Government without Bureaucracy in the Roman Empire, by Peter Garnsey & Richard Saller
Discretion and administrative diversity in an empire of many cities and few professionals, the full chapter..
Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller wrote:
Chapter 3
Government Without Bureaucracy
Introduction
The Romans controlled an empire far flung by any historical standards. They did not, however, develop an imperial administration that matched the dimensions of the empire. A rudimentary apparatus of officialdom sufficed a government whose concerns were limited to essentials. The basic goals of the government were twofold: the maintenance of law and order, and the collection of taxes. Taxes were needed for wages, military expenses and to provide shows, buildings and handouts of food or cash in the capital city. To achieve these very limited aims the early emperors took the Republican system of senatorial administration and expanded it, creating more posts for senators, but in addition employing for the first time in positions of public responsibility non-elective officials, men from the equestrian order, or lesser aristocracy, and, more controversially, slaves and freedmen of their own household.
Expansion in the number of posts and diversification in the social background of officials do not in themselves entail a more rationalized or bureaucratic administrative system. The functions of government remained essentially the same. The emperors brought in no sweeping social and economic reforms, and were not interested in interfering to any substantial degree in the lives of their subjects. Hence there was no dramatic increase in the number of centrally appointed officials. The Roman empire remained undergoverned, certainly by comparison with the Chinese empire, which employed, proportionately, perhaps twenty times the number of functionaries. Meanwhile the operation of patronage rather than the application of formal procedures and rules determined the admission and promotion of administrators, who were not and never became ‘professionals’. Again, there was substantial continuity in administrative practices. The limited financial ends of the government were achieved without recourse to economic dirigisme. The state did not seek to exercise control over the production and distribution of goods. There were no state factories, no state merchant fleets, and although the emperor’s landed possessions steadily grew as property was confiscated, legated or simply left vacant, the resources required by the state came in the main not from the imperial properties but as tax from the provincial population.
A fiscal policy was needed, though not an elaborate one. The nature of the tax system that evolved in the early empire reflects the restricted purposes it was intended to serve: it was unstandardized, undersupervised and it underwent little change. Thus the diversity of local procedure that was a hallmark of the Republican taxation system – so that for example the main direct tax (tributum) was paid by Spaniards in the form of a lump sum and by Sicilians as a quota of produce (a tithe) – did not disappear under the Principate. It remained the Roman custom where possible to follow the practices established by the previous rulers in any particular area, whether Carthaginians, Seleucids or Ptolemies. Emperors instituted regular provincial censuses, gradually phased out the Republican system of letting out contracts to private companies for the collection of direct (and later indirect) taxes, and in general raised taxes more effectively than any Republican government had done, and from a much larger empire. But these developments were not part of any drive for administrative uniformity such as might be associated with bureaucratic government.
If the government’s fiscal policy was only rudimentary, it is not clear that it can be said to have had a regular monetary policy at all. When faced with financial emergency or simply a pressing need for more cash, the central authorities tended to fall back on another solution, the debasement of the coinage. It is difficult to accept that emperors and officials, their attention fixed on the short-term advantages of debasement, appreciated the long- term consequences. They possessed only a limited empirical understanding of economic concepts and the working of the economy.
Central and provincial administration
There were around forty provinces in the Roman empire governed by a thin spread of centrally appointed officials. The proconsul of Africa stood over a vast expanse of territory comprising much of modern Libya, Tunisia and eastern Algeria, while his counterpart in the province of Asia governed the western coast of Turkey plus a substantial tract of land in the interior. Each official was assigned a single junior senatorial magistrate with financial responsibilities (quaestor). He took with him an advisory panel of friends or protégés (including one or more senatorial legates as potential deputies) and a small staff of minor officials of low rank (freedmen or slaves).
Government under the Republic was by proconsuls, ex-magistrates of senior standing (praetors or consuls) appointed by lot by the senate. Augustus took responsibility himself for those provinces where a continuous military presence was required, and entrusted them to officials appointed by him, of whom the most important were also of senatorial status (legati Augusti).
The organization of personnel was somewhat different in those provinces under the emperor’s control, but the numbers involved were no greater. In the major provinces, with the exception of Egypt, the emperor appointed a legate to govern in his stead from among the ex-praetors and ex-consuls, while the responsibility for finance fell to a procurator rather than a quaestor, an equestrian rather than a senator. Another group of provinces was governed by equestrian appointees, again responsible directly to the emperor. Foremost among these was Egypt, controlled by a prefect and lesser equestrian officials, and the only province with legions to be regularly governed by an equestrian. The other equestrian provinces were small enough to be run by a procurator, who heard legal cases, managed financial affairs and commanded auxiliary units of the army, if any were assigned to the province.
