughout the Empire. The limits, indeed, were somewhat narrow: with the accession of Septimius the Principate itself went to one who could not be mistaken for an Italian. Yet the general tendency was unmistakable. Local gods were identified with those of Rome; Latin spread over the West and, though pre-Roman languages long survived, struck its roots so deep that, with the assistance of the Church and its Latin versions of the Scriptures, it overcame all its rivals as the vernacular; and, even though the native peoples clung to their tribal forms of life, their towns grew to be cities scarcely distinguishable from those of the Mediterranean world and their local administration was steadily adapted to the Roman type. Even minor institutions of the imperial people were sedulously copied. One of the most striking records left by the Augustalitas is the building which served as its head­quarters in Sarmizegethusa, and there is no more impressive appearance of the Juventus, which Augustus had revived in Italy, than the half Celtic version found at Virunum in Noricum. Such developments are signs of that devotion to Rome which was encouraged and expressed by the great provincial cults of Rome and Augustus; but neither the acceptance of particular forms of organization nor the imitation of Roman fashions in the material furniture of life can claim a significance comparable to that of the imperial loyalty which was shared even by regions most conservative of their own traditions.

The strength of the Empire was derived from the devotion of its inhabitants, and that devotion was the result of gratitude for the peace which it was Rome’s primary business to maintain, for the ordered government of which the monument endures in Roman Law, and for that liberal attitude to the native populations of which the steady extension of the Roman franchise is the most notable expression. Roman methods were not, indeed, those of today. The aristocracy which formed the basis of the administration at home looked for help to the aristocrats in the provinces,  and in a world where education among the many was as backward as the means of disseminating news and forming public opinion the principles of democracy were neither honored nor observed. But the age was not necessarily the worse because ability commanded esteem, nor were the ignorant necessarily the less contented for their measure of dependence on the cultured few. Though class-war has been held responsible for the fall of the Empire itself, the evidence for its existence is elusive. In places there was, indeed, an opposition between town and country; for land was always the best investment, and the countryside suffered from the notorious defects of the absentee landlord. But, though cases of every kind were to be found in an area so large as the Roman world, it is an exaggeration to suggest a general feud between peasantry and city-populations: detailed study of such rural risings as are recorded does not disclose a single cause or one affecting all regions alike. Nor is every complaint a sign of disease.

When the Eastern provinces recovered a large measure of prosperity in the first century AD, it was no bad thing that reviving spirits found occasional expression in grievance, even against Rome; for acquiescence and ideals go ill together. The business of Rome was to meet such demands as she could, and for the rest to render the world a service which would attract loyalty of the kind which is immune from the effects of minor discontent. And this she did. When the issue was plainly put, men's hesitation between Rome and the alternative was brief. It did not need Plutarch to announce that the Romans were sympathetic to a cause vouched for by those they trusted, nor did the Rhodians wait to learn from Dio that they were not so crass and unperceptive as to want dominion over slaves rather than the noble allegiance of the free. With the easy tolerance acquired in the long history of the Republic, Rome accepted and even fostered the variety of customs and institutions to be described at length in the survey of the Empire which follows. Each in its own way the provinces progressed; their advance was made possible by the Pax Romana; and their fidelity was an outcome of the gratitude commanded by a power which established peace throughout the world and then was wise enough, despite the growing temptations of paternalism, to leave its inhabitants free to enjoy the measure of self-government which they could exercise with advantage to themselves and without danger to their neighbors—a measure which was as salutary as it was safe because it was fixed by a sober judgment of their capacity.