CHAPTER I.

From the Conquest of Greece to the Establishment of Constantinople as Capital of the Roman Empire. B.C. 146 — A.D. 330

 

The conquests of Alexander the Great effected a permanent change in the political condition of the Greek nation, and this change powerfully influenced its moral and social state during the whole period of its subjection to the Roman empire. The international system of policy by which Alexander connected Greece with Western Asia and Egypt, was only effaced by the religion of Mahomet and the conquests of the Arabs. Though Alexander was himself a Greek, both from education, and the prejudices cherished by the pride of ancestry, still neither the people of Macedonia, nor the chief part of the army, whose discipline and valour had secured his victories, was Greek, either in language or feelings. Had Alexander, therefore, determined on organizing his empire with the view of uniting the Macedonians and Persians in common feelings of opposition to the Greek nation, there can be no doubt that he could easily have accomplished the design. The Greeks might then have found themselves enabled to adopt a very different course in their national career from that which they were compelled to follow by the powerful influence exercised over them by Alexander’s conduct. Alexander himself, undoubtedly, perceived that the greater numbers of the Persians, and their equality, if not superiority, in civilization to the Macedonians, rendered it necessary for him to seek some powerful ally to prevent the absorption of the Macedonians in the Persian population, the loss of their language, manners, and nationality, and the speedy change of his empire into the sovereignty of a mere Graeco-Persian dynasty. It did not escape his discernment, that the political institutions of the Greeks created a principle of nationality capable of combating the unalterable laws of the Medes and Persians.

Alexander was the noblest model of a conqueror; his ambition aspired at eclipsing the glory of his unparalleled victories by the universal prosperity which was to flow from his civil government. New cities and extended commerce were to found an era in the world’s history. Even the strength of his empire was to be based on a political principle which he has the merit of discovering, and of which he proved the efficacy; this principle was the amalgamation of his subjects into one people by permanent institutions. All other conquerors have endeavoured to augment their power by the subjection of one race to another. The merit of Alexander is very much increased by the nature of his position with regard to the Greek nation. The Greeks were not favourably disposed either towards his empire or his person; they would willingly have destroyed both as the surest way of securing their own liberty. But the moral energy of the Greek national character did not escape the observation of Alexander, and he resolved to render this quality available for the preservation of his empire, by introducing into the East those municipal institutions which gave it vigour, and thus facilitate the infusion of some portion of the Hellenic character into the hearts of his conquered subjects.

The moderation of Alexander in the execution of his plans of reform and change is as remarkable as the wisdom of his extensive projects. In order to mould the Asiatics to his wishes, he did not attempt to enforce laws and constitutions similar to those of Greece. He profited too well by the lessons of Aristotle to think of treating man as a machine. But he introduced Greek civilization as an important element in his civil government, and established Greek colonies with political rights throughout his conquests. It is true that he seized all the unlimited power of the Persian monarchs, but, at the same time, he strove to secure administrative responsibility, and to establish free institutions in municipal government. Any laws or constitution which Alexander could have promulgated to enforce his system of consolidating the population of his empire into one body, would most probably have been immediately repealed by his successors, in consequence of the hostile feelings of the Macedonian army. But it was more difficult to escape from the tendency imprinted on the administration by the systematic arrangements which Alexander had introduced. He seems to have been fully aware of this fact, though it is impossible to trace the whole series of measures he adopted to accelerate the completion of his great project of creating a new state of society, and a new nation, as well as a new empire, in the imperfect records of his civil administration which have survived. His death left his own scheme incomplete, yet his success was wonderful; for though his empire was immediately dismembered, its numerous portions long retained a deep imprint of that Greek civilization which he had introduced. The influence of his philanthropic policy survived the kingdoms which his arms had founded, and tempered the despotic sway of the Romans by its superior power over society; nor was the influence of Alexander’s government utterly effaced in Asia until Mahomet changed the government, the religion, and the frame of society in the East.