The number of officials of senatorial rank employed in the provinces experienced no significant increase in our period. In the late first century and early second century we begin to hear of officials with judicial responsibilities, but this was clearly not an empire-wide or a permanent phenomenon. Two jurists are known to have held the post of iuridicus in Britain in the last decades of the first century, and one man with no special qualifications, the future emperor Septimius Severus, was apparently iuridicus in one of the Spanish provinces in about AD 177. Hadrian is said to have appointed four iudices of consular rank for Italy. In later reigns these were renamed or superseded by iuridici. Italy, not officially a province, was traditionally controlled by the consuls and the senate, but by the late second century jurisdiction in Italy as in Rome had been taken over by other officials more closely associated with the emperor. The urban prefect of the city of Rome, a senior senator, had jurisdiction up to the one hundredth milepost, and beyond this, the praetorian prefect, a high-placed equestrian official. The iuridici fit into the picture as subordinate judicial magistrates; their emergence in Italy is one of several signs that Italy was losing its special status and being gradually brought into line with the provinces of the empire.
From the same period, the late first century AD, city curators (curatores rei publicae) begin to be appointed in some cities with financial responsibilities. Again, the curators are likely to have been employed only to a limited extent, and the post was far from being the exclusive property of senators.
It was in the equestrian administration that the greatest changes took place, not only growth but also the unification of disparate elements into a single hierarchy. In the empire at large one development was the appointment of equestrians to govern Egypt and several minor provinces. In the latter such officials had at first a military title, prefect, and predominantly military duties. Their appointment and their brief is testimony to the determination of the emperors to bring to heel hitherto unsubjugated peoples within their empire (as in the Alps, central Sardinia or Judaea). The replacement from the reign of Claudius of prefect by procurator, a civilian title, was designed to reflect the success (sometimes as in Judaea more apparent than real) of the pacification process in the areas concerned. Secondly, emperors appointed equestrians (and sometimes freedmen) with the title of procurator of Augustus as their financial agents, with the task of superintending the imperial properties. Thirdly, procurators appear in the provinces as tax officials, collecting customs dues, the inheritance tax and other indirect taxes. The officials in these last two categories were potentially influential, and sometimes acted as a counterweight to the senatorial officials, but they cannot be said to have increased the administrative burden on the cities.
Finally, the military function of the equestrian order should be stressed. There were around 360 posts annually available for senior officers of equestrian rank: prefectures of cohorts, military tribunates and prefectures of alae (cavalry units). Progression through this series of posts, which were already being termed the equestrian militiae by the reign of Augustus’ successor Tiberius (Velleius Paterculus 2.111), was a necessary precursor to the tenure of posts in the civil administration. The careers (and, because of mortality patterns, the lives) of many equestrians proceeded no further. Military service must be seen as the basis of the equestrian career.
Developments in Rome and in the imperial court affected both equestrian and senatorial careers. The emperors gave the city of Rome for the first time a continuous administration. By the end of the reign of Augustus there existed a ‘police’ force, a fire department and an office for the grain supply. These prefectures fell to a senior senator and two equestrians (praefectus vigilum, praefectus annonae). Another leading equestrian was appointed praetorian prefect, commander of the emperor’s elite bodyguard, the praetorian guard. Because of his proximity to the emperor and control of troops in the vicinity of the capital, the praetorian prefect’s power was considerable: to hinder its abuse two prefects were usually appointed.
The structure of the central financial administration has been the subject of debate, much of it stemming from the various possible meanings of the word fiscus. The main treasury, the aerarium, into which provincial taxes flowed, was headed by a pair of prefects who were chosen by the emperor from the ranks of former praetors. Similar officials were appointed over the military treasury (aerarium militare) created by Augustus to provide benefits for veterans on retirement. Much of the fiscal responsibility, however, lay not with these men, but with the emperor’s freedmen and then from the middle of the first century with a high-ranking equestrian procurator (a rationibus), who with a staff of imperial freedmen and slaves kept accounts of the empire’s revenues and expenditures. It does not follow from the fact that these accounts were kept by the emperor’s slaves and freedmen that there was no division between public finances and those of the imperial household. But in the end the distinction between the two may not have been of great practical importance, because the emperor subsidized the public treasuries with his own steadily increasing private wealth, and was empowered to draw on funds from the public treasuries for the administration of his provinces.
It remains to consider the roles of the emperor, his advisers and personal staff in the administration. The emperor was ultimately responsible for policy decisions and the appointment of imperial officials, but in reaching his decisions he took advice from those around him. The good emperor, in the eyes of the aristocracy, found his advisers in his council (consilium principis), a group of leading senatorial and equestrian friends.
This council also advised the emperor in his legal capacities as a judge both of appeals and in the first instance, and as a formulator of new laws. Some emperors, most notably Claudius (but also Nero and Commodus), aroused the aristocracy’s anger by allowing themselves to be swayed by imperial freedmen, slaves or wives. In the case of freedmen and slaves, their power was a natural result of the access they gained to the emperor while helping him carry out routine duties, such as receiving reports from provincial officials and writing replies, and responding to petitions for favours or justice from cities and individual subjects. However, the emperor also dealt with many letters and petitions personally.
We can see the essentials of this administrative system in operation already under Augustus: the employment of senators by the emperor in new administrative posts, filling out the senatorial career and bringing it more closely under imperial control; the employment of equestrians and freedmen to non-elective posts as officials and agents, dependent on the emperor; the use of the imperial household, in effect, the emperor’s domestic servants, as supporting staff. In later reigns greater order was introduced into the non-senatorial sections of the administration. By the early second century the procuratorial administrative posts (then about 60 in number) were divided into four categories according to the salary of the office-holder. A career structure comparable to that of senators could now be held to exist, with the great prefectures at the top and the lowest ranking procurators at the bottom. Similarly, a clearly defined hierarchy of posts can be discerned in the imperial household itself (familia Caesaris). A slave on the clerical staff might hope for manumission and promotion to the position of record-keeper (tabularius) and finally to a freedman procuratorship. Imperial freedmen and slaves continued to provide the permanent support staff of the administrative system.
