If the foreign element preponderated in any provincial town, or if, for other reasons, it was undesirable or impracticable to rank it among Roman colonial cities, it was admitted to the status of a _municipium_. These latter possessed the rights of Roman citizenship and were assigned to a _tribus_ like the colonies, but they differed from them in their municipal and magisterial system and sought justice according to their local laws and legal formulæ and not according to Roman institutions. They were free cities in which few Romans lived, if any. As a rule their constitution was based on that of the Italian municipal organisation. In every province there were municipia of this character, and in organising them local tradition was treated with the utmost consideration. They promoted the civilisation of the natives, disposed them favourably towards Roman institutions, and familiarised them with Roman life. Everywhere imperial Rome was sedulous to transmit to the provinces the organisation, constitution, and legal system which had been perfected in Italy through the course of centuries, and to gain over the various communities by granting them a privileged position before the law, exempting them from the jurisdiction of the local governor, or lightening the burden of taxation. In Spain, Gaul, and other less civilised countries she endeavoured to bind the several communities to their allegiance to Rome by enrolling them among the municipia, or exempting them from the land tax by the bestowal of the _jus Italicum_, or by admitting them under the “Latin law” which insured to the communal magistrates the honorary freedom of the dominant city and conferred on such communities the rights of ownership over the soil, freedom of commerce and autonomous municipal administration. On the other hand, the Greek cities in Hellas, which prized highly the glorious names of liberty and autonomy even after they had long become empty sounds, were won over by being elevated to the rank of “free cities,” a distinction flattering to their national vanity, which privileged them to manage their own municipal affairs, to elect their own magistrates, and to maintain their national laws and judicial procedure, while it relieved them of the burden of maintaining garrisons and having soldiers billeted upon them and secured to them the right of coinage and the ownership of the soil. Thus were the provinces compassed about with a network of varying conditions, which linked them to Rome by every kind of tie. Even if the old policy of “_divide et impera_” lay at the bottom of this diversity of legal status, better conditions being held out as the reward of loyalty, devotion, and service to the supreme government, as a means of attaching the influential and ambitious to the Roman interest, yet this provincial organisation was a logical outcome of the political and juridical system developed under the republic.