From Rome and Italy, we turn to the ampler world of the Roman Empire, and are at once confronted with the cardinal reform introduced by Augustus in 27 B.C., when he divided the provinces between the Principate and the Senate. The principle upon which the division was made is succinctly laid down by Suetonius, who says that the Emperor took for himself the more powerful provinces which could neither conveniently nor safely be administered by magistrates holding office only for a single year: "Validiores provincias et quas annuis magistratuum imperiis regi nec facile nec tutum erat, ipse suscepit." In other words, he chose those which required the presence of troops to keep them in subjection, and the great frontier provinces which came in contact with barbarism. Those which lay outside the path of the storm he handed over to the Senate. Africa (which still retained a legion), Baetica, Asia, Sicily, Dalmatia, Macedonia, Achaia, Crete and Cyrene, Bithynia and Pontus, Sardinia and Corsica, were placed in the latter category. Of these, Dalmatia was transferred to the emperor in 2 B.C., on the outbreak of the Pannonian wars, and Sardinia and Corsica in 6 A.D., probably to enable the Emperor to exercise better control over the grain supplies. But the Senate had been more than compensated for the loss of these by the acquisition in 22 B.C. of Gallia Narbonensis and Cyprus. The remaining provinces were directly administered by the Emperor. Lusitania and Tarraconensis in Spain; Aquitania, Lugdunensis, and Belgica in Gaul; the two Germanic provinces on the Rhine, formed towards the close of his reign; the various Danubian provinces and procuratorships; Cilicia; the great eastern frontier province of Syria; and Egypt, which belonged to a special category of its own — all these were entirely removed from the sphere of the Senate's influence.
With the senatorial provinces Augustus interfered as little as possible. Their governors continued to be chosen by lot from among the ex-consuls and expraetors of five years' standing, until in 5 A.D. this method of selection — a clumsy device which had always given rise to endless intrigue and chicanery — was abolished. Owing to their wealth and importance, Asia and Africa seem to have been reserved for men of consular rank, but Augustus, lavish as ever in the grant of such distinctions as carried dignity without power, ordained that all senatorial governors should rank as proconsuls, even though they had never held the consulship. Thus the ruler of the most insignificant province was attended by his lictors with their axes and rods, and enjoyed the right of assuming the proconsular insignia on passing beyond the Pomaerium. But if his outward dignities were thus scrupulously maintained, his real power had become greatly diminished. Except in the case of Africa, no senatorial governor commanded an army. His freedom of action was curtailed in a number of indirect ways. He was no longer at liberty to plunder the provincials at discretion. His receipt of a fixed and adequate salary left him no excuse for levying exactions upon the natives, and there is good reason to believe that the senatorial commissioners, or legati, sent to accompany him and keep watch over his doings, were much more carefully selected than they had been in Republican days. Even his quaestor, his deputy and finance officer, whose chief duty was to look after the payment of the tribute and to see that neither the provincials nor the governor robbed the State, now bore the title of quaestor propraetore, and to him were assigned definite judicial functions, which limited the old absolute irresponsibility of the provincial governor.
In the imperial provinces, on the other hand, the governors were merely the representatives of the Princeps — legati Caesaris propraetore. One and all bore the title of propraetor, even though they had passed the curule chair. Answerable for their conduct to the emperor alone, they remained in their commands at his sole discretion. Thus while the system of annual governorships still prevailed in the senatorial provinces, it became no uncommon thing for the ruler of an imperial province to stay for a long term of years in his command, a fact which tended strongly to efficient administration. These imperial governors were attended by procurators who performed the duties of quaestor and eventually became persons of hardly less importance than the governors themselves. Sometimes, indeed, the procurator was actually the governor of the district in which he was placed. This was the case in Judea, when that country was attached to Syria, and in Rhaetia, Noricum, Epirus, and Thrace. Occasionally, indeed, the procurators were under the general supervision of the propraetor of the adjoining province, but for most practical purposes they held independent commands.
