Each city had its own courts, which resolved the great majority of legal disputes and trials. The governor had to deal with more serious cases, including many capital crimes, challenges to Roman authority and disputes between communities, or those involving Roman citizens or other prominent men who were not satisfied with local justice and hoped to overturn the result by approaching a higher authority. Litigants dissatisfied with a governor’s ruling favouring their opponents might in turn try to take the matter directly to the emperor – or, as in Cicero’s day, hope to postpone a resolution until his successor arrived. A set number of days were allocated for the governor to hold court in each assize centre. Normally the cases to be brought to him were announced in advance, although he had freedom to deal with them in any order he chose and to take as long as he wanted or felt necessary with each one. The impression is that there was far more work than could be completed, so that some litigants would wait, perhaps for years or even in vain. As always, the more influential had a better chance of gaining access to the governor and getting what they wanted.19
Pliny was about to leave the assizes at the city of Prusa when a magistrate asked him to deal with an accusation brought by one local aristocrat against a rival, the prolific orator Dio Chrysostom. The case involved a public building project Dio had undertaken but not completed, and involved accusations of embezzlement, as well as vaguer claims that as part of the work he had set up a statue of Trajan near some family graves. Given the importance of the men involved, Pliny agreed to delay his departure to hear the case. However, Claudius Eumolpus, the lawyer acting for Dio’s opponent, wanted time to prepare the case and asked for it to be dealt with in the assize at another city. Pliny told Trajan that he
. . . arranged to hold it in Nicaea, but, when I took my seat to hear the case, Eumolpus again began to beg for an adjournment on the grounds that he was still insufficiently prepared, whereas Dio demanded an immediate hearing. After much argument on both sides, some of it referring to the actual case, I decided to grant an adjournment to ask your advice, as the case is likely to create a precedent. I told both parties to present their demands in writing as I wanted to enable you to judge their statements from their own words.
Dio’s opponents felt that this would be to their disadvantage and had not produced their written case by the time that Pliny wrote to the emperor. Trajan dismissed the matter of his statue – a charge that might have carried more weight under some of his more nervous predecessors – and focused on the important charges, insisting that Dio produce full accounts of the project for Pliny to inspect. The exchange of letters between Bithynia and Rome must have taken several months, and we do not know when and how the case was ultimately resolved. Then as now, legal disputes could take a very long time and involved much manipulation of the system, with delays, other charges being made to occupy time and damage opponents, as well as seeking out the authority seen as most likely to be favourable.20
Pliny’s concern for precedent reflected every aspect of Roman government. At times this was purely formal, but important to all involved. The city of Apamea was a Roman colony and in the past proconsuls had not inspected the public accounts. Pliny wished to do this – it was part of his mission to ensure that the finances of the cities in his province were restored to order – and was told that the city authorities were happy for him to see them as long as it was put on record that they had not in the past been obliged to submit to such scrutiny. Pliny forwarded on to Rome the documentation they provided to support this claim; Trajan replied commending the Apameans and Pliny. The legate was to carry out the inspection at the princeps’ request, an extraordinary circumstance which in no way altered the colony’s status and did not set a precedent for the future.21
At various times Pliny consulted local laws, established practice and specific rulings including ones by Pompey, as well as several emperors, and also applied his understanding of Roman law. In many cases these dealt with specific communities, and only occasionally were applicable to the province as a whole. Each province had its own laws, rules and conventions, and there was no attempt to impose a standard legal system and civic organisation on the entire empire, so that examples from a governor’s past experience elsewhere were not applicable. It was rare for a man to serve in the same province twice in his career, and there is little sign of men with experience in a region being selected for posts on that basis.
