Page:The municipalites of the Roman empire (IA municipalitesofr00reidrich).pdf/7



HE present volume is the outcome of a course of lectures on the Municipalities of the Roman Empire, originally delivered in the University of London, as part of a scheme for the "higher learning" of students. The lectures, with some changes, were given afterward to American audiences, first as "Lowell Lectures" in Boston, then in the Columbia University, New York. My purpose is to provide students with a survey of the Roman Empire, regarded in one of its most important aspects, that of a vast federation of commonwealths, retaining many characteristics of the old so-called "city-state." This feature of the Graeco-Roman world, though it attracts an increasing amount of attention from the expert scholar, comes but little within the ken of the ordinary student of antiquity. He usually thinks of the component portions of the Roman empire as large sections which he conceives as provinces of nationalities. This impression is naturally conveyed by histories of the empire, both ancient and modern, in which the municipality hardly appears as what it really was, an institution fundamental and vital to the structure of the whole political organisation. It has been my endeavour to bring to light the historical significance of the great movement of civilisation whereby for loose rural and tribal unions, whose bond was mainly religious, was substituted a civic system, in which the walled city administered a territory, sometimes of large