Introduction This paper is an essay of interpretation. It is interested in typical political and social practices and developments. As such it brings together aseries of substantive topics, namely the spread of Roman citizenship, the acquisition of legal privilege, centrally generated rules for local office-holding, the collection of direct taxes, the maintenance of order and, finally, the local administrative and political role of civic magistrates and councillors, which in modem scholarship

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... e frequently treated in isolation from each other.' The crucial importance of the roles performed by civic magistrates and councillors for the routine functioning and stability of the imperial state is a commonplace of modem scholarship. So Peter Brunt in a characteristically magisterial dictum claimed that "hardly any class of men rendered more important services to the Roman state than those charged with local govemment".2 We need only to itemise these services to see the basic truth of this claim. First, the process of assessing and, above all, collecting direct taxes (however difficult it is in detail to give a systematic account of this process) was dependent on the active cooperation of the local elites. Secondly, the procedures for dispute-resolution and the maintenance of social order were similarly dependent on the active involvement of the local elites. Each city operated its own local jurisdictional system of limited competence, and in each city and its territory local magistrates were often responsible for the apprehension, detention and preliminary interrogation of individuals accused of those serious crimes over which only Roman govemors legitimately exercised jurisdiction. Given the primordial importance of the regular collection of taxes and of the maintenance of order for the routine functioning and stability of the imperial state, the significance of this role played by the local elites can hardly be overstated. Thirdly, some members of the local elites were required occasionally and unquantifiably to act as ambassadors or legal representatives