Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14/IX
IX
GREECE UNDER THE RULE OF ROME TO A.D. 14
After the settlement which followed the fall of Corinth in B.C. 146, Greece for the most part remained quietly obedient to its new masters. But the settlement itself was not the work of a day. The details involved long investigation and patient consideration. For some years to come there are traces in surviving inscriptions of awards made in regard to particular towns. Nor are there wanting indications of active resistance, especially to the limitation of the franchise which seems to have been everywhere required, even in states nominally free. For instance, an inscription exists giving a copy of a despatch from the proconsul of Macedonia to the magistrates and people of Dyme in Achaia condemning to death two men who had tried to abolish this property qualification, and, in order to secure that end, had set fire to the public records and registers. But such outbreaks were rare; there was doubtless a period of peace such as the country had not known before. Even those states which were numerically free could only use troops in the service of Rome or subject to an appeal to Rome. Thus a few years before (B.C. 152) the Athenians had ventured to make a raid on the territory of Oropus. The people of Oropus promptly appealed to the Roman Senate, and the Senate commissioned the government of Sicyon to assess the damages, and when the amount assessed proved to be beyond their means, the Athenians had to send commissioners to plead before the Senate for its reduction. It was on this occasion that they were represented by the heads of the three chief philosophical schools, Carneades of the new Academy, Critolaus the Peripatetic, and Diogenes the Stoic—a significant fact as showing the importance of the literary class in the city.
But though there was peace, it was in many cases the quiet of decay. Population, as already remarked, was dwindling, cities sank into villages, and poverty was everywhere apparent. Exceptions were generally those places which were on the line of route from West to East, such as Dyrrachium, Apollonia, Corcyra, and Patrae. Above all, the destruction of Corinth and the assignment of Delos to Athens as a free port, gave the Athenians considerable wealth and importance for a time. A series of inscriptions discovered at Delos by French archaeologists has disclosed a curious history of the commercial importance and activity of Delos. It was especially known for its market of slaves and bronzes. It was peopled by Athenian cleruchs, and the "Commissioner of Delos" (ἐπιμελήτης) was the most important official at Athens, and had the best residence in the Piraeus. But the profits earned at Delos and the still existing mines at Laurium were the only source of revenue. The harbour of the Piraeus was empty, and though there was a war minister (στρατηγὸς ἐπὶ τὰ ὅπλα) it was with difficulty that troops were collected to suppress a rising of slaves in Attica and Delos about B.C. 132, brought about probably, as the nearly contemporary rising in Sicily, by the poverty as much as by the harshness of masters.
Another hindrance to Hellenic prosperity was piracy. This had always existed in the Mediterranean even before the time of Homer. One of the professed purposes of the Confederacy of Delos of B.C. 476 had been to prevent its practice in the Ægean, and as long as the Athenian naval supremacy lasted it was kept in check. Its subsequent reappearance is testified by inscriptions recording thanks to those sovereigns or generals who had done anything to suppress it. The fleets of the kings of Pergamus, of Syria, the ships maintained by a sort of island confederation which was renewed in Delos after the death of Alexander, and those of Rhodes and her allies, all did something to abate this nuisance. But the fatal weakening of all these naval powers by the Roman policy after B.C. 146 had allowed piracy to break out again in an aggravated form. The number of the piratical ships constituted a formidable fleet, which swept round the coasts unhindered. Their chief haunts were, in the West, the islands fringing the Illyrian coast and the Balearic Islands; in the East, Crete and the coast of Cilicia. As years went on, and poverty in Greece became more marked, it seems that many Greeks who in earlier and better times would have been in the active service of their state drifted into this way of life. In spite of the mischief and loss which they caused, the profession was regarded with a curious tolerance as something hardly in itself dishonourable, and the various sovereigns were at times glad to avail themselves of the services of the pirates. It was not until well into the first century B.C. that the Romans seemed to wake to their responsibilities in regard to them, and to see that having practically taken over Greece in Europe and Asia it was their interest as well as their duty to put down this lawless trade. In the West, indeed, they had done something; the war with Queen Teuta and other princes (B.C. 229) had stopped for a time the Illyrian pirates; and in B.C. 123 the Balearic Islands were annexed on the ground of their giving shelter to piratical vessels. In the East for a long time the Romans did nothing, but their responsibilities were accumulating and could not be neglected.
