w the condition
of the provinces as Caesar found them.

Provinces

The provinces, which Caesar found in existence, were fourteen in number:
seven European--the Further and the Hither Spain, Transalpine Gaul,
Italian Gaul with Illyricum, Macedonia with Greece, Sicily,
Sardinia with Corsica; five Asiatic--Asia, Bithynia and Pontus,
Cilicia with Cyprus, Syria, Crete; and two African--Cyrene and Africa.
To these Caesar added three new ones by the erection of the two new
governorships of Lugdunese Gaul and Belgica(79) and by constituting
Illyricum a province by itself.(80)

Provincial Administration of the Oligarchy

In the administration of these provinces oligarchic misrule
had reached a point which, notwithstanding various noteworthy
performances in this line, no second government has ever attained
at least in the west, and which according to our ideas it seems
no longer possible to surpass. Certainly the responsibility for this
rests not on the Romans alone. Almost everywhere before their day
the Greek, Phoenician, or Asiatic rule had already driven out
of the nations the higher spirit and the sense of right and of liberty
belonging to better times. It was doubtless bad, that every
accused provincial was bound, when asked, to appear personally
in Rome to answer for himself; that the Roman governor interfered
at pleasure in the administration of justice and the management
of the dependent communities, pronounced capital sentences, and cancelled
transactions of the municipal council; and that in case of war
he treated the militia as he chose and often infamously, as e. g.
when Cotta at the siege of the Pontic Heraclea assigned to the militia
all the posts of danger, to spare his Italians, and on the siege
not going according to his wish, ordered the heads of his engineers
to be laid at his feet. It was doubtless bad, that no rule
of morality or of criminal law bound either the Roman administrators
or their retinue, and that violent outrages, rapes, and murders
with or without form of law were of daily occurrence in the provinces.
But these things were at least nothing new; almost everywhere
men had long been accustomed to be treated like slaves,
and it signified little in the long run whether a Carthaginian overseer,
a Syrian satrap, or a Roman proconsul acted as the local tyrant.
Their material well-being, almost the only thing for which
the provincials still cared, was far less disturbed by those occurrences,