Political Science Of The State

COMPOSITE GOVERNMENTS. 153

owes its origin to the Romans settled in Dacia at that period.
Nor can we doubt that colonies and settlements of Romans
in Spain and Gaul, together with soldiers returning there, did
much towards helping the dialects derived from the Latin in
those countries to take root. The Roman colonies then owed
their foundations to several motives ; first, to the desire of
protecting the territories won by war; next, to that of re-
moving the pauper class from Rome ; and afterwards, to that
of scattering abroad and giving rewards to soldiers, which
rewards were a stimulus to future enlistments.* The influ-
ence of the system, which was essentially administrative and
political without commercial motives, was to spread the laws,
language, turn of thinking of Rome, and to help in consoli-
dating the empire.

The treatment of the people in the provinces is so vast a
subject that only a faint and diminished outline of ^it can be
exhibited.

A province, in the local sense of the word provincia} de-
noted a land subjugated in war and placed under the adminis-
tration of a Roman governor, a proconsul or propraetor, or,
under Augustus, after the division between senatorial and im-
perial provinces took effect, either governed by the emperor's
vicars bearing different names, or, where they needed no
military control, by the senate, as before the institution of the
empire. The first that was ever established was Sicily, in
241 B. C. ; at the death of Augustus there were about thirty;
a little after the end of the first Christian century, some forty-
six or forty-seven. As a general rule at first, the conquering
officer with' a delegation of ten senators, acting according to
instructions of the senate, laid down the platform which was
to serve for the future government of the province. In the
instance of Sicily this was not done for many years subsequent
to the first occupation ; but the later provinces, when the
plan had been adopted, were remodelled soon after their sub-

*Comp. esp. Marquardt in Bekker—Marq., iii., i, 311, and
Zumpt's commentationes epigraph.