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. A burgess-assembly was placed at the head, with the prerogative of issuing municipal statutes and nominating the municipal magistrates. A municipal council of a hundred members acted the part of the Roman senate. The administration of justice was conducted by four magistrates, two regular judges corresponding to the two consuls, and two market-judges corresponding to the curule aediles. The functions of the censorship, which recurred, as in Rome, every five years and, to all appearance, consisted chiefly in the superintendence of public buildings, were also undertaken by the supreme magistrates of the community, namely the ordinary -duumviri-, who in this case assumed the distinctive title of -duumviri- "with censorial or quinquennial power." The municipal funds were managed by two quaestors. Religious functions primarily devolved on the two colleges of men of priestly lore alone known to the earliest Latin constitution, the municipal pontifices and augurs.
Relation Of The -Municipium- To The State
With reference to the relation of this secondary political organism to the primary organism of the state, political prerogatives in general belonged completely to the former as well as to the latter, and consequently the municipal decree and the -imperium- of the municipal magistrates bound the municipal burgess just as the decree of the people and the consular -imperium- bound the Roman. This led, on the whole, to a co-ordinate exercise of power by the authorities of the state and of the town; both had, for instance, the right of valuation and taxation, so that in the case of any municipal valuations and taxes those prescribed by Rome were not taken into account, and vice versa; public buildings might be instituted both by the Roman magistrates throughout Italy and by the municipal authorities in their own district, and so in other cases. In the event of collision, of course the community yielded to the state and the decree of the people invalidated the municipal decree. A formal division of functions probably took place only in the administration of justice, where the system of pure co-ordination would have led to the greatest confusion. In criminal procedure presumably all capital causes, and in civil procedure those more difficult cases which presumed an independent action on the part of the directing magistrate, were reserved for the authorities and jurymen of the capital, and the Italian municipal courts were restricted to the minor and less complicated lawsuits, or to those which were very urgent.
Rise Of The -Municipium-
The origin of this Italian municipal system has not been recorded by tradition. It is probable that its germs may be traced to exceptional regulations for the great burgess-colonies, which were founded at the end of the sixth century;(43) at least several, in themselves indifferent, formal differences between burgess-colonies and burgess--municipia- tend to show that the new burgess-colony, which at that time practically took the place of the Latin, had originally a better position in state-law than the far older burgess- -municipium-, and the advantage doubtless can only have consisted in a municipal constitution approximating to the Latin, such as afterwards belonged to all burgess-colonies and burgess--municipia-. The new organization is first distinctly demonstrable for the revolutionary colony of Capua;(44) and it admits of no doubt that it was first fully applied, when all the hitherto sovereign towns of Italy had to be organized, in consequence of the Social war, as burgess- communities. Whether it was the Julian law, or the censors of 668, or Sulla, that first arranged the details, cannot be determined: the entrusting of the censorial functions to the -duumviri- seems indeed to have been introduced after the analogy of the Sullan ordinance superseding the censorship, but may be equally well referred to the oldest Latin constitution to which also the censorship was unknown.