The Roman Empire was governed, in its day-to-day reality, not by emperors but by governors — men appointed to run the provinces who held nearly unlimited authority within their territories for the duration of their term and who constituted the primary interface between Rome and the millions of people who lived under Roman rule without ever seeing the emperor or setting foot in the capital. The quality of Roman provincial governance varied as widely as the quality of the men appointed to it, and the mechanisms for selecting, instructing, supervising, and holding accountable these distant administrators were imperfect in ways that had significant consequences for the populations they served.