Beyond the sweeping reform involved by this division of the provinces into two separate and distinct classes, Augustus did not introduce any violent changes into the provincial administration itself. He simply took over the republican system and saw that it was worked in an efficient manner, his aim being rather to destroy its abuses than to recast its general character. What he did was to set the provinces upon a business footing. One of the principal steps taken towards this end was the completion of the great ordnance survey begun by Julius. The four leading geometers of the day, Zenodoxus, Theodotus, Polycletus, and Didymus, were engaged for nearly twenty-five years in visiting every corner of the Empire and preparing a new map, whereon were shown the configuration of each province, with its principal roads and towns, and a minute description of the character of the soil. A copy of this was painted or engraved by Agrippa on the walls of his portico at Rome, while the originals were carefully kept in the Roman treasury and constituted the official record upon which the provinces were assessed. In addition to this orbis pictus, or painted world, Augustus carried out a census in Gaul, Spain, and Syria, and the probabilities are that the same course was pursued in each province, with periodical revisions every few years. The census papers show that a careful inventory was made for the purpose of the land tax, which was the most profitable source of Roman revenue. Julius Caesar had already abolished in 48 B.C. the system of farming the tithe, which had been the cause of endless extortion, especially in the Asiatic provinces. The tributum soli, or land tax, was now apparently collected by the province itself and paid over to the quaestor or to the procurator directly, without the intervention of the publicanus, or middleman. The operations of the latter were not indeed wholly dispersed with, for the publicanus still continued to farm the revenues obtained from the portoria (the customs and octroi) and from the mines and quarries which belonged to the State. Yet these revenues were no longer sold at public auction, but were leased by the treasury officials at Rome.
There is no reason to believe that the burden of taxation was unduly heavy. The chief direct taxes were the tributum soli and the tributum capitis, the former a land tax, paid either in money or in grain, and the latter a personal tax on property or income. The principal indirect tax was the customs, which varied in amount in different provinces. In addition to these, there were other imposts, such as the four percent tax on all inheritances, the five percent on the enfranchisement of every slave, the one percent on all commodities sold by auction or in open market, and the two percent on the sale of slaves. The revenue derived from the ager publicus, or State domains in Italy, had dwindled almost to the vanishing point, and the fact that Augustus practically introduced no new taxes to meet the enormously increased public expenditure is a striking proof at once of the prosperity which attended his rule and of the greater honesty of the public officials. In Cicero's time, we hear only of the provincials as being ground down by the rapacity of their governors, while the exchequer was constantly empty. In the reign of Augustus, commerce had revived with a bound. The system of a double exchequer seems clumsy to modern ideas, but it flowed naturally from the division of the provinces. The Aerarium Saturni, controlled by senatorial officers, continued to receive all the revenues from the public domains and the senatorial provinces. The Aerarium militare, or military treasury, depended mainly upon the one percent tax on the sale of commodities; while into the Emperor's Fiscus flowed all the revenues from the imperial provinces.
Augustus spent public money freely upon the provinces for imperial purposes. It is impossible, for example, to compute the enormous sums which must have been expended in the construction of the great military roads which led to the frontiers. In the East, no doubt, such roads were already in existence, for in Greek times there had been an elaborate posting system throughout Asia and Syria. But in the West and North, the roads had to be cut through virgin forests and swamps and over mountains which had never before been penetrated by a wheeled vehicle. Apparently the principle adopted was to construct the main highways at the expense of the State, inasmuch as they were primarily intended for the rapid movement of the legions, and to throw the cost of the crossroads and subsidiary ways upon the localities through which they passed — an equitable management which was perfectly fair to the provincial taxpayer, who benefited from both alike.
