@WulfyK: let’s hear it! No time like the present.
- It’s more feudal than bureaucratic, and a combination of formal and informal authority. Formally, an aristarch is appointed to work with the Alastors and Ecclesiasts in their district to hold courts, punish crimes, enforce laws, and do whatever else is necessary to maintain order. The amount of power this actually entails varies tremendously across the Hegemony. There are aristarchs who serve as nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Hegemonic institutions in their area; there are aristarchs who play these relatively ignorant, frequently rotated outsiders like harps; and there are not a few aristarchs who are at daggers drawn with their Ecclesiast and/or Alastor captain, but manage to stay in the office because they keep the peace, keep up a respectable veneer of cooperation, and have the right allies to make the case in the provincial capital that no one else would keep things running as smoothly in that district.
Lord Keriatou’s formal authority does not extend to telling Lady Pelematou what she should do with her helots, but she’d be reckless to ignore his advice.