The next great change in the status of a large district in the Hellenic world occurred in B.C. 133, when Attalus III.—the last sovereign of Pergamus—died after a brief and not very distinguished reign, leaving a will in which he bequeathed, as Roman writers put it briefly, his kingdom to the Romans. It is a natural reflection that a sovereign has no such power of transferring a people to another ruler. He cannot, except in special circumstances, even name his successor. Yet it is not more outrageous than the transference of whole nations from one sovereign to another by treaty without the people so transferred being consulted, as has often happened in modern Europe. We must remember, however, that the larger part of the kingdom of Pergamus had been taken by the Romans bodily from King Antiochus and annexed to Pergamus, equally without any regard to national sentiment. To most of the cities, which were administered by their own laws, it meant little more than a change of the exchequers into which their taxes were to be paid, and the occasional obligation of serving in a Roman rather than a Pergamene army. There would also be from time to time appeals to a Roman tribunal instead of to the Royal Court at Pergamus. But this would little affect the bulk of the people. An inscription found on the site of Pergamus, however, puts a somewhat different complexion upon this will. What Attalus did leave to the Romans was his personal property, including domain lands, factories, and slaves. This legacy was of immense value, because it seems that nearly all manufactories were in the king's hands. As for the people of Pergamus itself, he not only regarded it as remaining free, but left it the territories which he had won from hostile peoples. The object seems to have been to induce the Roman government in return to respect the liberty of the demos of Pergamus. This the Romans at first did, but they assumed that the tribute paid by the districts which they had annexed to Pergamus would now be paid to them and they collected it at once, though on a lower scale than had been paid to the King of Pergamus. And this arrangement would probably have gone on, and the Greek cities would have enjoyed internal independence, while paying a tax to the Roman exchequer. But the appearance of a pretender in the person of Aristonicus (a natural son of Attalus), who claimed the whole inheritance, upset this arrangement. He held out for three years and inflicted more than one defeat upon Roman commanders. When at length he was suppressed, the whole of the Pergamene territory, as well as the annexed districts of Mysia, Lydia, Phrygia, and Caria, were formed into one province of “Asia.” Thus a large number of Greek cities, each with a local history and constitution of its own, were placed in a position like that of the cities of European Greece. Some of them were made liberae civitates for special reasons, but the greater part were like cities in other provinces with local institutions, but subject to a tributum and to the jurisdiction of the propraetorial court.
The change does not seem to have interfered with their prosperity. Pergamus itself, from which branched the principal roads to other parts of Asia, remained rich and flourishing, and was the central city of the new as of the old government. The whole province contributed to the Roman exchequer by a tithe on produce, port dues or customs, and a payment for grazing on domain land. The burden of taxation, if fairly distributed and honestly collected, was probably less than in the times of Attalus. But the Roman governor and his retinue of legati, praefecti, and the rest, were expensive luxuries. They levied contributions for entertainment, cartage, forage, and other expenses, and exacted various percentages, some of them sanctioned perhaps by custom, but many of them absolutely illegal. Moreover, in their anxiety to propitiate their rulers, a sort of epidemic of servility seemed to set in upon the Hellenic world—laudatory inscriptions (which were cheap) were continually set up, as well as temples erected and complimentary embassies sent to Rome (which were both costly) testifying to the virtues and purity of governors who had probably already mercilessly fleeced the cities. Some cities also sent “voluntary” contributions to the aediles at Rome to defray the expenses of the games. Above all, after B.C. 123 the tithe and other dues were collected by companies of publicani, who purchased the contract from the censors at Rome. The purchase was effected by a competition between rival companies, who often therefore paid a heavy sum to the Exchequer, and consequently had, in order to avoid bankruptcy, to exact the last farthing from the taxpayers. The attempt to appeal against extortionate acts on the part of these publicani was seldom successful. The governor was often himself implicated by the taking of percentages, and the jury before whom such cases came in Rome were themselves equites (to which order all the publicani belonged), and interested either actually or potentially in maintaining the system. The expenses of a prosecution, with the necessary journey of witnesses, would be enormous, and the prospect of redress slight. There were instances, of course, of good and honest men as governors, but they ran the risk of political ruin at the hands of the equites if they interfered with the publicani. A notorious case was that of P. Rupilius Rufus, who was a legate of Q. Mucius Scaevola in B.C. 95. The rule of Scaevola himself was long remembered by the Asiatic Greeks, not only for its integrity, but for its encouragement of local rights and privileges. He seems to have been out of the reach of the equites, but his legate Rupilius, who had distinguished himself by repressing the extortion of the publicani, was prosecuted and condemned, and passed the rest of his life in exile. The system, however, lasted on till B.C. 48, and it involved besides its direct hardships the presence in the country of numerous Italian money-lenders and of bankers who found their opportunity in the necessities of states and individuals alike.
If we turn from material grievances to those of sentiment, we must note that the Roman and the Greek did not easily amalgamate in Greek lands. The Greek in Rome was both useful and agreeable, and most of the leading men found it convenient and pleasant to have educated Greeks as members of their household, not only to educate their children, but to supply themselves with the society they needed, to be friend, secretary, and the companion of leisure hours. We hear of this as early as the third century B.C., and with the increased interest in philosophy and art it became even more common. Nevertheless the average Roman despised the average Greek, and thought him shifty, supple, or false. And when he went into the Greek's own lands he felt it due to his dignity not. to be on too familiar terms with the “inferior people.” Even Cicero, writing to his brother Quintus, who was governing Asia (B.C. 60), says:—
“Among the Greeks themselves you must be on your guard against admitting close intimacies, except in the case of the very few, if such are to be found, who are worthy of ancient Greece. As things now stand, indeed, too many of them are untrustworthy, false, and schooled by long servitude in the arts of extravagant adulation. My advice is that these men should all be entertained with courtesy, but that close ties of hospitality or friendship should only be formed with the best of them: excessive intimacies with them are not very safe—for they do not venture to oppose our wishes—and they are not only jealous of our countrymen but of their own as well.”
