GREEK EUROPE.

Hellenism and Panhellenism.With the general intellectual development of the Hellenes the political development of their republics had not kept equal pace, or rather the luxuriant growth of the former had—just as too full a bloom bursts the calyx that contains it—not allowed any individual commonwealth to acquire the extent and stability which are preliminary conditions for the thorough formation of a state. The petty–state–system of individual cities or city–leagues could not but be stunted in itself or fall a prey to the barbarians. Panhellenism alone guaranteed alike the continued existence of the nation and its further development in presence of the alien races dwelling around it. It was realised by the treaty which king Philip of Macedonia, the father of Alexander, concluded in Corinth with the states of Hellas. This was, in name, a federal agreement, in fact, the subjection of the republics to the monarchy, but a subjection, which took effect only as regards external relations, seeing that the absolute generalship in opposition to the national foe was transferred by almost all towns of the Greek mainland to the Macedonian general, while in other respects freedom and autonomy were left to them; and this was, as circumstances stood, the only possible realisation of Panhellenism and the form regulating in substance the future of Greece. It subsisted in presence of Philip and Alexander, though the Hellenic idealists were reluctant, as they always were, to acknowledge the realised ideal as such. Then, when the kingdom of Alexander fell to pieces, all was over, as with Panhellenism itself, so also with the union of the Greek towns under the monarchic supremacy; and these wore out their last mental and material power in centuries of aimless striving, distracted between the alternating rule of the too powerful monarchies, and vain attempts, under cover of their quarrels, to restore the old particularism.

Hellas and Rome.When at length the mighty republic of the west entered into the conflict, hitherto in some measure balanced, of the monarchies of the east, and soon showed itself more powerful than each of the Greek states there striving with one another, the Panhellenic policy became renewed as the position of supremacy became fixed. Neither the Macedonians nor the Romans were Hellenes in the full sense of the word; it is indeed the sad feature of Greek development that the Attic naval empire was more a hope than a reality, and the work of union could not emanate from the bosom of the nation itself. While in a national respect the Macedonians stood nearer to the Greeks than the Romans did, the commonwealth of Rome had politically far more of elective affinity to the Hellenic than the Macedonian hereditary kingdom. But—what is the chief matter—the attractive power of the Greek spirit was probably felt more permanently and deeply by the Roman burgesses than by the statesmen of Macedonia, just because the former stood at a greater distance from it than the latter. The desire to become at least internally Hellenised, to become partakers of the manners and the culture, of the art and the science of Hellas, to be—in the footsteps of the great Macedonian—shield and sword of the Greeks of the East, and to be allowed further to civilise this East not after an Italian but after a Hellenic fashion—this desire pervades the later centuries of the Roman republic and the better times of the empire with a power and an ideality which are almost no less tragic than that political toil of the Hellenes failing to attain its goal. For both sides strove after the impossible: to Hellenic Pan–hellenism there was refused duration, and to Roman Hellenism solid intrinsic worth. Nevertheless it has essentially influenced the policy of the Roman republic as well as that of the emperors. However much the Greeks, particularly in the last century of the republic, showed the Romans that their labour of love was a forlorn one, this made no change either in the labour or in the love.

The Amphictiony of Augustus.The Greeks of Europe had been comprehended by the Roman republic under a single governorship named after the chief country Macedonia. When this was administratively dissolved at the beginning of the imperial period, there was at the same time conferred on the whole Greek name a religious bond of union, which attached itself to the old Delphic Amphictiony introduced for the sake of “a peace of God” and then misused for political ends. Under the Roman republic it had been in the main brought back to the original foundations; Macedonia as well as Aetolia, both of which had intruded as usurpers, were again eliminated, and the Amphictiony once more embraced not all, but most, of the tribes of Thessaly and of Greece proper. Augustus caused the league to be extended to Epirus and Macedonia, and thereby made it in substance the representative of the Hellenic land in the wider sense alone suited to this epoch. A privileged position in this union alongside of the time–honoured Delphi was occupied by the two cities of Athens and Nicopolis, the former the capital of the old, the latter, according to Augustus’s design, that of the new imperial, Hellenic body.146 This new Amphictiony has a certain resemblance to the diet of the three Gauls (p.93); just like the altar of the emperor at Lyons for this diet, the temple of the Pythian Apollo was the religious centre of the Greek provinces. But, while to the former withal a directly political activity was conceded, the Amphictions of this epoch, in addition to the religious festivals proper, simply attended to the administration of the Delphic sanctuary and of its still considerable revenues.147 If its president in later times ascribed to himself “Helladarchy,” this rule over Greece was simply an ideal conception.148 But the official conserving of the Greek nationality remained always a token of the attitude which the new imperialism occupied towards it, and of its Philhellenism, far surpassing that of the republic.

Province of Achaia.Hand in hand with the ritual union of the European Greeks went the administrative breaking up of the Graeco–Macedonian governorship of the republic. It did not depend on the partition of the imperial administration between emperor and senate, as this whole territory and not less the adjacent Danubian regions were assigned in the original partition to the senate; as little did military considerations here intervene, seeing that the whole peninsula up to the frontier of Thrace was—as protected partly by this region, partly by the garrisons on the Danube—always reckoned to belong to the pacified interior. If the Peloponnesus and the Attico–Boeotian mainland obtained at that time its own proconsul and was separated from Macedonia—which perhaps Caesar may have already designed—it may be presumed that in that course, along with the general tendency not to magnify the senatorial governorships the dominant consideration was that of separating the purely Hellenic domain from what was half–Hellenic. The boundary of the province of Achaia was at first Oeta, and, even after the Aetolians were subsequently attached to it,149 it did not go beyond the Achelous and Thermopylae.

The Greek towns under the Roman republic.These arrangements concerned the country as a whole. We turn now to the position which was given to the several urban communities under the Roman rule.

The original design of the Romans—to attach the whole of the Greek urban communities to their own commonwealth, in a way similar to what had been done with the Italian—had undergone essential restrictions, in consequence of the resistance which these arrangements met with, especially in consequence of the insurrection of the Achaean league in the year 608 (iii.47)iii.45., and of the falling away of most of the Greek towns to king Mithradates in the year 666 (iii.313)iii.297.. The city–leagues, the foundation of all development of power in Hellas as in Italy, and at first accepted by the Romans, were all of them—particularly the most important, the Peloponnesian, or, as it called itself, the Achaean—broken up, and the several cities were admonished to regulate their own public affairs. Moreover certain general rules were laid down by the leading power for the several communal constitutions, and according to this scheme these were reorganised in an anti–democratic sense. It was only within these limits that the individual community retained autonomy and a magistracy of its own. It retained also its own courts; but the Greek stood at the same time de jure under the rods and axes of the praetor, and at least could be sentenced—on account of any offence which admitted of being regarded as rebellion against the leading power—by the Roman officials to a money–fine or banishment, or even capital punishment.150 The communities taxed themselves; but they had throughout to pay to Rome a definite sum, on the whole, apparently, not on a high scale. Garrisons were not assigned, as formerly in the Macedonian period, to the towns, for the troops stationed in Macedonia were in a position, should need arise, to move also into Greece. But a graver blame than that falling on the memory of Alexander through the destruction of Thebes rests on the Roman aristocracy for the razing of Corinth. The other measures, odious and exasperating as in part they were, particularly as imposed by foreign rule, might, taken as a whole, be unavoidable and have in various respects a salutary operation; they were the inevitable palinode of the original Roman policy—in part truly impolitic—of forgiving and forgetting towards the Hellenes. But in the treatment of Corinth mercantile selfishness had after an ill–omened fashion shown itself more powerful than all Philhellenism.

Freed communities under the Roman republic.Amidst all this, the fundamental idea of Roman policy—to confederate the Greek towns with the Italian—was never forgotten; just as Alexander never wished to rule Greece like Illyria and Egypt, so his Roman successors never completely applied the subject–relation to Greece, and even in the republican period essentially fell short of urging the strict rights of the war forced upon the Romans. Especially was this the case in dealing with Athens. No Greek city from the standpoint of Roman policy erred so gravely against Rome as this; its demeanour in the Mithradatic war would, had its case been that of any other commonwealth, have inevitably led to its being razed. But from the Philhellenic standpoint, doubtless, Athens was the masterpiece of the world, and for the genteel world of other lands similar leanings and memories were associated with it, as for our cultivated circles are connected with Pforta and Bonn. This consideration then, as formerly, prevailed. Athens was never placed under the fasces of the Roman governor, and never paid tribute to Rome; it always had a sworn alliance with Rome, and granted aid to the Romans only in an extraordinary and, at least as to form, voluntary fashion. The capitulation after the Sullan siege brought about doubtless a change in the constitution of the community, but the alliance was renewed,—in fact, even all extraneous possessions were given back, including the island of Delos itself, which, when Athens passed over to Mithradates, had broken off and constituted itself an independent commonwealth, and had been, by way of punishment for its fidelity towards Rome, pillaged and destroyed by the Pontic fleet.151

Sparta was treated with similar consideration, and that doubtless in good part on account of its great name. Some other towns of the freed communities to be afterwards named had this position already under the republic. Probably such exceptions occurred in every Roman province; but this was from the outset peculiar to the Greek territory, that precisely its two most noted cities were beyond the range of the subject–relation, which accordingly affected only the smaller commonwealths.

City–leagues under the republic.Even for the subject Greek cities alleviations were introduced already under the republic. The city–leagues, at first prohibited, gradually and very soon revived, especially the smaller and powerless ones, like the Boeotian;152 with the becoming familiarised to foreign rule the oppositional tendencies disappeared which had brought about their abolition, and their close connection with the time–hallowed cultus carefully spared must have further told in their favour, as indeed it has already been observed that the Roman republic restored and protected the Amphictiony in its original non–political functions. Towards the end of the republican period the government seems even to have allowed the Boeotians to enter into a collective union with the small regions adjacent to the north and the island of Euboea.153

The copestone of the republican epoch was the atonement for the sack of Corinth made by the greatest of all Romans and of all Philhellenes, the dictator Caesar (iv.574)iv.544., and the renewal of the star of Hellas in the form of an independent community of Roman citizens, the new “Julian Honour.”

