IV. The Provinces under the Principate
It is to the provinces that one must turn to win a true appreciation of the beneficial aspects of Roman government during the principate. As Mommsen[16] has said: “It is in the agricultural towns of Africa, in the homes of the vine-dressers on the Moselle, in the flourishing townships of the Lycian mountains, and on the margin of the Syrian desert that the work of the imperial period is to be sought and found.” In this sphere the chief tasks of the principate were the correction of the abuses of the republican administration and the extension of Graeco-Roman civilization over the barbarian provinces of the west and north. How well this latter work was done is attested not merely by the material remains of once flourishing communities but also by the extent to which the civilization of Western Europe rests upon the basis of Roman culture.
Number of the provinces. At the establishment of the principate there were about thirteen provinces, at the death of Augustus twenty-eight, and under Hadrian forty-five. In the course of the third century the latter number was considerably increased. The new provinces were formed partly by the organization of newly conquered countries as separate administrative districts and partly by the subdivision of larger units. At times this subdivision was made in order to relieve a governor of an excessively heavy task and to improve the administration, and at times it proceeded from a desire to lessen the dangers of a revolt of the army by breaking up the larger military commands.
Senatorial and imperial provinces. As we have seen the provinces were divided into two classes, senatorial or public and imperial or Caesarian, corresponding to the division of administrative authority between the Senate and the princeps. The general principle laid [pg 278]down by Augustus that the garrisoned provinces should come under the authority of the princeps was adhered to, and consequently certain provinces were at times taken over by the latter in view of military necessities while others were given up by him to the Senate. As a rule newly organized provinces were placed under imperial governors, so that these soon came to outnumber the appointees of the Senate. Eventually, as has been observed in connection with the history of the civil service, the public provinces passed completely into the hands of the princeps.
Administrative officials. The governors of the senatorial provinces were entitled proconsuls, even if they were of pretorian rank. However, Asia and Africa were reserved for ex-consuls. Following the law of Pompey, a period of five years intervened between the holding of a magistracy and a promagisterial appointment. Each proconsul was assisted by a quaestor, and by three propraetorian legati whose appointment was approved by the princeps. The imperial governors were of two classes, legati Augusti and procurators. In the time of Hadrian there were eleven proconsuls, twenty-four legati Augusti and nine procurators, besides the prefect of Egypt. The subordinates of the legati Augusti were the legates in command of the legions, and the fiscal procurators. The procuratorial governors, at first called prefects, were equestrians, and were placed in command of military districts of lesser importance which were garrisoned by auxiliaries only. An exception to this practice was made in the case of Egypt, which senators were forbidden to enter, and which was governed by a prefect who ranked next to the praetorian prefect and had under his orders a garrison of three legions. These governmental procurators had, in addition to their military duties, the task of supervising financial administration. The title praeses (plural praesides) which was used in the second century for the imperial governors of senatorial rank, came to designate the equestrian governors when these supplanted the legati in the latter half of the third century.
As under the republic, the governors exercised administrative, judicial, and, in the imperial provinces, military authority. However, with the advent of the principate the government of the empire aimed to secure the welfare and not the spoliation of its subjects, and hence a new era dawned for the provinces. All the governors now received fixed salaries and thus one of their chief temptations to abuse their power was removed. Oppressive governors were still to be found, but [pg 279]they were readily brought to justice—the senatorial governors before the Senate and the imperial before the princeps—and condemnations, not acquittals, were the rule. It was from the exactions of the imperial fiscal procurators rather than those of the governors that the provinces suffered under the principate. Although the term of the senatorial governors, as before, was limited to one year, tried imperial appointees were frequently kept at their posts for a number of years in the interests of good government.
It has been mentioned before that under Augustus the taxation of the provinces was revised to correspond more closely to their taxpaying capacity. Under the principate these taxes were of two kinds, direct or tributa and indirect or vectigalia. The tributa, consisted of a poll-tax (tributum capitis), payable by all who had not Roman or Latin citizenship, and a land and property tax (tributum soli), from which only communities whose land was granted the status of Italian soil (ius Italicum) were exempt. The chief indirect taxes were the customs dues (portoria), the five per cent tax on the value of emancipated slaves, possibly the one per cent tax on sales, and the five per cent inheritance tax which was levied on Roman citizens only. In the imperial provinces the land tax was a fixed proportion of the annual yield of the soil, whereas in the senatorial provinces it was a definite sum (stipendium) annually fixed for each community.
The principate did not break abruptly with the republican practice of employing associations of publicani in collecting the public revenues. It is true that they had been excluded from Asia by Julius Caesar, and it is possible that Augustus dispensed with them for the raising of the direct taxes in the imperial provinces, but even in the time of Tiberius they seem to have been active in connection with the tributa in some of the senatorial provinces. Their place in the imperial provinces was taken by the procurator and his agents, in the senatorial at first by the proconsul assisted by the taxpaying communities themselves and later by imperial officials.
On the other hand the indirect taxes long continued to be raised exclusively by the corporations of tax collectors in all the provinces. However, the operations of these publicani were strictly supervised by the imperial procurators. In place of the previous custom of paying a fixed sum to the state in return for which they acquired a right to the total returns from the taxes in question, the publicani now received a fixed percentage of the amount actually collected. Under [pg 280]Hadrian the companies of publicani engaged in collecting the customs dues began to be superseded by individual contractors (conductores), who like the companies received a definite proportion of the amount raised. About the time of Commodus the system of direct collection by public officials was introduced and the contractors gave way to imperial procurators. In the same way, the five percent taxes on inheritances and manumissions were at first farmed out, but later (under Hadrian in the case of the former) collected directly by agents of the state.
The municipalities. Each province was an aggregate of communes (civitates), some of which were organized towns, while others were tribal or village communities. From the opening of the principate it became a fixed principle of imperial policy to convert the rural communities into organized municipalities, which would assume the burden of local administration. Under the Republic the provincial communities had been grouped into the three classes, free and federate (liberae et foederatae), free and immune (liberae et immunes), and tributary (stipendiariae). In addition to these native communities there had begun to appear in the provinces Roman and Latin colonies. Towards the close of the Republic and in the early principate the majority of the free communities lost their immunity from taxation and became tributary. Some of them exchanged the status of federate allies of Rome for that of Roman colonies. During the same period the number of colonies of both types was greatly increased by the founding of new settlements or the planting of colonists in provincial towns. Some of the latter also acquired the status of Roman municipalities. Thus arose a great variety of provincial communities, which is well illustrated by conditions in the Spanish province of Baetica (Farther Spain) under Vespasian. At that time this province contained nine colonies and eight municipalities of Roman citizens; twenty-nine Latin towns; six free, three federate, and one hundred and twenty tributary communities.