We seem to hear an elderly Indian civilian discoursing to a junior in the service. Another extract from the same letter will show generally both the evils in the province and the sort of benefits that the Roman rule might confer if honestly administered. He is enumerating the good points in his brother's rule:—
“No new debt is being contracted by the states, while many have been relieved by you from a heavy and longstanding one. Several cities that had become dilapidated and almost deserted, of which one was the most famous state in Ionia, the other in Caria—Samos and Halicarnassus—have been given a new life by you. There is no party fighting, no civil strife in the towns: you take care that the government of the states is administered by the best class of citizens; brigandage is abolished in Mysia; murder sup- pressed in many districts; peace is established throughout the province; and not only the robberies usual on highways and in country places, but those more numerous and more serious ones in towns and temples, have been completely stopped; the fame, fortunes, and repose of the rich have been relieved of that most oppressive instrument of praetorial rapacity—vexatious prosecution: the expenses and tribute of the states are made to fall with equal weight on all who live in the territories of those states: access to you is as easy as possible: your ears are open to the complaints of all: no man's want of means or want of friends excludes him, I don't say from access to you in public or on the tribunal, but even from your house and chamber: in a word, through- out your government there is no harshness or cruelty—everywhere clemency, mildness, and kindness reign supreme.”
This ideal picture of the pax Romana is probably very unlike the real state of things under Ouintus Cicero or any one else. It rather serves to show us clearly what the evils of the system were. A lurid example of quite a different state of things is the anecdote which Cicero tells Atticus in regard to his own province of Cilicia in B.C. 51 [ad Att. v. 21; vi. 1]. When he arrived he found that a certain Scaptius, a praefectus under his predecessor Claudius, had been at Salamis in Cyprus with a squadron of cavalry, which he had employed to coerce the town councillors to pay a large sum of money which they had borrowed with interest at 48 per cent. He had shut them up in their council chamber so long that some had actually died of starvation. Cicero recalled Scaptius, refused to reappoint him as a praefectus, and when the case came before him refused to decree any payment beyond 12 per cent. But he found to his surprise that the real creditor was M. Brutus. Very strong pressure was put upon Cicero himself to secure the payment of the money, which he appears to have resisted as far as the heavy interest was concerned, but as he expected to be succeeded by a man connected with Brutus he expressed some doubt as to what would happen under a new régime.
The instances of extortion and cruelty might be multiplied from the speeches against Verres, the plunderer of Sicily, and against Piso of Macedonia. It is well perhaps to notice what may be said on the other side in favour of Roman administration. The first and most obvious is that the Romans did maintain peace, and that, except in cases of revenue and where the personal advantage of the proconsul came in, the administration of justice in the Roman courts was more equitable than that in the native or Greek tribunals. We even hear in regard to tax-collecting of some of the states assigned by Sulla to Rhodes petitioning the Senate that they might pay to Roman rather than Rhodian collectors. This, however, was an exception; and while, generally speaking, in the Greek towns the trading class was in favour of the Roman sway, the feelings of the majority was seen only too clearly when in B.C. 88 Mithradates, King of Pontus, suddenly called upon the Greeks in Asia to strike a blow at the Roman domination.
Mithradates VI., Eupator, held a kingdom origin- ally (between B.C. 313-280) carved out of Cappadocia. It had been extended by the successors of the founder partly by conquest, partly by Roman favour. He himself (B.C. 118-62) had pushed his power westward round the shores of the Black Sea, from Sinope on the south coast to the Crimea on the north, and eastward to the Euphrates. He was a man of considerable culture, and had made alliances with Greeks, especially with Athens, as controlling Delos and thereby the island confederacy, and surrounded himself with Greek officers. In B.C. 105 he began preparations for further annexations by a tour of inspection through Asia Minor, and presently made an arrangement with Nicomedes, King of Bithynia, for a joint invasion of Paphlagonia. This was the first of a series of encroachments and intrigues during the next seventeen years in which he was constantly thwarted by Roman officers or legates who ordered him to relinquish one plan after another. At last, towards the end of B.C. 89, the Roman government declared war. During the year B.C. 88 fortune was almost uniformly in favour of Mithradates, and two Roman imperators were being led about as prisoners in the king's train.
Immediately there was a movement throughout all the Greek cities, with some insignificant exceptions, in his favour; and later in the same year, B.C. 88, he issued instructions to the cities—now mostly controlled by his own officers, that all Latin-speaking residents should be put to death on a fixed day. The order was almost universally obeyed, and a massacre took place of almost unexampled horror, no respect being shown to sex, age, or character, or the protection of altar or sanctuary. From the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, of Asclepius at Pergamus, of Hestia at Caunes, of Concord at Tralles, the suppliants were torn away and slain. At Caunes children were killed in the presence of their mothers, wives in that of their husbands. At Adrymittium in Mysia, they were driven into the sea and drowned, at Tralles a Paphlagonian captain and soldiers were hired to carry out the order of death. The massacre, in fact, was an outburst of deadly vengeance for wrongs long silently borne and an indulgence of the long-pent-up anger of an oppressed people. In a few places the right of sanctuary was respected for a time, and some Italians managed to escape to Rhodes, which almost alone of the states in or near Asia held aloof from Mithradates, though it had many grievances against Rome. The loss of its Paraea (or territory on the mainland) and the diminution of its trade by the opening of Delos as a free port had been serious misfortunes, but the extension of its Italian trade had partly made up for these things, and at any rate the Rhodians did not feel sufficiently certain of the ultimate success of Mithradates or of any benefit likely to accrue to them from it. Their successful resistance to the blockade of the royal fleet did something towards saving the situation. For the movement was not confined to Asia. Athens—which had been distinguished by Roman favour, and had been allowed to retain some of its island empire—had yet been for some time past looking to Mithradates as a possible restorer of Hellenic independence. It had been on friendly terms with his ancestors and with the king himself—decreeing to him the usual honours of statues, gymnasia, and votive offerings. The Athenians were now instigated to join him by Aristion, a philosophic demagogue, who, being commissioned to visit Mithradates at Ephesus, sent home such glowing descriptions of the abilities, resources, and successes of the king, that when he returned accompanied by numerous slaves laden with gold, and wearing a ring engraved with a portrait of the king (who had a famous collection of gems), he was received as though he were a victorious general. His speech, dwelling on the oppressions of Rome, roused such enthusiasm that he was elected commander-in-chief, the friendship of Rome was renounced, and the abolition of the limited franchise decreed.
