The Grandeur That Was Rome: a survey of Roman culture and civilisation

by J. C. Stobart

The Provinces

In considering the ancient, imperial, and provincial systems it is necessary for the modern to divest himself of all the geographical notions which spring from the study of maps. The ancients probably had only the most vague notions of territory. Natural frontiers such as mountains, rivers, and coasts were of course familiar to them, from the strategic point of view. Within those were cities great and small, which in the case of civilised people formed the units of life and government. In the case of barbarians there were tribes and nations, seldom sufficiently settled to produce any notion of geographical area. Thus when Rome conquered Sicily she was acquiring not so much one geographical unit, an island, as a collection of states of various types and constitutions. Similarly in the case of Spain; she said and thought that she acquired Spain, although the greater part of the Iberian peninsula remained unconquered for another century and a half. To remember the limitations of ancient geographical knowledge is essential to the understanding of the Roman provincial system. Provincia means in the first instance a sphere of official duty, a man’s provincia might be the feeding of the sacred geese or it might be the control of an army. It was not for a long time that the word came to connote a territorial area. When it did so, the day of the city-state was at an end.

The earliest Roman provinces were Sicily, acquired by conquest in the First Punic War, 241 B.C., then Corsica and Sardinia, annexed in the diplomatic intrigues which followed. Spain, or rather “the Spains.” Further and Hither, were the fruit of the Second Punic War (201). After the Third Punic War (146) the territory of Carthage became a province under the name of Africa. At the same time the Macedonian Wars gave Rome the province of Macedonia. To complete the list so far as the Roman Republic is concerned: Attalus III. bequeathed his kingdom to Rome in 133, and this became the province of Asia. In 121 the conquest of Southern Gaul gave Rome Gallia Narbonensis. In 103 the prevalence of piracy on the southern coasts of Asia Minor compelled the Romans to make Cilicia a province. In 81 a legislative act of Sulla brought the already conquered Cisalpine Gaul into the same category. The King of Bithynia imitated Attalus in bequeathing his kingdom to Rome. Cyrene also was bequeathed to Rome and united in one province with Crete in 63. In 64 Pompeius the Great deposed the King of Syria and annexed his kingdom. About the same time, on the death of Mithradates, Pontus was added to Bithynia as a united province. In 51 Julius Cæsar completed the conquest of Gaul and added it as Gallia Comata to the old province of Narbonensian Gaul. Finally in 31 Octavianus added Egypt to the list.

It was not the Roman way to think a situation out with the logic and directness of a Greek or a Frenchman. More like the Englishman, he took things as they came and made the best of them with as little derangement as possible of his pre-existing system and preconceived ideas. The Roman Empire was not governed on a system as it was not acquired by a policy. When Sicily came into the Roman hands, it came piecemeal in the course of the war. Various cities accepted Roman “alliance” on various terms. Rome had never been able to grant full citizenship to Greek states, because their inhabitants, speaking a foreign language, could not give the equivalent in military service. If Sicily had been Italian it would no doubt have entered the Roman alliance as a collection of municipia; as it was, the sixty-five or so separate Sicilian states continued to enjoy for the most part their previous constitutions under various agreements with Rome. Some were “free,” some were “free and confederate”; similarly of kings who yielded to Rome, some were styled “allies,” some “allies and friends.” The cities would have their charters and the kings would have their personal treaties with Rome which lapsed with their death. But in a region conquered in war most of the tribes or states were simply “stipendiary,” that is, tribute-paying. The stipendium paid was originally, and in theory, an indemnity or a contribution for the maintenance of a military force by people who were unqualified to give personal service. It was generally settled by a commission of ten members of the senate, who went out to organise a newly acquired territory. Even these tributary states had their charters from Rome. The stipendium was by no means extortionate. In Macedonia, for example, the people only paid to Rome half as much as they had previously paid to their kings. In Sicily and Sardinia the tillers of the soil paid a tithe, generally in kind (that is, in corn), to the Roman treasury, and the town-dwellers probably paid a poll-tax. It was an error of the jurists, who confused this tithe with the tenth paid by occupants of Roman public land, which afterwards led to the dangerous legal theory that Rome had acquired the whole soil of the country conquered by her arms and leased it back for a consideration to the original proprietors. As a matter of fact, few of the provinces were remunerative to the Roman state. Spain, where warfare was incessant, was certainly a heavy loss. Macedonia was no source of profit. Sicily, largely owing to the Roman Peace, became the granary of the capital, but Asia alone was a source of great wealth to the treasury. There were, of course, harbour dues for the provinces as for Italy herself.

On the whole, it is fair to say that local autonomy was generally preserved. Either through policy or, more probably, because the Romans habitually took things as they found them, the previous laws and constitutions of conquered units, whether cities or tribes, remained in force. In Syracuse, for example, the law of King Hiero remained, and it was much better for the Sicilians to pay their taxes to Rome than to be subject to the personal extortions of a monster like Agathocles. In law-suits between citizens of one Sicilian state the trial was to be held in that state by a native judge and according to the native laws—possibly with a right of appeal to the Roman governor. In suits between Romans and Sicilians the judge was to be a native of the defendant’s state. So far the Roman sway is the mildest, the most benevolent system of government which has ever been imposed by an empire upon conquered subjects. Athens, it will be remembered, had grown rich and beautiful by misapplying the contributions of allies which she had converted into the tribute of subjects. Sparta had put garrisons into every conquered city. So had Carthage. No modern power allows as much local autonomy to conquered territories as Rome granted to hers.