For an understanding of how this administrative organization worked and where the power lay, it is important to know how the office-holders were appointed. The emperor ultimately made all the above-mentioned appointments except to the proconsulships and quaestorships, but it must still be asked how he made his decisions. This is an important question because it shapes our view of how bureaucratic the administration became under the Principate. Numerous scholars have held that during the second and early third centuries bureaucratic rules governed appointments and promotions to the point where the process became almost automatic, leaving the emperor little discretion. Senatorial careers do exhibit certain patterns: ex-praetors holding senior posts in the emperor’s service were usually promoted to the consulship while their contemporaries in the senate usually were not; moreover the emperor preferred to use men without consular ancestors as legates to govern his provinces. These regularities, however, do not constitute automatic promotions: the variety in the number and order of offices held, as well as the decreasing number of posts available at each succeeding level of promotion, suggest that emperors must have used their discretion in the appointment of senators and equestrians. In addition, our literary sources of the first and second centuries speak not of rules, but of personal factors, such as patronage, as being decisive in imperial appointments.
In regard to promotions, and in other respects, the central administration of the Principate represents an advance in bureaucratic organization over the Republic, but the extent of the advance must not be exaggerated. The administration at its top levels remained amateurish. Senators and equestrians spent only a part of their working lives in office, they received no special training for their duties, and in the course of their careers they did not develop specialist expertise. If there were any administrative ‘professionals’, they were the emperor’s freedmen and slaves. Moreover, the numbers remained small enough (around 350 elite officials in Rome, Italy and the provinces in the Severan period) to make unnecessary the development of a hierarchy of responsibility: for the most part each senatorial or equestrian official was responsible directly to the emperor.
Cities
The secret of government without bureaucracy was the Roman system of cities which were self-governing and could provide for the needs of empire. The period of the Principate witnessed a striking multiplication and expansion of autonomous urban units, especially in those parts of the empire where cities had been few. Roman pragmatism rather than Greek cultural idealism lay behind this development. It was a characteristic Greek view that higher civilization was only attainable within the framework of the polis. The Romans were not equally dedicated to this belief, even when they fell under the influence of Greek culture. No Latin word for city (civitas, municipium, colonia, res publica) has the ideological potency of polis, while Latin literature can easily give the impression that the city was viewed as the seedbed of immorality rather than the seat of civilization. As organizers of empire, the Romans rated most highly the administrative function of the city, without however losing sight of its potential role as a centre of Romanization in newly conquered and incompletely pacified areas. We shall inquire in a moment into the mechanisms by which cities performed their administrative tasks. First, it is necessary to explore, on the one hand, the diverse statuses of cities and, on the other, the common features that set cities apart from the countless subordinate communities in the empire.
City statuses
The different statuses and privileges of cities were a heritage of the period of the Republic. The colonia and the municipium were standard in the West, but, especially in the case of the municipium, rare in the East. The colonia was essentially an extension of Rome. It was a community of Roman citizens established with a standard form of constitution modelled on that of Rome. Outside Italy colonies tended to be settlements of retired soldiers, but when veteran colonies were discontinued, in the early empire, colonia became an honorific title conferred by special grant, linking a city in its title with an emperor but carrying no substantive privileges.
A municipium in theory possessed greater freedom than a colonia because it used its own laws and magistrates. This is reflected in the ‘surprised’ reaction of the early second-century emperor Hadrian to the request of the people of Italica in southern Spain (his town of origin) for ‘promotion’ from municipium to colonia (A. Gellius, NA 16.13.4–5). Italica was not alone in its ambitions: at least 120 Italian cities, more than a quarter of the whole, had converted from municipia to colonies by the end of the third century. Hadrian was being perversely pedantic. The miscellanist Aulus Gellius, who recorded Hadrian’s remarks made in a speech to the Roman senate, is not being unusually percipient when he comments that the two categories of city were virtually indistinguishable, but colonia had the higher status. The essential point is that municipia grew and spread in Republican Italy, and were exported overseas under the empire, in quite different historical circumstances. To put it simply, municipal status was won by Italy from Rome by dint of a bloody ‘civil’ war (the so-called Social War, war against the allies, of 91–89 BC), but was imposed on the western provinces as a standard Roman form of constitution for the purpose of consolidating Roman power. For this reason in Italian municipia Roman citizenship was the possession of all free inhabitants, but in the corresponding cities abroad it was bestowed as a rule only on the most eligible provincials: in some communities magistrates and ex-magistrates, in others local councillors (some of whom had held no magistracy).
Apart from the chances afforded prominent individuals for self-advancement, these ‘chartered’ cities, colonies or municipia, had no special material privileges, unless they were brought into line with all Italian cities by the award of ‘Italian rights’ (ius Italicum) carrying exemption from the land tax. Septimius Severus rewarded in this way his native city of Lepcis Magna, Carthage, and Utica in Africa, and civil war partisans Tyre, Heliopolis and Laodicea in Syria (among others), but other emperors were much less generous (Digest 50.15.1).