Achaia under the emperors.These were the relations which the imperial government at its outset found existing in Greece, and in these paths it went forward. The communities freed from the immediate interference of the provincial government and from the payment of tribute to the empire, with which the colonies of Roman burgesses in many respects stood on a level, comprehended far the largest and best part of the province of Achaia:Freed towns and Roman colonies.in the Peloponnesus, Sparta, with its territory diminished no doubt, but yet once more embracing the northern half of Laconia,154 still the counterpart of Athens as well in its petrified, old–fashioned institutions as in its at least outwardly preserved organisation and bearing; further, the eighteen communities of the free Laconians, the southern half of the Laconian region, once Spartan subjects, organised by the Romans as an independent cities–league after the war against Nabis, and, like Sparta, invested with freedom by Augustus;155 lastly, in the region of the Achaeans not only Dyme, which had been already furnished by Pompeius with pirate–colonists, and then had received new Roman settlers from Caesar,156 but above all Patrae, which Augustus, on account of its position favourable for commerce, transformed from a declining hamlet,—partly by drawing together the small surrounding townships, partly by settlement of numerous Italian veterans—into the most populous and most flourishing city of the peninsula, and constituted as a Roman burgess–colony, under which was also placed Naupactus (the Italian Lepanto) on the opposite Locrian coast. On the Isthmus Corinth, as it had formerly become a victim to the advantages of its site, had now after its restoration rapidly risen, similarly to Carthage, and had become the richest in industry and in population of the cities of Greece, as well as the regular seat of government. As the Corinthians were the first Greeks who had recognised the Romans as countrymen by admission to the Isthmian games (ii.79)ii.75., so this town now, although a Roman burgess–community, took charge of this high Greek national festival. On the mainland there belonged to the freed districts not merely Athens, with its territory embracing all Attica and numerous islands of the Aegean Sea, but also Tanagra and Thespiae, at that time the two most considerable towns of the Boeotian country, as also Plataeae;157 in Phocis Delphi, Abae, Elateia, as well as the most considerable of the Locrian towns, Amphissa. What the republic had begun Augustus completed in the arrangement just set forth, which was at least in its main outlines settled by him and was afterwards in substance maintained. Although the communities of the province subject to the proconsul preponderated, certainly as to number, and perhaps also as to the aggregate population, yet in a genuinely Philhellenic spirit the towns of Greece most distinguished by material importance or by great memories were set free.158

Nero’s liberation of Greece.The last emperor of the Claudian house, one of the race of spoiled poets and so far at all events a born Philhellene, went further than Augustus had gone in this direction. In gratitude for the recognition which his artistic contributions had met with in the native land of the Muses, Nero, like Titus Flamininus formerly (ii.262)ii.247.—and that once more in Corinth at the Isthmian games—declared the Greeks collectively to be rid of Roman government, free from tribute, and, like the Italians, subject to no governor. At once there arose throughout Greece movements, which would have been civil wars, if these people could have achieved anything more than brawling; and after a few months Vespasian re–established the provincial constitution,159 so far as it went, with the dry remark that the Greeks had unlearned the art of being free.

Rights of the freed towns.The legal position of the communities set free remained in substance the same as under the republic. They retained, so far as Roman burgesses were not in question, the full control of justice; only, the general enactments as to appeals to the emperor on the one hand and to the senatorial authorities on the other seem to have also included the free towns.160 Above all, they retained full self–determination and self–administration. Athens, for example, exercised in the imperial period the right of coinage, without even putting the emperor’s head on its coins, and even on Spartan coins of the first imperial period it is frequently wanting. In Athens even the old reckoning by drachmae and oboli continued; only that, it is true, the local Attic drachma of this period was nothing but small money current on the spot, and as to value circulated as obolus of the Attic imperial drachma or of the Roman denarius. Even the formal exercise of the right of war and peace was in individual treaties granted to such states.161 Numerous institutions quite at variance with the Italian municipal organisation remained in existence, such as the annual change of the members of council and the daily allowance–moneys of these and the jurymen, which, at least at Rhodes, were still paid in the imperial period. As a matter of course, the Roman government nevertheless exercised continuously a regulative influence over the constitution even of the freed communities. Thus, for example, the Athenian constitution was, whether at the end of the republic or by Caesar or Augustus, modified in such a way that the right of bringing a proposal before the burgesses belonged no longer to every burgess, but, as according to the Roman arrangement, only to definite officials; and among the great number of officials, who were mere figures, the conduct of business was placed in the hands of a single one—the Strategos. Certainly in this way various further reforms were carried out, the presence of which, in dependent as in independent Greece, we everywhere discern, without being able to determine the time and occasion of the reform. Thus the right, or rather the wrong, of asylums, which, as survivals of a lawless period, had now become pious retreats for bad debtors and criminals, was certainly, if not set aside, at least restricted in this province also. The institution of proxenia—originally an appropriate arrangement, that may be compared to our foreign consulates, but politically dangerous through the bestowal of full civil rights and often also of the privilege of exemption from taxes on the friendly foreigner, especially considering the extent to which it was granted—was set aside by the Roman government, apparently only at the beginning of the imperial period; in room of which thereupon came, after the Italian fashion, the empty city–patronate, which did not come into contact with the system of taxation. Lastly, the Roman government, as wielding supreme sovereignty over these dependent republics just as over the client–princes, always regarded it as its right, and exercised the power, to cancel the free constitution in case of misuse, and to take the town into its own administration. But partly the sworn agreement, partly the powerlessness of these nominally allied states, gave to these treaties a greater stability than is discernible in the relation to the client–princes.

Diets of the Greek cities.While the freed communities of Achaia retained their previous legal position under the empire, Augustus conferred on those communities of the province, in which freedom was not granted or possessed, a new and better legal position. As he had given to the Greeks of Europe a common centre in the reorganised Delphic Amphictiony, he allowed also all the towns of the province of Achaia, so far as they were placed under Roman administration, to constitute themselves as a collective union, and to meet annually in Argos, the most considerable town of non–free Greece, as a national assembly.162 Thereby not merely was the Achaean league, dissolved after the Achaean war, reconstituted, but also the enlarged Boeotian union formerly mentioned (p.259) was engrafted on it. Probably it was just by the laying together of these two domains that the demarcation of the province of Achaia was brought about. The new union of the Achaeans, Boeotians, Locrians, Phocians, Dorians, and Euboeans,163 or, as it is usually designated like the province, the union of the Achaeans, presumably had rights neither more nor less than the other provincial diets of the empire. A certain control of the Roman officials must have been intended in the case, and for that reason the towns not placed under the proconsul, like Athens and Sparta, must have been excluded from it. This diet withal, like all similar ones, must have found the centre of its activity chiefly in the common cultus embracing the whole land. But, while in the other provinces this cultus of the land preponderantly attached itself to Rome, the diet of Achaia was rather a focus of Hellenism, and was perhaps meant to be so. Already under the Julian emperors it regarded itself as the true representative of the Greek nation, and assigned to its president the name of Helladarch, to itself even that of “the Panhellenes.”164 The assembly thus deviated from its provincial basis, and its modest administrative functions fell into the background.

The Panhellenion of Hadrian in Athens.These Panhellenes therefore took to themselves this name by an abuse of language, and were simply tolerated by the government. But as Hadrian created a new Athens, so he created also a new Hellas. Under him the representatives of all the autonomous or non–autonomous towns of the province of Achaia were allowed to constitute themselves in Athens as united Greece, as the Panhellenes.165 The national union, often dreamed of and never attained in better times, was thereby created, and what youth had wished for old age possessed in imperial fulness. It is true that the new Panhellenion did not obtain political prerogatives; but there was no lack of what imperial favour and imperial gold could give. There arose in Athens the temple of the new Zeus Panhellenios, and brilliant popular festivals and games were connected with this foundation, the carrying out of which pertained to the collegium of the Panhellenes, and primarily to the priest of Hadrian as the living god who founded them. One of the acts, which these performed every year, was the offering of sacrifice to Zeus the Deliverer at Plataeae, in memory of the Hellenes that fell there in battle against the Persians, on the anniversary of the battle, the 4th Boedromion: this marks its tendency.166 Still more clearly was this shown in the fact that the Greek towns outside of Hellas, which appeared worthy of the national fellowship, had ideal certificates of Hellenism issued to them by the assembly in Athens.167

The decay of Hellas.While the imperial rule in its whole wide range encountered the devastations of a twenty years’ civil war, and in many places its consequences were never entirely healed, probably no domain was so severely affected by them as the Greek peninsula. Fate had so arranged, that the three great decisive battles of this epoch—Pharsalus, Philippi, Actium—were fought on its soil or on its coast; and the military operations, which with both parties led up to these battles, had here above all demanded their sacrifices of human life and human happiness. Even Plutarch was told by his great–grandfather how the officers of Antonius had compelled the citizens of Chaeronea, when they no longer possessed slaves or beasts of burden, to drag their last grain on their own shoulders to the nearest port to be shipped for the army; and how thereupon, just as the second convoy was about to depart, the accounts of the battle of Actium arrived as glad news of relief. The first thing that Caesar did after the victory was to distribute the enemy’s stores of grain that had fallen into his power among the famishing population of Greece. This heaviest measure of suffering fell upon a specially weak power of resistance. Decrease of the population.Already, more than a century before the battle of Actium, Polybius had stated that unfruitfulness in marriage and diminution of the population had in his time come over all Greece, without any diseases or severe wars befalling the land. Now these scourges had emerged in fearful fashion; and Greece remained desolate for all time to come. Plutarch thinks that throughout the Roman empire the population had fallen off in consequence of the devastating wars, but most of all in Greece, which was not now in a position to furnish from the better circles of the citizens the 3000 hoplites, with which once the smallest of the Greek districts, Megara, had fought at Plataeae.168 Caesar and Augustus had attempted to remedy this depopulation, which alarmed even the government, by the despatch of Italian colonists, and, in fact, the two most flourishing towns of Greece were these very colonies; the later governments did not repeat such consignments. The background to the charming Euboean peasant–idyll of Dio of Prusa is formed by a depopulated town, in which numerous houses stand empty, flocks are fed at the council–hall and at the city register–house, two–thirds of the territory lie untilled for want of hands; and when the narrator reports this as falling within his own experience, he therewith assuredly describes not unaptly the circumstances of numerous small Greek country towns in the time of Trajan. “Thebes in Boeotia,” says Strabo in the Augustan age, “is now hardly to be termed even a goodly village, and the same holds true of all the Boeotian towns, with the exception of Tanagra and Thespiae.” But not merely did men dwindle away as regards number; the type also declined. “There are doubtless still beautiful women,” says one of the finest observers about the end of the first century,169 “but beautiful men one sees no longer; the Olympian victors of more recent times appear, compared with the older, inferior and common, partly no doubt owing to the fault of the artists, but chiefly because they are just what they are.” The bodily training of the youth had been carried in this promised land of ephebi and athletes to such an extent, as if the very aim of the communal constitution were to rear the boys as gymnasts and the men as boxers; but, if no province possessed so many artists for the ring, none supplied so few soldiers to the imperial army. Even from the instruction of the Athenian youth—which in the olden time embraced spear–throwing, shooting with the bow, the use of missiles, the marching out and pitching of the camp—this playing at soldiers on the part of the boys now disappears. The Greek towns of the empire were virtually not taken account of in the levy, whether because their recruits appeared physically incapable, or because this element appeared dangerous in the army; it was an imperial pleasantry that the caricature of Alexander, Severus Antoninus, reinforced the Roman army for the conflict with the Persians by some companies of Spartiates.170 Whatever was done for internal order and security must have emanated from the individual communities, as Roman troops were not stationed in the province; Athens, for example, maintained a garrison in the island of Delos, and probably a division of militia lay also in the citadel.171 In the crises of the third century the general levy of Elateia (p.242) and that of Athens (p.246) valiantly repulsed the Costoboci and the Goths; and, after a worthier fashion than the grandchildren of the combatants of Thermopylae in Caracalla’s Persian war, in the Gothic the grandchildren of the victors of Marathon inscribed their names for the last time in the annals of ancient history. But, though such incidents must preclude us from treating the Greeks of this epoch absolutely as a decayed rabble, yet the decline of the population as regards number and vigour steadily continued even during the better imperial period, until, from the end of the second century, the diseases which severely visited these lands, likewise the inroads of land and sea pirates who particularly affected the east coast, and lastly, the collapse of the imperial power in the time of Gallienus, raised the chronic suffering into an acute catastrophe.