The monarchs of Egypt, Syria, Pergamus, and Bactriana, who were either Macedonians or Greeks, respected the civil institutions, the language, and the religion of their native subjects, however adverse they might be to Greek usages; and the sovereigns of Bithynia, Pontus, Cappadocia, and Parthia, though native princes, retained a deep tincture of Greek civilization after they had thrown off the Macedonian yoke. They not only encouraged the arts, sciences, and literature of Greece, but they even protected the peculiar political constitutions of the Greek colonies settled in their dominions, though at variance with the Asiatic views of monarchical government.

The Greeks and Macedonians long continued separate nations, though a number of the causes which ultimately produced their fusion began to exert some influence shortly after the death of Alexander. The moral and social causes which enabled the Greeks to acquire a complete superiority over the Macedonian race, and ultimately to absorb it as a component element of their own nation, were the same which afterwards enabled them to destroy the Roman influence in the East. For several generations, the Greeks appeared the feebler party in their struggle with the Macedonians. The new kingdoms, into which Alexander’s empire was divided, were placed in very different circumstances from the older Greek states. Two separate divisions were created in the Hellenic world, and the Macedonian monarchies on the one hand, and the free Greeks on the other, formed two distinct international systems of policy. The Macedonian sovereigns had a balance of power to maintain, in which the free states of Europe could only be directly interested when the overwhelming influence of a conqueror placed their independence in jeopardy. The multifarious diplomatic relations of the free states among themselves required constant attention, not only to maintain their political independence, but even to protect their property and civil rights. These two great divisions of Hellenic society were often governed by opposite views and feelings in morals and politics, though their various members were continually placed in alliance as well as collision by their struggles to preserve the balance of power of their respective systems.

The immense power and wealth of the Seleucidae and Ptolemies rendered vain all the efforts of the small European states to maintain the high military, civil, and literary rank they had previously occupied. Their best soldiers, their wisest statesmen, and their ablest authors, were induced to emigrate to a more profitable and extensive scene of action. Alexandria became the capital of the Hellenic world. Yet the history of the European states still continued to maintain its predominant interest, and as a political lesson, the struggles of the Achaian. League to defend the independence of Greece against Macedonia and Rome, are not less instructive than the annals of Athens and Sparta. The European Greeks at this period perceived all the danger to which their liberties were exposed from the wealth, and power of the Asiatic monarchies, and they vainly endeavoured to effect a combination of all the free states into one federal body. Whatever might have been the success of such a combination, it certainly offered the only hope of preserving the liberty of Greece against the powerful states with which the altered condition of the civilized world had brought her into contact.

At the very time when the Macedonian kings were attacking the independence of Greece, and the Asiatic courts undermining the morals of the Greek nation, the Greek colonies, whose independence, from their remote situation, was secured against the attacks of the Eastern monarchs, were conquered by the Romans. Many circumstances tending to weaken the Greeks, and over which they had no control, followed one another with fatal celerity. The invasion of the Gauls, though bravely repulsed, inflicted great losses on Greece. Shortly after, the Romans completed the conquest of the Greek states in Italy. From that time the Sicilian Greeks were too feeble to be anything but spectators of the fierce struggle of the Romans and Carthaginians for the sovereignty of their island, and though the city of Syracuse courageously defended its independence, the struggle was a hopeless tribute to national glory. The cities of Cyrenaica had been long subject to the Ptolemies, and the republics on the shores of the Black Sea had been unable to maintain their liberties against the repeated attacks of the sovereigns of Pontus and Bithynia.

Though the Macedonians and Greeks were separated into two divisions by the opposite interests of the Asiatic monarchies and the European republics, still they were united by a powerful bond of national feelings. There was a strong similarity in the education, religion, and social position of the individual citizen in every state, whether Greek or Macedonian. Wherever Hellenic civilization was received, the free citizens formed only one part of the population, whether the other was composed of slaves or subjects; and this peculiarity placed their civil interests as Greeks in a more important light than their political differences as subjects of various states. The Macedonian Greeks of Asia and Egypt were a ruling class, governed, it is true, by an absolute sovereign, but having their interest so identified with his, in the vital question of retaining the administration of the country, that the Greeks, even in the absolute monarchies, formed a favoured and privileged class. In the Greek republics, the case was not very dissimilar; there, too, a small body of free citizens ruled a large slave or subject population, whose numbers required not only constant attention on the part of the rulers, but likewise a deep conviction of an ineffaceable separation in interests and character, to preserve the ascendency. This peculiarity in the position of the Greeks cherished their exclusive nationality, and created a feeling that the laws of honour and of nations forbade free men ever to make common cause with slaves. The influence of this feeling was visible for centuries on the laws and education of the free citizens of Greece, and it was equally powerful wherever Hellenic civilization spread.

