The Imperial Bureaucracy

Trajan transformed the imperial administration from a domestic staff (for instance, Claudius had often used his own freedmen) into a civil service, with a career to be followed through various levels, as well as remuner­ation.

This does not mean that there was no corruption or bribery in the Roman empire or abuse of power: on the contrary, already in the republic a statute had been passed against corruption; later came the lex Iulia de repetundis; and the emperors repeatedly issued measures against corrupt practices, such as in AD 414: ‘With remedies well planned Our Clemency provides against the dissimulation and the petty corruption (corruptela) of the offices of the prefect of the city and of the prefect of the annona.’ In this case the context was covering up (naturally for payment of money) that a shipmaster had delivered less public grain in Ostia than he should have. The guilty officer was to be sent to Africa. If the prefect of the annona allowed the shipmaster to delay his case (in the hope, of course, of permanently delaying it), he and his office were to be fined five pounds of gold.¹⁷ Sometimes the emperor admitted his own helplessness: ‘But since very often in some cases we are so constrained by the shameless greed of petitioners for such [confiscated] property that we even grant requests which should not be allowed.’¹⁸ A corps of officials, the agentes in rebus, was set up in the fourth century to inspect the functioning of the admin­istration and to spy; unfortunately they often abused their position. So corruption was repudiated, one could try to seek redress against admini­strative abuse, and redress was given - but how often we do not know. Lower down the scale, recourse to a more powerful person could always help against a local potentate, as long as the latter was not too well connected higher up in the system. The rise of bishops as arbiters may indicate that they offered better prospects at the lower levels of the system. But in the end the large number of rescripts in Justinian’s Code which are reproduced from the Gregorian and Hermogenian Codes (dating from about AD 293 and after AD 294 respectively) testify that at least in the first three centuries the system of appeal and petition must have provided redress to the people at large. In the fourth century the emperors relied more on internal checks, as the legislation on this point shows.

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