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Administration produces documents. In that respect Roman administration does not differ from its modem counterparts. An identifying mark of Roman administration is the libellous, submitted to the emperor or to an official by a petitioner-even when the petitioner presents himself in person before the emperor, as so many embassies and legates of cities did. All appointments to senatorial and equestrian offices were made in written form, by codicilli, letters of appointment, although we can be sure that governors of the great military commands, if setting out from Rome (or from the emperor's place of residence at the time) received their commission personally and orally from the emperor. However, all this material, with some unique exceptions outside Egypt (and a few other localities in the Roman Near East), has vanished completely. To reconstruct the working of Roman administration from what has survived is difficult and only in part possible; if we persist against the odds in trying to do so, we are bound to stumble continuously against the limits of the available evidence and of our knowledge alike. This chapter discusses the administrators and prosopographical material; and the contested existence of rules governing patterns of promotion.

This chapter reprints Ste. Croix's 1963 Past and Present investigation of why Christians were persecuted in the first three centuries, together with a brief response in 1964 to criticisms by A.N. Sherwin-White. Ste. Croix's main objective was to counter Sherwin-White's theory that Christians fell foul of Roman provincial administration because of the obstinacy they displayed in adherence to their beliefs. Ste. Croix insisted that the main charge against Christians under Roman law was simply the name of Christian, which was sufficient to generate persecution unless the accused could clear themselves by a variety of relatively simple procedures. Careful scrutiny of the evidence for persecution, especially during the 2nd century, clarifies the mechanics of Roman administration and the application of imperial law.

This chapter provides detailed information about the Roman aqueducts, ranging from the position and importance of the water sources to the course and volume of the aqueducts and the number and organization of the personnel employed in this critical branch of the Roman public administration. It presents the summary created by Frontinus about the history of how Rome's citizens obtained water during the centuries stretching from the city's foundation to the creation of the aqueducts.

The main focus of this chapter is on the role of the emperor in the quarrying industry and his impact on market demand for coloured marble. Unique epigraphic evidence of intervention by Emperor Hadrian in c.AD 136 in ongoing quarrying operations at specific sites is discussed. The underlying rationale for this intervention may have arisen from the unsatisfactory progress of Hadrian’s construction projects in the city of Rome and reflect his manifest proclivity for administrative issues throughout the empire. Not all quarries supplying imperial building projects in Rome were necessarily under imperial oversight, and some imperial quarries possibly generated revenue for the emperor/state. We do not know whether Hadrian’s ‘directive’ affected the organization of extraction procedures at other quarries. Employing contractors was the default setting of decision makers within the imperial administration. Most imperial quarry operations were possibly contracted out in their entirety to private individuals or ‘companies’.