This is why Rome long retained the habit of dealing with her subjects with the respect deserved by the free, and why Roman rule so long remained
indirect. To the end of antiquity most of the cities of the Empire and their territories were ruled by local magistrates many of whose domestic executive
actions were taken as if they were independent; indeed they often needed to be reminded that there were limits to the licence they were allowed. Similarly
Rome also long tolerated local kings and dynasts, and the survival of these dependent kingdoms and free cities contributed much to the fuzzy informality
of the power structure of the Empire before the age of the Antonines. Even in the third century, tens of thousands of Rome's subjects would have contact
with superior executive authority only through whatever magistrates had authority in their own city. It was in Italy that the autonomy of the cities was first
seriously weakened; there, already before the end of the Republic, regulations define the limits of city magistrates' competence.
More significant is the interference in the financial affairs of cities which becomes widespread during the second century A.D. Governors in the provinces
or the Senate or the Emperor had always been able to intervene in some such matters, but their competence was of course severely restricted by their
limited time and knowledge. In the appointment from Rome from the end of the first century A.D. of senatorial or equestrian state guardians (curatores rex
publicae) or accountants (logistai) in the cities we find a momentous departure from the traditional laissez-faire attitude to government which had hitherto
prevailed. In Italy the change can be linked with other administrative policies, such as the setting up of charitable foundations for poor children or the
centralizing of many local administrative functions on regions based on the great Italian highways, developments which confirm that a new attitude to
government was being born. Because of the crisis of the third century and the different direction taken by the administration of the late Empire as a result
of the reforms of the age of Diocletian (284-305), this attitude never evolved fully; but combined with the final stage in the evolution of the provinces and
the maturing of the office of provincial governor, it forms one of the hallmarks of the Antonine Empire. Of this world of diminishing autonomy and
growing governmental solicitude the experience of the Younger Pliny in Bithynia is not untypical. But a reading of his correspondence with Trajan, which
forms our best evidence for this acme of Roman administrative excellence, leaves an abiding impression of how arbitrary, haphazard, and superficial
Roman government was even then.