whole burden of government. Indeed some senators did feel that their dignity should be reflected in their agenda, and that they should not debate trivial or
demeaning subjects, but others considered that an exhaustive concern for every corner of the res publica had been the great ideal of the statesmen of old.
'How every single thing mattered to our ancestors!', exclaims the Elder Pliny admiringly of a censorial regulation about laundry men passed in 220 B.C.
(NH 35. 197). The evidence suggests that the opinion of Pliny prevailed: even if an issue came to the attention of the authorities, it was only at the top that
any consideration of it could take place. Hence the hours that the Emperors, their high officials, and the provincial governors spent in routine jurisdiction;
the inscriptions recording minor local administrative decisions often taken at a very high, even at an imperial level; the small issues discussed in the
surviving letters between the relatively few executives of the Roman Empire; hence too, no doubt, the hundreds, thousands of matters as important as
those that did receive attention, that simply went by default. There was a great reluctance to multiply positions of authority or to complicate the business
of government. There was little forward planning; new administrative measures (sometimes) followed only on acute crisis. So it was naturally to
dependents that over-pressed office-holders looked for their assistants; some of these might be equestrians or free plebeian clients, but the total obedience
of the unfree offered much more extensive possibilities in a slave-owning society. It is with the role of authority conferred within the household, but
applied to public life, that we are here concerned.
The Emperor was the most hard-pressed administrator of all; Fergus Millar has demonstrated conclusively how his detailed concern for specific matters
and his virtually undivided responsibility for all the business for which he could find time left no time for the creation of what we would call policy. His it
was to begin to deal, rather, with all the appeals, petitions, embassies which reached him from below. Because it was only as judge that he was expected to
act, whole areas of government-education, the economy, welfare, administration-only impinged on him accidentally, and were treated unsystematically.
Nevertheless the volume of material reaching him required some management, and so it was that in the imperial household we have our clearest example
of an administrator's personal dependents gaining responsibility for public affairs and enormous political power.
So great were the fortunes of some late-republican senators that the slaves or freedmen on whom they relied might find themselves in control of sums of
money or tracts of land comparable in size to objects of the state's administration. This was naturally most true of Augustus, whose personal property and
wealth was truly imperial in scale. The private estate of the Julio-Claudians was settled by the falling in of the shares allotted by Augustus to his family,
above all to Livia and Antonia the younger, and by the policy of accumulating goods by inheritance and confiscation. Thanks to the ravages in the Roman
upper class of Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Commodus, and Septimius Severus, this imperial patrimonium gave the Emperor control over a substantial
proportion of the real estate of the Empire by means of direct ownership, not simply constitutionally sanctioned political control. Ownership entailed a
different style of administration, and one which evolved very fast.
There were other ingredients as well. In Egypt royal land was a phenomenon which survived from the time of the Pharaohs. As their successors, the
Emperors enjoyed in this province at least the experience of the direct management of a large proportion of the soil. Although Egypt was a very special
case in this, as in so many ways, it provided a precedent, if not a model, for the running on behalf of the Emperors of other formerly royal lands, especially
in the eastern part of the Empire, where royal lands had previously become public land of the Roman People. It would be very interesting to know how
such tracts had been administered in the last years of the Republic. A good example is Galatia, where the extensive estates of the last king, Amyntas,
became under Augustus an imperial property of a sufficient scale to make an impact on the organization of the province. The potential power of the
supervisors of these estates is clearest in the case of geographically circumscribed areas like the Gallipoli peninsula (the Thracian Chersonese) which
formed a single imperial property. In places like this the agent of the emperor had to exercise functions not unlike those of a provincial governor, and we
hear of the punishment of one such in Judaea in the reign of Tiberius who took it on himself to give orders to Roman soldiers as if he held imperium
(Tacitus, Annals 4. 15). As we shall see, such licence was soon to be regularized. It was in Africa that the imperial estates reached their greatest extent,
and epigraphic evidence from the second century, especially the Lex Manciana, reveals a good deal about their scale and management. But every province
had them; they included mines, quarries, forests, as well as agricultural land; and Emperors were not slow to add to them. Septimius Severus, in particular,
vastly increased the imperial holdings in the provinces, and the substitution of imperial for private markings on oil-jars from southern Spain eloquently