Alexander’s conquests soon exercised a widely extended influence on the commerce, literature, morals, and religion of the Greeks. A direct communication was opened with India, with the centre of Asia, and with the southern coast of Africa. This immense extension of the commercial transactions of the Asiatic and Egyptian Greeks diminished the relative wealth and importance of the European states, while, at the same time, their stationary position assumed the aspect of decline from the rapidly increasing power and civilization of Western Europe. A considerable trade began to be carried on directly with the great commercial depots of the East which had formerly afforded large profits to the Greeks of Europe by passing through their hands. As soon as Rome rose to some degree of power, its inhabitants, if not its franchised citizens, traded with the East, as is proved by the existence of political relations between Rome and Rhodes, more than three centuries before the Christian era. There can be no doubt that the connection between the two states had its origin in the interests of trade. New channels were opened for mercantile enterprise as direct communications diminished the expense of transport. The increase of trade rendered piracy a profitable occupation. Both the sovereigns of Egypt and the merchants of Rhodes favoured the pirates who plundered the Syrians and Phoenicians, so that trading vessels could only navigate with safety under the protection of powerful states, in order to secure their property from extortion and plunder, These alterations in commercial affairs proved every way disadvantageous to the small republics of European Greece; and Alexandria and Rhodes soon occupied the position once held by Corinth and Athens.

The literature of a people is so intimately connected with the local circumstances which influence education, taste, and morals, that it can never be transplanted without undergoing a great alteration. It is not wonderful, therefore, that the literature of the Greeks, after the extension of their dominion in the East, should have undergone a great change; but it seems remarkable that this change should have proved invariably injurious to all its peculiar excellencies. It is singular, at the same time, to find how little the Greeks occupied themselves in the examination of the stores of knowledge possessed by the Eastern nations. The situation and interests of the Asiatic and Egyptian Greeks must have compelled many to learn the languages of the countries which they inhabited, and the literature of the East was laid open to their investigation. They appear to have availed themselves very sparingly of these advantages. Even in history and geography, they made but small additions to the information already collected by Herodotus, Ctesias, and Xenophon; and this supercilious neglect of foreign literature has been the cause of depriving modern times of all records of the powerful and civilized nations which flourished while Greece was in a state of barbarism. Had the Macedonians or Romans treated the history and literature of Greece with the contempt which the Greeks showed to the records of the Phoenicians, Persians, and Egyptians, it is not probable that any very extensive remains of later Greek literature would have reached us. At a subsequent period, when the Arabs had conquered the Syrian and Egyptian Greeks, their neglect of the language and literature of Greece was severely felt.

The munificence of the Ptolemies, the Seleucidae, and the kings of Pergamus, enabled their capitals to eclipse the literary glory of the cities of Greece. The eminent men of Europe sought their fortunes abroad; but when genius emigrated it could not transplant those circumstances which created and sustained it. In Egypt and in Syria, Greek literature lost its national character; and that divine instinct in the portraiture of nature, which had been the charm of its earlier age, never emigrated. This deficiency forms, indeed, the marked distinction between the literature of the Grecian and Macedonian periods; and it was a natural consequence of the different situations held by literary men. Among the Asiatic and Alexandrine population, literature was a trade, knowledge was confined to the higher classes, and literary productions were addressed to a public widely dispersed and dissimilar in many tastes and habits. The authors who addressed themselves to such a public could not escape a vagueness of expression on some subjects, and an affectation of occult profundity on others. Learning and science, in so far as they could be rendered available for upholding literary renown, were most studiously cultivated, and most successfully employed; but deep feeling, warm enthusiasm, and simple truth were, from the very nature of the case, impossible.

