News of the massacre in Asia caused widespread anger at Rome. Yet war had already been declared against Mithridates, and once the initial phase of the civil war had run its course, a consul took his army east to deal with the king of Pontus, first expelling him from Greece and then beating him in Asia. The slaughter of so many Romans did not provoke the war, nor did it prevent the Roman general from agreeing peace terms with Mithridates – admittedly encouraged by his desire to return to Italy, where his Roman enemies had gathered once again. In 229 BC the complaints of traders had convinced the Senate to send ambassadors to Queen Teuta in Illyria, and it was the murder of one of these representatives which had led to the declaration of war. The massacre of Italians at Cirta by Jugurtha similarly outraged many Romans, but did not in itself cause an army to be sent against him. Just as wars were not fought to gain access to trade routes, there is no evidence that the killing of Roman civilians by a foreign leader or community in itself would provoke the Senate to action. In the provinces, things were very different, and it is to the administration of these that we must now turn.32
V
‘HOW MUCH DID YOU MAKE?’ – GOVERNMENT
‘The Senate’s judgement that a province has been held and preserved by its governor’s mild and upright administration rather than by the swords of an army or the favour of the gods is a far greater distinction than a triumph.’ – Cato to Cicero, April 50 BC.1
PROCONSULS
On the last day of July 51 BC the proconsul Marcus Tullius Cicero reached the city of Laodicea, having crossed the boundary from Asia and entered his own province of Cilicia. He had left Rome in May and made his way to the port of Brundisium (modern Brindisi), the main route to the east. Cicero was in no great hurry, tarrying at his own and friends’ villas along the way. There were more delays when he fell ill, and later as he waited for one of his senior subordinates to arrive, so that it was early June before he set sail. The fifty-five-year-old proconsul paused to visit Athens for twelve days, and did not land at Ephesus on the coast of Asia until 22 July, where he rested for four days. From then on he travelled overland, following the old trunk road that led in time to Tarsus and eventually the great city of Antioch in Syria.2
The governorship of a province was a prize that went only to men doing well in the Republic’s fiercely competitive public life. By this time magistrates spent their year of office in Rome, and only then were given a command. The most important went to the former consuls, with the title and imperium of a proconsul. Former praetors sometimes received this title, but were allocated the less important provinces. Any command was an honourable distinction. In some there was the opportunity to win military glory, while all offered the chance of profit, most of all for the unscrupulous. By the middle of the first century BC bribery was rife in elections, the candidates trying to outspend each other and purchase the support of voters, trusting to a provincial command to restore their finances.3
Provincial commands were coveted by many ambitious – and plenty of desperate – senators, but not by all. Cicero held the consulship in 63 BC, winning the magistracy as soon as he had reached the minimum age. This was a point of pride for an aristocrat, but a truly remarkable distinction for a ‘new man’ like Cicero, the first in his family to become consul. During his twelve months of office he defeated a coup launched by a group of senators and their associates, but then chose not to follow his consulship with a provincial command. He had done the same after his praetorship, and the only overseas service of his entire career before 51 BC was as quaestor in Sicily in 74 BC. The Cilician command only came about because a new law stipulated a five-year interval between holding a senior magistracy and going out to a province – a measure aimed mainly at curbing electoral bribery. Introduced in 52 BC, this inevitably meant a shortage of governors for the next few years, and so any former consuls and praetors who had not held a command in the past were obvious candidates to undertake these duties.4
Cicero was not keen – ‘“putting panniers on a draft ox”, not the right sort of job for me’, he wrote of one of his first tasks when he reached Cilicia – but he was obliged to go. His command was to begin when he reached the province and to last for a year. However, the Senate had the option not to appoint a successor at the end of this period and instead to extend his command. Fear that this would happen plagued Cicero, who wrote letter after letter urging his friends to do everything possible to prevent this, and lobbied the incoming consuls and other magistrates in the same cause. To his great relief, his term was not extended, for his attitude to the post did not mellow over time.5 ‘The City, my dear Rufus,’ he wrote in June 50 BC to a young friend, ‘cling to the City and live in its limelight. Serving abroad, as I have known since my youth, is obscure and sordid for those whose efforts can win fame in Rome.’6
The greatest orator of his day – and that was the common opinion and not simply his own – Cicero’s political rise rested heavily on the speeches he made in the Senate, at public meetings, and most of all in the law courts. By Roman standards he had very little military experience, at most a couple of years in his late teens. Yet he was far from unique. The governor appointed to Syria at the same time as Cicero was one Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, colleague of Julius Caesar as consul in 59 BC. He had not taken a province after that magistracy, nor had he held one after his praetorship in 62 BC. This was largely a matter of choice, for he was a man of modest abilities and not someone whose oratory or skill as a political operator could only shine in Rome.
