Municipium

Social Organisation Under the Empire.

The municipia of the empire may be treated under three heads: (I) as centres of local self-government, (2) as religious centres, (3) as industrial centres. (I) The chief feature of the local government is the activity of the authorities in improving the conditions of life in the town. Provision was made out of the public funds for feeding the poor and providing corn which could be bought by ordinary citizens at a moderate price. In Pliny's time there existed in many towns schools controlled by the municipal authori ties. Pliny promoted another kind of school at Como, where the leading townspeople subscribed for the maintenance of the school and the control remained in the hands of the subscribers. Phy sicians seem to have been maintained at the public expense. The water-supply was provided out of the municipal budget and con trolled by magistrates. To enable it to bear the expense involved in all these undertakings, the local treasury was assisted by bene factions from individual citizens ; but direct taxation was hardly ever resorted to. The treasury was filled out of the proceeds of the landed possessions of the community, especially mines and quarries, and out of import and export duties.

(2) The chief feature in the religious life of the towns was the position they occupied as centres for the cult of the em peror. Caesar-worship developed spontaneously in many provin cial towns during the reign of Augustus, and was fostered by him and his successors as a means of promoting a strong loyalty to Rome and the emperor, which was one of the firmest supports of the latter's power.

(3) The development of this free industrial class is the chief feature of the municipia considered as centres of industry and handicraft. The rise of the equestrian order had to some extent modified the old Roman principle that commerce was beneath the dignity of the governing class; but the aristocratic notion survived in Rome that industry and handicrafts were fitted only for slaves. In the provincial towns, however, this idea rapidly disappeared, and even in Italy the inscriptions give evidence of the existence of a flourishing free industrial class. The members of this class show a strong tendency to bind themselves together in gilds (collegia, sodalitates). These societies were viewed with suspicion by the emperors as politically dangerous ; but in spite of opposition the gilds in the provincial towns grew and flourished. The ostensible objects of such collegia were the worship of some god and provision for the funerary rites of their members.

The policy of encouraging the independence and civic patri otism of the towns was superseded in the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. by a deliberate effort to use the towns as instruments of the imperial government, under the control of representatives of the emperor in the provinces. This policy was accompanied by a decay of civic feeling and municipal enterprise, which showed itself in the unwillingness of the townsmen to become candidates for local magistracies. Popular control of the towns was ceasing to be a reality by the end of the 1st century. Two centuries later local government was a mere form.