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."

As recent trends in comparing the Han and Roman empires from primarily the point of view of literary evidence has brought forth new frameworks and opportunities of research, one asks how these developments could contribute to the comparison of governance behaviors, such as the administration of the iron industry. The paper first surveys the Han and the Roman literary sources regarding the iron industry governance, with which to establish parameters of the modus operandi in the respective imperial domains, and, when possible, identifies problems articulated by ancient authors. An interesting contrast is how Han sources showed particular concern for the impact of the iron industry on agricultural performance, while the primary concerns of Roman administrators were performances in leasing and taxation. Among the items known are mines, nails, and recycled iron. Both imperial administrations took a spatially oriented approach, establishing offices and bureaus across their respective domains to address their different concerns. Mapping iron production and administration sites in the Han and the Roman empires spatially further illustrate the governance behaviors identified above. Focused discussions on new excavations in the Martys (80km NW of Narbo) and Taicheng (90km W of Chang'an) further provide local frames of reference to interrogate the priorities and challenges highlighted. The preliminary results suggest that while concerns may differ between the two imperial governments, there are similarities in governance behaviors that are not technologically related, as some scholars suggest. Both imperial governments seemed to have been capitalizing on existing iron industry communities through managerial posts, at times bureaucratizing them. While the Han empire, in particular, attempted to bureaucratize iron production and distribution wholesale, the eventual scaling back of such mobilization marks the shared limitations of imperial control on the traditional culture of production and distribution of this basic commodity.