Greek tone of feeling.The decay of Hellas, and the feelings which it called forth among the best men, come before us after a striking manner in the appeal which one of these, the Bithynian Dio, addressed about the time of Vespasian to the Rhodians. These were not unjustly regarded as the most excellent of the Hellenes. In no city were the lower population better cared for, and nowhere did that care bear more the stamp of giving not alms but work. When, after the great civil war, Augustus made all private debts irrecoverable at law in the East, the Rhodians alone rejected the dangerous favour. Although the great epoch of Rhodian commerce was over, there were still in Rhodes numerous flourishing branches of business and wealthy houses.172 But many evils had invaded the place, and the philosopher demands that they be done away, not so much, as he says, for the sake of the Rhodians, as for the sake of the Hellenes in common. “Once upon a time the honour of Hellas rested on many, and many increased its renown—you, the Athenians, the Lacedaemonians, Thebes, Corinth for a time, at a remote period Argos. But now the others are as nothing; for some are totally decayed and destroyed, others conduct themselves as you know, and are dishonoured and destroyers of their old renown. You are surviving; you alone are still somewhat and are not utterly despised; for, after the way in which those go to work, all Hellenes would long ago have sunken more deeply than the Phrygians and the Thracians. As when a great and noble family is reduced to a single survivor, and the sin which this last of the house commits brings all his ancestors into dishonour, so you stand in Hellas. Believe not that you are the first of the Greeks; you are the only ones. If we look at those pitiful scoundrels, the great destinies of the past become themselves inconceivable; the stones and ruins of cities show more clearly the pride and the greatness of Hellas than these descendants not even worthy of Mysian ancestors; and better than with towns inhabited by such as these has it fared with those cities which lie in ruins, for their memory remains in honour and their well–acquired renown unstained—better burn the carcase than allow it to lie rotting.”173

The good old manners.We shall not disparage this noble spirit of a scholar who measured the petty present by the great past, and, as could not fail to be the case, looked at the one with indignant eyes and at the other in the transfigured glory of what had been, if we point out the fact that the good old Hellenic habits were at that time and even long afterwards not merely to be found in Rhodes, but were in many respects still everywhere alive. The inward independence, the well warranted self–esteem of the nation that was still standing at the head of civilisation had not disappeared in the Hellenes even of this age, amidst all the pliancy of subjection and all the humility of parasitism. The Romans borrowed the gods from the old Hellenes and the form of administration from the Alexandrines; they sought to master the Greek language and to Hellenise their own in measure and style. The Hellenes even of the imperial period did not pursue a like course; the national deities of Italy, like Silvanus and the Lares, were not adored in Greece, and it never entered into the mind of any Greek urban community to introduce at home the political organisation which their Polybius celebrates as the best. So far as the knowledge of Latin was a condition for the career of the higher as of the lower magistracies, the Greeks who entered upon this career acquired it; for, though practically it only occurred to the emperor Claudius to withdraw the Roman franchise from the Greeks who did not understand Latin, certainly the real execution of the rights and duties connected with it was possible only for one who was master of the imperial language. But, apart from public life, Latin was never so learned in Greece as Greek in Rome. Plutarch, who, as an author, joined as it were in marriage the two halves of the empire, and whose parallel biographies of famous Greeks and Romans recommended themselves and were effective above all by this juxtaposition, understood not very much more of Latin than Diderot of Russian, and at least, as he himself says, did not master the language; the Greek literati having a real command of Latin were either officials, like Appian and Dio Cassius, or neutrals, like king Juba.

Really Greece was far less changed in itself than in its external position. The government of Athens was truly bad, but even in the time of Athenian greatness it had not been at all exemplary. “There is,” says Plutarch, “the same national type, the same disorders, earnest and jest, charm and malice, as among their ancestors.” This epoch, too, still exhibits in the life of the Greek people individual features which are worthy of its civilising leadership. The gladiatorial games, which spread from Italy everywhere, especially to Asia Minor and to Syria, found admission to Greece latest of all lands; for a considerable period they were confined to the half–Italian Corinth, and when the Athenians, in order not to be behind that city, introduced them also among themselves without listening to the voice of one of their best men, who asked them whether they would not first set up an altar to the God of compassion, several of the noblest turned indignantly away from the city of their fathers that so dishonoured itself. In no country of the ancient world were slaves treated with such humanity as in Hellas; it was not the law, but custom that forbade the Greek to sell his slaves to a non–Greek master, and so banished from this region the slave–trade proper. Only here in the imperial period do we find the non–free people provided for in the burgess–feasts and in largesses of oil to the burgesses.174 Only here could one who was not free, like Epictetus under Trajan, in his more than modest outward existence in the Epirot Nicopolis, hold intercourse with respected men of senatorial rank, after the manner of Socrates with Critias and Alcibiades, so that they listened to his oral instructions as disciples to the master, and took notes of, and published, his conversations. The alleviations of slavery by the imperial law are essentially traceable to the influence of Greek views, e.g. with the emperor Marcus, who looked up to that Nicopolitan slave as his master and model.

Parallel between Roman and Athenian life.The author of a dialogue preserved among those of Lucian gives an unsurpassed description of the demeanour of the polished Athenian citizen, amidst his narrow circumstances, overagainst the genteel and rich travelling public of doubtful culture or else undoubted coarseness; how the rich foreigner has been weaned from appearing in the public bath with a host of attendants, as if he were not otherwise certain of his life in Athens and there were no peace in the land; and how he was weaned from showing himself on the street with his purple dress by people making the friendly inquiry whether it was not that of his mamma. He draws a parallel between Roman and Athenian existence; in the former the burdensome banquets and the still more burdensome brothels, the inconvenient convenience of the swarms of menials and the domestic luxury, the troubles of a dissolute life, the torments of ambition, all the superfluity, the multifariousness, the unrest of the doings of the capital; in the latter the charm of poverty, the free talk in the friendly circle, the leisure for intellectual enjoyment, the possibility of peace and of joy in life— “How couldest thou,” one Greek in Rome asks another, “leave the light of the sun, Hellas, and its happiness and its freedom for the sake of this crowd?” In this fundamental keynote all the more finely and purely organised natures of this epoch are agreed; the very best Hellenes would rather not exchange with the Romans. There is hardly anything equally pleasing in the literature of the imperial period with the already mentioned Euboean idyll of Dio; it depicts the existence of two families of hunters in the lonely forest, whose property consists of eight goats, a cow without a horn, and a fine calf, four sickles and three hunting–spears, who know nothing either of gold or of taxes, and who, when placed before the raging burgess–assembly of the city, are by the latter dismissed at length unmolested to joy and to freedom.

Plutarch.The real embodiment of this poetically transfigured conception of life is Plutarch of Chaeronea, one of the most charming, most fully informed, and withal most effective writers of antiquity. Sprung from a family of means in that small Boeotian country–town, and introduced to the full Hellenic culture, first at home and then at Athens and at Alexandria; familiar, moreover, with Roman affairs through his studies and manifold personal relations, as well as by his travels in Italy, he disdained to enter into the service of the state or to adopt the professional career after the usual manner of gifted Greeks; he remained faithful to his home, enjoying domestic life, in the finest sense of the word, with his excellent wife and his children, and with his friends, male and female; contenting himself with the offices and honours which his own Boeotia was able to offer to him, and with the moderate property which he had inherited. In this Chaeronean the contrast between the Hellenes and the Hellenised finds expression; such a type of Greek life was not possible in Smyrna or in Antioch; it belonged to the soil like the honey of Hymettus. There are men enough of more powerful talents and of deeper natures, but hardly any second author has known in so happy a measure how to reconcile himself serenely to necessity, and how to impress upon his writings the stamp of his tranquillity of spirit and his blessedness of life.

Misgovernment of the provincial administration.The self–mastery of Hellenism cannot manifest itself in the field of public life with the purity and beauty which it presents in the quiet homestead, after which history happily does not inquire any more than it inquires after history. When we turn to public affairs, there is more to be told of misrule than of rule, both as regards the Roman government and the Greek autonomy. There was no want of goodwill on the part of the former, in so far as Roman Philhellenism dominated the imperial period even much more decidedly than the republican. It expresses itself everywhere in great matters as in small, in the prosecution of the Hellenising of the Eastern provinces and the recognition of a double official language for the empire, as well as in the courteous forms in which the government dealt, and enjoined its officials to deal, even with the pettiest Greek community.175 Nor did the emperors fail to favour this province with gifts and buildings; and, though most things of this sort came to Athens, Hadrian at any rate constructed a great aqueduct for the benefit of Corinth, and Pius the hospital at Epidaurus. But the considerate treatment of the Greeks in general, and the special kindness which was shown by the imperial government to Hellas proper, because it was accounted in a certain sense as, like Italy, “motherland,” did not redound to the true benefit either of the government or of the country. The annual changes of the chief magistrates, and the remiss control of the central position, made all the senatorial provinces, so far as rule by governors went, feel rather the oppression than the blessing of unity of administration, and doubly so in proportion to their smallness and their poverty. Even under Augustus himself these evils prevailed to such a degree that it was one of the first acts of the reign of his successor to take Greece as well as Macedonia into his own power,176 as it was alleged, temporarily, but in fact for the whole duration of his reign. It was very constitutional, but perhaps not quite so wise on the part of the emperor Claudius, when he came to power, that he re–established the old arrangement. Thenceforward the matter remained on this footing, and Achaia was administered by magistrates not nominated, but chosen by lot, till this form of administration fell altogether into abeyance.

Misgovernment of the free towns.But the case was far worse with the communities of Greece exempted from the rule of the governor. The design of favouring these commonwealths—by freeing them from tribute and levy, and not less by the slightest possible restriction of the rights of the sovereign state—led at least in many cases to the opposite result. The intrinsic falseness of the institutions avenged itself. No doubt among the less privileged or better administered communities the communal autonomy may have fulfilled its aim; at least we do not learn that Sparta, Corinth, Patrae fared specially ill in this respect. Administration of Athens.But Athens was not made for self–administration, and affords the disheartening picture of a commonwealth pampered by the supreme power, and financially as well as morally ruined. By rights it ought to have found itself in a flourishing condition. If the Athenians were unsuccessful in uniting the nation under their hegemony, this city was the only one in Greece, as in Italy, which carried out completely the union of its territory: no city of antiquity elsewhere possessed a domain of its own, such as was Attica, of about 700 square miles, double the size of the island of RÜgen. But even beyond Attica they retained what they possessed, as well after the Mithradatic war by favour of Sulla, as after the Pharsalian battle, in which they had taken the side of Pompeius, by the favour of Caesar—he asked them only how often they would still ruin themselves and trust to be saved by the renown of their ancestors. To the city there still belonged not merely the territory, formerly possessed by Haliartus, in Boeotia (ii.329)ii.309, but also on their own coast Salamis, the old starting–point of their dominion of the sea, and in the Thracian Sea the lucrative islands Scyros, Lemnos, and Imbros, as well as Delos in the Aegean; it is true this island, after the end of the republic, was no longer the central emporium of trade with the East, now that the traffic had been drawn away from it to the ports of the west coast of Italy, and this was an irreparable loss for the Athenians. Of the further grants, which they had the skill to draw by flattery from Antonius, Augustus, against whom they had taken part, took from them certainly Aegina and Eretria in Euboea, but they were allowed to retain the smaller islands of the Thracian Sea, Icus, Peparethus, Sciathus, and further Ceos confronting the promontory of Sunium; and Hadrian, moreover, gave to them the best part of the great island Cephallenia in the Ionian Sea. It was only by the emperor Severus, who bore them no good will, that a portion of these extraneous possessions was withdrawn from them. Hadrian further granted to the Athenians the delivery of a certain quantity of grain at the expense of the empire, and by the extension of this privilege, hitherto reserved for the capital, acknowledged Athens, as it were, as another imperial metropolis. Not less was the blissful institute of alimentary endowments, which Italy had enjoyed since Trajan’s time, extended by Hadrian to Athens, and the capital requisite for this purpose certainly presented to the Athenians from his purse. An aqueduct, which he likewise dedicated to his Athens, was only completed after his death by Pius. To this falls to be added the conflux of travellers and of students, and the endowments bestowed on the city in ever increasing number by Roman grandees and by foreign princes.