The constitutions of the rest of the cities of the empire were as diverse as the cities themselves. The cities ranged all the way from the Greek polis with its elaborate and time-hallowed constitution to the tribal capital of Gaul and Britain, which tended to ape Roman constitutional practices. Within the cities there existed a number of privileged categories. Federate cities (civitates foederatae) were so called because they had struck treaties with Rome establishing their rights. Free cities (civitates liberae) were theoretically exempt from interference by the provincial governor. Free and immune cities (civitates liberae et immunes) possessed the additional privilege of immunity from taxation. Tax-exempt cities were always very rare, while the number of free cities declined in the course of the late Republic and early empire. A mere handful of western cities enjoyed free or federate status at any time. This goes back to the fact that in the West, outside the areas where Etruscan, Greek and Phoenician influence was strongly felt, the growth of cities was a late and largely unspontaneous development, coinciding with the spread of Roman power. Most provincial cities in the West were either new creations or grew up on or near the site of earlier communities of lesser significance. Thus the typical western city was always in principle subject to outside interference. In the East, in contrast, the Romans had to establish a modus vivendi with numerous city-states having proud and long-standing traditions of sovereignty. Nevertheless privileges were dispensed only selectively in the East. They were typically the reward for conspicuous service to the winning side during the civil wars staged by Roman generals in the eastern Mediterranean in the course of the first century BC. Thus for example Aphrodisias was rewarded with freedom and immunity by Octavian (Augustus) in 39 BC for its loyal support of the Julian cause after the death of Caesar.
Cities and villages
Cities, despite their diverse traditions and character, did have something in common that distinguished them from communities of lower degree. A city was essentially a self-governing urban community, with a regular constitution centring on a council and magistrates and a rural territory under its jurisdiction and control. This is a political/administrative definition, squaring with the attitude of the central government, if not with that of representatives of the Greek-speaking or Hellenocentric elite, whose definition would have included cultural institutions, amenities and public buildings, whether purely decorative or utilitarian. However, when the Roman authorities are found making decisions as to the status of a particular community, practical considerations come to the fore, in particular the potential viability of the community in economic and demographic terms. The interplay of formal and material requirements can be followed in the documents.
In an inscription of Orcistus, a town situated on the borders of Galatia in central Asia Minor, the citizens are shown seeking from the emperor Constantine an upgrading from village to city (ILS 6099). This was a lapsed city; as evidence of its former status, it was urged that it had once elected annual magistrates, had a council and a full complement of ordinary citizens; and that it still had baths, statues and aqueducts. It was also thought worthwhile to inform Constantine that Orcistus was a Christian community. But the crucial point to establish was that a city on the site would be a practical proposition. The emperor was informed that there was a plentiful water supply, and that the community stood at the meeting-point of four roads. The distance from the neighbouring cities is given precisely, perhaps with a view to showing that there was room in the region for another city with a territory of reasonable size. Orcistus was a dependency of one of those cities, Nacola, and judged its rule oppressive. It was standard practice for a city to exact financial contributions, services and manpower for its own benefit from the communities under its control. As Strabo wrote of Nimes (Nemausus) in Gaul: ‘It has subject to its authority twenty-four villages that are exceptional in their supply of strong men, of stock like its own, and contribute towards its expenses’ (186). Here we catch a glimpse of the way cities went about providing the imperial government with its revenue.
A second inscription from Galatia concerns the town of Tymandus, which petitioned an unknown emperor for the status of city (ILS 6090). We do not have the petition itself, but an imperial letter to an official. This states explicitly that it was the assurance of the Tymandeni that they could provide a sufficient number of local councillors that decided the issue in their favour. A third inscription, dated to AD 158, shows Antoninus Pius in correspondence with a newly established city in the Strymon valley in Macedonia (IGBulg. IV 2263). The city was permitted to strengthen its financial base in two ways, by imposing a poll tax on free citizens in its territory, and by expanding its local council, or boulê, of 80 men, all liable to an entry-fee. A council of 80 reasonably wealthy men suggests a relatively substantial population base, and is something of a surprise in a remote Thracian village. Pius had presumably supplemented the existing population by drafting both rich and poor from nearby settlements, to create a community better endowed in population and resources than any pre- existing one. Nine villages contributed residents to Pizos on the Thracian sector of the via Egnatia when it was established by Septimius Severus and Caracalla in AD 202 (IGBulg. III/2 1690). In rather different circumstances Augustus had herded Achaeans into Patrae and Aetolians into Nicopolis (Pausanias 7.18.7–8,10.38.4). Roman city-foundation from early days had a strongly coercive aspect.
That is not to say that communities such as those established in Macedonia and Thrace were invariably successful. No inscription from the site of the city in the Strymon is known after AD 238. It may be that our anonymous city soon after this date slipped back into its previous condition as an anonymous village. Some cities in rural areas of provinces such as Moesia Superior and Dalmatia had a history of this kind. Such communities may never have acquired the outward form of cities or become centres of administration or social activity, partly no doubt because the councillors, who were intended to be the mainstay of the new foundations, preferred to live in their villages or on their estates. They had the name and status of cities but otherwise were not distinguishable from the independent villages that commonly prevailed where city life was underdeveloped, as in the interior of Syria or in central Asia Minor.
