40 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
third centuries bureaucratic rules governed appointments and promotions to
the point where the process became almost automatic, leaving the emperor
little discretion.^17 Senatorial careers do exhibit certain patterns: ex- praetors
holding senior posts in the emperor’s service were usually promoted to the
consulship while their contemporaries in the senate usually were not;
moreover the emperor preferred to use men without consular ancestors as
legates to govern his provinces. These regularities, however, do not constitute
automatic promotions: the variety in the number and order of offi ces held, as
well as the decreasing number of posts available at each succeeding level of
promotion, suggest that emperors must have used their discretion in the
appointment of senators and equestrians. In addition, our literary sources of
the fi rst and second centuries speak not of rules, but of personal factors, such
as patronage, as being decisive in imperial appointments.^18
In regard to promotions, and in other respects, the central administration
of the Principate represents an advance in bureaucratic organization over
the Republic, but the extent of the advance must not be exaggerated. The
administration at its top levels remained amateurish. Senators and
equestrians spent only a part of their working lives in offi ce, they received
no special training for their duties, and in the course of their careers they did
not develop specialist expertise.^19 If there were any administrative
‘professionals’, they were the emperor’s freedmen and slaves. Moreover, the
numbers remained small enough (around 350 elite offi cials in Rome, Italy
and the provinces in the Severan period) to make unnecessary the
development of a hierarchy of responsibility: for the most part each
senatorial or equestrian offi cial was responsible directly to the emperor.
Cities
The secret of government without bureaucracy was the Roman system of
cities which were self- governing and could provide for the needs of empire.
The period of the Principate witnessed a striking multiplication and
expansion of autonomous urban units, especially in those parts of the empire
where cities had been few. Roman pragmatism rather than Greek cultural
idealism lay behind this development. It was a characteristic Greek view
that higher civilization was only attainable within the framework of the
polis. The Romans were not equally dedicated to this belief, even when they
fell under the infl uence of Greek culture. No Latin word for city ( civitas,
municipium, colonia, res publica ) has the ideological potency of polis , while
Latin literature can easily give the impression that the city was viewed as the
seedbed of immorality rather than the seat of civilization.^20 As organizers of
empire, the Romans rated most highly the administrative function of the
city, without however losing sight of its potential role as a centre of
Romanization in newly conquered and incompletely pacifi ed areas. We shall
inquire in a moment into the mechanisms by which cities performed their