CHAPTER XI

ITALY AND THE PROVINCES UNDER THE PRINCIPATE

§ 1. The Organisation of Italy

THE chief feature of the organisation of Italy during the early Principate was the completion of the efforts made during the later Republic at incorporating its towns with Rome. The unity aimed at was chiefly that of jurisdiction, but we have no evidence of the steps which Augustus took to perfect the system of judicial centralisation, which had been devised at the close of the Republic.1 At the same time this Emperor adopted a device which, though its full details and effects are unknown, seemed to foreshadow the later principle of a close administrative unifi cation of Italy with the capital. He divided the peninsula, exclusive of the immediate territory of Rome, into eleven regions (regiones).2 The immediate purpose contemplated by this division is unknown; but it laid the basis for subsequent distributions of many branches of Italian administration. The public domains, taxes paid by Roman citizens such as the vicesima hereditatum, and the results of the census, were organised or calculated by regions. They were employed, therefore, for work which necessarily fell on the central government, and this organisation so far implied no infringement on the communal autonomy of the towns. Such infringement came as a necessary result of the influence of the personality of the Princeps, which finally dominated Italy as effectually as it controlled Rome. But its coming was very gradual. The final change may be illustrated by the

1

3

p. 314.

2 Plin. H.N. iii. 46 "nunc ambitum ejus (Italiae) urbesque enumerabimus, qua in re praefari necessarium est auctorem nos divum Augustum secuturos, descriptionemque ab eo factam Italiae totius in regiones XI."

See the references in Marquardt Staatsverw. i. p. 220.

disappearance of the municipal comitia, the limitation of local jurisdiction, the loss of an independent system of local finance, and the control ultimately assumed by the central government of the actual administration of many of the Italian states.

Of these changes, the downfall of the comitia is perhaps less remarkable than their continuance for so long a period after the assemblies had ceased to be a reality at Rome. A Latin colony in the time of Domitian still elects its magistrates at a comitia curiata,1 and the transference of this principle to Spain shows its prevalence at the time in Italy. The paucity of inscriptions of the early Principate which speak of elections by the only alternative body, the local Senate, is remarkable, and there are clear indications of the survival of the principle of popular election until the time of Antoninus Pius.2 It doubtless retained its hold on Italy as late as it did on the western provinces; its disappearance from the whole municipal sphere was the result of a new system of creating magistrates, the characteristics of which will be traced when we are dealing with the provinces of this period. The elective power of the assemblies no doubt survived all their administrative functions. The tendency even of the early Principate was to confine these to the local Senates, which were accounted more responsible bodies, and were far better instruments of the central controlling power of Rome.

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The limitation of the local courts of law cannot be fully illustrated, but it is to some extent connected with the establishment of high individual authorities for jurisdiction in Italy, which begins with Hadrian. That Emperor divided Italy into four great circuits, and placed each of them under a consularis.1 These magistrates were replaced under Marcus Aurelius by juridici 5 of praetorian rank, whose purely civil jurisdiction was finally concerned with that portion of Italy which was separated from the urbica dioecesis, the sphere of the praetor's competence."

1 Lex Malacitana c. lii. ff.

2 Kuhn Verfassung des römischen Reiches i. pp. 236, 237. In an inscription of Hadrian's time we find in Ostia II. vir . . in comitiis factus (C.I.L. xiv. 375). For this and other instances see Liebenam Städteverwaltung p. 479.

4 Vita Hadr. 22 "quattuor consulares per omnem Italiam judices constituit." Of Antoninus Pius, who was one of these, it is said "cum Italiam regeret" (Vita Anton. 3). Cf. App. B.C. i. 38.

5 Vita M. Anton. 11 "datis juridicis Italiae consuluit ad id exemplum, quo Hadrianus consulares viros reddere jura praeceperat."

6 Ulpian in Fragmenta Vaticana 205, 232, 241.

These officials are mentioned only in connexion with extraordinary jurisdiction concerned with trusts, the nomination of guardians,1 or questions of administrative law, such as a controversy concerning the qualification for the decurionate.2 But, as extraordinary jurisdiction was gaining the upper hand of the jus ordinarium, and as such administrative questions would at an earlier period have been settled by the municipalities themselves,3 the powers of the juridici may be regarded as a very real limitation of those of the local magistrates and senates. We have already seen that all the higher criminal jurisdiction of these towns had disappeared. Within the limit of a hundred miles from Rome such cognisance belonged to the praefect of the city, outside this limit to the praefect of the guard.

The financial difficulties under which many of the Italian towns laboured, invited a further system of imperial control. This took the form of the institution of curatores rei publicae, of senatorial or equestrian rank, whose existence is traceable from the close of the first century A.D., and who were given by the Princeps as extraordinary commissioners to reinvigorate the financial life of poverty-stricken municipalities.5

But an even more vigorous control was impending, which was to bring Italy nearer to the condition of a province. The extraordinary commissioners known as correctores (Stopwтai), whom the Principate often gave to free cities or districts in the provinces, were finally transferred to Italy. When its municipalities were placed under this tutelage, there was little more than a formal difference between their condition and that of the subject towns, and nothing but a more regular system of administration and the imposition of direct taxation was wanted to change Italy into a province. Both these changes were effected under the rule of Diocletian. Italy was, it is true, not divided into

1 Ulp. l.c.; Dig. 40, 5, 41, 5.

2 Fronto ad Amicos ii. 7.

3 Marquardt (Staatsverw. i. p. 227) remarks that such a question as the qualification of a decurion belongs under Caesar's legislation (lex Ursonensis c. 105) to the municipal courts.