Social and cultural considerations, therefore, played their part in influencing the success or failure of a city. But the inscriptions suggest that the decision of a Roman emperor as to the status of a community was closely related to his assessment of the adequacy of its economic and demographic base.
Nevertheless such criteria were not applied throughout the empire or in all periods. There were villages within the substantial territory of Trier in Gaul that were larger than the smaller cities of Italy or Britain. Similarly in Greece a number of cities retained their status because propped up by Leagues, if they were not saved from downgrading by their past fame. Thebes in Boeotia was one of the latter, in Strabo’s view not even a significant village: it was underpopulated, its buildings were dilapidated or in ruins, its economy was weak and its culture in decay (402). That it was officially a city is indicated by Strabo’s own account, which contains scattered references to settlements and geographical features incorporated in its territory. When Pausanias saw Thebes in the mid-second century it had a few hundred inhabitants who had retired to the Cadmeia, but was still a city (8.33.2). The same writer knew that Panopeus in Phocis was a city but was doubtful whether it deserved the title. It did have a territory and magistrates, or at least personages who represented the city in the Phocian assembly; on the other side, it lacked magistrates’ offices, a gymnasium, an agora, fountains and respectable housing (10.4.1ff.).
The political division between city and village was conspicuously out of tune with economic and cultural realities in Egypt. The capitals of the administrative districts, or nomes, were only late given municipal institutions, limited self-government, and jurisdiction of a sort over their hinterlands by Septimius Severus at the beginning of the third century. Alexandria, one of the largest centres of population in the whole empire, lacked a local council until this time. The explanation can only be political and fiscal. Alexandria had a very bad record for civil disturbance involving the Jewish and Greek populations. Moreover, the Romans had inherited from the Ptolemies a complicated and oppressive bureaucratic structure, unique to Egypt, that it suited them to perpetuate because of the enormous agricultural resources of the province. Municipal or quasi-municipal government came to Egypt only when the Severans saw the advantage to themselves of spreading more widely the burdens of administration among the better-off members of the subject population.
Self-governing cities were also slow in coming in the heartland of Africa Proconsularis, the other great grain surplus producing area of the empire, before the Severan period. The primary explanation is the scale of imperial interest and presence in the area, which included the Medjerda valley behind Carthage, the location of extensive imperial properties. Administration and control, traditional functions of such communities, were in large part accounted for in this area by the imperial authorities in Carthage and on the domains. When eventually civic status was granted, the size of the imperial estates, the number of communities and their proximity to one another ensured that the newly chartered cities would have exiguous territories and therefore little opportunity for growth.
Other factors, and especially the influence in Rome of powerful expatriates of senatorial or equestrian status, may have played a part in postponing the fragmentation of the huge territory of Carthage, or for that matter, that of its counterpart in Numidia, Cirta. The operation of patronage could, however, work against the interests of the large cities. Four communities within Carthage’s vast territory, Avitta Bibba, Bisica, Thuburbo Maius and Abthugni, became municipia in the reign of Hadrian, thus outpacing numerous others of equal insignificance that in most cases had to wait for the Severan period or later for promotion. We may suppose that Hadrian was influenced by the pleas of patrons of the communities or of other important individuals, as Pius certainly was when he granted the status of city to Gigthis in southern Tunisia. But emperors did not always need prompting. Byzantium, Antioch and Neapolis in Palestine happened to support the wrong side in the civil war that led to the elevation of Septimius Severus and lost their civic rights in consequence. At the same time other cities, such as Tyre and Laodicea, neighbour and rival of Antioch, received ‘Italian rights’ and therefore tax exemption. The village in Syrian Auranitis that produced the emperor Philip was renamed Philippopolis in AD 244 when it achieved the status of a colony. In short, the initiative of individuals, imperial whim or other chance factors rather than a deliberate policy originating in Rome might determine on which side of the line a community fell, or for that matter, and even more so, the special status and privileges, if any, that it held.
To sum up, the distinction between city and communities of lower status in the Roman context is at base one of political constitution and relationship to the surrounding territory. In the Greek East where the political landscape was already fully formed in the islands, coasts and river valleys Roman intervention took the form of minor adjustment to existing settlement hierarchies, and the promotion of new foundations in the underurbanized hinterland. In contrast the West (especially in North Africa and the Iberian peninsula), and to a much lesser extent the North, witnessed the remarkable spread of Roman cities. Here decisions had to be made with some frequency as to the status of individual communities and the shape and extent of their rural territories. Intense diplomatic activity involving the local elites formed part of the background. The communities were not and could not afford to be passive. Their fortunes depended upon the ability of their leadership to mobilize support in high places or if necessary argue their cases in person before a governor or an emperor. The documents cited above from the East show the kind of arguments that weighed with the Roman authorities. In the West the Romans were looking in addition for concrete evidence from pacified barbarian tribal communities of a reorientation of their political loyalties and culture. Empire-wide, the broad objective was the same, to build up a structure of centres of local government that could render practical services to the imperial power.
