The Government of the Roman Provinces

Abstract

By the middle of the second century B.C. every state in the Mediterranean, except Mauretania and a few Balkan principalities, was held to Rome by some kind of political tie. Of this ring of dominions and dependencies it might be asserted, as it has been said of the British Empire, that it was acquired ‘in a fit of absentmindedness’. As a result of the unpremeditated character of most of their conquests the Romans had no ready-made plan for their control, but gradually evolved their rules of administration by trial and error; and they never reduced their empiric practices to a cut-and-dried system. Nevertheless the main lines of their methods of government had been laid down before the end of the second century.