It was the old mistake of hoping for freedom from foreign intervention ; and this policy, adopted with such levity by the Athenians, was followed by the cities of the Peloponnese, Boeotia, and many other parts of Greece. Delos, that owed its commercial existence to Rome and was full of Italian men of business, almost alone held out, and was accordingly overrun by Archelaus, the general of Mithradates, who put Delians and Italians to the sword indiscriminately, sold women and children into slavery, and plundered the temples, which, as in other places, were used as banks. The Athenians were gratified by having half the spoil and seeing their “general” Aristion treated as an equal of the king's general. Nevertheless, they had to admit a royal garrison into the Piraeus, and at the beginning of B.C. 87 Mithradates was elected general-in-chief, after the precedent of Philip and Alexander. Athens, there- fore, practically became subject to the King of Pontus. The rest of Southern Greece submitted ; Chalcis was forcibly occupied, which involved the submission of all Euboea. Thespiae was the only state in Boeotia which did not follow the lead of Thebes; and the Mithradatic fleet sailed among the islands without meeting with any resistance. Once more Greece had found a champion of her liberties.
The nemesis was not long delayed. Sulla entered Greece with an army in the summer of B.C. 87, when the Pontic forces by sea and land had already sustained a check at the hand of the pro quaestor, Bruttius Sura, off Sciathus and in Boeotia. But Athens was now the headquarters of Pontic power in Greece, and upon Athens Sulla directed his attack. Southern Greece generally was let alone, as sure to fall to the power that commanded the pass of Thermopylae and held Athens. But a Pontic army overran Macedonia, which was almost denuded of troops, and was prepared, like Persian and Macedonian invaders of old, to march thence upon the Peloponnese. Meanwhile Athens was closely invested, and when it fell in the spring of B.C. 86, after many months of great suffering, the recuperation of seventy years was all undone. By Sulla's order a great part of its inhabitants was put to the sword; and though the rest were spared and the buildings left uninjured,[1] the ancient inhabitants were so much reduced and the new ones introduced were of such heterogeneous quality that the Athenian character was permanently modified, and much that was characteristic disappeared. The fall of the city was followed by that of the Piraeus, and in this case Sulla spared nothing. The docks and magazines were burnt, the fortifications were entirely destroyed; and from this the place never recovered. The famous letter of consolation to Cicero written by Sulpicius in B.C. 45 forms an eloquent comment upon the permanence of the ruin wrought by Sulla. “On my return voyage from Asia, while sailing from Aegina towards Megara, I began surveying the adjacent regions. Behind me was Aegina, in front Megara; on my right the Piraeus, on my left Corinth. All these towns were once upon a time eminently prosperous: they now lie before my eyes mere heaps of ruins.”[2]
This was not the end of the sufferings of Greece. Archelaus, the general of Mithradates, was in occupation of Phocis and Boeotia, and in the summer of B.C. 86 was defeated with great slaughter at Chaeroneia. He still, however, had command of the sea, and retreating to Chalcis carried on a series of piratical descents upon the coast of the Peloponnese and the western islands. It was not till Sulla's legate, Lucullus, had collected a fleet from Egypt, Rhodes, Cyprus, and other islands that the Romans were able to stop these piracies. Meanwhile Greece had to endure both them and the severities of Sulla, who not only punished those Athenian citizens who had remained during the Pontic occupation, but mulcted many other states. Half the territory which had been left to Thebes was now devoted to repay the treasures he had taken from the temples at Delphi, Olympia, and Epidaurus. Oropus—taken from Athens—was assigned in similar payment to the oracle of Amphiaraus in Boeotia, and works of art from many places were shipped to Rome. Among other valuables it is specially recorded that Sulla seized the library of Apellicon, containing the works of Aristotle and Theophrastus. The cowed inhabitants tried to propitiate him by paying him honours as a benefactor, and he left the Hellenic world full of his statues, his trophies, and his devastations.