Functions of cities
The primary goals of the imperial administration were the collection of taxes, the recruitment of soldiers and the maintenance of law and order, but the cities from time to time were required in addition to respond to requests for animals for transport, hospitality for visiting officials, or shelter and equipment for soldiers. In addition to these state-imposed burdens, local governments had to shoulder the regular ‘parish pump’ jobs of city administration: supervision of aqueducts, repair of buildings, provision of fuel for public baths, preservation of public order (a local responsibility especially in provinces where no soldiers were stationed), staging of religious festivals and games, furnishing of embassies and legal representation.
The key institution that enabled the cities to meet the demands of the government and their own needs was the liturgical system. This was a system by which the more well-to-do members of a community saw to the performance of essential services and responsibilities by payment in cash or kind or by personal service. The wealthy also gave of their time and money in performing the regular magistracies of their city, and some, a small minority, made benefactions over and above what was expected of them as liturgists and magistrates.
The phenomenon of public expenditure by individuals has economic, political and social implications. Private munificence was necessitated by the weakness of city finance. But it suited the rich that city finances should be weak. The alternative of regular taxation was unattractive, because it did not carry political, social and perhaps economic rewards. The system of liturgies rendered legitimate the domination of local society and politics by the rich: if local politicians are required to be benefactors, whether by custom or by law, then political office is effectively restricted to the rich. At another level, the system enabled the rich to compete with each other for prestige, honour and office. To put it in another way, there was a close relationship between the liturgical system and public munificence in general and social differentiation within the local aristocracy. The legal sources of the second century AD reveal the existence of men whose wealth and social standing placed them above other local aristocrats as civic leaders.
Moreover, the social inequality within the governing class that this implies is sometimes referred to in the context of liturgies. For example, we hear in a rescript of Hadrian to the city of Klazomenai in the province of Asia of embassies classed as more important for which only the most prominent people should be chosen (primores viri) rather than those of lesser eminence (inferiores) (Digest 50.7.5.5). Honorific inscriptions convey the same message, that a small group of dominant families monopolized those offices and liturgies that both were intrinsically important and brought the greater opportunities for self-advancement. The irony is that mounting central government interest and interference in city finances had the effect of accentuating differences in wealth and status that were already present in the municipal upper class, and reduced the capacity of the class as a whole to fulfil its liturgical obligations.
Emperor, governor, cities
The task of extracting the surplus resources of the provinces was handled by the cities. But could the cities be relied on to collect the taxes and fulfil their other obligations, and was a monarchical government likely to take this on trust? It might be supposed that a central administration of the kind that we have described, centrally organized and controlled, and ready to contemplate modest expansion and diversification where crucial needs were served not at all or only inefficiently, was likely to take a more active interest than its Republican predecessor had done in local administration and in particular in the tax-collecting operation.
The appearance from the late first century of city curators, centrally appointed from the senatorial or equestrian order or the local elite, has already been noted. Their sphere was primarily financial administration, and their typical tasks were control of investment of city funds, management of city lands, enforcement of the payment of debts owed to the city or of pledges of financial expenditure made (Digest 22.1.33; 50.10.5 etc.). The sources rarely show us curators in action, we know little of their doings, and they are likely to have been employed only to a limited extent in our period. Their emergence is nevertheless a sign of central government concern over the state of municipal finance.
But other evidence suggests that the emperor and his advisers manifested this concern not by multiplying the officials who were active in the provinces, but by supervising more closely those who were already there. This means, in the first place, the provincial governor, and secondly, local government officials themselves.
Governors with consular or praetorian rank possessed imperium. A holder of imperium by tradition had the power to command an army and full jurisdictional authority. But the concept was ill-defined, and this was not unintended. The Romans were inclined to give their high officials wide discretionary powers, and to provide safeguards against their use in the case of certain privileged categories of people, in the first instance Roman citizens. A precise definition of powers might have limited their scope and flexibility. This imprecision was exploited in the reverse direction by emperors who were rather less interested than the senatorial oligarchy of the Republic had been in preserving magisterial and pro-magisterial initiative. Under the Principate a governor was likely to possess only so much power and independence as he was allowed by emperors.