The frame of society in earlier times had been very different in the free states of Greece. Literature and the fine arts then formed a portion of the usual education and ordinary life of every citizen in the State; they were consequently completely under the influence of public opinion, and received the impress of the national mind which they reflected from the mirror of genius. The effects of this popular character in Greek literature and art are evident, in the total freedom of all the productions of Greece, in her best days, from anything that partakes of mannerism or exaggeration. The truer to nature any production could be rendered, which was to be offered to the attention of the people, the abler would they be to appreciate its merits, and their applause would be obtained with greater certainty; yet, at the same time, the farther the expression of nature could be removed from vulgarity, the higher would be the degree of general admiration. The sentiment necessary for the realization of ideal perfection, which modern civilization vainly requires from those who labour only for the polished and artificial classes of a society broken into sections, arose in profusion, under the free instinct of the popular mind to reverence simplicity and nature, when combined with beauty and dignity.

The connection of the Greeks with Assyria and Egypt, nevertheless, aided their progress in mathematics and scientific knowledge; yet astrology was the only new object of science which their Eastern studies added to the domain of the human intellect. From the time Berosus introduced astrology into Cos, it spread with inconceivable rapidity in Europe. It soon exercised a powerful influence over the religious opinions of the higher classes, naturally inclined to fatalism, and assisted in demoralizing the private and public character of the Greeks. From the Greeks it spread with additional empiricism among the Romans: it even maintained its ground against Christianity, with which it long strove to form an alliance, and it has only been extirpated in modern times. The Romans, as long as they clung to their national usages and religious feelings, endeavoured to resist the progress of a study so destructive to private and public virtue; but it embodied opinions which were rapidly gaining ground. In the time of the Caesars, astrology was generally believed, and extensively practised.

The general corruption of morals which followed from the Macedonian conquests, was the inevitable effect of the position in which mankind were everywhere placed. The accumulated treasures of the Persian Empire, which must have amounted to between seventy and eighty millions sterling, were suddenly thrown into general circulation, and the large sums which passed into the hands of the soldiery enriched the very worst classes of society. The Greeks profited greatly by the expenditure of these treasures, and their social position became soon so completely changed by the facilities afforded them of gaining high pay, and of enjoying luxury in the service of foreign princes, that public opinion ceased to exercise a direct influence on private character . The mixture of Macedonians, Greeks, and natives, in the conquered countries of the East, was very incomplete, and they generally formed distinct classes of society: this circumstance alone contributed to weaken the feelings of moral responsibility, which are the most powerful preservatives of virtue. It is difficult to imagine a state of society more completely destitute of moral restraint than that in which the Asiatic Greeks lived. Public opinion was powerless to enforce even an outward respect for virtue; military accomplishments, talents for civil administration, literary eminence, and devotion to the power of an arbitrary sovereign, were the direct roads to distinction and wealth; honesty and virtue were very secondary qualities. In all countries or societies where a class becomes predominant, a conventional character is formed, according to the exigencies of the case, as the standard of an honourable man; and it is usually very different indeed from what is really necessary to constitute a virtuous, or even an honest citizen.

With regard to the European Greeks, high rank at the Asiatic courts was often suddenly, and indeed accidentally, placed within their reach by qualities that had in general only been cultivated as a means of obtaining a livelihood. It is not, therefore, wonderful that wealth and power, obtained under such circumstances, should have been wasted in luxury, and squandered in the gratification of lawless passions. Yet, in spite of the complaints most justly recorded in history against the luxury, idleness, avarice, and debauchery of the Greeks, it seems surprising that the people resisted, so effectually as it did, the powerful means at work to accomplish the national ruin. There never existed a people more perfectly at liberty to gratify every passion. During two hundred and fifty years, the Greeks were the dominant class in Asia; and the corrupting influence of this predominance was extended to the whole frame of society, in their European as well as their Asiatic possessions. The history of the Achaian League, and the endeavours of Agis and Cleomenes to restore the ancient institutions of Sparta, prove that public and private virtue were still admired and appreciated by the native Greeks. The Romans, who were the loudest in condemning and satirizing the vices of the nation, proved far less able to resist the allurements of wealth and power; and in the course of one century, their demoralization far exceeded the corruption of the Greeks. The severe tone in which Polybius animadverts on the vices of his countrymen, must always be contrasted with the picture of Roman depravity in the pages of Suetonius and Tacitus, in order to form a correct estimate of the moral position of the two nations. The Greeks afford a sad spectacle of the debasing influence of wealth and power on the higher classes; but the Romans, after their Asiatic conquests, present the loathsome picture of a whole people throwing aside all moral restraint, and openly wallowing in those vices which the higher classes elsewhere have generally striven to conceal.