4 pp. 408, 410.

5 Mommsen Staatsr. ii. p. 1082, Liebenam Städteverw. p. 480, and in Philologus lvi. 290 ff. How far this curatorship became a standing office is uncertain.

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p. 428.

7 The first official ad corrigendum statum Italiae belongs to the year 214 A.D., while the provincial corrector goes back to the time of Trajan (Marquardt Staatsverw. i. pp. 228, 229).

provinciae, but its districts were placed under regularly-appointed correctores, and its lands supplied revenues to the imperial court and to Rome. This climax of centralisation was probably the inevitable result of the imperial system and the external circumstances of the time. To the Princeps Italian and provincial problems were the same; Italy was not always the country in which the Emperor established his permanent residence, and, as the onset of the barbarians threatened even the Italian frontier, there was no possible reason why Italy should not pay its quota to the general taxation. But economic and social evils may have contributed to the imperial encroachments on Italian administration. The weaknesses which led to imperial control may have been those which the Emperors sought to cure. These were poverty and depopulation, and how earnestly they were grappled with may be seen by a glance at the system of state support known as the alimentarium. The leading idea of this institution is the endowment of a state or district with a fund which should give partial support to children, and by this means encourage production and relieve the responsibilities of parents or guardians. Such charitable efforts had, at an early period, been made by individuals;1 and from the reign of Nerva the state, as represented by the Princeps, took up the enterprise. Nerva's example was followed by Trajan," who extended and organised the system, and similar efforts were made by Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, and Severus Alexander.3 The form usually taken by the endowment was an advance by the Princeps of funds which were deposited on good landed security at moderate interest, 5 or 2 per cent. From this interest a certain number of boys and girls were to be supported, by the gift either of a certain amount of corn or of a sum of moneytwelve, sixteen, or twenty sesterces-per month. This support was guaranteed until the boys had attained their eighteenth and the girls their fourteenth year. The details of this organisation

1 See the inscription of Atina of the time of Augustus (Wilmanns 1120), "T. Helvio. . . legato Caesaris Augusti, qui Atinatibus HS . . . legavit, ut liberis eorum ex reditu, dum in aetatem pervenirent, frumentum et postea sestertia singula millia darentur."

2 Victor Epit. 12; Dio Cass. lxviii. 5.

3 Marquardt Staatsverw. ii. pp. 143, 144. Pius, in honour of his wife Faustina, created a fund for puellae Faustinianae (Vita 8); Alexander, in honour of his mother, one for pueri puellaeque Mammaeani (Vita 57).

4 Our knowledge of this institution is derived chiefly from two metal tables, the Tabula Veleias (of Veleia in Cisalpine Gaul) and the Tubula Bachianorum (of

were supervised in each locality by a quaestor alimentorum, while the general control of the funds over a large district was usually entrusted to the curators of the roads 1 which ran through that domain, who sometimes bore the title praefectus, sometimes that of curator alimentorum.2 This wise method of charitable relief, which inspired an interest in agriculture while it relieved poverty and encouraged the growth of population, continued in force until the close of the Principate, and the praefecti, who administered this department, can be traced till the time of Diocletian.3

§ 2. The Organisation of the Provinces

The imperial problem of the later Republic-the task of finding a frontier-occupied the unceasing energy of the early Principes, and in this, as in similar cases in the history of the world, delimitation involved extension. Sometimes the views as to the proper boundary altered, and advance was at times succeeded by retrogression. Thus Augustus sought the Elbe only to fall back on the Rhine, and Trajan adopted against the great eastern power a heroic policy of annexation which did not commend itself to his successor. In one instance, too—that of Britain—a forward movement was made which can scarcely be explained as the search for a scientific frontier. But, on the whole, the slow and ordered progress was one that sought not territories, but boundaries, and the movement necessitated expansion, whether it took the form of the annexation of the wild districts to the south of the Danube, or the gradual absorption of the kingdoms and principalities which intervened between the old Asiatic provinces and the Euphrates or the African dominions and the sea. The Danube, the Rhine, and the German Ocean; the Euphrates and the Syrian Desert; the Ethiopian kingdoms, the Sahara, and the Atlantic, were the limits within which

the Ligures Baebiani near Beneventum). See E. Desjardins De tabulis alimentariis, Mommsen in I.R.N. 1354, Wilmanns 2844, 2845. On the institution see Marquardt Staatsverw. ii. pp. 141-147, Liebenam Städteverw. pp. 105, 360. p. 413.

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2 e.g. curator viae Appiae, praefectus alimentorum: curator viarum et praefectus alimentorum Clodiae et coherentium: curator viae Aemiliae et alimentorum (Wilmanns 1189, 1215, 1211). See Marquardt, Liebenam ll.cc., and Mommsen Staatsr. ii. p. 1079. In districts not pierced by the great roads, procurators (alimentorum, ad alimenta) were employed. 3 Marquardt 1.c. p. 147.