Both the powers and independence of governors were reduced under the Principate, and the crucial steps were taken by Augustus. The subordinate position of governors vis-à-vis the emperor was institutionalized early in his reign in the grant to Augustus by the senate and Roman people in 23 BC of power superior to that of other provincial officials (maius imperium) (Cassius Dio 51.32.5). This among other things settled the issue of whether a governor held any military power independent of the emperor. Thereafter no one could command an army unless with the authority of the emperor. The control of armies by proconsuls, as distinct from imperial legates, was phased out, and the rewards of military success – the acclamation ‘imperator’ and the award and celebration of a triumph – were monopolized by the emperor. The coming of the empire also made a difference to the jurisdictional authority of the governor. Under the Republic the power of a magistrate or pro-magistrate with imperium to inflict full punitive sanctions was limited in respect of citizens. In particular, appeal, provocatio, was a Roman citizen’s peculiar prerogative. The first emperor was disinclined to bestow benefits on citizens exclusively, and his successors showed a similar tendency not to discriminate against aliens. The distinction between honestiores and humiliores that first makes an appearance in legal texts in the early second century is a status distinction that cuts across the citizen/alien division: there are citizens and non-citizens on both sides of the line. The differential treatment of the two broad status groups is spelled out most clearly in the area of penalties, but it is likely to have extended to all aspects of judicial affairs. It may even have been possible for some aliens, those of high status, to have their cases taken to a higher authority than the governor, namely the emperor or a deputy. Citizens appear to have been able to apply to have their cases referred to a court at Rome in the first instance or on appeal after sentence. It is unnecessary to believe, as some have done, that citizens acquired an automatic right from about the turn of the first century AD to have their cases transferred to Rome from the court of the governor, who now lost the power to try them, at least in capital cases. On the other hand, it is clearly attested in the legal documents that by the Severan period governors had lost the power to execute a man of high status, and apparently also a citizen of any status. All such cases involving the death sentence had to be referred to Rome.
Another aspect of imperial supervision and control of provincial administrators is the issuing of instructions, mandata, to governors, proconsuls as well as legates of the emperor. This practice was apparently initiated by Augustus himself, and shows that he was not merely interested in asserting his superior authority on an ad hoc basis. Unfortunately our only detailed knowledge of the content of mandata is derived from the younger Pliny’s untypical experience from about AD 109 as a special emissary of the emperor Trajan with the rank of legate in the normally proconsular province of Bithynia/Pontus (ILS 2927; Pliny, Ep.10). If we took Pliny as a model governor, we might find it easy to believe that gubernatorial actions were as a rule closely monitored by emperors. His general brief was to try to bring to heel a province that had established a reputation for maladministration, corruption and civil disorder. But he also received a number of specific instructions, which he incorporated in an edict, ranging from the examination of city accounts to the suppression of potentially subversive associations; a minor persecution of Christians was an unintended consequence of this clause in the edict (Ep. 10.96–7). However, a normal governor, in particular a proconsul, might not have received such detailed instructions, nor have reported back to his emperor so regularly seeking advice, approval or sanction for his actions. Moreover, although Pliny’s successor Cornutus Tertullus had the same status and responsibilities (ILS 1024), there is no sign, and no likelihood, that there was a significant multiplication of special legates in proconsular provinces in the second century.
Nevertheless, not only the governor’s formal powers but also his discretionary authority were significantly reduced in our period. An anecdote from the reign of Hadrian suggests that part of the responsibility lay with the governor. At a drunken gathering in Spain, a young man was tossed in the air from a military cloak and died of injuries received in the fall. The governor punished the offenders lightly, but apparently unnecessarily asked the emperor to comment. Hadrian was thus given the chance of overruling the governor (he did not do so), and of penning the jurisprudential maxim: ‘even in the case of more serious offences, it is of concern whether the action was intentional or accidental’ (Mos. Rom. Leg. Coll. 1.11.1–3). But it would be idle to blame governors for the erosion of their powers. The root cause is to be found in the arrival of monarchy, which deprived the senate of its central authority in the state, silenced its more independent members and replaced them with a new breed of deferential senators of undistinguished backgrounds, of whom Pliny may be taken as representative.
The identification of standard patterns or general trends in governor-city or emperor-city relationships is equally difficult. Pliny’s contacts with the cities of Bithynia-Pontus are no more likely to have been typical than his dealings with Trajan. His Letters record a quite unusual degree of interference on the part of the governor in the administrative affairs of the cities, both those few that possessed special rights and the majority that did not. Pliny had been ordered to examine the accounts of all the cities in his province, including those privileged cities, such as ‘free and federate’ Chalcedon and Amisus, that would normally have escaped such intervention. There is nothing to suggest that these occasions were anything but unusual.
But Pliny’s treatment of the ordinary subject cities was equally untypical. The more conscientious governors in all periods would have made it their business to check municipal accounts. It was always within their discretionary authority to do so. More than one and a half centuries earlier Cicero had carefully investigated the accounts of the cities of Cilicia. But neither Cicero nor the standard proconsul of the period of the Principate, including Pliny’s predecessors in Bithynia, would have received instructions as Pliny had to investigate city accounts systematically throughout the province, and to make this his chief concern. Moreover, no rule was ever enacted to the effect that cities should regularly submit their accounts to governors.
The power of the cities to regulate their own finances was restricted by imperial directive in at least two respects. No city was to levy new taxes without special permission of the emperor (Cod.Iust. 4.62.1), and no new public buildings were to be erected at public expense without the emperor’s licence (e.g. Digest 50.10.3 pr-1). The first regulation was probably issued early in the empire, perhaps in the reign of Augustus, as is implied in a reply of the emperor Vespasian to the city of Sabora in the south Spanish province of Baetica that requested a new site and amendments to local tax arrangements. Vespasian confirmed those taxes that were conceded by Augustus, but ordered the community to approach the proconsul if it wished to impose new ones, ‘for I cannot make any decision if I have no advice on this matter’ (ILS 6092). The second rule can be seen evolving in the late first and early second centuries. Already before Pliny arrived in his province it had become regular and perhaps compulsory to sound out the proconsul before embarking on a building project (Dio Chrysostom, Or. 40.6, 45.5–6). In the reign of Antoninus Pius, a generation after Pliny’s legateship, a rule was formulated making imperial permission a prerequisite.