The swift change of front on the part of the Greek cities in Asia was no less sudden and complete. The king made one more attempt to retain Greece. He sent an army of seventy thousand men under Dorilaus into Boeotia later in the same year (B.C. 86) which was defeated by Sulla at Orchomenus with such immense slaughter that the hold of Mithradates in Greece was completely destroyed. The effect in Asia was immediate. The Greek cities expelled their Pontic garrisons and declared for Rome. The movement had begun after the battle at Chaeroneia, for the yoke of Mithradates had been found to be no lighter than that of Rome. If he remitted taxes, he enforced military service, and incurred the resentment of the mercantile classes by a partial abolition of debts and the enfranchisement of slaves who had betrayed their masters. These measures, joined to some instances of severity, such as the deportation of the inhabitants of Chios, turned the feelings of the Greeks from him, and we have a series of inscriptions in Ephesus and elsewhere renouncing his authority and striving—by representing that they had acted under compulsion—to ingratiate themselves once more with Rome. The campaign or march of Flaccus and Fimbria, sent out to supersede Sulla, cleared Macedonia and Thrace as far as Byzantium of the enemy and carried victory into Bithynia (B.C. 85-4). The appearance of the fleet collected by Lucullus then enabled Sulla (who declined to be superseded) to negotiate with Mithradates, who, by the treaty of Delium (B.C. 84), agreed to evacuate Roman Asia and to restore the inhabitants whom he had removed from Chios and Macedonia.
The results to Asiatic Greece were deplorable. Sulla treated the province with great severity, especially, of course, those states which had been prominent in joining Mithradates. Some few were rewarded for loyalty by being granted “freedom”—such as Ilium, Chios, Lycia, Salonike, Magnesia ad Sipylum, and Rhodes. But not only were some of the rest given up to pillage, as Iasos, Samos, and Clazomenae, but in all of them Roman garrisons were stationed, and any sign of resistance led to the destruction of walls and the massacre or enslavement of the inhabitants. Upon all alike was imposed a fine equal to the taxation of five years. “The cities,” says Appian, “oppressed by poverty, borrowed the money at high rates of interest or mortgaged their theatres, gymnasiums, walls, harbours, and every other kind of public property, being pressed for payment by the soldiers.” Moreover, the withdrawal of Sulla's main army and fleet. left them a prey to the pirates, who had been fostered and employed by Mithradates, and now grew bolder and more outrageous than ever, not confining their attacks to ships, but seizing harbours, forts, and cities, overrunning islands and plundering temples. Sulla therefore, left Greece and Asia in a pitiable plight, though once more obedient. The only place that had not given in was Mitylene, which did not surrender till five years later (B.C. 79), when it was taken and plundered by Thermus.
Nothing effective was done to put down piracy for nearly twenty years, and meanwhile the question of the government of Bithynia, whose last sovereign Nicomedes on his death (B.C. 79) left the Romans his heirs, gave rise to another war with Mithradates (B.C. 74–63), which, however, did not much affect Hellenic Asia, except the cities on the Propontis and Euxine, and especially Cyzicus, which had to stand a long siege. Lucullus, who commanded in this war, spent the winter of B.C. 71–70 in Ephesus in reorganising the finances of many of the Greek cities, now overburdened with debt, by cutting down the interest to 12 per cent, which, according to the edict of several praetors, was the highest rate that the Roman courts would recognise. He also prevented debtors from being deprived of the whole of their property. These measures were doubtless a great relief, but their necessity shows how quickly the Roman moneylender had regained his footing in the province. Careful governors mitigated the evil by refusing to nominate any man engaged in business in the province (negotiator) as a praefectus. But others were less scrupulous, and the deplorable result has been already illustrated in the case of Salamis in Cyprus.
The next event of importance to the Greek world was Pompey's suppression of the pirates B.C. 67–66) and his settlement of the East after the death of Mithradates (B.C. 63). These two things contributed largely to make European and Asiatic Greece what they were when the Empire began. Some partial attempts to check piracy in the Mediterranean had been already made by P. Servilius Isauricus in Cilicia B.C. 74; and by Q. Caecilius Metellus when praetor in Sicily, B.C. 71–70. But C. Antonius had failed (apparently from corruption) in Crete (B.C. 74), and when Metellus undertook the task in B.C. 68–7 he seems to have, to a great extent, depopulated the island, which henceforth was held as a Roman province, either separately or in conjunction with Greece. In B.C. 67 Pompey received a wide commission, giving him absolute power for three years over the Mediterranean and 50 miles inland, with 24 legates, 500 ships, and the right of raising 120,000 men as soldiers or sailors, with 500 horsemen, for the express purpose of destroying piracy. He performed his mission with marvellous rapidity. It may be, as has been said, that he was too lenient, and that the evil was only in abeyance after his six months' campaign. He certainly treated the pirates not as mere ruffians beyond the pale of law, but rather as a population driven to this way of life by want, and, accordingly, found settlements and lands for them at Dyme in Achaia and in Cilicia. But for the time, at any rate, the success was so complete and the relief so clearly marked by the fall in the price of provisions that he was not only regarded by the Roman people as their greatest and most indispensable general, but was looked up to in Greece as the greatest of the Romans, and honoured as a benefactor, and in some cases as a second founder.[3] This was the case in an increased degree at the end of the Mithradatic war, to which he was appointed in B.C. 66, with the absolute power of settling affairs in Phrygia, Lycaonia, Galatia, Cappadocia, Colchis, and Armenia. These districts, though including some Hellenic or semi-Hellenic cities, cannot be reckoned as Greece. But his settlement of affairs in Asia generally affected the interests of many Greeks, especially in the reduction of Syria to the form of a province. His plan was not to destroy, but rather to strengthen existing liberties or privileges. He, however, assessed the tribute with greater care, so as to include many cities which up to this time, from one cause or another, had escaped; and he surrounded the Greek communities in Asia as a whole with a number of subordinate sovereigns, who owed their position to Rome, and were really forced in many ways to act in obedience to Roman magistrates. It is significant that though Pompey deservedly had a high character for honour and disinterestedness, yet he had vast sums of money invested in loans to many of these subordinate sovereigns, whose establishment was to depend upon his recommendation to the Senate and upon the Senate's confirmation of his acta. It is as though a governor-general of India were to make private advances to a Rajah whom he was supporting in his royalty by British forces. Nor under Pompey did the flow of gold and works of art from Greece into Italy cease. Yet the general result of his five years in the East was beneficial to Greece, and some states had particular causes of gratitude to him. Thus, besides restoring Mitylene to freedom, he presented Athens with fifty talents for the restoration of the city; visited Rhodes and confirmed its privileges; and did so much for the merchants at Delos that they formed a club—Pompeiastae—to keep alive the memory of his victories and his services. Pompey's personal integrity, the mildness and equity of his administration of justice, helped, with his success in arms, to make his name favourably known in Asia and Greece, just as we are told that it was respected among the Sicilian Greeks in B.C. 82. “He was one,” says Cicero, “by whose valour the Roman people were more dreaded among foreign nations, by whose justice were more beloved.”