Its difficulties.Yet the community was in constant distress. The right of citizenship was dealt with not merely in the way everywhere usual of giving and taking, but was made formally and openly a matter of traffic, so that Augustus interfered to prohibit the evil. Once and again the council of Athens resolved to sell this or that one of its islands; and not always was there found a rich man ready to make sacrifices like Julius Nicanor, who, under Augustus, bought back for the bankrupt Athenians the island of Salamis, thereby earning from its senate the honorary title of the “new Themistocles,” as well as, seeing that he also made verses, that of the “new Homer,” and—together with the noble councillors—from the public well–merited derision. The magnificent buildings with which Athens continued to embellish herself were obtained without exception from foreigners, among others from the rich kings Antiochus of Commagene and Herod of Judaea, but above all from the emperor Hadrian, who laid out a complete “new town” (novae Athenae) on the Ilisus, and—besides numberless other buildings, including the already mentioned Panhellenion—worthily brought to completion the wonder of the world, seven centuries after it had been begun, the gigantic building, commenced by Pisistratus, of the Olympieion, with its 120 columns partly still standing, the largest of all that are erect at the present day. This city itself was without money, not merely for its harbour–walls, which now certainly might be dispensed with, but even for its harbour. In Augustus’s time the Piraeus was a small village of a few houses, only visited for the sake of the masterpieces of painting in the halls of the temples. There was hardly any longer commerce or industry in Athens; or rather for the citizens as a body as well as individually there was but a single flourishing trade—begging.

Street–riots.Nor did the matter end with financial distress. The world doubtless had peace, but not the streets and squares of Athens. Even under Augustus an insurrection in Athens assumed such proportions that the Roman government had to take steps against the free city;177 and though this event stands isolated, riots on the street on account of the price of bread and on other trifling occasions belonged in Athens to the order of the day. The prospect must not have been much better in numerous other free towns, of which there is less mention. To give criminal justice absolutely into the hands of such a burgess–body could hardly be justified; and yet it belonged de jure to the communities admitted to international federation, like Athens and Rhodes. When the Athenian Areopagus in the time of Augustus refused to release from punishment on the intercession of a Roman of rank a Greek condemned for forgery, it must have been within its right; but when the Cyzicenes under Tiberius imprisoned Roman burgesses, and under Claudius the Rhodians even nailed a Roman burgess to the cross, these were formal violations of law, and a similar occurrence under Augustus cost the Thessalians their autonomy. Arrogance and aggression are not excluded by absence of power—are not seldom even ventured on by weak clients. With all respect for great memories and sworn treaties, these free states could not but appear to every conscientious government not much less than an infringement of the general order of the empire, like the still more time–hallowed right of asylum in the temples.

Correctores.Ultimately the government acted with decision, and placed the free towns, as regards their economy, under the superintendence of officials of imperial nomination, who, at all events in the first instance, are described as extraordinary commissioners “for the correction of evils prevailing in the free towns,” and thence subsequently bear the designation “Correctores” as their title. The germs of this office may be traced back to the time of Trajan; we find them as standing officials in Achaia in the third century. These officials, appointed by the emperor, and acting alongside of the proconsuls, occur in no part of the Roman empire so early, and are in no case found so early permanent, as in Achaia, which half consisted of free cities.

Clinging to memories of the past.The self–esteem of the Hellenes, well–warranted in itself and fostered by the attitude of the Roman government, and perhaps still more by that of the Roman public—the consciousness of intellectual primacy—called into life among them a cultus of the past, which was compounded of a faithful clinging to the memories of greater and happier times and a quaint reverting of matured civilisation to its in part very primitive beginnings.

Religion.To foreign worships, if we keep out of view the service of the Egyptian deities already earlier naturalised by trading intercourse, particularly that of Isis, the Greeks in Hellas proper sustained throughout the attitude of declining them; if this held least true in the case of Corinth, Corinth was also the least Greek town of Hellas. The old religion of the country was not protected by hearty faith, from which this age had long since broken off;178 but the habits of home and the memory of the past clung to it by preference, and therefore it was not merely retained with tenacity, but it even became—in good part by the process of erudite retouching—always more rigid and more antique as time went on, always more a distinctive possession of such as made it a study.

Pedigrees.It was the same with the worship of pedigrees, in which the Hellenes of this age performed uncommon feats, and left the most aristocratic of the Romans far behind them. In Athens the family of the Eumolpidae played a prominent part at the reorganisation of the Eleusinian festival under Marcus. His son Commodus conferred on the head of the clan of the Kerykes the Roman franchise, and from him descended the brave and learned Athenian, who, almost like Thucydides, fought with the Goths and then described the Gothic war (p.246). A contemporary of Marcus, the professor and consular Herodes Atticus, belonged to this same clan, and his court–poet sings of him, that the red shoe of the Roman patriciate well befitted the high–born Athenian, the descendant of Hermes and of Cecrops’s daughter Herse, while one of his panegyrists in prose celebrates him as Aeacides, and at the same time as a descendant of Miltiades and Cimon. But even Athens was far outbidden in this respect by Sparta; on several occasions we meet with Spartiates who boast of descent from the Dioscuri, Herakles, Poseidon, and of the priesthood of these ancestors hereditary for forty generations and more in their house. It is significant of this nobility, that it in the main presents itself only with the end of the second century; the heraldic draughtsmen who projected these genealogical tables cannot have been very punctilious as to vouchers either in Athens or in Sparta.

Language; archaism and barbarism.The same tendency appears in the treatment of the language or rather of the dialects. While at this time in the other Greek–speaking lands and also in Hellas the so–called common Greek, debased in the main from the Attic dialect, predominated in ordinary intercourse, not merely did the written language of this epoch strive to set aside prevalent faults and innovations, but in many cases dialectic peculiarities were again taken up in opposition to common usage, and here, where it was least of all warranted, the old particularism was in semblance brought back. On the statues which the Thespians set up to the Muses in the grove of Helicon, there were inscribed in good Boeotian the names Orania and Thalea, while the epigrams belonging to them, composed by a poet of Roman name, called them in good Ionic Uranie and Thaleie, and the non–learned Boeotians, if they knew them, like all other Greeks called them Urania and Thaleia. By the Spartans especially incredible things were done in this way, and not seldom more was written for the shade of Lycurgus than for the Aelii and Aurelii living at the time.179 Moreover, the correct use of the language at this period appears gradually losing ground even in Hellas; archaisms and barbarisms often stand peacefully side by side in the documents of the imperial period. The population of Athens, much mixed with foreigners, has at no time specially distinguished itself in this respect,180 and, although the civic documents keep themselves comparatively pure, yet from the time of Augustus the gradually increasing corruption of language here also makes itself felt. The strict grammarians of the time filled whole books with the linguistic slips with which the much celebrated rhetorician Herodes Atticus just mentioned and the other famous school–orators of the second century were chargeable,181 quite apart from the quaint artificiality and the affected point of their discourse. But barbarism proper as regards language and writing set in in Athens and all Greece, just as in Rome, with Septimius Severus.182

The public career.The bane of Hellenic existence lay in the limitation of its sphere; high ambition lacked a corresponding aim, and therefore the low and degrading ambition flourished luxuriantly. Even in Hellas there was no lack of native families of great wealth and considerable influence.183 Great families. The country was doubtless on the whole poor, but there were houses of extensive possessions and old–established prosperity. In Sparta, for example, that of Lachares occupied, from Augustus down at least to the time of Hadrian, a position which in point of fact was not far removed from that of a prince. Antonius had caused Lachares to be put to death for exaction. Thereupon his son Eurycles was one of the most decided partisans of Augustus, and one of the bravest captains in the decisive naval battle, who had almost made the conquered general personally a captive; he received from the victor, among other rich gifts as private property, the island of Cythera (Cerigo). Later he played a prominent and hazardous part not merely in his native land, over which he must have exercised a permanent presidency, but also at the courts of Jerusalem and Caesarea, to which the respect paid to a Spartiate by the Orientals contributed not a little. For that reason brought to trial several times at the bar of the emperor, he was at length condemned and sent into exile; but death seasonably withdrew him from the consequences of the sentence, and his son Lacon came into the property, and substantially also, though in a more cautious form, into the position of power of his father. The family of the often–mentioned Herodes had a similar standing in Athens; we can trace it going back through four generations to the time of Caesar, and confiscation was decreed, just as over the Spartan Eurycles, over the grandfather of Herodes on account of his exorbitant position of power in Athens. The enormous landed estates which the grandson possessed in his poor native country, the extensive spaces applied for the sake of erecting tombs for his boy–favourites, excited the indignation even of the Roman governors. It may be presumed that there were powerful families of this sort in most districts of Hellas, and, while they as a rule decided matters at the diet of the province, they were not without connections and influence even in Rome. The career of state–offices. But although those legal bars, which excluded the Gaul and the Alexandrian even after obtaining the franchise from the imperial senate, hardly stood in the way of those Greeks of rank, but on the contrary the political and military career which offered itself to the Italian likewise stood open in law to the Hellenes, these in point of fact entered only at a late period and to a limited extent into the service of the state; partly, doubtless, because the Roman government of the earlier imperial period reluctantly admitted the Greeks as foreigners, partly because these themselves shunned the translation to Rome that was associated with entrance on this career, and preferred to be the first at home instead of one the more among the many senators. It was the great–grandson of Lachares, Herclanus, who first in the time of Trajan entered the Roman senate; and in the family of Herodes probably his father was the first to do so about the same time.184

Personal service of the emperor.The other career, which only opened up in the imperial period—the personal service of the emperor—gave doubtless in favourable circumstances riches and influence, and was earlier and more frequently pursued by the Greeks; but, as most, and the most important, of these positions were associated with service as officers, there seems to have been for a considerable time a de facto preference of Italians for these places, and the direct way was here also in some measure barred to Greeks. In subordinate positions Greeks were employed at the imperial court from the first and in great numbers, and they often in circuitous ways attained to trust and influence; but such persons came more from the Hellenised regions than from Hellas itself, and least of all from the better Hellenic houses. For the legitimate ambition of the young man of ancestry and estate there was, if he was a Greek, but limited scope in the Roman empire.

