=Municipal life.=—­Under these omnipotent representatives of the emperor the smaller subject peoples continued to administer their own government.  The emperor had the right of interfering in their local affairs, but ordinarily he did not exercise this right.  He only demanded of them that they keep the peace, pay their taxes regularly, and appear before the tribunal of the governor.  There were in every province several of these little subordinate governments; they were called, just as at other times the Roman state was called, “cities,” and sometimes municipalities.  A city in the empire was copied after the Roman city:  it also had its assembly of the people, its magistrates elected for a year and grouped into colleges of two members, its senate called a curia, formed of the great proprietors, people rich and of old family.  There, as at Rome, the assembly of the people was hardly more than a form; it is the senate—­that is to say, the nobility, that governs.

The centre of the provincial city was always a town, a Rome in miniature, with its temples, its triumphal arches, its public baths, its fountains, its theatres, and its arenas for the combats.  The life led there was that of Rome on a small scale:  distributions of grain and money, public banquets, grand religious ceremonies, and bloody spectacles.  Only, in Rome, it was the money of the provinces that paid the expenses; in the municipalities the nobility itself defrayed the costs of government and fetes.  The tax levied for the treasury of the emperor went entirely to the imperial chest; it was necessary, then, that the rich of the city should at their own charges celebrate the games, heat the baths, pave the streets, construct the bridges, aqueducts, and circuses.  They did this for more than two centuries, and did it generously; monuments scattered over the whole of the empire and thousands of inscriptions are a witness to this.

=The Imperial Regime.=—­After the conquest three or four hundred families of the nobility of Rome governed and exploited the rest of the world.  The emperor deprived them of the government and subjected them to his tyranny.  The Roman writers could groan over their lost liberty.  The inhabitants of the provinces had nothing to regret; they remained subject, but in place of several hundreds of masters, ceaselessly renewed and determined to enrich themselves, they had now a single sovereign, the emperor, interested to spare them.  Tiberius stated the imperial policy in the following words:  “A good shepherd shears his sheep, but does not flay them.”  For more than two centuries the emperors contented themselves with shearing the people of the empire; they took much of their money, but they protected them from the enemy without, and even against their own agents.  When the provincials had grounds of complaint on account of the violence or the robbery of their governor, they could appeal to the emperor and secure justice.  It was known that the emperor received complaints against his subordinates; this was sufficient to frighten bad governors and reassure subjects.  Some emperors, like Marcus Aurelius, came to recognize that they had duties to their subjects.  The other emperors at least left their subjects to govern themselves when they had no interest to prevent this.