This chapter commences from consideration of literatures that distinguish national states from premodern empires on grounds of the normative salience of national cultures in the former and cultural and institutional heterogeneity in the latter. The infrastructure of the classical Roman state being very limited, the Romans sought to coopt local elites in the project of empire, all the while maintaining and cultivating forms of cultural and legal difference between the varied populations of the empire. To achieve this end, the Roman state surrendered a broad range of powers to those elites, including control over markets and the incidence of taxation. The collaboration of indigenous elites in the furtherance of imperial ends encourages us to regard with diminished importance cultural constructions of difference between metropolitan and local elites, and instead view local elites and their city-state institutions as contributing to the overall infrastructural power of the high imperial state.