Chapter VII: Greek Europe (1)

[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.]