The provinces

The province was the largest territorial and administrative Roman unit outside Italy until Diocletian. Rome began expanding beyond Italy during the First Punic War (264-241 bce).

Under the Roman Republic, the power to organize a new province rested with the Senate. The provincial laws (leges provinciarum), none of which have come down to us, were probably the basic statutory decrees issued by the general who conquered the province and ratified by a senatorial commission. Besides these leges, the jurisdiction of the governor of the province was con­strained by the provincial edict he issued after his appointment as a governor and by the city charters held by various colonial or municipal communities inside the province. The famous letter Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus (Ad Atticum 6.1.15), when Cicero was the governor of Cilicia in 51 bce, provides the best evidence for the existence of a provincial edict during the Roman Republic. During the reign of Emperor Hadrian, the jurist Salvius Julianus

Constitutional background of Roman law 41 fixed the content and structure of the provincial edict, following the structure of the edict of the urban praetor. Remaining portions of the jurist Gaius’s commentary on the provincial edict confirm the connection between the structure and contents of the city edict and those of the provincial edict.

During the reign of Augustus, provinces were divided into two classes: imperial provinces, under the emperor’s jurisdiction, and public (or senatorial) provinces, under the control of the Senate.

Public (or senatorial) provinces, in contrast, were those that had been long annexed and pacified by the Romans. They were often along the Mediterranean Sea (Achaea, Hispania Baetica, Sicilia, Africa, and so on). The governors of these public provinces were proconsuls (especially in the provinces of Asia and Africa) or propraetors (in the rest of the provinces) appointed by the Senate and under its instructions. Though the Senate appointed proconsuls, the emperor, by virtue of his “supreme proconsular power,” had the right to intervene tactically in the appointment of senatorial governors. The soil of the public provinces belonged to the Roman people. The emperor had the authority to order the change of a province from one category to another. In 68 ce, of a total of thirty-six provinces, eleven were public, and twenty-five were imperial. Of the imperial, fifteen were under legati, and ten under procuratores or praefecti.

During the reign of Diocletian, the division of the empire into prefectures and dioceses was connected to the creation of more and smaller provinces than those of the Principate. Diocletian divided the empire into almost a hundred provinces, including Italy. The provinces were combined into thirteen dioceses, and the dioceses, in turn, were grouped into four prefectures. The governors of the dioceses were the representatives to the prefects. This new administrative structure marked the beginning of the process of the division of the Roman Empire, which culminated in 395 ce with its formal partition.