The interest of the Roman authorities encompassed not only the vetting of building projects but also their completion. At Claudiopolis in Bithynia, Pliny had to exact entry-fees from some newly admitted city councillors so that a massive bath-project could get off the ground (Ep. 10.39). But a project might be held up because of the withholding of contributions pledged voluntarily, as in the case of the redevelopment scheme at Prusa sponsored by Dio Chrysostom the philosopher/politician a few years before the arrival of Pliny (Dio Chrysostom, Or.47.13–16,19). Here the legal position was less clear, because private rather than public funds were in question, until Trajan ruled that pledges of expenditure made by private individuals in favour of their cities had to be fulfilled, if not by themselves, then by their heirs (Digest 50.12.14). Thereafter, an ambitious politician who sought to buy his way to office with a pledge of some bounty would have to make good his promise. Two inscriptions of the early 160s from Cuicul in north Africa show unfulfilled pledges of a statue, and of a hall with statue and columns, being honoured by order of a legate of Numidia. Such rulings, and others on bequests for games, hunts and other spectacles, show that the voluntary benefactions as well as the obligatory contributions of the local aristocracy came under scrutiny and at least partial control, and in about the period that we have already identified as one in which imperial anxiety as to the state of local finances was expressing itself in sporadic intervention. A parallel, roughly contemporaneous and much more significant development is the increasing regulation of the whole liturgical system by the central government and its representatives. Liability to serve, exemption from service and the distribution of liturgies among those eligible are all addressed by a stream of imperial rescripts, establishing rules where previously there had been lack of regulation or simply confusion.
The risk of misinterpreting these interventions and exaggerating the scale of the interference is reduced if two points are borne in mind. First, the imperial rulings were invariably elicited by interested groups and individuals. Similarly, when governors became involved in appointments, as they did from time to time, it was only on receipt of appeals from aggrieved nominees or councils attempting to nominate them. The involvement of the governor, and even more so, the emperor, in the affairs of the cities remained sporadic, limited and ad hoc throughout our period. It was out of the question that the central government should attempt to exert direct and continuous control over local administration. The governor was best placed to do so, but his term was too short (one year or three), his sphere of responsibility too large and his supporting staff too small.
Secondly, the imperial rulings fell far short of a rash of general enactments that drastically undermined the autonomy of local government institutions. Above all, the emperors failed to produce new institutions and offices. (The far from ubiquitous city curator stands alone.) Nor for that matter did they reform old ones. The transformation of traditional Greek-style councils with changing memberships into Roman-style permanent councils was a gradual process and was not imposed by the central authorities. More generally, no attempt was made by Roman governments to eradicate the many differences which persisted between city constitutions in the Greek world. When a Roman official tampered with a local constitution (leaving aside the suppression or suspension of the systematically distrusted popular assemblies, the last vestiges of Greek democracy) it was by invitation. This is the origin of Marcus Aurelius’ intervention in Athens over the recruitment of the council of the Areopagus. It is interesting that Marcus stood by the traditional regulation that only men of good birth should be admitted, defending it against Athenian attempts to undermine it by adlecting freedmen into vacancies.
The treatment of privileged cities conveys the same impression. What happened in Bithynia/Pontus under Pliny, when the accounts of Apamea and Sinope (colonies), Chalcedon and Amisus (free and federate cities), traditionally immune from inspection, were checked by order of the emperor, was merely the temporary suspension of privileges. As Trajan explicitly states in a reply to his legate, loss of privilege was not in question (Pliny, Ep. 10.48, 93). If Aphrodisias is any example, the threat to the special status of a city came not from emperors – who regularly confirmed traditional privileges in return for a demonstration of loyalty – but from tax-collectors acting on their own initiative, or from rival communities within the province. In practice, of course, real civic independence was unattainable within the Roman empire. This is why Aphrodisias thought nothing of asking emperors for curators to investigate their ‘neglected’ finances or for that matter for earthquake relief. The best that a city could hope for was favoured ally status, and to hold on to such privileges as it possessed by careful cultivation of each succeeding emperor. The uniquely informative Aphrodisias dossier shows no change in this situation over almost three centuries, from Augustus to Decius.
No emperor, in sum, was interested in introducing a substantially larger and more highly organized bureaucracy at any level, or in reorganizing local government systematically. Nor was there any need to do so. Despite more or less endemic corruption in the localities, tax revenues forwarded by the cities were adequate for the limited goals of the central government. Civic office was still by and large attractive to the wealthy. Local patriotism, civic autonomy and the tax system that was built on them eventually fell victim to the insecurity of the post-Severan era and the multiplication of taxes and exactions for military purposes that were features of that age. The replacement of the local aristocrat by the governor in the honorific epigraphy of the period after AD 250 is symptomatic of the change that had overtaken the city. The governor had become ‘the arbiter and saviour of its fortunes’. [END]
The Source:
Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture, University of California Press, 2015 [2nd edition with Jaś Elsner, Martin Goodman, Richard Gordon, Greg Woolf]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.