Municipal administration.There remained to him his native land, and in its case to be active for the common weal was certainly a duty and an honour. But the duties were very modest and the honours more modest still. “Your task,” Dio says further to his Rhodians, “is a different one from that of your ancestors. They could develop their ability on many sides, aspire to government, aid the oppressed, gain allies, found cities, make war and conquer; of all this you can no longer do aught. There is left for you the conduct of the household, the administration of the city, the bestowal of honours and distinctions with choice and moderation, a seat in council and in court, sacrifice to the gods and celebration of festivals; in all this you may distinguish yourselves above other towns. Nor are these slight matters: the decorous bearing, the care for the hair and beard, the sedate pace in the street, so that the foreigners accustomed to other things may by your side unlearn their haste, the becoming dress, even, though it may seem ridiculous, the narrow and neat purple–border, the calmness in the theatre, the moderation in applause—all this forms the honour of your town; therein more than in your ports and walls and docks appears the good old Hellenic habit; and thereby even the barbarian, who knows not the name of the city, perceives that he is in Greece and not in Syria or Cilicia.” All this was to the point; but, if it was no longer required now of the citizen to die for the city of his fathers, the question was at any rate not without warrant, whether it was still worth the trouble to live for that city.Plutarch’s view of its duties. There exists a disquisition by Plutarch as to the position of the Greek municipal official in his time, wherein he discusses these relations with the fairness and circumspection characteristic of him. The old difficulty of conducting the good administration of public affairs by means of majorities of the citizens—uncertain, capricious, often bethinking them more of their own advantage than of that of the commonwealth—or even of the very numerous council–board—the Athenian numbered in the imperial period first 600, then 700, later 750 town–councillors—subsisted now, as formerly: it is the duty of the capable magistrate to prevent the “people” from inflicting wrong on the individual burgess, from appropriating to themselves unallowably private property, from distributing among them the municipal property—tasks which are not rendered the easier by the fact that the magistrate has no means for the purpose but judicious admonition and the art of the demagogue, that it is further suggested to him not to be too punctilious in such things, and, if at a city festival a moderate largess to the burgesses is proposed, not to spoil matters with the people on account of such a trifle. But in other respects the circumstances had entirely changed, and the official must learn to adapt himself to things as they are. First of all he has to keep the powerlessness of the Hellenes present at every moment to himself and to his fellow–citizens. The freedom of the community reaches so far as the rulers allow it, and anything more would doubtless be evil. When Pericles put on the robes of office, he called to himself not to forget that he was ruling over free men and Greeks; to–day the magistrate has to say to himself that he rules under a ruler, over a town subject to proconsuls and imperial procurators, that he can and may be nothing but the organ of the government, that a stroke of the governor’s pen suffices to annul any one of his decrees. Therefore it is the first duty of a good magistrate to place himself on a good understanding with the Romans, and, if possible, to form influential connections in Rome, that these may benefit his native place. It is true that the upright man warns urgently against servility; in case of need the magistrate ought courageously to confront the bad governor, and the resolute championship of the community in such conflicts at Rome before the emperor appears as the highest service. In a significant way he sharply censures those Greeks who—quite as in the times of the Achaean league—call for the intervention of the Roman governor in every local quarrel, and urgently exhorts them rather to settle the communal affairs within the community than by appeal to give themselves into the hands, not so much of the supreme authority, as of the pleaders and advocates that practise before it. All this is judicious and patriotic, as judicious and patriotic as was formerly the policy of Polybius, which is expressly referred to. At this epoch of complete world–peace, when there was neither a Greek nor a barbarian war anywhere, when civic commands, civic treaties of peace and alliances belonged solely to history, the advice was very reasonable to leave Marathon and Plataeae to the schoolmasters, and not to heat the heads of the Ecclesia by such grand words, but rather to content themselves with the narrow circle of the free movement still allowed to them. The world, however, belongs not to reason but to passion. The Hellenic burgess could still even now do his duty towards his fatherland; but for the true political ambition striving after what was great, for the passion of Pericles and Alcibiades, there was in this Hellas—apart perhaps from the writing–desk—nowhere any room; and in the vacant space there flourished the poisonous herbs which, wherever high effort is arrested in the bud, harden and embitter the human heart.

Games.Therefore Hellas was the motherland of the degenerate, empty ambition which was perhaps the most general, and certainly among the most pernicious, of the many sore evils of the decaying ancient civilisation. Here in the first rank stood the popular festivals with their prize competitions. The Olympic rivalries well beseemed the youthful people of the Hellenes; the general gymnastic festival of the Greek tribes and towns, and the chaplet plaited from the branches of the olive for the ablest runner according to the decision of the “Hellas–judges,” were the innocent and simple expression of the young nation as a collective unity. But their political development had soon carried them beyond this early dawn. Already in the days of the Athenian naval league, or at least of the monarchy of Alexander, that festival of the Hellenes was an anachronism, a childs’ play continued in the age of manhood; the fact, that the possessor of that olive wreath passed at least with himself and his fellow–citizens as holder of the national primacy, had nearly as much significance, as if in England the victors in the students’ boat races were to be placed on a level with Pitt and Beaconsfield. The extension of the Hellenic nation by colonising and Hellenising found, amidst its ideal unity and real disruption, its true expression in this dreamy realm of the olive–wreath; and the materialist policy of the time of the Diadochi thereupon gave itself, as was meet, but little trouble on the subject. But when the imperial period after its fashion took up the Panhellenic idea, and the Romans entered into the rights and duties of the Hellenes, then Olympia remained or became the true symbol for the Roman “All–Hellas”; at any rate the first Roman Olympic victor appears under Augustus, and in the person of no less than Augustus’s stepson, the subsequent emperor Tiberius.185 The far from pure marriage–alliance, which Allhellenism entered into with the demon of play, converted these festivals into an institution as powerful and lasting as it was injurious in general, and especially for Hellas. The whole Hellenic and Hellenising world took part therein, sending deputies to them and imitating them; everywhere similar festivals destined for the whole Greek world sprang from the soil, and the zealous participation of the masses at large, the general interest felt in the individual competitors, the pride not merely of the victor but of his adherents and of his native land, made people almost forget what in the strict sense were the things contended for.

Universal interest in them.Not merely did the Roman government allow free scope to this rivalry in gymnastic and other competitions, but the empire took part in them; the right solemnly to fetch home the victor to his native city did not in the imperial period depend on the pleasure of the burgesses concerned, but was conferred on the individual agonistic institutes by imperial charter,186 and in this case also the yearly pension (s?t?s??) assigned to the victor was charged upon the imperial exchequer, and the more important agonistic institutes were treated directly as imperial institutions. This interest in games seized all the provinces as well as the empire itself; but Greece proper was always the ideal centre of such contests and victories. Here was their home on the Alpheus; here the seat of the oldest imitations, of the Pythia, Isthmia, and Nemea, still belonging to the great times of the Hellenic name and glorified by its classic poets, and no less of a number of more recent but richly equipped similar festivals, the Euryclea, which the just–mentioned lord of Sparta had founded under Augustus, the Athenian Panathenaea, the Panhellenia, endowed by Hadrian with imperial munificence and likewise celebrated at Athens. It might be matter for wonder that the whole world of the wide empire seemed to revolve round these gymnastic festivals, but not that the Hellenes above all got intoxicated over this rare cup of enchantment, and that the life of political quiet, which their best men recommended to them, was in the most injurious way disturbed by the wreaths and the statues and the privileges of the festal victors.

Municipal ambition.Civic institutions took a similar course, certainly in the empire as a whole, but again more especially in Hellas. When great aims and an ambition still existed there, in Hellas, just as in Rome, the pursuit of public offices and public honours had formed the centre of political emulation, and had called forth, along with much that was empty, ridiculous, mischievous, also the ablest and noblest services. Now the kernel had vanished and the husk remained; in Panopeus, in the Phocian territory, the houses were roofless, and the citizens dwelt in huts, but it was still a city, indeed a state, and in the procession of the Phocian communities the Panopeans were not wanting. These towns, with their magistracies and priesthoods, with their laudatory decrees proclaimed by herald and their seats of honour in the public assemblies, with the purple dress and the diadem, with statues on foot and on horseback, drove a trade in vanity and money–jobbing worse than the pettiest paltry prince of modern times with his orders and titles. There would not be wanting even amidst these incidents real merit and honourable gratitude; but generally it was a trade of giving and taking, or, to use Plutarch’s language, an affair as between a courtesan and her customers. As at the present day private munificence in the positive degree procures an order, in the superlative a patent of nobility, so it then procured the priestly purple and the statue in the market place; and it is not with impunity that the state issues a spurious coinage of its honours.

Its honours and their evils.As regards the scale of conducting such proceedings and the grossness of their forms the doings of the present day fall considerably behind those of the ancient world, as is natural, seeing that the seeming autonomy of the community, not sufficiently restrained by the idea of the State, bore unhindered sway in this domain, and the decreeing authorities throughout were the burgesses or the councils of petty towns. The consequences were pernicious on both sides; the municipal offices were given away more according to the ability to pay than according to the aptitude of the candidates; the banquets and largesses made the recipients none the richer, and often impoverished the donor; to the increased aversion for labour and the decay in the means of good families, this evil habit contributed its full share. The economy of the communities themselves also suffered severely under the spreading evil of adulation. No doubt the honours, with which the community thanked the individual benefactor, were measured in great part by the same rational principle of cheapness which governs at the present day similar decorative favours; and, when that was not the case, the benefactor frequently found himself ready, for example, personally to pay for the statue to be erected in his honour. But the same did not apply to the marks of honour which the community showed to foreigners of rank, above all to the governors and the emperors, and to the members of the imperial house. The tendency of the time to set value even on meaningless and enforced homage did not dominate the imperial court and the Roman senators so much as the circles of ambition in the petty town, but yet it did so in a very perceptible way; and, as a matter of course, the honours and the homage grew withal in the course of time through misuses to which they were put, and, further, in the same proportion as the worthlessness of the personages governing or taking part in the government. In this respect, as might be conceived, the supply of honours was always stronger than the demand for them, and those who correctly valued such marks of homage, in order to remain spared from it, were compelled to decline them, which seems to have been done often enough in individual cases,187 but seldom with consistency—for Tiberius, the small number of statues erected to him may perhaps be recorded among his titles to honour. The disbursements for honorary memorials, which often went far beyond the simple statue, and for honorary embassies,188 were a cancer, and became ever more so, in the municipal economy of all the provinces. But none perhaps expended uselessly sums so large in proportion to its slender ability to furnish them as the province of Hellas, the motherland of municipal honours as of rewards for the festal victor, and unexcelled at this period in one pre–eminence—that of menial humility and abject homage.

Trade and intercourse.That the economic circumstances of Greece were not favourable, scarce needs to be specially set forth in detail. The land, taken on the whole, was but of moderate fertility, the agricultural portions of limited extent, the culture of the vine on the mainland not of prominent importance, that of the olive more so. As the quarries of the famous marble—the shining white Attic and the green Carystian—belonged, like most others, to the domanial possessions, the working of them by imperial slaves tended little to benefit the population.

The most assiduous of the Greek districts from an industrial point of view was that of the Achaeans, where the manufacture of woollen stuffs, that had long existed, maintained its ground, and in the well–peopled town of Patrae numerous looms worked up the fine flax of Elis into clothing and head–dresses. Art and art–handiwork still continued chiefly in the hands of the Greeks; and of the masses in particular of Pentelic marble, which the imperial period made use of, no small portion must have been worked up on the spot. But it was predominantly abroad that the Greeks practised both; of the export of Greek art–products formerly so important there is little mention at this period. The city of the two seas, Corinth—the metropolis common to all Hellenes, constantly swarming with foreigners, as a rhetorician describes it—had the most stirring traffic. In the two Roman colonies of Corinth and Patrae, and, moreover, in Athens constantly filled by strangers seeing and learning, was concentrated the larger banking–business of the province, which, in the imperial period, as in the republican, lay largely in the hands of Italians settled there. In places too of the second rank, as in Argos, Elis, Mantinea in the Peloponnesus, the Roman merchants who were settled formed societies of their own, standing alongside of the burgesses. In general trade and commerce were at a low ebb in Achaia, particularly since Rhodes and Delos had ceased to be emporia for the carrying traffic between Asia and Europe, and the latter had been drawn to Italy. Piracy was restrained, and even the land–routes were tolerably secure;189 but withal the old happy times did not return. The desolation of the Piraeus has been already mentioned; it was an event when one of the great Egyptian corn ships once strayed thither. Nauplia, the port of Argos, the most considerable coast town of the Peloponnesus after Patrae, lay likewise desolate.190

Roads.It is in accordance with this state of things that virtually nothing was done for the roads of this province in the imperial period; Roman milestones have been found only in the immediate vicinity of Patrae and of Athens, and even these belong to the emperors of the end of the third and of the fourth century; evidently the earlier governments renounced the idea of restoring communications here. Hadrian alone undertook at least to make the equally important and short land–connection between Corinth and Megara—by way of the wretched pass of the “Scironian cliffs”—into a practicable road by means of huge embankments thrown into the sea.

