摘要:

It is possible to make a list of able governors and their qualities from sources such as Suetonius and Tacitus. The ability to win battles and suppress revolts aside, there seems to be a preference for a combination of qualities such as "equal justice and courage"  and "great care for strictness and justice even in the smallest matters." For Agricola there was the assimilative project in Britannia, teaching chieftain's children the liberal arts and drawing Britons towards humanitas that included porticoes, baths and banquets, so that they forget servitude. These are candidates for "good" governors, but from a Roman perspective. Beyond the transmitted texts, what are other indicators of a good governor?  Using a peculiar document dealing with a bakers' strike at Ephesus in the second century CE to read against a number of gubernatorial pronouncements selected from an assembled dossier, in this article, I show that governors who restrained their power to coerce and threatened punishment only in reserve for the benefit of their subjects can be regarded as a form of governance that strived to meet a standard higher than the Augustan principles of "no-harm" set down in the fifth Cyrene edict, so much so that they may meet the "good" governor test. I will first examine the notion of good governance from the Republic to the Principate, and provide a close reading of a pronouncement so-called the bakers' strike edict that is suitable to examine notions of practical versus good governance in the second century CE. Further comparanda are imported to discuss why some governors may have been willing to take risks to show their care for the communities they govern when local peace, imperial expectations, and personal reputation collided.  A pattern that emerges among pronouncements dealing with crises is a "monitive" idiom: governors hang punishment in suspense, invoke the notion of civic benefit through pronouncements, verbal, written then inscribed, ready to take action, should persuasion through monitive and exhortative speech fail. Such a gradational, escalatory approach seems to pass several measures described in the first section can be considered "good governance."