GOVERNMENT WITHOUT BUREAUCRACY 41administrative tasks. First, it is necessary to explore, on the one hand, the
diverse statuses of cities and, on the other, the common features that set
cities apart from the countless subordinate communities in the empire.
City statuses
The different statuses and privileges of cities were a heritage of the period of
the Republic. The colonia and the municipium were standard in the West,
but, especially in the case of the municipium , rare in the East. The colonia
was essentially an extension of Rome. It was a community of Roman citizens
established with a standard form of constitution modelled on that of Rome.
Outside Italy colonies tended to be settlements of retired soldiers, but when
veteran colonies were discontinued, in the early empire, colonia became an
honorifi c title conferred by special grant, linking a city in its title with an
emperor but carrying no substantive privileges.^21
A municipium in theory possessed greater freedom than a colonia because
it used its own laws and magistrates. This is refl ected in the ‘surprised’
reaction of the early second- century emperor Hadrian to the request of the
people of Italica in southern Spain (his town of origin) for ‘promotion’ from
municipium to colonia (A. Gellius, NA 16.13.4–5). Italica was not alone in
its ambitions: at least 120 Italian cities, more than a quarter of the whole,
had converted from municipia to colonies by the end of the third century.^22
Hadrian was being perversely pedantic. The miscellanist Aulus Gellius, who
recorded Hadrian’s remarks made in a speech to the Roman senate, is not
being unusually percipient when he comments that the two categories of city
were virtually indistinguishable, but colonia had the higher status. The
essential point is that municipia grew and spread in Republican Italy, and
were exported overseas under the empire, in quite different historical
circumstances. To put it simply, municipal status was won by Italy from
Rome by dint of a bloody ‘civil’ war (the so- called Social War, war against
the allies, of 91–89 BC ), but was imposed on the western provinces as a
standard Roman form of constitution for the purpose of consolidating
Roman power. For this reason in Italian municipia Roman citizenship was
the possession of all free inhabitants, but in the corresponding cities abroad
it was bestowed as a rule only on the most eligible provincials: in some
communities magistrates and ex- magistrates, in others local councillors
(some of whom had held no magistracy).
Apart from the chances afforded prominent individuals for self-
advancement, these ‘chartered’ cities, colonies or municipia , had no special
material privileges, unless they were brought into line with all Italian cities
by the award of ‘Italian rights’ ( ius Italicum ) carrying exemption from the
land tax. Septimius Severus rewarded in this way his native city of Lepcis
Magna, Carthage, and Utica in Africa, and civil war partisans Tyre,
Heliopolis and Laodicea in Syria (among others), but other emperors were
much less generous ( Digest 50.15.1).