Piercing of the Isthmus.The long–discussed plan of piercing the Corinthian isthmus, which the dictator Caesar had conceived, was subsequently attempted, first by the emperor Gaius and then by Nero. The latter even, on occasion of his abode in Greece, personally took the first step towards the canal, and caused 6000 Jewish captives to work at it for a series of months. In connection with the cutting operations resumed in our own day, considerable remains of these buildings have been brought to light, which show that the works were tolerably far advanced when they were broken off, probably not in consequence of the revolution that broke out some time afterwards in the West, but because here, just as with the similar Egyptian canal, in consequence of the difference of level that was erroneously assumed to exist between the two seas, there were apprehensions of the destruction of the island of Aegina and of further mischief on the completion of the canal. No doubt had this canal been completed, it would have shortened the course of traffic between Asia and Italy, but it would not have tended specially to benefit Greece itself.

Epirus.It has already been remarked (p.256) that the regions to the north of Hellas, Thessaly, and Macedonia, and at least from Trajan’s time Epirus, were in the imperial period separated administratively from Greece. Of these the small Epirot province, which was administered by an imperial governor of the second rank, never recovered from the devastation to which it had been subjected in the course of the third Macedonian war (ii.329)ii.309.. The mountainous and poor interior possessed no city of note and a thinly–scattered population. Augustus had endeavoured to raise the not less desolated coast by the construction of two towns—by the completion of the colony of Roman citizens already resolved on by Caesar in Buthrotum overagainst Corcyra, which, however, attained no true prosperity, and by the founding of the Nicopolis.Greek town Nicopolis, just at the spot where the headquarters had been stationed before the decisive battle of Actium, at the southernmost point of Epirus, about an hour and a half north of Prevesa, according to the design of Augustus, at once a permanent memorial of the great naval victory and the centre of a newly flourishing Hellenic life. This foundation was new in its kind as Roman.191 The words of a contemporary Greek poet, which we quote below, simply express what Augustus here did; he united the whole surrounding territory, southern Epirus, the opposite region of Acarnania with the island of Leucas, and even a portion of Aetolia into one urban domain, and transferred the inhabitants still left in the decaying townships there existing to the new city of Nicopolis, opposite to which on the Acarnanian shore the old temple of the Actian Apollo was magnificently renewed and enlarged.

Its character and privileges.A Roman city had never been founded in this way; this was the synoekismos of the successors of Alexander. Quite in the same way had king Cassander constituted the Macedonian towns Thessalonica and Cassandreia, Demetrius Poliorcetes the Thessalian town Demetrias, and Lysimachus the town of Lysimachia on the Thracian Chersonese out of a number of surrounding townships divested of their independence. In keeping with the Greek character of the foundation Nicopolis was, according to the intention of its founder, to become a Greek city on a great scale.192 It obtained freedom and autonomy like Athens and Sparta, and was intended, as already stated, to wield the fifth part of the votes in the Amphictiony representing all Hellas, and to do so, like Athens, without alternating with other towns (p.254). This new Actian shrine of Apollo was erected quite after the model of Olympia, with a quadriennial festival, which even bore the name of “Olympia” alongside of its own, had equal rank and equal privileges, and even its Actiads as the former had its Olympiads;193 the town of Nicopolis stood related to it like the town of Elis to the Olympian temple.194 Everything properly Italian was carefully avoided in the erection of the town as well as in the religious arrangements, however natural it might be to mould after the Roman fashion the “city of victory” so intimately associated with the founding of the empire. Whoever considers the arrangements of Augustus in Hellas in this connection, and especially this remarkable corner–stone, will not be able to resist the conviction that Augustus believed that a reorganisation of Hellas under the protection of the Roman principate was practicable, and wished to carry it out. The locality at least was well chosen for it, as at that time, before the foundation of Patrae, there was no larger city on the whole Greek west coast. But what Augustus may have hoped for at the commencement of his sole rule, he did not attain, and perhaps even subsequently abandoned, when he gave to Patrae the form of a Roman colony. Nicopolis remained, as the extensive ruins and the numerous coins show, comparatively populous and flourishing;195 but its citizens do not appear to have taken a prominent part in commerce and manufactures or otherwise. Northern Epirus, which, like the adjoining Illyricum bordering on Macedonia, was in greater part inhabited by Albanian tribes and was not placed under Nicopolis, continued during the imperial period in its primitive condition, which still subsists in some measure at the present day. “Epirus and Illyricum,” says Strabo, “are in great part a desert; where men are found, they dwell in villages and in ruins of earlier towns; even the oracle of Dodona,”—laid waste in the Mithradatic war by the Thracians (iii.312)iii.296.,—“is extinct like everything else.”196

Thessaly.Thessaly, in itself a purely Hellenic district as well as Aetolia and Acarnania, was in the imperial period separated administratively from the province of Achaia and placed under the governor of Macedonia. What holds true of northern Greece applies also to Thessaly. The freedom and autonomy which Caesar had allowed generally to the Thessalians, or rather had not withdrawn from them, seem to have been withdrawn, on account of misuse, from them by Augustus, so that subsequently Pharsalus alone retained this legal position;197 Roman colonists were not settled in the district. It retained its separate diet in Larisa, and civic self–administration was left with the Thessalians, as with the dependent Greeks in Achaia. Thessaly was far the most fertile region of the whole peninsula, and still exported grain in the fourth century; nevertheless Dio of Prusa says that even the Peneus flows through waste land; and in the imperial period money was coined in this region only to a very small extent. Hadrian and Diocletian exerted themselves to restore the roads of the country, but they alone, so far as we see, of the Roman emperors did so.

Macedonia.Macedonia, as a Roman administrative district under the empire, was materially curtailed as compared with the Macedonia of the republic. Certainly, like the latter, it reached from sea to sea, inasmuch as the coast as well of the Aegean Sea from the region of Thessaly belonging to Macedonia as far as the mouth of the Nestus (Mesta), as of the Adriatic from the Aous198 as far as the Drilon (Drin), was reckoned to this district; the latter territory, not properly Macedonian but Illyrian land, but already in the republican period assigned to the governor of Macedonia (iii.44)iii.42., remained with the province also during the time of the empire. But we have already stated that Greece south of Oeta was separated from it. The northern frontier towards Moesia and the east frontier towards Thrace remained indeed in so far unaltered, as the province in the imperial period reached as far as the Macedonia proper of the republic had reached, viz. on the north almost as far as the vale of the Erigon, eastward as far as the river Nestus; but while in the time of the republic the Dardani and the Thracians, and all the tribes of the north and north–east adjoining the Macedonian territory, had to do with this governor in their circumstances of peaceful or warlike contact, and in so far it could be said that the Macedonian boundary reached as far as the Roman lances, the Macedonian governor of the imperial period bore sway only over the district assigned to him, which no longer bordered on neighbours half or wholly independent. As the defence of the frontier was transferred in the first instance to the kingdom of the Thracians which had come under allegiance to Rome, and soon to the governor of the new province Moesia, the governor of Macedonia was from the outset relieved of his command. There was hardly any fighting on Macedonian soil under the empire; only the barbarian Dardani on the upper Axius (Vardar) still at times pillaged the peaceful neighbouring province. There is no report, moreover, from this province of any local revolts.

Nationalities.From the more southerly Greek districts this—the most northerly—stood aloof as well in its national basis as in the stage of its civilisation. While the Macedonians proper on the lower course of the Haliacmon (Vistritza) and the Axius (Vardar), as far as the Strymon, were an originally Greek stock, whose diversity from the more southern Hellenes had no further significance for the present epoch, and while the Hellenic colonisation embraced within its sphere both coasts—on the west with Apollonia and Dyrrachium, on the east in particular with the townships of the Chalcidian peninsula—the interior of the province, on the other hand, was filled with a confused mass of non–Greek peoples, which must have differed from the present state of things in the same region more as to elements than as to results. After the Celts who had pushed forward into this region, the Scordisci, had been driven back by the generals of the Roman republic, the interior of Macedonia fell to the share especially of Illyrian stocks in the west and north, of Thracian in the east. Of both we have already spoken previously; here they come into consideration only so far as the Greek organisation, at least the urban, was probably introduced—as in the earlier,199 so also in the imperial period—among these stocks only in a very limited measure. On the whole, an energetic impulse of urban development never pervaded the interior of Macedonia; the more remote districts hardly reached—at least as in a real sense—beyond the village–system.

Greek polity.The Greek polity itself was not a spontaneous growth in this monarchical country, as it was in Hellas proper, but was introduced by the princes, who were more Hellenes than their subjects. What shape it had is little known; yet the civic presidency of politarchs uniformly recurring in Thessalonica, Edessa, Lete, and not met with elsewhere, leads us to infer a perceptible, and indeed in itself probable, diversity of the Macedonian urban constitution from that elsewhere usual in Hellas. The Greek cities, which the Romans found existing, retained their organisation and their rights; Thessalonica, the most considerable of them, also freedom and autonomy. There existed a league and a diet (??????) of the Macedonian towns, similar to those in Achaia and Thessaly. It deserves mention, as an evidence of the continued working of the memories of the old and great times, that still in the middle of the third century after Christ the diet of Macedonia and individual Macedonian towns issued coins on which, in place of the head and the name of the reigning emperor, came those of Alexander the Great. The pretty numerous colonies of Roman burgesses which Augustus established in Macedonia, Byllis not far from Apollonia, Dyrrachium on the Adriatic, on the other coast Dium, Pella, Cassandreia, in the region of Thrace proper Philippi, were all of them older Greek towns, which obtained merely a number of new burgesses and a different legal position, and were called into life primarily by the need of providing quarters in a civilised and not greatly populous province for Italian soldiers who had served their time, and for whom there was no longer room in Italy itself. The granting of Italian rights certainly took place only to gild for the veterans their settlement abroad. That it was never intended to draw Macedonia into the development of Italian culture is evinced, apart from all else, by the fact that Thessalonica remained Greek and the capital of the country. By its side flourished Philippi, properly a mining town, constituted on account of the neighbouring gold mines, favoured by the emperors as the seat of the battle which definitively founded the monarchy, and on account of the numerous veterans who took part in it and subsequently settled there. A Roman, not colonial, municipal constitution was obtained already in the first period of the empire by Stobi, the already mentioned most northerly frontier–town of Macedonia towards Moesia, at the confluence of the Erigon with the Axius, in a commercial as in a military point of view an important position, and which, it may be conjectured, had already in the Macedonian time attained to Greek polity.

