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Bible Dictionaries
Procurator
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or The position of procurator, in the sense in which we are familiar with the word, cannot be understood without a knowledge of the word’s history. Before the Roman Empire was ever thought of, and regularly also after it had come into existence, a procurator (Greek, ἐπίτροπος) was one qui procurat, ‘who attends to’ or ‘manages,’ particularly the affairs of a house-hold or an estate-an agent, steward, or bailiff, in fact. Such a person was a superior servant, acting for his master, but still a servant. The Emperor required servants to manage his property in various parts of the Empire, and these were regularly known by the name procuratores. They derived what importance they had solely from the high position of their master. If this had been clearly understood, probably we should have been spared much cheap criticism of a man like Pilate, procurator of Judaea , whose career could be made or marred by a master’s whim. Such a man was in an entirely different position from an ordinary governor of a province, who would be a member of the Senate, still a privileged body, and might be of as good as, or of better blood than, the Emperor himself. It is true that an Emperor could also get rid of such, but not so easily.
Procuratores were of many kinds, but were never of higher rank than the equestrian. Once or twice they were Imperial freedmen. The Emperor had procuratores in all provinces, senatorial and Imperial alike, who attended to his financial interests there. The Emperors had private property in the provinces, often consisting of estates that had belonged to the domains of various gods and goddesses. These demanded a large staff of workers of many kinds, and over them were set procuratores. Sometimes these would take over the command of a province on the occasion of the death or absence of the real governor. They are to be distinguished from the procuratores who were actually set over provinces as governors. Only Imperial provinces were thus governed, and only the less important of these (see Governor, Province). They took the place of the earlier military prefects. The following provinces among others were governed at one time or another by them-the two Mauretaniae, Raetia, Noricum, Alpes Maritimae, Alpes Cottiae, Judaea , Cappadocia, Epirus, the Hellespont, Corsica, Sardinia, Bithynia, Pamphylia. To the student of Christian origins Judaea is the most interesting. Of Pontius Pilate we know almost nothing, but Felix was the first man born a slave who governed a Roman province and commanded the troops in it. Antonius Felix was brother of Claudius’ great minister of finance (a rationibus), Pallas, and, probably on account of his marriage into a higher class, was raised to the equestrian order before his appointment to Judaea . Such governors had a lower status than the finance procurators in other provinces. The troops under their command were auxiliaries, which were for the most part drawn from the country itself, and militia formed from the able-bodied men of the province. Such troops did not belong to the Imperial army in the strict sense. In Judaea , e.g., there was an ala formed of Caesariani and Sebasteni, the ala prima gemina Sebastenorum (apparently drafted in Vespasian’s time to Mauretania), and five cohorts (cf. Acts 10:1 for the name of one of them), which also appear to have been raised entirely in the country, and were probably in part also commanded by officers of Eastern birth (e.g., probably, Claudius Lysias, Acts 23:26). Only one of these cohorts had its quarters in Jerusalem. The 200 δεξιολάβοι (probably ‘slingers’) who were sent as an escort with St. Paul (Acts 23:23) probably did not form a separate troop. In their quality of commanders of troops the procurators had beneficiarii under them. Sometimes also a sub-procurator (ἀντεπίτροπος) of equestrian rank is mentioned as an assistant to the procurator. Lower posts, filled by Imperial freedmen and slaves, were those of the tabularii, commentarienses, librarii, arcarii (cf. Romans 16:23, where dispensator would be a more exact translation; also CIL_ iii. 556, v. 8818), and dispensatores with their vicarii, to which titles the name of the province is always added. These officials, to avoid the appearance of partiality, were never natives of the provinces in which they served.
The functions of the procurators were judicial, financial, and military. The last tended to become less important in the later Empire. They had supervision of the taxes. They had to pay the soldiers, not only in procuratorial but also in the other Imperial provinces. Each had charge of the carrying out of road-building and other buildings in his province. In the more important Imperial provinces the financial procurators acted ordinarily with the governors in the supervision of building and also in the settlement of boundary disputes, but also sometimes independently. In the ordinary Civil Court (Recorder’s Court, Court of Common Pleas) they had a jurisdiction like that of other governors, and in later times at least they could appoint a guardian to a ward (tutoris datio). Criminal jurisdiction over non-citizens was extended to them in Judaea already in Augustus’ time in full compass (John 19:10), but over Roman citizens they had no power of life and death (ius gladii), unless this had been communicated to them in a special mandate from the Emperor. The right of pardon belonged only to the Emperor, and the liberation of such a criminal as Barabbas can have been made possible only by a clause in the special lex prouinciCE, according to which Judaea was governed (John 18:39). The procurator of Judaea appears to have stood in a special position of dependence under the governor of the Imperial province of Syria. Pilate was deposed, or at least suspended, by L. Vitellius, the governor of Syria (Josephus, Ant. XVIII. iv. 2), with the command that he should appear before the Emperor in Rome, and a provisional governor appointed for Judaea . A similar experience fell to the lot of later procurators of Judaea , Felix and Cumanus, at the hands of Ummidius Quadratus, governor of Syria. But it has been pointed out that both these governors had a wider command than Syria, extending in fact over the neighbouring provinces as well. There was, however, a close connexion between Judaea and Syria, the result of Syria’s importance as a frontier province with four legions stationed in it.
Literature.-O. Hirschfeld, Die kaiserlichen Verwaltungsbeamten bis auf Diocletian2, Berlin, 1905, pp. 410-465. On Imperial estates, formerly the property of gods or goddesses, see W. M. Ramsay, ‘The Tekmoreian Guest-Friends; an Anti-Christian Society on the Imperial Estates at Pisidian Antioch,’ in Studies in the History and Art of the Eastern Provinces of the Roman Empire, 1906, pp. 305-377, Athenaeum, 12 Aug. 1911, p. 193, ‘Iconium and Antioch,’ in Exp_, 8th ser., ii. [1911] 257 ff., JHS_ xxxii. [1912] 151 ff.; J. G. C. Anderson, in JRS_ iii. [1913] 267 ff.; M. Rostowzew, Studien zur Gesch. des röm. Kolonates, Leipzig, 1910.
A. Souter.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Procurator'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/p/procurator.html. 1906-1918.
