The City Magistrate at Home and Abroad
Rome had from the earliest times enjoyed very close contacts with the Greek world, and had, like most ancient cities, a tripartite political structure of
magistrates, council (the Senate), and popular assembly. The importance of the last for our purpose is that its early power produced the uniquely Roman
and constitutionally vital concept of imperium. The Roman people conferred upon its chosen magistrates the right to command it and the sanctions against
disobedience-ever more strictly circumscribed-of corporal and capital punishment of its members. On this depended the powers of the magistrates, and
therefore of the Emperor and of provincial governors under the principate. Provinciae, which were at first simply the military spheres of command of
consuls or praetors, changed greatly towards the late Republic. Not only had access to, and tenure of, the commands been progressively regularized, but
proconsuls and propraetors, encouraged no doubt by the opportunities for reasonable or unreasonable profit, found themselves deeply involved in
diplomacy, in the settling of disputes, the managing of their province's finances, and the giving of justice. They often spent more time on what came to be
a regular assize-tour of their province than on military matters.
When Augustus, needing to take over practically all the armies of the Empire, left the provinces of senatorial governors almost without legions, there was
no governmental difficulty. Some provinces came to be governed not by men who might command Roman soldiers, but by freedmen and by equestrians
whose title, procurator, was drawn not from public law, but from the language of the household. Finally, from the Flavian period, governors who found
themselves overburdened by military duties began to be assisted by special deputies who would see to the jurisdiction of the governor and were called
iuridici. The subordination of the governors of the provinces to the Emperor-although in the case of the proconsular provinces some still showed signs of
their old independence in the Julio-Claudian period-eventually also brought about the establishment of a fixed hierarchy of provinces and exact definition
of their boundaries, so that the Antonines ruled an Empire which was a tessellation of exactly fitting administrative units which, it is interesting to note,
showed a tendency to divide and subdivide in the second and third centuries. This exactly bounded Empire was, however, a recent creation, and until the
Flavian period much remained vague about the boundaries of Empire and provinces alike. But despite the changes of the early Empire, in the second
century there was still much in the government of the provinces that would have been familiar in the age of Scipio Aemilianus: proconsuls and
propraetors, assisted by quaestors and assistants such as scribes and messengers drawn from public panels, and delegating their imperium to deputies
called, if senators, legati, and if equestrians, praefecti, still ruled much of the Empire. And this includes the legates and prefects appointed by the Emperor
as proconsul of his enormous province. To that extent the Roman Empire was run by the magistrates of a city-state.