Economy. Roads and levy.In an economic point of view little was done on the part of the state for Macedonia under the emperors; at least there is no appearance of any special care on their part for this province, which was not put under their own administration. The military road already constructed under the republic right across the country from Dyrrachium to Thessalonica, one of the most important arteries of intercourse in the whole empire, called forth renewed effort, so far as we know, only from emperors of the third century, and first from Severus Antoninus; the towns adjacent to it, Lychnidus on the Ochrida–lake and Heraclea Lyncestis (Bitolia), were never of much account. Yet Macedonia was, economically, better situated than Greece. It far excelled it in fertility; as still at present the province of Thessalonica is relatively well cultivated and well peopled, so in the description of the empire from the time of Constantius, at all events when Constantinople was already in existence, Macedonia is reckoned among the specially wealthy districts. If for Achaia and Thessaly our documents concerning the Roman levy are absolutely silent, Macedonia on the other hand was drawn upon, in particular for the imperial guard, to a considerable extent, more strongly than the most of the Greek districts—on which, no doubt, the familiarity of the Macedonians with regular war–service and their excellent qualifications for it, and probably also the relatively small development of the urban system in this province, had an important bearing. Thessalonica, the metropolis of the province, and its most populous and most industrial town at this time, represented likewise under various forms in literature, has also secured to itself an honourable place in political history by the brave resistance which its citizens opposed to the barbarians in the terrible times of the Gothic invasions (p.248).

Thrace.If Macedonia was a half–Greek, Thrace was a non–Greek land. Of the great but for us vanished Thracian stock we have formerly (p.207) spoken. Into its domain Hellenism came simply from without; and it will not be superfluous in the first instance to glance back and to set forth how often Hellenism had previously knocked at the gates of the most southerly region which this stock possessed, and which we still name after it, and how little it had hitherto penetrated into the interior, in order to make clear what was left for Rome here to overtake and what it did overtake.Philip and Alexander.Philip, the father of Alexander, first subjected Thrace, and founded not merely Calybe in the neighbourhood of Byzantium, but also in the heart of the land the town which thenceforth bore his name. Alexander, here too the precursor of Roman policy, arrived at and crossed the Danube, and made this stream the northern boundary of his empire; the Thracians in his army played by no means the least part in the subjugation of Asia. After his death the Hellespont seemed as though it would become one of the great centres of the new formation of states, and the wide domain from thence to the Danube200 as though it would become the northern half of a Greek empire, and would promise for the capital of Lysimachus, the former governor ofLysimachus.Thrace—the town of Lysimachia, newly established in the Thracian Chersonese—a like future as for the capitals of the marshals of Syria and Egypt. But this result was not attained; the independence of this kingdom did not survive the fall of its first ruler (281 B.C., 473 U.C.). In the century which elapsed from that time to the establishment of the ascendancy of Rome in the East, attempts were made, sometimes by the Seleucids, sometimes by the Ptolemies, sometimes by the Attalids, to bring the European possessions of Lysimachus under their power, but all of them without lasting result. Empire of Tylis. The empire of Tylis in the Haemus, which the Celts not long after the death of Alexander, and nearly at the same time with their permanent settlement in Asia Minor, had founded in the Moeso–Thracian territory, destroyed the seed of Greek civilisation within its sphere, and itself succumbed during the Hannibalic war to the assaults of the Thracians, who extirpated these intruders to the last man. Thenceforth there was not in Thrace any leading power at all; the relations subsisting between the Greek coast–towns and the princes of the several tribes, which would probably correspond approximately to those before Alexander’s time, are illustrated by the description which Polybius gives of the most important of these towns: “Where the Byzantines had sowed, there the Thracian barbarians reaped, and against these neither the sword nor money is of avail; if the citizens kill one of the princes, three others thereupon invade their territory, and, if they buy off one, five more demand the like annual payment.”

Later Macedonian rulers.The efforts on the part of the later Macedonian rulers to gain once more a firm footing in Thrace, and in particular to bring under their power the Greek towns of the south coast, were opposed by the Romans, partly in order to keep down the development of Macedonia’s power generally, partly in order not to allow the important “royal road” leading to the East—that along which Xerxes marched to Greece and the Scipios marched against Antiochus—to fall in all its extent into Macedonian hands. Already, after the battle at Cynoscephalae, the frontier–line was drawn nearly such as it thenceforth remained. The two last Macedonian rulers made several attempts, either directly to establish themselves in Thrace or to attach to themselves its individual rulers by treaties; the last Philip even gained over Philippopolis once more, and put into it a garrison, which, it is true, the Odrysae soon drove out afresh. Neither he nor his son succeeded in placing matters on a permanent footing; and the independence conceded by Rome to the Thracians after the breaking up of Macedonia destroyed whatever Hellenic germs might still be left there. Thrace itself became—in part already in the republican, and more decidedly in the imperial period—a Roman vassal–principality, and then in 46 a Roman province (p.211); but the Hellenising of the land had not passed beyond the fringe of Greek colonial towns, which in the earliest period had been established round this coast, and in course of time had sunk rather than risen. Powerful and permanent as was the hold of Macedonian civilisation on the East, as weak and perishable was its contact with Thrace; Philip and Alexander themselves appear to have reluctantly undertaken, and to have but lightly valued, their settlements in this land.201 Till far into the imperial period the land remained with the natives; the Greek towns that were still left along the coast, almost all on the decline, remained without any Greek land in their rear.

Greek towns in Thrace and on the Black Sea.This belt of Hellenic towns stretching from the Macedonian frontier to the Tauric Chersonese was of very unequal texture. In the south it was close and compact from Abdera onward to Byzantium on the Dardanelles; yet none of these towns held a prominent position in later times with the exception of Byzantium, which through the fertility of its territory, its productive tunny fisheries, its uncommonly favourable position for trade, its industrial diligence, and the energy of its citizens—heightened merely and hardened by its exposed situation—was enabled to defy even the worst times of Hellenic anarchy. Far more scantily had the settlements developed themselves on the west coast of the Black Sea; among those subsequently belonging to the Roman province of Thrace Mesembria alone was of some importance; among those subsequently Moesian Odessus (Varna) and Tomis (KÜstendje). Beyond the mouths of the Danube and the boundary of the Roman empire, on the northern shore of the Pontus, there lay amidst the barbarian land Tyra202 and Olbia; further on, the old and great Greek mercantile cities in what is now the Crimea—Heraclea or Chersonesus and Panticapaeum—formed a stately copestone.

Under Roman protection.All these settlements enjoyed Roman protection, after the Romans had become generally the leading power on the Graeco–Asiatic continent; and the strong arm, which often came down heavily on the Hellenic land proper, prevented here at least disasters like the destruction of Lysimachia. The protection of these Greeks devolved in the republican period partly on the governor of Macedonia, partly on the governor of Bithynia, after this became Roman; Byzantium subsequently remained with Bithynia.203 We may add that in the imperial period, after the erection of the governorship of Moesia and subsequently of that of Thrace, the supplying of protection devolved on these.

Protection and favour were granted by Rome to these Greeks from the first; but neither the republic nor the earlier imperial period made efforts for the extension of Hellenism.204 After Thrace had become Roman, it was divided into land–districts;205 and almost down to the end of the first century there is no record of the laying out of a town there, with the exception of two colonies of Claudius and Vespasian—Apri in the interior not far from Perinthus, and Deultus on the most northern coast.206 Philippopolis and other towns with civic rights. Domitian began by introducing the Greek urban constitution into the interior, at first for the capital of the country, Philippopolis. Under Trajan a series of other Thracian townships obtained like civic rights; Topirus not far from Abdera, Nicopolis on the Nestus, Plotinopolis on the Hebrus, Pautalia near KÖstendil, Serdica now Sofia, Augusta Traiana near Alt–Zagora, a second Nicopolis on the northern slope of Haemus,207 besides, on the coast, Traianopolis at the mouth of the Hebrus; further, under Hadrian Adrianopolis, the modern Adrianople. All these towns were not colonies of foreigners but polities of Greek organisation, composed after the model set up by Augustus in the Epirot Nicopolis; it was a civilising and Hellenising of the province from above downwards. A Thracian diet existed thenceforth in Philippopolis just as in the properly Greek provinces. This last offshoot of Hellenism was not the weakest. The country was rich and charming—a coin of the town Pautalia praises the fourfold blessing of the ears of grain, of the grapes, of the silver, and of the gold; and Philippopolis as well as the beautiful valley of the Tundja were the home of rose–culture and of rose–oil—and the vigour of the Thracian type was not broken. Here was developed a dense and prosperous population; we have already mentioned the largeness of the levy in Thrace, and few territories stand on an equality with Thrace at this epoch in the activity of the urban mints. When Philippopolis succumbed in the year 251 to the Goths (p.240), it is said to have numbered 100,000 inhabitants. The energetic part taken by the Byzantines in favour of the emperor of the Greek East, Pescennius Niger, and the several years’ resistance which the town even after his defeat opposed to the victor, show the resources and the courage of these Thracian townsmen. If the Byzantines here, too, succumbed and lost even for a season their civic rights, the time, for which the rise of the Thracian land paved the way, was soon to set in, when Byzantium should become the new Hellenic Rome and the chief capital of the remodelled empire.

Lower Moesia.In the neighbouring province of lower Moesia a similar development took place, although on a smaller scale. The Greek coast–towns, the metropolis of which, at least in the Roman period, was Tomis, were, probably on the constituting of the Roman province of Moesia, grouped as the “Five–cities–league of the left shore of the Black Sea,” or as it was also called, “of the Greeks,” that is, the Greeks of this province.Tomis and the Pontic Pentapolis.Later there was annexed to this league, as a sixth town, that of Marcianopolis, constructed by Trajan not far from the coast on the Thracian frontier, and organised, like the Thracian towns, after the Greek model.208 We have already observed that the camp–towns on the bank of the Danube, and generally the townships called into life by Rome in the interior, were instituted after the Italian model; lower Moesia was the only Roman province intersected by the linguistic boundary, inasmuch as the Tomitanian cities–league belonged to the Greek, the Danubian towns, like Durostorum and Oescus to the Latin, linguistic domain. In other respects essentially the same holds true of this Moesian cities–league, as was remarked regarding Thrace. We have a description of Tomis from the last years of Augustus, doubtless by one banished thither for punishment, but certainly true in substance. The population consists for the greater part of Getae and Sarmatae; they wear, like the Dacians on Trajan’s column, skins and trousers, long waving hair and unshorn beard, and appear in the street on horseback and armed with the bow, with the quiver on their shoulder, and the knife in their girdle. The few Greeks who are found among them have adopted the barbarian customs, including the trousers, and are able to express themselves as well or better in Getic than in Greek; he is lost, who cannot make himself intelligible in Getic, and no man understands a word of Latin. Before the gates rove predatory bands of the most various peoples, and their arrows not seldom fly over the protecting city–walls; he who ventures to till his field does it at the peril of his life, and ploughs in armour—at anyrate about the time of Caesar’s dictatorship; on occasion of the raid of Burebista, the town had fallen into the hands of the barbarians, and a few years before that exile came to Tomis, during the Dalmato–Pannonian insurrection, the fury of war had once more raged over this region. The coins and the inscriptions of that city accord well with these accounts, in so far as the metropolis of the “left–Pontic cities–league” in the pre–Roman period coined no silver, which several other of these towns did; and, in general, coins and inscriptions from the time before Trajan occur only in an isolated way. But in the second and third centuries it was remodelled and may be termed a foundation of Trajan with very much the same warrant as Marcianopolis, which likewise quickly attained to considerable development. The barrier formerly mentioned (p.227) in the Dobrudscha served at the same time as a protecting wall for the town of Tomis. Behind this wall commerce and navigation were flourishing. There was in the town a society of Alexandrian merchants with its own chapel of Serapis;209 in municipal liberality and municipal ambition the town was inferior to no Greek town of middle size; it was still even now bilingual, but in such a way that, alongside of the Greek language always retained on the coins, here on the border, where the two languages of the empire came into contact, the Latin is also often employed even in public monuments.

