Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1918 edition. Excerpt: ... chapter xii the provinces under septimius Any inquiry which has as its subject the provinces of the Roman Empire is bound to fall into a twofold division. The question, that is to say, must be examined from two points of view, viz. that of the home government and that of the provincials themselves. The first of these is clearly but one facet of the more general inquiry into the administration of the reign, and is complementary to the investigation of the methods of home government; the second, evidence for which must be almost entirely archaeological, belongs rather to the world's history of civilization and progress, and goes to justify or to condemn not an emperor but an empire for the furtherance or retardation of those beneficent forces. We will examine the question in this order. Perhaps the most striking, if not the most important, feature of Severus' provincial administration is that tendency to break up big commands into smaller ones which characterized the policy of Domitian and his successors. Septimius' wars of accession had provided no uncertain testimony to the power of a provincial legate, and the founder of a dynasty had no wish to witness a re-enactment of his own success or even of the failures of Niger and Albinus. The province governed by the last-named legate was one of the first to experience the new treatment. The date of the division is uncertain, but it is no very hazardous supposition that it was made after the defeat of Albinus at Lyon, that is to say some time in the year 197.1 1 So Ceuleneer (p. 244) and Wirth (p. 11). Schiller (ii, p. 731) says 'wahrscheinlich bereits 196', but refrains from advancing any support for the Wahrscheinlichkeit. Hefner (p. 326), also with little probability and slender evidence, ..