ings devolved on the Roman praetors
and censors. The utmost to which Rome consented was to allow at
least the most urgent lawsuits to be settled on the spot by a
deputy (-praefectus-) of the praetor nominated from Rome.(40)
The provinces were similarly dealt with, except that the governor
there came in place of the authorities of the capital. In the free,
that is, formally sovereign towns the civil and criminal jurisdiction
was administered by the municipal magistrates according to the local
statutes; only, unless altogether special privileges stood in the
way, every Roman might either as defendant or as plaintiff request
to have his cause decided before Italian judges according to Italian
law For the ordinary provincial communities the Roman governor was
the only regular judicial authority, on whom devolved the direction
of all processes. It was a great matter when, as in Sicily, in the
event of the defendant being a Sicilian, the governor was bound by the
provincial statute to give a native juryman and to allow him to decide
according to local usage; in most of the provinces this seems to
have depended on the pleasure of the directing magistrate.

In the seventh century this absolute centralization of the public
life of the Roman community in the one focus of Rome was given up,
so far as Italy at least was concerned. Now that Italy was a
single civic community and the civic territory reached from the Arnus
and Rubico down to the Sicilian Straits,(41) it was necessary to
consent to the formation of smaller civic communities within that
larger unit. So Italy was organized into communities of full
burgesses; on which occasion also the larger cantons that were
dangerous from their size were probably broken up, so far as this
had not been done already, into several smaller town-districts.(42)
The position of these new communities of full burgesses was a compromise
between that which had belonged to them hitherto as allied states,
and that which by the earlier law would have belonged to them as
integral parts of the Roman community. Their basis was in general
the constitution of the former formally sovereign Latin community, or,
so far as their constitution in its principles resembled the Roman,
that of the Roman old-patrician-consular community; only care was
taken to apply to the same institutions in the -municipium- names
different from, and inferior to, those used in the capital, or,
in other words, in the state.