Given the itinerant nature of legates and proconsuls, it was impossible for their staff to carry thorough documentation dealing with every law and regulation for the situations they might encounter. Therefore they relied on litigants and local authorities bringing these to their attention and providing documentary proof of authenticity, or on consulting the emperor whose secretariat – limited though it was by modern standards – had access to rulings made in the past at Rome. In his correspondence with Pliny, Trajan always respected decisions made on such matters by his predecessors – even such generally criticised men like Domitian – and preferred to do this rather than establish a new rule. The need to refer questions to Rome was probably common for all governors and not simply Pliny, and can only have meant that many cases dragged out over long periods of time. Disputes between provincials drew the Roman authorities into issues that would not have concerned them at other times.22
On the whole the initiative still lay with the populations in the provinces, just as it had under the Republic. They came to Pliny with problems and disputes because he had the power to act. There is no hint of powerful men at Rome pressuring the legate to aid them in their business ventures in Bithynia and Pontus. Companies of publicani continued to take on the collection of some levies and tolls, but direct taxation was dealt with by the state, assisted by the provincial communities who in turn often farmed this out to locally based private contractors. In the changed political environment of the Principate, the money of the publicani and their backers was no longer an important factor in elections and political competition at Rome. No doubt there was still plenty of corruption within the system, but there was no longer one influential group capable of collaborating to put heavy pressure on governors. As before there were plenty of local interests, who did their best to enlist the influence of important Romans to gain leverage with the governor. More and more important local men were also Roman citizens – although this was at first more common in the western provinces – and so entitled to greater consideration.23
The aim of Roman government was to keep the provincial communities stable, prosperous enough to pay their taxes in the long term, at peace with each other and content with imperial rule. The Romans’ preference for letting the provincials run their own affairs is strikingly illustrated in the most famous exchange between Pliny and Trajan, two letters that deal with Christians arrested and brought to the governor by the authorities in one of the cities. The legate informs the emperor that he has executed Christians who refused to recant, unless they were citizens whom he has arranged to send to Rome for trial. Everyone who denied being a Christian, and gave proof of this by taking an oath, by making a sacrifice and reviling the name of Christ, was allowed to go free. Trajan approved this procedure, but added that ‘these people must not be hunted out; if they are brought before you and the charge against them is proved, they must be punished’.
It was up to the provincial leaders to find and arrest Christians if they chose to look for them. If they were not aware of them, or unconcerned by their presence, then nothing would happen. Nero had declared Christianity to be illegal at the time he made Christians scapegoats for the great fire in Rome in AD 64. Trajan and most other emperors until the middle of the third century AD did not consider them to be a significant threat, either because their numbers remained small or because their activities were unimportant and not dangerous. Pliny’s investigations revealed a harmless group guilty only of ‘excessive superstition’ – hence the curious willingness to execute Christians when brought before the authorities while at the same time delibe
rately not trying to find them. Persecutions occurred only when important provincials became worried, so were rare and local in their impact. It was all about keeping communities content.24
The bulk of a governor’s time was spent dealing with issues brought to him – just as, at a higher level, emperors were constantly answering petitions and appeals. Yet it would be wrong to portray either as wholly passive and reactive. Pliny’s special legateship was intended to deal with the disorder and financial problems in his province, and from the start he was active in investigating a wide range of civic functions. We have already encountered his short-lived experiment of using soldiers to supervise the public slaves guarding prisoners. Trajan ordered him to bring this to an end and instead ensure that the public slaves did their duty, assuring the legate that this relied on his ‘firmness and diligence’. On another occasion, in both Nicaea and Nicomedia he discovered men convicted of serious crimes and sentenced to the effective death sentences of the mines or the arena, but instead acting as public slaves, performing work for the community and even receiving an annual salary. Examination of the records failed to reveal how they had escaped their sentences. Trajan replied saying that this failure of the justice system could not be allowed to stand. Anyone sentenced in the last ten years was to be sent for their allotted punishment, but there was an element of mercy: ‘if the men are elderly and have sentences dating back farther than ten years, they can be employed in work not far removed from penal labour, cleaning public baths and sewers, or repairing streets and highways, the usual employment for men of this type’.25
One area of particular concern was a number of major civic building projects which had either been abandoned, were delayed, or were of dubious quality, all at great public expense. Nicomedia had two aqueducts abandoned before completion, after spending 3,318,000 and 200,000 sesterces respectively. Nicaea spent more than ten million on a theatre which suffered from subsidence and had not been finished – Pliny noting that several prominent men had promised to add embellishments to the basic structure, but that nothing had been done. The same city was making little headway at great cost on a gymnasium intended to replace an earlier one destroyed by fire. At Claudiopolis there was limited progress on a bath, and the legate’s concern was more for the funding of the project. The building at Prusa which was the grounds for the attacks on Dio Chrysostom had also stalled, as the orator wanted the project, and presumably its costs, to be taken over by the authorities. Magistrates and local aristocrats were expected to be generous in funding public works. They competed for prestige, while cities vied with each other to possess the grandest monuments. Like some politicians today, more than a few of these men had more interest in gaining the credit for announcing a grand project than in the arduous task of seeing it through to completion.