Highly centralized though the provincial system was, a generous measure of local government was left to the provincials. Throughout the East, there were many free cities which were, to all intents and purposes, autonomous. The provinces of Asia and Syria were in fact hardly more than aggregates of city states, while the Western provinces were aggregates of cantons, as in Gaul, or of tribes, as in Spain. Some of these city states were absolutely independent of Rome, though they lay within the confines of a province. The liberae et faederatae civitates were protected by a special treaty. These paid no taxes of any sort to the Empire. They managed their own finances. They enjoyed their own laws without let or hindrance. Others, which though free, had no treaty with Rome, but merely a charter of rights revocable at will, were in a less-favored position. Their libertas gave them the right of self government but did not carry with it immunity from the tribute. Augustus, while generally confirming them in their privileges, did not hesitate to punish them by deprivation for turbulence or maladministration. For example, during his visit to Asia Minor in 22 B.C., he conferred freedom upon Samos but took it away from Cyzicus, Tyre, and Sidon on account of their seditiousness. According to Suetonius, he abrogated the treaty rights even of certain allied free cities, which had got utterly out of hand (ad exitium licentia praecipites), but he lightened the burdens of many which were heavily in debt, rebuilt others which had been shattered by earthquakes, and bestowed Latin rights and, in some instances, the full Roman citizenship upon those which could show that they had rendered valuable service to the Roman people. The Emperor, in other words, was not suspicious of local self government and did not consider it incompatible with a highly centralized regime.
Moreover, these Greek cities of Asia Minor and Syria were not only autonomous but enjoyed their own provincial representative assemblies, formed originally, no doubt, for festival and religious purposes. Here delegates of the various groups of cities met in conference and their proceedings were by no means confined to mere formalities. On the contrary, we find that when a province had cause of quarrel with a governor and wished to lay an impeachment against him for injustice or extortion, it was in the provincial assembly that the matter was formally discussed and by that assembly that the indictment was drawn up. Deputies were appointed to bring the matter before the Senate at Rome, where they were assured of a much fairer hearing than under the Republic. "The subject nations," Thrasea declared a few years later, "used to tremble before the proconsuls; now the proconsul trembles before the subjects over whom he rules." These assemblies had also the privilege of recommending a popular governor to the Emperor's favorable notice, and so eagerly sought after was this testimonial of good character that Augustus found it necessary to forbid the assemblies from passing any such resolution until sixty days after a governor's departure, in order to prevent him from intriguing to get such a resolution passed.
The Emperor also gave the provinces an honest currency, a boon which all engaged in commerce must have hailed with delight. He withdrew from circulation the debased coin issued in the days of Sulla, who had passed a law making it obligatory upon the public to accept at its face value all money issued from the mints, irrespective of its intrinsic worth. The means whereby this operation was carried out are not known, nor is it stated whether the public or the State bore the loss, but, for the future, it was enacted that all gold and silver coins should be of standard weight and that the right of coinage should be restricted to Rome and a few provincial mints. And as a curious but convincing illustration — in itself of minor importance — of Augustus' general policy, it is worth noting that he allowed the Senate the right of minting the copper coinage. Nothing could be more characteristic. The gold and silver were to be imperial. The copper was to be senatorial. Such a division of the metals was symbolical of much.
There can be no question that the provinces were the chief gainers by the change from the Republic to the Principate, and that they sincerely welcomed the establishment of the Empire. They reaped advantage therefrom in a hundred diverse ways. The strong central government at Rome imposed peace within the frontiers. The older provinces no longer required armies for their protection and were able to pursue unmolested the path of peaceful development. Such a province as Further Spain was no longer threatened by the mountaineers of Lusitania. The Narbonensis had no more cause to fear the half-conquered tribes of Gaul, now that their hinterlands had become Roman too. The same was true in the East of provinces like Macedonia, Asia, Bithynia, and Cilicia. The seas were swept clear of pirates and their coasts were secure, while the advancement of the frontier to the Danube protected Macedonia from the incursions of the Dacians, and the interior of Asia Minor grew more settled from year to year. By planting the legions permanently on the boundaries, Augustus drew a wall of swords around the provincials and kept them sheltered from invasion. The Republic — had it survived — might perhaps have done the same, but it is hard to believe that the Senate would have conceived such a policy or would have dared to carry it into practice, involving as it did the creation of huge military commands.
