one of Rome's most successful tools.
At Rome itself, the growth of the Empire had brought about indirectly an ever growing population of slaves, freedmen, foreigners, and Italians, the
ambitious, the curious, the needy, and the desperate. Quite apart from the very serious problem of keeping the peace, the nourishment of scores of
thousands of people and the keeping of the city wholesome and habitable posed very serious difficulties. Fortunately proceeds of empire could be devoted
to the building projects, above all the aqueducts, which alone made it possible for so large a population to survive. But such projects needed organization
as well as capital. In the (usual) absence of the consuls and often of the praetors, the management of Rome, the cura Urbis, devolved on other magistrates.
Their principal resource for the job was a distinctive Roman procedure for the letting of contracts, locatio. This needs some stressing because it always
remained one of the main governmental activities of Roman administrators, and because it was through this that so much of the civil engineering which is
so eloquent a testimony of Roman rule was carried on. It was also for a very long period the principal mode, through tax-farming, of collecting public
revenues, that basic activity of ancient governments. Moreover it was unique to Rome in its developed form, and appeared to Polybius (6. 117) one of the
most striking and effective aspects of Roman state activity, embracing all activities from the contract for feeding the sacred geese of Juno (always let first)
to the taxes of the provinces or the resurfacing of main roads. Polybius saw this practice as a democratic aspect of Roman public life, no doubt because it
involved in state business some prominent plebeians. For our purposes it is doubly important. First it encouraged the formation of semi-public corporate
organizations, collegia and societates, the spirit of which contributed to Roman notions of how to form administrative institutions-and indeed it is from
this world that the important late-Roman official title magister derives. Second, and even more importantly, we see again here the unwillingness of Roman
magistrates to undertake themselves the direct overseeing of the activities which they sponsored. The wish to limit the public sphere and privatize official
actions is again apparent.