It is worth remembering that even a man who won praetorship and consulship and followed each with a provincial command still spent the bulk of his career in Rome. A senator was not free to travel as he willed, and required formal permission from the Senate to leave Italy, something only given in exceptional circumstances. Ambitious young men like Cicero and Caesar went to the Greek east to train in oratory, but once they were enrolled as senators, something that automatically followed the quaestorship, they could only go to the provinces in an official capacity, as governors, on the staff of another governor, as senior officers, or as part of a senatorial delegation – usually sent as boards of three on some diplomatic service.
There were a few senators who chose long service with the legions, such as Marcus Petreius, ‘the military man [homo militaris] who had served with considerable distinction for more than thirty years as tribune, prefect, legate and as a praetorian governor’, but these were rare enough to invite comment. When the forty-one-year-old Julius Caesar arrived in Gaul, he had spent at most nine years away from Italy and quite possibly less. Apart from a handful of unusual individuals, for most senators provincial service was an interruption of their normal life and career. Many welcomed the opportunity, and nearly all were glad of the honour and especially the profits of overseas service. The poet Catullus claimed that the first question he was asked on returning from a spell on the staff of the governor of Bithynia was ‘How much did you make?’7
Yet for all the appeal of a province, every senator knew that the experience for good or ill would be a brief one before a return to public life back in Rome. One-year commands were fairly common, and it was exceptionally rare to spend more than three years as a governor. It was unusual and purely coincidental if a man returned as governor to the same province in which he had served as quaestor. The Romans did not feel any great need for specialists in this or any other aspect of public life, and the vast majority of governors had never before visited a province until they arrived as its governor. Nor did most of them pay much attention to what went on in their empire. Cicero later joked about his surprise when he came back from a term as quaestor in Sicily. Some people had not even noticed that he had been away, and another thought that he had been to Africa and not Sicily. It reinforced his sense that only what happened in Rome really mattered.8
The Senate gave each governor instructions (mandata) sketching his responsibilities and perhaps drawing attention to particular concerns – in Cicero’s case he was to e
nsure the security of King Ariobarzanes, whose Cappadocian kingdom bordered on his province. However, no example survives and so it is hard to know how full these instructions were. In 59 BC Julius Caesar had introduced the latest in a succession of laws regulating governors’ conduct, repeating a ban on their leaving or taking troops beyond the boundaries of their provinces without permission. It also regulated the expenses a governor and his staff could claim to support themselves as they went about their duties, and insisted on detailed account-keeping of all their activities. Neither instructions nor legislation covered the numerous day-to-day decisions, large and small, required of a governor. Communications were simply too slow for the Senate to direct them, and both their will and the law could be ignored by the man on the spot if he believed – or at least could argue – that this was in the best interests of the Republic. Thus Caesar claimed that all his interventions further and further away from Transalpine Gaul were entirely justified by the situation. Governors could not be recalled prematurely once given a command, and could not be regulated closely, so that it was only on their return to Rome that their actions might be challenged.
Each governor issued an edict before or on arrival in the province. Cicero followed the normal practice of drawing heavily on those of previous governors. In particular, much of the text and the overall template came from the edict of Quintus Murcius Scaevola, who as consul had governed Asia in an exemplary manner in 95–94 BC, so that the Senate formally recommended that others copy his edict. This included a formal statement that disputes between provincials would be resolved according to their own laws. Another clause stated that as governor he would not enforce the terms of contracts that did not deserve in good faith to be followed. Cicero adhered to this ruling in practice, and noted that the proconsul in Syria had announced the same approach, although he chose to word it slightly differently. This tendency to copy earlier edicts helped to give some continuity to Roman administration in each province, but it was not compulsory and an incoming pro-magistrate could make drastic changes, albeit with the risk that this might be used against him should he ever be brought to trial.9
For the duration of his command, there was no higher authority within his province than the governor. This also meant that there were many issues for them to decide and much to do, dealing with small local problems, and for Cicero these were pale imitations of the serious matters debated and decided at Rome. Hence his foot-dragging progress to Cilicia, a journey that could easily have been done in half the time. Yet it should also be said that the state did little to arrange for appointed governors to reach their commands. Only very rarely would they be carried in a navy ship, and instead they took passage on merchant vessels going in the right direction. Nor was there any official postal service to permit the governor and Senate to communicate while he was away, and instead any correspondence went by private means.
Cicero was not alone in taking longer than was necessary to reach his province. Yet we should be glad that the reluctant proconsul was forced away from the limelight of Rome, for his letters written over the next twelve months provide us with by far our most detailed picture of the activities of a Roman governor under the Republic.