The rapid Romanization of Spain and Gaul was the chief triumph of Augustus in the West, while throughout the East commerce prospered as it had never prospered before. Even Tacitus, despite all his republican sympathies, was compelled to acknowledge that "the provinces did not object to the new regime": "Neque provinciae illum rerum statum abnuebant." That is the grudging admission of a man who would like to have denied, if denial had been possible, the clear evidence of his senses, and, coming from such a source, it is tantamount to proof that the loyalty of the provinces was beyond dispute. There may not have been any great outburst of enthusiasm towards its ruler on the part of the Grecian East. The Greek populations of Syria and Asia Minor, who had long ago forgotten their ancestors' devotion to freedom, accepted foreign rule as a matter of course, having never known what it was to be independent. Provided their customs and observances were not interfered with, provided they were left free to amuse themselves with their festivals and their arts — which, as Cicero had long before pointed out, solaced them for their loss of freedom — they were content. Factious among themselves, they never threatened insurrection against the imperial master whose armies guarded them alike from the Parthian and the Median and from the depredations of the mountaineer tribes which lay behind them. One need only compare the letters of the younger Pliny written to Trajan from the province of Bithynia, not with the terrible picture of the rule of Verres in Sicily but with the letters written by Cicero himself from Cilicia, to see that the spirit of the Roman provincial administration had in the intervening years undergone a complete revolution.
It is not to be supposed that night was suddenly changed into day by the mere fact that there was now an emperor in Rome instead of a ruling clique of oligarchs, most of whom had looked forward to the day when their own turn would come for loot and plunder. But the situation was profoundly changed by the substitution of one permanent master for a yearly succession of masters who came and went. In the imperial provinces, the emperor was supreme. He appointed his own men to the governorships. All the revenues from these provinces flowed into his new treasury, and, responsible as he was for the security of an Empire which required a vast expenditure, he chose his financial officers with care, and looked strictly into the details of his budget. To say that peculation and rapacity on the part of his agents were thereby made impossible would be a gross exaggeration, but at least they became infinitely more dangerous to the corrupt official, who now had to answer not to a venal jury but to the emperor himself, or to a court of law which gave its verdict under the emperor's eyes. Augustus, in short, created a great civil service which offered a fine career to men of capacity and ambition, and in which promotion was only to be looked for as a reward for fidelity to trust. Very little is heard during his reign of provincial misgovernment. Cassius Dio, indeed, attributes the revolt of Pannonia and Illyricum to the discontent of the natives at their financial burdens. Varus, again, is described as having gone to the rich province of Syria a poor man and as having stripped it bare: "Pauper divitem ingressus, dives pauperem reliquit." But the most striking case of all is that of Licinus, a freedman of Gallic birth who rose to the important position of chief procurator in Gaul. According to Cassius Dio, Licinus not only angered the Gauls by his insolent and overbearing demeanor, but extorted from them their monthly taxes fourteen times in the year, after the style of the worst kind of republican governor. And the story goes that when Augustus visited Lugdunum and called his procurator to account for his rapacity, Licinus invited him to his house, displayed before him the treasures which he had amassed and avowed that, if he had plundered, he had done so not for his own gain but for that of his imperial master. Augustus, we are told, condoned the crime and, instead of dismissing Licinus from his service, took the bribe and advanced the crafty procurator to even higher dignities. But these exceptions, important though they are, do not affect the general truth of the argument that the provincials were far less exposed to the rapacity of their governors than they had been in the old days. Instead of the provinces being "the farms of the Roman people" — to quote Cicero's striking and significant phrase from the Verrine orations — they were now the farms of the emperor, who might occasionally rack rent them to meet some extraordinary expenditure, but who, as a rule, took care that no one else should do the same. Some years later, when Tiberius' financial advisers recommended him to increase the provincial tribute, the Emperor replied with a homely proverb which contained the maximum of political insight: "A good shepherd shears his sheep, he does not flay the skin off their backs"; "Boni pastoris esse tondere pecus, non deglubere." Such in a word was the provincial policy of Augustus with respect to taxation, and it fully explains the popularity of the Empire throughout the provinces.