Chapter VII: Greek Europe (2)

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.]

Macedonia, as a Roman administrative district under the empire, was materially curtailed as compared with the Macedonia of the republic. Certainly, like the latter, it reached from sea to sea, inasmuch as the coast as well of the Aegean Sea from the region of Thessaly belonging to Macedonia as far as the mouth of the Nestus (Mesta), as of the Adriatic from the Aous[198] as far as the Drilon (Drin), was reckoned to this district; the latter territory, not properly Macedonian but Illyrian land, but already in the republican period assigned to the governor of Macedonia (iii. 44) {iii. 42.}, remained with the province also during the time of the empire. But we have already stated that Greece south of Oeta was separated from it. The northern frontier towards Moesia and the east frontier towards Thrace remained indeed in so far unaltered, as the province in the imperial period reached as far as the Macedonia proper of the republic had reached, viz. on the north almost as far as the vale of the Erigon, eastward as far as the river Nestus; but while in the time of the republic the Dardani and the Thracians, and all the tribes of the north and north-east adjoining the Macedonian territory, had to do with this governor in their circumstances of peaceful or warlike contact, and in so far it could be said that the Macedonian boundary reached as far as the Roman lances, the Macedonian governor of the imperial period bore sway only over the district assigned to him, which no longer bordered on neighbours half or wholly independent. As the defence of the frontier was transferred in the first instance to the kingdom of the Thracians which had come under allegiance to Rome, and soon to the governor of the new province Moesia, the governor of Macedonia was from the outset relieved of his command. There was hardly any fighting on Macedonian soil under the empire; only the barbarian Dardani on the upper Axius (Vardar) still at times pillaged the peaceful neighbouring province. There is no report, moreover, from this province of any local revolts.

[Sidenote: Nationalities.]

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

[Sidenote: Greek polity.]

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

[Sidenote: Economy. Roads and levy.]

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

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Thrace.]

[Sidenote: Philip and Alexander.]

[Sidenote: Lysimachus.]

[Sidenote: Empire of Tylis.]

If Macedonia was a half-Greek, Thrace was a non-Greek land. Of the great but for us vanished Thracian stock we have formerly (p. 207) spoken. Into its domain Hellenism came simply from without; and it will not be superfluous in the first instance to glance back and to set forth how often Hellenism had previously knocked at the gates of the most southerly region which this stock possessed, and which we still name after it, and how little it had hitherto penetrated into the interior, in order to make clear what was left for Rome here to overtake and what it did overtake. Philip, the father of Alexander, first subjected Thrace, and founded not merely Calybe in the neighbourhood of Byzantium, but also in the heart of the land the town which thenceforth bore his name. Alexander, here too the precursor of Roman policy, arrived at and crossed the Danube, and made this stream the northern boundary of his empire; the Thracians in his army played by no means the least part in the subjugation of Asia. After his death the Hellespont seemed as though it would become one of the great centres of the new formation of states, and the wide domain from thence to the Danube[200] as though it would become the northern half of a Greek empire, and would promise for the capital of Lysimachus, the former governor of Thrace--the town of Lysimachia, newly established in the Thracian Chersonese--a like future as for the capitals of the marshals of Syria and Egypt. But this result was not attained; the independence of this kingdom did not survive the fall of its first ruler (281 B.C., 473 U.C.). In the century which elapsed from that time to the establishment of the ascendancy of Rome in the East, attempts were made, sometimes by the Seleucids, sometimes by the Ptolemies, sometimes by the Attalids, to bring the European possessions of Lysimachus under their power, but all of them without lasting result. The empire of Tylis in the Haemus, which the Celts not long after the death of Alexander, and nearly at the same time with their permanent settlement in Asia Minor, had founded in the Moeso-Thracian territory, destroyed the seed of Greek civilisation within its sphere, and itself succumbed during the Hannibalic war to the assaults of the Thracians, who extirpated these intruders to the last man. Thenceforth there was not in Thrace any leading power at all; the relations subsisting between the Greek coast-towns and the princes of the several tribes, which would probably correspond approximately to those before Alexander's time, are illustrated by the description which Polybius gives of the most important of these towns: "Where the Byzantines had sowed, there the Thracian barbarians reaped, and against these neither the sword nor money is of avail; if the citizens kill one of the princes, three others thereupon invade their territory, and, if they buy off one, five more demand the like annual payment."

[Sidenote: Later Macedonian rulers.]

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

[Sidenote: Greek towns in Thrace and on the Black Sea.]

This belt of Hellenic towns stretching from the Macedonian frontier to the Tauric Chersonese was of very unequal texture. In the south it was close and compact from Abdera onward to Byzantium on the Dardanelles; yet none of these towns held a prominent position in later times with the exception of Byzantium, which through the fertility of its territory, its productive tunny fisheries, its uncommonly favourable position for trade, its industrial diligence, and the energy of its citizens--heightened merely and hardened by its exposed situation--was enabled to defy even the worst times of Hellenic anarchy. Far more scantily had the settlements developed themselves on the west coast of the Black Sea; among those subsequently belonging to the Roman province of Thrace Mesembria alone was of some importance; among those subsequently Moesian Odessus (Varna) and Tomis (Küstendje). Beyond the mouths of the Danube and the boundary of the Roman empire, on the northern shore of the Pontus, there lay amidst the barbarian land Tyra[202] and Olbia; further on, the old and great Greek mercantile cities in what is now the Crimea--Heraclea or Chersonesus and Panticapaeum--formed a stately copestone.

[Sidenote: Under Roman protection.]

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

[Sidenote: Philippopolis and other towns with civic rights.]

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

[Sidenote: Lower Moesia.]

[Sidenote: Tomis and the Pontic Pentapolis.]

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

[Sidenote: Tyra.]

[Sidenote: Olbia.]