It was no wonder, then, that in the next occasion of the Greeks taking active part in military affairs (the civil war of B.C. 49–48) they were generally found on the side of Pompey rather than of Caesar. The former obtained recruits from Ionia, Macedonia, Boeotia, Athens, Sparta, and other parts of the Peloponnese, and many cities in Greece were occupied by his troops. Consequently while Caesar was person- ally engaged with Pompey in the early part of B.C. 48, his officers had to undertake a kind of conquest of Greece. It was accomplished apparently for the most part without bloodshed and with little serious resistance. Aetolia, Acarnania, and Amphilochia gave in their adherence at once, as did Delphi, Thebes, and Orchomenus. In Thessaly there was a division of opinion, for Pompey's father-in-law, Metellus Scipio, coming from Syria with troops, occupied Larisa and the line of the Via Egnatia, which the Romans had constructed from Apollonia on the west coast to Thessalonika on the east. The Peloponnesians blocked the Isthmus of Corinth against Caesar's legate, Fufius Calenus, and Athens closed her gates. But the Piraeus—now an open town—was occupied in Caesar's interest. After the victory of Pharsalia, however (September, B.C. 48), there was a sudden change. Megara, indeed, held out and was taken by force, and many of its citizens slaughtered or sold into slavery. But the Athenians at once submitted, and sent envoys to seek for pardon, which Caesar granted easily, with the remark: “How often is the glory of your ancestors to save you?”—and the humbled people were fain to erect his statue as their “saviour and benefactor.”[4] Calenus then went to Patrae, which made no resistance, and the whole of the Peloponnese fell into his hands. He remained in military occupation till Caesar's return from Alexandria in the autumn of B.C. 47, when Greece was put as a separate province under the rule of an eminent lawyer, Servius Sulpicius Rufus. This arrangement, as we shall see, was at first only temporary, but the appointment of Sulpicius seems to have been meant to be a measure of conciliation. He had been an anti-Caesarian, but probably had not actually been engaged in the war, having retired to Samos, while his son was actually serving on Caesar's staff. He was a man of learning, and would have some sympathy with Greek ideas, while his legal training would incline him to follow the precedent of Scaevola in Asia by respecting the local laws and rights of jurisdiction in the cities.
The end of the Alexandrine war, which left Caesar practically master of Egypt, though it was still nominally independent, was followed by a visitation of Greek cities in Asia. The fervour of their new allegiance or servility is again illustrated by inscriptions. At Ephesus, in the name of council and people “and the other Greek cities of Asia,” he is styled “descendant of Ares and Aphrodite, a glorious god and common saviour of human life.” Even the people of Mitylene who so lately had styled Pompey their benefactor and founder were fain to seek Caesar's friendship and favour.[5] Caesar had already in his first consulship (B.C. 59) benefited the provinces by passing a law to limit the amount of requisition to be made by a governor and his staff: his actual benefits now were rather in the restoration of order and peace than in more palpable ways. But in Asia he abolished the system of farming the revenue by Roman publicani, fixing the amount to be paid by each state, and leaving it to be levied by native or Greek collectors. He also placed a colony of veterans in Corinth, which quickly regained something of its old prosperity, and he projected the cutting of a canal across the isthmus—a work which, started a hundred years later by Nero, has only been accomplished within the last few years. The liberties and privileges of the cities he seems to have left much as he found them. But just before his death he seems to have arranged that Greece should be for three years at least united to Macedonia, under the rule of Marcus Brutus, at any rate, so far as it had always been under the pro-consul of Macedonia.
