In so far there was no proper municipal system from
the outset either in Greece or in Italy. The
Roman polity especially adhered to this view with
its peculiar tenacious consistency; even in the sixth
century the dependent communities of Italy were either,
in order to their keeping their municipal constitution,
constituted as formally sovereign states of non-burgesses,
or, if they obtained the Roman franchise, were—although
not prevented from organizing themselves as collective
bodies—deprived of properly municipal rights,
so that in all burgess-colonies and burgess—municipia-
even the administration of justice and the charge
of buildings devolved on the Roman praetors and censors.
The utmost to which Rome consented was to allow at
least the most urgent lawsuits to be settled on the
spot by a deputy (-praefectus-) of the praetor nominated
from Rome.(40) The provinces were similarly dealt
with, except that the governor there came in place
of the authorities of the capital. In the free,
that is, formally sovereign towns the civil and criminal
jurisdiction was administered by the municipal magistrates
according to the local statutes; only, unless altogether
special privileges stood in the way, every Roman might
either as defendant or as plaintiff request to have
his cause decided before Italian judges according to
Italian law For the ordinary provincial communities
the Roman governor was the only regular judicial authority,
on whom devolved the direction of all processes.
It was a great matter when, as in Sicily, in the
event of the defendant being a Sicilian, the governor
was bound by the provincial statute to give a native
juryman and to allow him to decide according to local
usage; in most of the provinces this seems to have
depended on the pleasure of the directing magistrate.
In the seventh century this absolute centralization
of the public life of the Roman community in the one
focus of Rome was given up, so far as Italy at least
was concerned. Now that Italy was a single civic
community and the civic territory reached from the
Arnus and Rubico down to the Sicilian Straits,(41)
it was necessary to consent to the formation of smaller
civic communities within that larger unit. So
Italy was organized into communities of full burgesses;
on which occasion also the larger cantons that were
dangerous from their size were probably broken up,
so far as this had not been done already, into several
smaller town-districts.(42) The position of these
new communities of full burgesses was a compromise
between that which had belonged to them hitherto as
allied states, and that which by the earlier law would
have belonged to them as integral parts of the Roman
community. Their basis was in general the constitution
of the former formally sovereign Latin community, or,
so far as their constitution in its principles resembled
the Roman, that of the Roman old-patrician-consular
community; only care was taken to apply to the same
institutions in the -municipium- names different from,