Control over the Governors
Supervision of the Senate over the Provinces and Their Governors

The government had no right to be surprised at such things, for it provided no serious check on the excesses of this capricious military administration.  Judicial control, it is true, was not entirely wanting.  Although, according to the universal but more than questionable rule of allowing no complaint to be brought against a commander-in-chief during his term of office,(35) the Roman governor could ordinarily be called to account only after the mischief had been done, yet he was amenable both to a criminal and to a civil prosecution.  In order to the institution of the former, a tribune of the people by virtue of the judicial power pertaining to him had to take the case in hand and bring it to the bar of the people; the civil action was remitted by the senator who administered the corresponding praetorship to a jury appointed, according to the constitution of the tribunal in those times, from the ranks of the senate.  In both cases, therefore, the control lay in the hands of the ruling class, and, although the latter was still sufficiently upright and honourable not absolutely to set aside well-founded complaints, and the senate even in various instances, at the call of those aggrieved, condescended itself to order the institution of a civil process, yet the complaints of poor men and foreigners against powerful members of the ruling aristocracy—­submitted to judges and jurymen far remote from the scene and, if not involved in the like guilt, at least belonging to the same order as the accused—­could from the first only reckon on success in the event of the wrong being clear and crying; and to complain in vain was almost certain destruction.  The aggrieved no doubt found a sort of support in the hereditary relations of clientship, which the subject cities and provinces entered into with their conquerors and other Romans brought into close contact with them.  The Spanish governors felt that no one could with impunity maltreat clients of Cato; and the circumstance that the representatives of the three nations conquered by Paullus—­the Spaniards, Ligurians, and Macedonians—­would not forgo the privilege of carrying his bier to the funeral pile, was the noblest dirge in honour of that noble man.  But not only did this special protection give the Greeks opportunity to display in Rome all their talent for abasing themselves in presence of their masters, and to demoralize even those masters by their ready servility—­the decrees of the Syracusans in honour of Marcellus, after he had destroyed and plundered their city and they had complained of his conduct in these respects to the senate in vain, form one of the most scandalous pages in the far from honourable annals of Syracuse —­but, in connection with the already dangerous family-politics, this patronage on the part of great houses had also its politically perilous side.  In this way the result perhaps was that the Roman