A peculiar right of the Princeps to try cases from the provinces in which the lives of Roman citizens were involved may, perhaps, have grown up during the Principate. It certainly does not exist during the early portion of this period. Instances of the maintenance of the Republican principle, that capital charges against Roman citizens should be sent to Rome, are indeed furnished by such cases as those of the Bithynian Christians in the reign of Trajan,[1851] and perhaps of St. Paul’s appeal in the reign of Nero;[1852] and perhaps such a demand for a trial at Rome was accompanied by a request, usually accepted, to be tried before the Princeps; but there are as many instances which prove the unlimited jurisdiction of the provincial governor, at least when dealing with ordinary crimes. Thus Marius Priscus scourged and strangled a Roman knight in the province of Africa, and Galba, when governor of Tarraconensis, crucified a guardian, who was a Roman citizen, for poisoning his ward.[1853] There are, however, signs that the right to kill (_jus gladii_), if this expression refers to ordinary as well as to military jurisdiction, was specially given by the Emperor at least to the administrators of his own provinces,[1854] which shows that the frequent requests of one who stood “before Caesar’s judgment seat” to be tried by Caesar had issued in some standing rule. At a later time, when the universal criminal appeal to Caesar had grown up, certain persons—senators, officers, and decurions—are exempted from capital or severe penalties pronounced by provincial governors,[1855] and this jurisdiction, reserved for the Princeps, was exercised by the _praefectus praetorio_ without appeal. The Princeps was (especially in the early Principate) by no means a universal court of criminal appeal for the whole Roman world. There was no appeal to him from the _quaestiones perpetuae_, although he may have had some right of rescinding the inequitable judgments of such courts (_in integrum restitutio_); nor is there theoretically any appeal from the Senate, although the Princeps possesses, through the _tribunicia potestas_, a practical power of rescinding the judgments of that body.[1856] In the matter of jurisdiction delegated to his praefects, the appeal lies unless he wills it away, as he does in favour of the _praefectus praetorio_. With respect to the provinces, the principle of the dual control, which we have illustrated with reference to civil jurisdiction,[1857] must have originally been supposed to hold good with reference to criminal jurisdiction as well; but the dyarchy was, in this particular, ultimately dissolved. By the end of the second century Caesar, represented in most cases by his inappellable praetorian praefect, was the highest court of criminal appeal for the whole Roman world.