But in every conquered territory it was necessary to have an armed force, large or small according to circumstances, and for the soldiers a general. As all the Roman magistrates were military in the first instance, but also judicial and executive—as, in fact, the nature of Roman ideas of imperium implied an unlimited competence in every department of rule, the provincial general was also, necessarily, a provincial judge and administrator free from all control during his year of office. No doubt the Romans, if they had possessed the wisdom and retrospective foresight so lavishly displayed by their modern critics, would, in sending officers to distant parts, have revised their notions of imperium and defined the spheres of duty which they entrusted to their generals. If they had studied political science they might have learnt that it is wise to separate the legal functions from the administrative, and both from the military. Or if they had made historical researches, they might have discovered that the Persian administrative system of three independent functionaries in each satrapy was the best that had yet been discovered. But they did none of these things: they simply blundered on in the old Roman way, more maiorum. They did not foresee the demoralising effect of absolute power in an alien and subject land. They did not foresee the necessity for central control in a Roman Colonial Office; there was not even any Latin equivalent for the Franco-Grecian term “bureaucracy.” Thus they were compelled to trust to the honour and sense of justice which was, when this colossal experiment began, still believed to exist in the heart of a Roman officer and gentleman, unaware that corruption was beginning even then to taint the whole body of their aristocracy.

They might, one would think, have realised the super-human temptations in the path of a Roman governor. He went out, with a company of his own friends, chiefly ambitious young men, for a staff, with a senatorial legate chosen by himself, and a juvenile quæstor as his subordinate to keep accounts, if he could: for there was no competitive examination in book-keeping. The governor went for a year only among a people whose traditions, laws, and even language, were probably quite unknown to him. He left an austere and barbarous republic to act as monarch among flattering Greeks or cringing Asiatics. No power on earth could even criticise him while he held the imperium: afterwards he might be impeached, it is true, but before a court of his own friends. He had just completed a civic magistracy, and these were won and held by means of lavish bribes and public entertainments. Opportunities to recoup himself were irresistible.

True to the mos maiorum, the Romans invented no new magistracy for the provinces. Already as early as the Samnite Wars they had found it necessary sometimes to break down the annual system by proroguing a magistrate’s term of office in order that he might finish a campaign. If he were prætor or consul, he continued for another year as proprætor or proconsul. When Sicily was conquered the Romans added another prætor to the two functionaries already existing, another for Sardinia, and two more for Spain; but after that the new provinces were entrusted to proprætors and proconsuls, or, in case of a war, to the consuls themselves during the latter part of their year of office. The senate decided what the magisterial provinces should be, which of them should be consular, and then generally the qualified officers balloted for them.

The same want of elasticity in the Roman system spoilt their good intentions in the matter of finance. As we have seen, the State imposed no crushing burdens upon its vassals. Had the stipendium been honestly collected by official emissaries under proper control, the provincials would have had little cause of complaint. But the Romans here again provided no new functionaries for the new duty. In some cases they allowed the subject communities to collect their own taxes and forward the required aggregate to Rome, and in such cases there was a great deal of peculation on the way. But where this was impossible the senate farmed out the collection of taxes under contract to certain individuals who bought them at auction. The publicani quickly grew into a regular institution, grouping themselves into capitalist syndicates which combined tax-farming with money-lending. Banks were established in every provincial centre. This capitalist class soon established itself as a political body at Rome, where it exerted a powerful and sinister influence over public policy. Just below the senatorial order were the equites. Of old they had been real cavalry, for it was only the rich who could afford to maintain a horse and the necessary equipment; now it was mainly a titular distinction, implying a certain income. It was here that the bankers of Rome and the financial interests were grouped in a single powerful class. For a time these “horsemen” actually secured control of the jury courts which tried charges of extortion. Then the lot of the provincials was wretched indeed: to pay their greedy and extortionate tax-gatherers they had often to borrow from the same individuals in their capacity of usurers, and then, if they ventured to journey to Rome with a complaint, they would meet the same evil class in the very judges who heard their complaints. This was how “publican and sinner” came to be an appropriate conjunction.

The corruption, as we shall see later, began to be serious with the acquisition of Asia. At first the incompetence due to the inexperience of the governors and their staffs was the chief failing of the system. But when Asia with its stored-up capital, its possibilities of exploitation, and its extreme helplessness, fell to Rome, traders and money-lenders swarmed down upon it, so that there were 80,000 Italians there when Mithradates ordered his famous massacre. Thus money poured into the capital, and there was an unseemly scramble for wealth. But for the present we are only concerned with the system of provincial government as it was in the beginning. I think we may conclude that it started with the best intentions, but with two inherent defects, both due to the conservatism of the Roman character. Their constitution was municipal and their outlook parochial. Their empire-building was precisely of the narrow-minded, well-intentioned character that one would expect if the Marleybone Borough Council suddenly found itself presented with Ireland, France, and half Spain, and asked to govern them.