Trajan’s replies generally returned the matter to Pliny, saying that each case could best be assessed on the spot and trusting in his legate’s good judgement. Thus the princeps left the fate of the theatre at Nicaea in his hands, to repair or demolish and start again from scratch as was most practical, and only insisted that all the promised embellishments would be provided by the donors once the main building was complete. The Nicaeans were advised to be realistic in their plans for the gymnasium – something the ‘Little Greeks’ (Graeculi in Latin) dearly loved, which made the emperor fear that their plans were over-ambitious. Pliny was to look into the planned baths at Claudiopolis, but was once again assured that there was no need to send an architect from Rome or one of the military provinces since there must be capable men in the province. Trajan told him to ensure that Nicomedia finally got the aqueduct needed to give it a water supply, and was more concerned about the waste of so much money, telling Pliny to find out who was to blame.26
Pliny was willing to forward on requests from community leaders concerning new projects, for instance when Prusa asked permission to build public baths to replace the existing building, which was old and in poor repair. Such projects would not normally have required imperial approval, and the request reflects the recent spate of scandals and failures in public construction in the province. In this case, it was planned to use money set aside for another purpose, the free distribution of olive oil to citizens of the city, on the building, which would be fitting for the ‘prestige of the city’ and the ‘splendour of your leadership’. Trajan told Pliny to let them go ahead as long as the funds were there and the cost would not overstrain Prusa’s finances or require the introduction of new taxes.27
In other cases, Pliny appears to have come up with the idea rather than receiving petitions from the locals. For instance he felt Sinope needed a water supply, and so suggested that an aqueduct be built. Once again, Trajan’s approval was ready, but conditional on the city being able to afford the project – we may recall the anger prompted when Pontius Pilate employed Temple funds for a similar work at Jerusalem. At Amastris Pliny found one of the main streets built on a grand scale, except that an open sewer ran along it, and proposed sealing this off to remove the stench and improve public health. He assured the princeps that the work was affordable and received the usual permission on this basis. His grandest design was for a canal to connect a lake near Nicomedia with the sea to make transporting heavy goods much easier, a work ‘worthy of your immortal name and glory and likely to combine utility with magnificence’. Suitably impressed, this was the aforementioned exception where Trajan allowed Pliny to summon a military engineer from Moesia. Both men emphasised the need for careful and precise planning to make something of this sort succeed and understood that mistakes in calculation might do considerable damage, even draining the lake.28
Designs involving the control of large quantities of water were by their nature complex. A long inscription from Africa records the experiences of a similar specialist, in this case a recalled veteran soldier, sent to supervise the construction of an aqueduct, involving tunnelling through some high ground. Nothing proved straightforward for this man, Nonius Datus. Before he arrived he was attacked by bandits and ‘escaped naked and wounded’. The project was already under way, and the locals had decided to begin the tunnel at opposite sides of the mountain. Measurement revealed that the combined length of the two tunnels was wider than the mountain, so that one or both had deviated from a straight path and there was no chance of them joining up. The mood of despair among the locals made it likely that the enterprise would be abandoned – at least so the military engineer claimed in his own account. Through careful survey, close supervision and using a labour force drawn from naval units and auxiliaries, who were encouraged to compete with each other as they worked, Datus was able to finish the tunnel.29
A better water supply improved the life of the inhabitants of the city it supplied, even if much went to the houses of the wealthy and to meet the high demands of public bath houses. Whoever had supplied amenities of this sort wanted the praise and gratitude of the population. The characteristic high arches of Roman aqueducts were not always necessary, but raised the structure to dominate the landscape and remind people of the benefaction. Pliny and Trajan show a concern for the welfare of the provincials, with regard to both the infrastructure and the status of such unfortunate groups as babies exposed by parents too poor to keep them and raised as slaves. The legate also recommended forming a fire brigade at Nicomedia, which had suffered from a serious conflagration that destroyed private houses and some public buildings. This seems to have been later than the blaze that badly damaged its gymnasium, suggesting that fires were a common problem, as they were in most ancient cities. Yet Trajan felt the proposed cure might make the citizens worse off:
You may well have had the idea . . . to form a company of firemen at Nicomedia . . . but we must remember that it is societies like these which have been responsible for the political disturbances in your province, particularly in towns. If people assemble for a common purpose, whatever name we give them and for whatever reason, they soon turn into a political club. It is better policy then to pro
vide the equipment necessary for dealing with fires, and to instruct property owners to make use of it, calling on the help of the crowds which collect if they find it necessary.30
In Rome Augustus had created the vigiles, a paramilitary night police and fire service, moved in part by an attempted coup in 19 BC led by a man who had raised his own force of firemen. There was a good deal of truth in Trajan’s claim that any organised band or association was likely to become a political force – especially firemen, who needed to be physically strong, but who were only employed occasionally. The vigiles were under close imperial control, and were balanced by the other units in Rome, which as well as being the largest city in the world also contained the biggest force of soldiers and other uniformed men in one place – some 20,000 by the late second century AD. A fire brigade in Nicomedia, even if it numbered no more than a few hundred, would have represented formidable and unmatched strength if it entered local politics. The provincial garrison was too small and too scattered to have countered it on a routine basis.31
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