Officia: Romanization And The Emergence Of The Imperial Civil Service On The Middle Danube During The Principate (rome, Bureaucracy, Administration).

Abstract

Although the main elements of the Roman system of provincial administration remained stable from Augustus to the late third century A.D., internal changes were taking place which greatly altered the administration's character. One of the most fundamental of these changes was the emergence and elaboration of civil service apparatuses in the judicial and financial administrations. No evidence exists to attribute the creation of these apparatuses to any individual emperor, nor can they be explained as the result of a conscious effort to consolidate power in the hands of the imperial administration. So fundamental a change, rather, is better explained as a response to a fundamental change in the tasks of the administration. This dissertation presents the thesis that the elaboration of the administrative apparatuses occurred because the tasks of provincial administration changed as a result of profound alterations in political, economic, and social life in the provinces consequent to Romanization. To demonstrate this thesis, the dissertation concentrates on the provinces of the middle Danube region, and focuses particularly on the urbanization of provincial communities and the evolution of the officia, or clerical staffs, which served the governors and financial administrators. By studying the chronological and geographical distribution of the epigraphic evidence, it becomes clear that the administrative officia emerged first in those parts of the middle Danube where urban governments first appeared, and continued to be concentrated in areas where social and economic patterns came most closely to approximate those in Italy. Careful examination also reveals that conventional interpretations of the role of soldiers on the officia are questionable, and new interpretations are suggested which better accord with the evidence. Although strong correlations exist on the middle Danube between the changes caused by Romanization and the evolution of the administrative apparatus, the regional peculiarities which characterized the Roman Empire require that careful case-by-case studies be made before the results from the middle Danube are applied elsewhere.