All provincial land is however distinguished from Italic land by the fact that it is subject to tribute, that is pays either vectigal or tributum; for at all events from the time of the Gracchi it is a recognised political maxim that property in a provincial dependency has passed to the Roman people, the original owners retaining only a right of user; so that the province is a _prædium populi Romani_ whose revenues pour into the state exchequer. Accordingly one may define the province as an administered district of the Roman Empire, geographically marked out, committed to the control of a permanent higher official and subject to taxation. The obligation to pay taxes is so important a feature in the conception of the province that the historians, in treating of every country actually subordinated and made subject to taxes by the Romans, include it with the provinces, even if it was not yet incorporated in the Roman system of administration; and the dynasties in Cilicia and Syria although not directly subject to governors, are regarded as an integral part of the empire on account of their obligation to pay duty. The organisation of the province at the time of the republic was directed upon instruction from the senate by the victorious general himself with the subsidiary aid of a commission of ten senators appointed by the senate for this object. The fundamental law of the province thus established (lex provinciæ) determined the character of the administration from that time forward, laws affecting private relations being adopted partly through Roman laws and partly through the edicts of the governor. The duties of the commission were concerned with the following points: First, there was a fresh parcelling out of the whole province into definite districts of administration with one of the larger towns, where such were available, for a centre; of such town dioceses there were about sixty-eight in Sicily, sixty-four in the three Gauls, forty-four in Asia, eleven in the Ora Pontica, the part of Bithynia that became a province in 63 B.C., six in Pontus Polemoniacus, twenty-three in Lycia, seventeen in Syria, five in Cyrene. The magistrates and the senate of these towns, although appointed for the affairs of their commune, are at the same time of use to the government in taking over the gathering in of taxes in the district assigned to them.