The religion of the Greeks was little more than a section of the political constitution of the State. The power of religion depended on custom. Strictly speaking, therefore, the Greeks never possessed anything more than a national form of worship, and their religious feelings produced no very important influence on their moral conduct. The conquests of Alexander effected as great a change in religion as in manners. The Greeks willingly adopted the superstitious practices of the conquered nations, and, without hesitation, paid their devotions at the shrines of foreign divinities; but, strange to say, they never appear to have profoundly investigated either the metaphysical opinions or the religious doctrines of the Eastern nations. They treated with neglect the pure theism of Moses, and the sublime religious system of Zoroaster, while they cultivated a knowledge of the astrology, necromancy, and sorcery of the Chaldaeans, Syrians, and Egyptians.

The separation of the higher and lower ranks of society, which only commenced among the Greeks after their Asiatic conquests, produced a marked effect on the religious ideas of the nation. Among the wealthy and the learned, indifference to all religions rapidly gained ground. The philosophical speculations of Alexander’s age tended towards scepticism; and the state of mankind, in the following century, afforded practical proofs to the ancients of the insufficiency of virtue and reason to insure happiness and success either in public or private life. The consequence was, that the greater number embraced the belief in a blind overruling destiny, — while a few became atheists. The absurdities of popular paganism had been exposed and ridiculed, while its mythology had not yet been explained by philosophical allegories. No system of philosophy, on the other hand, had sought to enforce its moral truths among the people, by declaring the principle of man's responsibility. The lower orders were without philosophy, the higher without religion.

This separation in the feelings and opinions of the different ranks of society, rendered the value of public opinion comparatively insignificant to the philosophers; and consequently, their doctrines were no longer addressed to the popular mind. The education of the lower orders, which had always depended on the public lessons they had received from voluntary teachers in the public places of resort, was henceforward neglected; and the priests of the temples, the diviners and soothsayers, became their instructors and guides. Under such guidance, the old mythological fables, and the new wonders of the Eastern magicians, were employed as the surest means of rendering the superstitious feelings of the people, and the popular dread of supernatural influences, a source of profit to the priesthood. While the educated became the votaries of Chaldaeans and astrologers, the ignorant were the admirers of Egyptians and conjurors.

The Greek nation, immediately before the conquest of the Romans, was rich both in wealth and numbers. Alexander had thrown the accumulated treasures of centuries into circulation; the dismemberment of his empire prevented his successors from draining the various countries of the world, to expend their resources on a single city. The number of capitals and independent cities in the Grecian world kept money in circulation, enabled trade to flourish, and caused the Greek population to increase. The elements of national prosperity are so various and complex, that a knowledge of the numbers of a people affords no certain criterion for estimating their wealth and happiness; still, if it were possible to obtain accurate accounts of the population of all the countries inhabited by the Greeks after the death of Alexander, such knowledge would afford better means of estimating the real progress or decline of social civilization, than either the records which history has preserved of the results of wars and negotiations, or than the memorials of art and literature. The population of Greece, as of every other country, must have varied very much at different periods; even the proportion of the slave to the free inhabitants can never have long remained exactly the same. We are, unfortunately, so completely ignorant of the relative density of the Greek population at different periods, and so well assured that its absolute numbers depended on many causes which it is now impossible to appreciate fully, that it would be a vain endeavour to attempt to fix the period when the Greek race was most numerous. The empire of the Greeks was most extensive during the century which elapsed immediately after the death of Alexander; but it would be unsafe to draw, from that single fact, any certain conclusion concerning the numbers of the Greek race at that period, as compared with the following century.

