Practice question · Multiple choice
The Roman Empire had a standing army of perhaps 350,000 for fifty million people and no police. How was such thin administration possible?
Hints
- Ask who collected the taxes in a provincial town, and what they got out of it.
- There is no imperial bureaucracy in the town. Who is running it?
Show the answer
C. It devolved government to city elites, so it governed cities
Why
Local notables did the governing and Rome supplied recognition and the ultimate threat, so the imperial apparatus stayed astonishingly small. It is why Caracalla's universal citizenship in 212 mattered less as liberation than as a tax and legal reclassification of a system already running on local hands.
Practise The Roman Empire and its Fall
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
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