The government and administration of the empire in the central decades of the third century

Abstract

The unified political control of the Roman Empire was the issue principally at stake, and the very foundations of the legitimation of imperial power seemed to change both markedly and rapidly. In this respect the accession of Maximinus and his refusal to come to Rome to endorse his designation at the centre of the empire are revealing, for they already show signs of a breakdown in that delicate equilibrium between the senate and the army which had hitherto guaranteed the process of imperial legitimation. On a number of occasions during the two centuries before the Severans, the central authority had intervened in the internal affairs of the Italian urban communities. The administrative areas in which the central government interfered were few and far between, and were those that somehow lay outside the territorial boundaries within which the magistrates of individual towns were allowed to act.

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