The fallacy of any inferences concerning the population of ancient times, which are drawn from the numbers of the inhabitants in modern times, is apparent, when we reflect on the rapid increase of mankind, in the greater part of Europe, in late years. Gibbon estimates the population of the Roman Empire, in the time of Claudius, at one hundred and twenty millions, and he supposed modern Europe to contain, at the time he wrote, one hundred and seven millions. Seventy years have not elapsed, and yet the countries which he enumerated now contain upwards of two hundred and ten millions. The variations which have taken place in the numbers of the Jews at different periods, illustrate the vicissitudes to which an expatriated population, like a large portion of the Greek nation, is always liable. The Jews have often been far less — perhaps they have been frequently more numerous — than they are at present, yet their numbers now seem to equal what they were at the era of the greatest wealth, power, and glory of their nation under Solomon. A very judicious writer has estimated the population of continental Greece, Peloponnesus, and the Ionian Islands, at three millions and a half, during the period which elapsed from the Persian wars to the death of Alexander. Now, if we admit a similar density of population in Crete, Cyprus, the islands of the Archipelago, and the colonies on the coasts of Thrace and Asia Minor, this number would require to be more than doubled. The population of European Greece declined after the time of Alexander. Money became more abundant; it was easy for a Greek to make his fortune abroad; increased wealth augmented the wants of the free citizens, and the smaller states became incapable of supporting as large a free population as in earlier times, when wants were fewer, and emigration difficult. The size of properties and the number of slaves, therefore, increased. The diminution which had taken place in the population of Greece must, however, have been trifling, when compared with the immense increase in the Greek population of Asia and Egypt; in Magna Graecia, Sicily, and Cyrene, the number of the Greeks had not decreased. Greek civilization had extended itself from the banks of the Indus to the Pillars of Hercules, and from the shores of the Palus Maeotis to the island of Dioscorides. It may therefore be admitted, that the Greeks were, at no earlier period of their history, more numerous than at the time the Romans commenced the subjugation of the countries which they inhabited.

The history of the Greeks under the Roman domination tends to correct the opinion that national changes are to be solely attributed to those remarkable occurrences which occupy the most prominent place in the annals of states. It not unfrequently happened that those events which produced the greatest change on the fortunes of the Romans, exerted no very important or permanent influence on the fate of the Greeks ; while, on the other hand, some change in the state of India, Bactria, Ethiopia, or Arabia, by altering the direction of commerce, powerfully influenced their prosperity and future destinies. A revolution in the commercial intercourse between Europe and eastern Asia, which threw ancient Greece out of the direct line of trade, assisted in producing the great changes which took place in the Greek nation, from the period of the subjection of Greece by the Romans, to that of the conquest of the semi-Greek provinces which had belonged to the Macedonian empire, by the Saracens. The history of mankind requires a more accurate illustration than has yet been undertaken, of the causes of the depopulation and impoverishment of the people, as well as of the general degradation of all the political governments with which we are acquainted, during the period embraced in this volume; but the task belongs to universal history. To obtain a correct view of the social condition of the European nations in the darkest periods of the middle ages, it is necessary to examine society through a Greek as well as a Roman medium, and to weigh the experience and the passions of the East against the force and the prejudices of the West. It will then be found, that many germs of that civilization which seemed to have arisen in the dark ages as a natural development of society, were really borrowed from the Greek people and the Byzantine empire, in which a Graeco-Macedonian civilization long pervaded society.

