The further we move our attention away from the emperor and Rome, the less adequate the information of our literary sources, especially the historical narratives, becomes. Nevertheless, it is vital to our understanding of the empire to have some idea of how the provincials related to Rome and Roman officials in the provinces. In this final chapter I wish to consider how patronage functioned in this relationship. The discussion will concern provincial patronage as a whole insofar as it has been necessary to draw on literary sources from all regions for a few scattered bits of information. The conclusions drawn from the literary passages can often be corroborated by the epigraphic evidence. With regard to the inscriptions, a somewhat different approach has been adopted: rather than utilizing scattered stones from the whole empire in a haphazard fashion, I have decided to study the whole corpus of material from one region in order to discover whether patterns emerge. North Africa appeared to be a good choice for several reasons. A large corpus of inscriptions has been collected from the area, and useful preliminary studies are available. More importantly, during the second century North Africans came to be more successful than men from any other region outside Italy in securing positions in the imperial aristocracy. Despite their success, the relation between Rome and the North African aristocracies has not received as much attention and emphasis as the influence of prominent figures from the Greek East, especially the famous figures of the Second Sophistic.