ABSTRACT
DURING THE REPUBLICAN period two senatorial provinces were located to the west of Egypt-Cyrene (with Crete) and Africa. The original province of Africa (Vetus) lay in modern Tunisia. Since its conquest in the second century BC it had attracted a steady stream of immigrants from Italy, with the founding of colonies and the establishment of a prosperous merchant class. It was bordered by Numidia, the last of whose kings, Juba I, a man of excessive ambitions, had designs on the province. They came to nothing, and Juba was forced to commit suicide in 46 BC, after Julius Caesar’s victory at the battle of Thapsus. Caesar created a new province, Africa Nova, from Juba’s kingdom, and some time before 27 the two Africas were combined by Augustus into a single province.1 Under Augustus, with some changes of boundary, the united province of Africa Proconsularis became a prosperous, but anomalous part of the empire. Its agricultural wealth gave it great economic importance, but it was at the same time a region under constant threat. Economic development entailed a persistent tendency to push further and further south and to displace the nomadic tribes from their traditional grazing lands, creating a constant potential for conflict. Much of the investment in the province had been made by rich members of the senatorial class — in fact by Nero’s day half of Africa was reputedly owned by six landowners.2 Augustus thus had to balance senatorial interests with military necessity, and in his settlement Africa was granted a special status. As a ‘senatorial’ province it was governed by a proconsul designated by the senate, but it was also protected by a Legion (II), under the command of the proconsul, rather than of an imperial legate. Although applied on a limited scale elsewhere (Macedonia, for instance), only in Africa did this peculiar arrangement survive Augustus.
