70 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
distance, greatly modified the forms of authority in the interior of the empire, and especially in Italy.
Meanwhile, under the empire from the close of the third century, there had already begun a modification of the general defensive limits. The countries protected by the limes of Ger- many and of Rhaetia are lost. The frontier is brought back to the Rhine and the Danube. Dacia is lost, and in 368 a portion of Mesopotamia. General instability, greatest in the most distant regions, which are the latest acquired and the most exposed, the danger resulting from the excessive power of the governors of military provinces, the increasing multiplicity of conflicts of all kinds, and of problems to be solved far from the administrative centers, tended to increase the number of the contractions. While at the beginning of the first century there were only twenty-nine provinces at the end of the same century there were thirty-six; at the end of the second, forty-two; at the end of the third they had become ninety-six ; and at the year 400 the number of prov- inces was one hundred and twenty.
Augustus had divided Italy into eleven regions or circuits. Some of these still had mountains and rivers as boundaries, but none of them any longer corresponded to earlier ethnic conditions. Italy had now become cut up into provinces scarcely at all corre- sponding with the physical characteristics of the older regions. These natural physical and ethnic traits had become secondary in importance and had passed into neglect. Thus there was a province of Liguria, but it was located north of the Po, with Milan as its capital.
While increasing differentiation of internal administration went on, a hierarchy established itself in the administration itself. Aurelian and Diocletian grouped all the provinces into twelve dioceses, and between the governors and the central power he created vkarii. The unity of the empire is only administrative, hence in reality very feeble in view of the new social situation. All in all, the political center has become as fragile as the frontier. Rome for centuries is no longer a military march nor a frontier capital (caput, frons). She is at the center of a world, but an already insufficient center, because the Orient is less solidly and
