CHAPTER VII.

GREEK EUROPE.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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."

[Sidenote: Achaia under the emperors.]

[Sidenote: Freed towns and Roman colonies.]

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:

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]

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: The decay of Hellas.]

[Sidenote: Decrease of the population.]

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. 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.

[Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Misgovernment of the free towns.]

[Sidenote: Administration of Athens.]

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. 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: The public career.]

[Sidenote: Great families.]

[Sidenote: The career of state-offices.]

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] 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. 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]

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Municipal administration.]

[Sidenote: Plutarch's view of its duties.]

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. 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 (σίτησις)

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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Epirus.]

[Sidenote: Nicopolis.]

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 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.

[Sidenote: 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]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: 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.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Macedonia.]