Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/350

326 supplied the demands for unity and local organisation, which had arisen with the dissolution of the City-State. But the Roman Empire is now attracting the attention of scholars more perhaps than any other period of history, owing to the vast accumulation of valuable evidence which the collection of inscriptions has supplied in recent years, and is still steadily increasing; and as the work to be done is of immense extent, and of infinite human interest, it may be as well to conclude by indicating the several lines on which that work must necessarily be carried on.

First, there is the study of the new Imperial Constitution. Here the special interest lies in tracing the process by which the authority of the Cæsar, based on the old imperium, and called by the same name, came in time to penetrate every department of government; and it is here more particularly fruitful to examine the methods of provincial government, because it is in the provinces that the unifying force of the whole system may best be observed at work. Augustus had left the quieter provinces in the care of the Senate, which continued to send out its proconsuls, — relics of the old city-magistracy, — as it had so long done under the Republic; while he himself, like Julius, governed the others and watched the enemies of the State beyond their frontiers by the agency of his own delegates. But the student of the Empire has also to learn how even the Senate and its executive came to be controlled indirectly by the supreme ruler, and how by slow degrees one senatorial