CILICIA
Cicero’s province was prestigious, as befitted one allocated to a former consul, and was garrisoned by two legions. As well as Cilicia itself (equivalent to much of southern Turkey today), several regions of the province of Asia were added to his command, as was Cyprus, annexed by Rome in 58 BC. Two important allied kingdoms, Galatia and Cappadocia, bordered on the province and the proconsul was also expected to ensure their stability and security. Apart from protecting Ariobarzanes, there was the hovering threat of a major attack by the Parthians. In 53 BC a Roman invasion of Parthia had met with disaster at the Battle of Carrhae, and since then there had been several Parthian raids into the province of Syria. A larger-scale attack might easily reach Cilicia as well, and this possibility fed Cicero’s fear that he would be called on to serve there for longer than a year.10
It is a mistake to imagine a Roman governor processing in great state guarded by serried ranks of soldiers and attended by a large and sophisticated staff of bureaucrats. The Senate might allow a governor to raise a fresh draft of soldiers or even entire legions to take to his province, but only when this was felt to be necessary. Cicero is unlikely to have had a single soldier with him as he travelled to Cilicia, apart from a handful of senior officers. A governor’s staff was known as his cohort. The term was borrowed from the army, but whereas a cohort of legionaries had a paper strength of 480 men, a proconsul rarely had a tenth of that number to aid him.
The Republic provided each governor with a quaestor, the most junior of the magistracies for which the minimum age was thirty, and unlike the praetors and consuls these went to the provinces in their year of office. Twenty quaestors were elected each year and allocated by lot to their duties, which were predominantly financial, but could stretch to a range of other tasks including military command. Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar chose their quaestors, but this was exceptional and a reflection of their overwhelming influence. Cicero did not know the quaestor allocated to him at all well. The Senate allowed governors a set number of senior subordinates or legates (legati) – Cicero had four, two of them ex-praetors. One was his younger brother Quintus, who had governed Asia and later served as legate with Pompey during the war against the pirates and with Caesar in Gaul. All were senators, and in this case all boasted better military credentials than their commander, but ability was not necessarily the main factor in their choice, for these were relatives, friends or friends of friends. The word for legate was the same as the one for ambassador, and these men were considered representatives of the governor, their imperium delegated from his.
Quaestors were young men at an early stage in their careers, while the legates were chosen by the governor and might or might not be experienced. Only a few of the junior officials were remotely professional in the modern sense and even these were often selected by the governor. There was the accensus, who was something like a chief clerk in charge of the day-to-day running of the governor’s office. Usually this man was a freedman, often of the governor, although in Cicero’s case he took a former slave of one of his friends. A good accensus needed a talent for administration, but had to be kept on a tight rein. More than a decade earlier Cicero had warned Quintus to make sure that the freedman did not abuse his access to the governor and the governor’s official seal. There was also a scribe (scriba), in this case probably a freedman of Cicero’s, and he often worked with the quaestor to keep financial records. Added to these the state provided lictors – twelve for a proconsul – who acted as guards, attendants and doormen. On official occasions they carried the fasces, a bundle of rods surrounding an axe, and at the governor’s command could inflict corporal or capital punishment. There were also messengers (viatores), heralds (praecones) and priests (haruspices) to perform sacrifices – perhaps two or three of each.11
All in all, a governor’s cohort was not so very different from the staff of a magistrate in Rome and reflected the household of an aristocrat. This was reinforced by the personal freedmen and slaves, including in this case Cicero’s long-time secretary Tiro, cooks and other functionaries. Another group were the ‘tent-companions’ (contubernales) or family members and friends. Cicero had his son and nephew with him, in part for the adventure, but also to gain experience. Young aristocrats learned about public life by following older members of the family as they went about the daily business of being a senator, whether in Rome or in the provinces.
Even with these additions a governor’s cohort remained small. Sometimes he would add a few men seconded from the garrison of his province. The duties of the praefectus fabrum – the title does not have an ideal translation, but prefect in charge of logistics gives a rough idea – included the supply of the army, but this man was often given wider responsibilities by governors. Yet the legions of this era could not provide l
arge numbers of administrators, and as proconsul Cicero simply did not have the resources to carry out the day-to-day administration of all the communities within his province, nor was he expected to do this. The Roman way was to let each city or other grouping – tribes were common in some regions, especially in the west – govern itself. The governor was there to protect the province against internal and external threats, to oversee administration and taxation from a distance, and to act as the supreme judicial authority.
A governor held supreme military and civil power in his province, but the balance of importance between the two varied from region to region and over time. By the middle of the first century BC Asia, Sicily and Africa rarely had a legionary garrison. There might still be forces raised from local allies, and small-scale problems with banditry, piracy on- and offshore, or other threats to peace. In Sicily in the 70s BC slave rebellions had occurred within living memory, so that at harvest time one of the governor’s jobs was to tour the province and look for any signs of a fresh outbreak. Rebellion by the free provincial population does not appear as a realistic threat by this time. In contrast, in Gaul Caesar spent spring, summer and early autumn campaigning with the army. Even so, in all but one case where rebellion prevented this, each winter he returned to his province, and usually went south of the Alps to Cisalpine Gaul to hold assizes.12
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