In the renewed civil war of B.C. 43–2 Athens and other parts of Greece once more committed themselves to the losing side. It was from Athens that Marcus Brutus started to take over his Macedonian province, and from which he drew many recruits. But when, after the battles of Philippi (B.C. 42, November) Antony took over the eastern part of the Empire, he visited Greece without apparently inflicting any punishment. He affected the fashionable philhellenism, attended Greek games and literary competitions, was initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries, singled Athens out for special bounties, as well as restoring to her Aegina and other islands, and contributed liberally to the temple at Delphi. Greece as a province was reunited to Macedonia and placed under the government of L. Censorinus. When Antony crossed from Greece to Asia he was received with extravagant compliments and every kind of adulation and entertainment, the Greek states once more trying to excuse themselves for the assistance which they had rendered to the beaten party. Though the states now suffered severely in money, for Antony exacted a second tributum for the year, Brutus and Cassius having already collected one, he seems to have been willing to listen to remonstrances and not to have been harsh in exacting the tax. Nor did his rearrangements in Asia show any jealousy of Greek nationalities. The Lycian confederacy was relieved of tribute; Rhodes was strengthened by the attribution of Andros, Tenos, and Naxos, and some territory in Caria; Laodicea and Tarsus were made free cities. Later on, however, when his infatuation with Cleopatra and his quarrel with Octavian had turned his thoughts to the establishment of an Eastern Empire, with Alexandria as its Rome, he began the practice of robbing Greek towns and temples in Asia for the adornment of Alexandria, removing among other things the famous library at Pergamus to make up for the partial destruction by fire of the Alexandrian books during Caesar's occupation.
Yet on the whole, during Antony's Eastern imperium (B.C. 42–32) Greece itself enjoyed complete repose. The outlying semi-hellenistic countries—Syria and Coele-Syria, Cyprus, Cilicia, and Cyrene—were treated by him as at his disposal to be parcelled out into kingdoms for his or Cleopatra's children, or his own partisans. It was the Western Hellas of Sicily that suffered most, being held for several years by Sextus Pompeius—half-sovereign, half-pirate—and becoming the scene of many military operations. After the treaty of Misenum (B.C. 39) the Peloponnese was to be handed over to Pompeius, though it seems never to have really passed into his hands; but until his final defeat in B.C. 36 its coasts, like those of Italy itself, were constantly subject to attacks from his piratical fleets.
In the last scene of the civil war, the struggle between Augustus and Antony, which ended at Actium B.C. 31, Greece was again for the most part on the losing side, and again suffered as an enemy's country. Previous to Actium many coast towns had been forcibly occupied by Agrippa; but after the victory of Augustus the Greeks everywhere hastened to pay court to the conqueror. A temple in his honour was erected at Pergamus, statues set up at Olympia (ἀρέτης ἕνεκεν καὶ εὐνοίας) and in other places; and there are traces during his residence at Samos in the winter of B.C. 31 and again in B.C. 30 of his having taken various measures for restoring order and prosperity in the Greek towns of Asia. Certain cities in Crete were rewarded by being made free. He restored the monuments in Ephesus, Samos, and elsewhere, which had been taken away by Antony and Cleopatra, and he is said generally to have “ordered things” in Greece, though few details can be ascertained. He seems to have meditated establishing new centres of Greek life, though he visited Athens without any sign of disfavour and was initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries. The new colonies were to be Nicopolis, near Actium, to which he compelled various people in the neighbourhood to migrate, insisting that it should be admitted to the Amphictyonic League; and Patrae, with which also he united several townships in the same district. This policy of founding colonies in the provinces was extended to other parts of the Hellenic world, to Macedonia (as Philippi and Dyrrachium), to Asia (as Alexandrea Troas), to Syria (as Berytum), to Pisidia (as Antioch). It was not, however, till the division of the provinces in B.C. 27 between Augustus and the Senate that Greece seems to have become definitely a separate province (Senatorial) under the official title of Achaia. This name has had a variety of signification—at one time confined to the district on the north of Peloponnesus, then embracing the whole of the Peloponnesus, and then again confined to the territories of the Achaean League, after Sparta and Corinth had been separated from it. From this time it means the Roman Province, which included all of what we call Greece, except parts of Epirus and Thessaly, which were included in Macedonia, and it was governed by a propraetor (called also proconsul), whose official residence was Corinth.[6]
With the reduction of Egypt into the form of a Roman province (though with peculiar conditions that made it almost a private domain of the Emperor) disappeared the last of the semi-hellenic dynasties bordering on the Mediterranean, which in the previous century had been an actual Greek Power, controlling the Thracian Chersonese and the Cyclades. One more centre of Hellenic culture was to have its destinies shaped by Western influences.
The second visit of Augustus to the East (B.C. 21-19) was of somewhat more importance to Greece. Beginning with Sicily, he strengthened Syracuse and other cities by colonies of veterans, which, how- ever, must have done much to lessen their Hellenic character. In Greece proper, besides his colonies of Nicopolis and Patrae, which he was anxious to foster, he showed favour to Sparta rather than to Athens. This had also been the policy of Julius, and accordingly there was at Sparta a temple to Julius and an altar to Augustus. It had had a short season of prosperity under its prince or hegemon Eurycles who had erected some fine buildings both in it and in Corinth. But though Augustus restored Cythera to Sparta, in recognition, it was thought of hospitality shown to Livia when she fled there with her former husband, it was still debarred from the harbour town of Gytheium, and remained quite insignificant. Athens was, on the other hand, deliberately depressed as far as political interests were concerned, for it was deprived of Aegina and Eretria and of one of the few sources of revenue still left it—the sale of its citizenship. The next year was spent by Augustus in regulating the Asiatic provinces, especially Bithynia.
