The Powers That Be. It is hard for a citizen of any modern nation to grasp how little government Republican Rome had. The assemblies were quite clumsy and passed laws only occasionally. Magistrates had much more freedom of action but were remarkably few in number. Including promagistrates, the total in the late Republic was in the low hundreds. And recall that this government was not only of a city of hundreds of thousands of people but also of an empire whose population was in the tens of millions. These magistrates were, of course, supported by a bureaucratic staff of so-called apparitores. But these officials had little or no independent authority and were still few in number. Lack of information also made it harder to exercise systematic authority. The government had only a rough idea of where...