Tyra.Beyond the imperial frontier, between the mouths of the Danube and the Crimea, the Greek merchant had made few settlements on the coast; there were here only two Greek towns of note, both founded in remote times by Miletus, Tyra at the mouth of the river of the same name, the modern Dniester, and Olbia on the bay into which the Borysthenes (Dnieper) and the Hypanis (Bug) fall. The forlorn position of these Hellenes amidst the barbarians pressing around them, in the time of the Diadochi as well as during the earlier rule of the Roman republic, has already been described (iii.297)iii.282.. The emperors brought help. In the year 56, that is, in the exemplary beginning of Nero’s government, Tyra was annexed to the province of Moesia.Olbia.Of the more remote Olbia we possess a description from the age of Trajan;210 the town was still bleeding from its old wounds; the wretched walls enclosed equally wretched houses, and the quarter then inhabited filled but a small portion of the old considerable city–circuit, of which individual towers that were left stood far off in the desolate plain; in the temples there was no statue of the gods which did not bear traces of the hands of the barbarians; the inhabitants had not forgotten their Hellenic character, but they dressed and fought after the manner of the Scythians, with whom they were daily in conflict. Just as often as by Greek names, they designated themselves by Scythian, i.e. by those of Sarmatian stocks akin to the Iranians;211 in fact, in the royal house itself Sauromates was a common name. These towns were indebted doubtless for their very continued existence less to their own power than to the good–will or rather the self–interest of the natives. The tribes settled on this coast were neither in a position to carry on foreign trade from emporia of their own, nor could they dispense with it; in the Hellenic coast–towns they bought salt, articles of clothing and wine, and the more civilised princes protected in some measure the strangers against the attacks of the barbarians proper. The earlier rulers of Rome must have had scruples at undertaking the difficult protection of this remote settlement; nevertheless Pius, when the Scythians once more besieged them, sent to them Roman auxiliary troops, and compelled the barbarians to offer peace and furnish hostages. The town must have been incorporated directly with the empire by Severus, from whom onward Olbia struck coins with the image of the Roman rulers. As a matter of course this annexation extended only to the town–territories themselves, and it never was intended to bring the barbarian dwellers around Tyra and Olbia under the Roman sceptre. It has already been remarked (p.239) that these towns were the first which, presumably under Alexander († 235), succumbed to the incipient Gothic invasion.

Bosporus.If the Greeks had but sparingly settled on the mainland to the north of the Black Sea, the great peninsula projecting from this coast, the Tauric Chersonesus—the modern Crimea—had for long been in great part in their hands. Separated by the mountains, which the Taurians occupied, the two centres of the Greek settlement upon it were, at the western end the Doric free town of Heraclea or Chersonesus (Sebastopol), at the eastern the principality of Panticapaeum or Bosporus (Kertch). King Mithradates had at the summit of his power united the two, and here established for himself a second northern empire (iii.298), which then, after the collapse of his power, was left as the only remnant of it to his son and murderer Pharnaces. When the latter, after the war between Caesar and Pompeius, attempted to regain his father’s dominion in Asia Minor, Caesar had vanquished him (iv.439), and declared him to have forfeited also the Bosporan empire. Asander. In the meanwhile Asander, the governor left there by Pharnaces, had renounced allegiance to the king in the hope of acquiring the kingdom for himself by this service rendered to Caesar. When Pharnaces after his defeat returned to his Bosporan kingdom, he at first indeed repossessed himself of his capital, but ultimately was worsted, and fell bravely fighting in the last battle—as a soldier at least, not unequal to his father. The succession was contested between Asander, who was in fact master of the land, and Mithradates of Pergamus, an able officer of Caesar, whom the latter had invested with the Bosporan principality; both sought at the same time to lean for support on the dynasty heretofore ruling in the Bosporus and on the great Mithradates, inasmuch as Asander married Dynamis, the daughter of Pharnaces, while Mithradates, sprung from a Pergamene burgess–family, asserted that he was an illegitimate son of the great Mithradates Eupator—whether it was that this rumour determined the selection, or that it was put into circulation in order to justify it. As Caesar himself was called in the first instance to attend to more important tasks, arms decided between the legitimate and the illegitimate Caesarian, and once more in favour of the latter; Mithradates fell in combat, and Asander remained master in the Bosporus. In the outset—without doubt, because he had not the confirmation of the lord–paramount—he avoided assuming the name of king, and contented himself with the title of archon, borne by the older princes of Panticapaeum; but he soon procured, probably even from Caesar himself, the confirmation of his rule and the royal title.212 At his death (737–738 U.C.)17–16. he left his kingdom to his wife Dynamis. So strong was still the power of hereditary succession and of the name of Mithradates, that both a certain Scribonianus, who first attempted to occupy Asander’s place, Polemon.and after him king Polemon of Pontus, to whom Augustus promised the Bosporan kingdom, conjoined with the taking up of the dominion a marriage–alliance with Dynamis; moreover, the former asserted that he was himself a grandson of Mithradates, while king Polemon, soon after the death of Dynamis, married a granddaughter of Antonius, and consequently a kinswoman of the imperial house. After his early death—he fell in conflict with the Aspurgiani on the Asiatic coast—his children under age did not succeed him; and even with his grandson of the same name, whom the emperor Gaius reinstated, notwithstanding his boyish age, in the year 38, into the two principalities of his father, the Bosporan kingdom did not long remain. In his place the emperor Claudius called a real or alleged descendant of Mithradates Eupator, and in this house, apparently, the principality thenceforth continued.213

The Eupatorids.Extent of the Bosporan rule.While in the Roman state elsewhere the dependent principality disappears after the end of the first dynasty, and from Trajan’s time the principle of direct government is carried out through the whole extent of the Roman empire, the Bosporan kingdom subsisted under Roman supremacy down to the fourth century. It was only after the centre of gravity of the empire was shifted to Constantinople that this state became merged in the empire at large,214 in order to be soon thereafter abandoned by it and to become, at least in greater part, the prey of the Huns.215 The Bosporus, however, in reality was and continued to be more a town than a kingdom, and had more similarity with the town–districts of Tyra and Olbia than with the kingdoms of Cappadocia and Numidia. Here, too, the Romans protected only the Hellenic town Panticapaeum, and did not aim at enlargement of the bounds and subjugation of the interior any more than in Tyra and Olbia. To the domain of the prince of Panticapaeum belonged the Greek settlements of Theudosia on the peninsula itself, and Phanagoria (Taman) on the opposite Asiatic coast, but not Chersonesus216—or at least only somewhat as Athens belonged to the province of the governor of Achaia. The town had obtained autonomy from the Romans, and saw in the prince its immediate protector, not its sovereign; as a free town, too, in the imperial period, it never coined with the stamp either of king or emperor. On the mainland, not even the town which the Greeks called Tanais—a stirring emporium at the mouth of the Don, but hardly a Greek foundation—stood permanently under subjection to the Roman vassal–princes.217 Of the more or less barbarian tribes on the peninsula itself, and on the European and Asiatic coast southward from Tanais, probably only the nearest stood in a fixed relation of dependence.218

Military position of the Bosporus.The territory of Panticapaeum was too extensive and too important, especially for mercantile intercourse, to be left like Olbia and Tyra to the administration of changing municipal officials and a far distant governor; therefore it was entrusted to hereditary princes—a course further recommended by the circumstance that it might not seem advisable to transfer directly to the empire the relations which this region sustained to the surrounding tribes. The rulers of the Bosporan house, in spite of their Achaemenid pedigree and their Achaemenid mode of reckoning time, felt themselves thoroughly as Greek princes, and traced back their origin, after the good Hellenic fashion, to Herakles and the Eumolpids. The dependence of these Greeks on Rome—the royal in Panticapaeum, as the republican in Chersonesus—was implied in the nature of things, and they never thought of rising against the protecting arm of the empire; if once, under the emperor Claudius, the Roman troops had to march against an insubordinate prince of the Bosporus,219 yet withal this region itself, amidst the fearful confusion in the middle of the third century, which especially affected it, never broke away from the empire even when it was falling to pieces.220 The prosperous merchant–towns, permanently in need of military protection amidst a flux of barbaric peoples, held to Rome as the advanced posts to the main army. The garrison was doubtless chiefly raised in the land itself, and to create and manage it was beyond doubt the main task of the king of the Bosporus. The coins, which were struck on occasion of the investiture of such a king, exhibit doubtless the curule chair and the other honorary presents usual at such investiture, but also by their side shield, helmet, sword, battle–axe, and war–horse; it was no peaceful office which this prince undertook. The first of them, whom Augustus appointed, fell in conflict with the barbarians, and of his successors, e.g. king Sauromates, son of Rhoemetalces, fought in the first years of Severus with the Siracae and the Scythians—perhaps it was not quite without reason that he stamped his coins with the feats of Herakles. By sea, too, he had to be active, especially in keeping down the piracy which never ceased in the Black Sea (p.242); that Sauromates likewise is credited with having brought the Taurians to order and chastised piracy. Roman troops, however, were also stationed in the peninsula, perhaps a division of the Pontic fleet, certainly a detachment of the Moesian army; their presence even in small numbers showed to the barbarians that the dreaded legionary stood behind these Greeks. In another way still the empire protected them; at least in the later period there were regularly paid from the imperial chest to the princes of the Bosporus sums of money, of which they stood in need, in so far as the buying off of the hostile incursions by stated annual payments probably became a standing practice here—in what was not directly territory of the empire—still earlier than elsewhere.221

Position of this vassal–prince.That the centralisation of the government had its application also in reference to this prince, and he stood to the Roman Caesar on a footing not much different from that of the burgomaster of Athens, is in various ways apparent; it deserves mention that king Asander and the queen Dynamis struck gold coins with their name and their effigy, whereas king Polemon and his immediate successors, while retaining the right of coining gold, seeing that this territory as well as the adjoining barbarians were for long accustomed exclusively to gold currency, were induced to furnish their gold pieces with the name and the image of the reigning emperor. In like manner from Polemon’s time the prince of this land was at the same time the chief priest for life of the emperor and of the imperial house. In other respects the administration and the court retained the forms introduced under Mithradates after the model of the Persian grand monarchy, although the chief secretary (??????aate??) and the chief chamberlain (???????t??e?t??) of the court of Panticapaeum stood related to the leading court–officers of the great kings, as the enemy of the Romans Mithradates Eupator to his descendant Tiberius Julius Eupator, who, on account of his claim to the Bosporan throne, appeared as a suitor at Rome at the bar of the emperor Pius.

Trade and commerce in the Bosporus.This northern Greece remained valuable for the empire on account of its commercial relations. Though these at this epoch were doubtless less important than in earlier times,222 yet the mercantile intercourse continued very lively. In the Augustan period the tribes of the steppes brought slaves and skins,223 the merchants of civilisation articles of clothing, wine, and other luxuries to Tanais; in a still higher degree Phanagoria was the depÔt for the exports of the natives, Panticapaeum for the imports of the Greeks. Those troubles in the Bosporus in the Claudian age were a severe blow for the merchants of Byzantium. That the Goths began their piratic voyages in the third century by pressing the Bosporan vessels to lend them involuntary aid, has been already mentioned (p.244). It was doubtless in consequence of this traffic, indispensable for the barbarian neighbours themselves, that the citizens of Chersonesus maintained their ground even after the withdrawal of the Roman garrisons, and were able subsequently—when in Justinian’s time the power of the empire once more asserted itself in this direction—to return as Greeks into the Greek empire.