From henceforth these countries shared in the advantages which the imperial régime created—by the increased check upon the tyranny and rapacity of provincial governors, the facility of appeal to the Emperor, and the greater security that their complaints would be fairly considered. To the provincials the Emperor was not the despot which he appeared to certain classes at Rome, but their protector and support. Honours are therefore everywhere paid to him, or his family, or his responsible ministers. To this inscriptions give witness in every direction, as at Ilium to Agrippa, at Delos to Caesar's daughter Julia, at Hypata in Thessaly to his adopted son, Gaius. The one condition of favour, however, was order and loyalty. Samos was granted libertas in honour of his long residence in the island, but Cyzicus was deprived of the same privilege for having beaten and executed certain Roman citizens, as Tyre and Sidon incurred the same penalty by political disorders. The alarm of the magistrates at Philippi when told that St. Paul was a Roman citizen, and of the town clerk of Ephesus when there was an uproar in the theatre, vividly illustrate this cardinal principle of the Imperial rule—local institutions and jurisdictions were respected, but there must be order and peace and obedience to law. In every state—whether free or provincial—the Emperor represents a law which pervades all and is above all, and to him every citizen of any state within the Empire, whatever its theoretical status, can, in the last resort, look for justice, can, as we should say, change the venue of his cause, if he had good reason to doubt getting justice in his own country. The case of St. Paul would naturally occur to the mind, but a stronger one is contained in a still existing letter of Augustus to the people of Cnidus, which was a libera civitas, not under a provincial governor. It concerns a case of homicide, in which the accused were evidently unpopular in their native town, and who, there- fore, “appealed to Caesar.” His answer in a Greek translation still exists engraven on a stone tablet:—
“Imperator Caesar, son of the deified one, Augustus, twelve times consul, in the 18th year of his tribunician power [i.e., B.C. 6], to the magistrates, senate, and people of the Cnidians, greeting:
Your ambassadors, Dionysius and Dionysius son of Dionysius, appeared before me at Rome, and delivered the decree accusing Eubulus son of Anaxandridas, now dead, and his wife Truphera, who was present, concerning the death of Eubulus son of Chrysippus. Whereupon I—having ordered my friend Asinius Gallus to examine the slaves by torture who were implicated in the charge—ascertained that Philinus son of Chrysippus came three nights in succession to the house of Eubulus and Truphera with violence and intent to break into it, and that on the third night he brought with him his brother Eubulus: that the householders Eubulus and Truphera, as they could get no security in their own house either by parleying with Philinus or barricading themselves against his attack, ordered one of their slaves not to kill them barbarously, as one might not unjustly have been tempted by anger to do, but to keep them off by throwing the contents of the close-stool upon them: but that the slave, whether intentionally or unintentionally—for he persisted in denying intention—let the vessel slip with its contents, so that Eubulus was knocked down, though he better deserved to have escaped than his brother.
I send you the actual depositions. And I should have wondered how it came about that the defendants were so much afraid of the examination of the slaves being held in your courts, had it not been that you seemed to me to have been much irritated with them and to have shown a perverted indignation—not against those who deserved every kind of punishment for coming to attack another man's house by night with force and violence three distinct times, to the common danger of you all, but against those who have met with an accident while acting in self-defence, but have done no wrong.
But now you will in my opinion be acting rightly if, in accordance with my decision on this matter, you make the entry in your public records also to agree therewith.”
Asinius Gallus, who was commissioned by Augustus to take the depositions of the slaves, was at the time proconsul of Asia, but he does not act in that capacity because Cnidus is a free state, not under the jurisdiction of the provincial governor. He acts as Caesar's legatus, and sends the depositions to Rome, where they are considered by Augustus him- self, who acquits the accused and orders the decree passed against then in Cnidus to be erased.
Thus the personal authority of the Emperor is felt in every part of the Empire, and no one, however
VIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE OF THE ACROPOLIS AT ATHENS.
humble, but is conscious of an authority to which he may look in the last resort for justice.
This is the good side of the Empire as it affected the provinces. Still it remains true that Greece itself withered under the régime. There was no national life and no great men. For great men seem only to rise at the call of duty and patriotism, and are not, it appears, produced except at times of strife or danger, at some crisis which demands them.
- ↑ The Odeion was burnt, but apparently by Aristion, not by Sulla.
- ↑ Cic. Ep. ed. fam. iv. 5.
- ↑ For instance, an inscription on a base of a statue at Mitylene describes him as σωτῆρι καὶ κτίστᾳ, for in honour of his friend Theophanes he restored Mitylene to the status of a libera civitas after the Mithradatic war.
- ↑ Dittenb. Sylloge, 346, ὁ δῆμος Γάϊον Ἰούλιον Καίσαρα ἀρχιερέα καὶ δικτάτορα τὸν ἑαυτοῦ σωτῆρα καὶ εὐεργέτην.
- ↑ Dittenberger, Sylloge Inscript. 347, 349.
- ↑ Nevertheless the term was still sometimes applied in a narrower sense to that union of Achaean towns which was allowed to revive after the dissolution of B.C. 146 for certain purposes. Thus an inscription in honour of Augustus between the years B.C. 40 and B.C. 27 speaks of τὸ κοινὸν τῶν Ἀχαιῶν [Dittenb. 351].