Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/509

 CHA.P. II. THE ROMAN CONQUEST. {)03 lectors of the revenue. Their magistrates rendered their accounts to the governor of the province, who also heard the appeals from the judges.' Now, such was the nature of the municipal system among the an- cients that it needed complete independence, or it ceased to exist. Between the maintenance of the in stitutions of the city and their subordination to a for- eign power, there was a contradiction which perhaps does not clearly appear to the eyes of the moderns, but which must have struck every man of that period. Mu- nicipal liberty and the government of Rome were ir- reconcilable; the first could be only an appearance, a falsehood, an amusement calculated to divert the minds of men. Each of those cities sent, almost every year, a deputation to Rome, and its most minute and most pri- vate affiiirs were regulated by the senate. They still had their municipal magistrates, their archons, and their strategi, freely elected by themselves; but the archon no longer had any other duty than to inscribe his name on the registers for the purpose of marking the year, and the strategus, in earlier times the chief ■of the army and of the state, now had no other care than to keep the streets in order, and inspect the mar- kets.'^ Municipal institutions, therefore, perished among the nations that Avere called allies as well as among those that bore the name of subjects; there was only this ■difference, that the first preserved the exterior forms. Indeed, the city, as antiquity had understood it, was no longer seen anywhere, except within the walls of Rome. ' Livy, XLV. 18. Cicero, ad, Aiiic, VI. 1, 2. Appian, Civil Wars, I. 102. Tacitus, XV. 45. ' Pliilostratus, Lives of the Sophists, I. 23. Boeckh., Corp. Inscr., passim.