52 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
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 confi rmed 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’ fi nances 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.^46
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
offi ce was still by and large attractive to the wealthy.^47 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 honorifi c 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’.^48
ADDENDUM
The imperial administration of the Principate was not a formal and elaborate
bureaucratic system. If the term ‘bureaucracy’ is to be used with reference to ancient
Rome (or ‘civil service’, for that matter), it would be prudent to qualify it in some
way. Max Weber, against the background of contemporary German administrative
theory and practice, categorised the administration of the Roman empire as a
patrimonial bureaucracy, as distinct from a legal/rational bureaucracy. See Weber
(1968), esp. 956–1006; cf. Garnsey and Humfress (2001), ch. 3, following Saller
(1982). Eich (2005), 22–25, cf. Eich (2007), taking his cue from Johnson and
Dandeker (1989), 239, envisages an ideal- type of ‘personalen Bürokratie’
(‘personalized bureaucracy’), which he situates within a broad class of ‘vormoderne
Bürokratie’ (‘premodern bureaucracies’); for this term see Riggs (1964) and
Eisenstadt (1969). A ‘personalized bureaucracy’ consists of a hierarchy of offi ces
based on the household, designed to serve the ruler, his person, rather than the state
in an abstract sense. Eich (2005), 43, 48, cf. (2007), 36 also points to
‘protobürokratische Funktionselemente’ in the administration, which he sees as
becoming more prominent from the late second century. Scheidel (forthcoming) has
‘patrimonial protobureaucracy’.