 

 

Sect. I

 Immediate causes of the Conquest of Greece by the Romans

 

The great difference which existed in the social condition of the Greeks and Romans during the whole of their national existence, must be kept in view, in order to form a just idea of their relative position when ruled by the same government. The Romans formed a nation with the organization of a single city; their political government, always partaking of its municipal origin, was a type of concentration in administrative power, and was enabled to pursue its objects with undeviating steadiness of purpose. The Greeks were a people composed of a number of rival states, whose attention was incessantly diverted to various objects. The great end of existence among the Romans was war; they were the children of Mars, and they reverenced their progenitor with the most fervent enthusiasm. Agriculture itself was only honoured from necessity. Among the Greeks, civil virtues were called into action by the multifarious exigencies of society, and were honoured and deified by the nation. Linked together by an international system of independent states, the Greeks regarded war as a means of obtaining some definite object, in accordance with the established balance of power. A state of peace was, in their view, the natural state of mankind. The Romans regarded war as their permanent occupation; their national and individual ambition was exclusively directed to conquest. The subjection of their enemies, or a perpetual struggle for supremacy, was the only alternative that war presented to their minds.

The success of the Roman arms and the conquest of Greece were the natural results of concentrated national feelings, and superior military organization, contending with an ill-cemented political league, and an inferior military system. The Roman was instructed to regard himself merely as a component part of the republic, and to view Rome as placed in opposition to the rest of mankind. The Greek, though he possessed the moral feeling of nationality quite as powerfully as the Roman, could not concentrate equal political energy. The Greeks after the period of the Macedonian conquests, occupied the double position of members of a widely-spread and dominant people, and of citizens of independent states. Their minds were enlarged by this extension of their sphere of civilization; but what they gained in general feelings of philanthropy, they appear to have lost in patriotic attachment to the interest of their native states.

It would be a vain exercise of ingenuity to speculate on the course of events, and on the progress of the ancient world, had the national spirit of Greece been awakened in her struggle with Rome, and the war between the two peoples involved the question of Greek nationality, as well as political independence. On the one hand, Greece and Rome might be supposed existing as rival states, mutually aiding the progress of mankind by their emulation; on the other, the extinction of the Greek people, as well as the destruction of their political government, might be regarded as a not improbable event. No strong national feeling was, however, raised in Greece by the wars with Rome, and the contest remained only a political one in the eyes of the people; consequently, even if the military power of the belligerents had been more nearly balanced than it really was, the struggle could hardly have terminated in any other way than by the subjugation of the Greeks.

It seems at first sight more difficult to explain the facility with which the Greeks accommodated themselves to the Roman sway, and the rapidity with which they sank into political insignificancy, than the ease with which they were vanquished in the field. The fact, however, is undeniable, that the conquest was generally viewed with satisfaction by the great body of the inhabitants of Greece, who considered the destruction of the numerous small independent governments in the country as a necessary step towards improving their own condition. The political constitutions even of the most democratic states of Greece excluded so large a portion of the inhabitants from all share in the public administration, and after the introduction of large mercenary armies, military service became so severe a burden on the free citizens, that the majority looked with indifference on the loss of their independence, when that loss appeared to insure a permanent state of peace. The selfishness of the Greek aristocracy, which was prominently displayed at every period of history, proved peculiarly injurious in the latter days of Greek independence. The aristocracy of the Greek cities and states indulged their ambition and cupidity to the ruin of their country. The selfishness of the Roman aristocracy was possibly as great, but it was very different. It found gratification in increasing the power and glory of Rome, and it identified itself with pride and patriotism; Greek selfishness, on the contrary, submitted to every meanness from which an aristocracy usually recoils; and to gratify its passions, it sacrificed its country. Greece had arrived at that period of civilization, when political questions were determined by financial reasons, and the hope of a diminution of the public burdens was a powerful argument in favour of submission to Rome. When the Romans conquered Macedonia, they fixed the tribute at one half the amount which had been paid to the Macedonian kings.

At the period of the Roman conquest, public opinion had been vitiated, as well as weakened, by the corrupt influence of the Asiatic monarchies. Many of the Greek princes employed large sums in purchasing the military services and civic flatteries of the free states. The political and military leaders throughout Greece were thus, by means of foreign alliances, rendered masters of resources far beyond what the unassisted revenues of the free states could have placed at their disposal. It soon became evident that the fate of many of the free states depended on their alliances with the kings of Macedonia, Egypt, Syria, and Pergamus; and the citizens could not avoid the despairing conclusion that no exertion on their part could produce any decisive effect in securing the tranquillity of Greece. They could only increase their own taxes, and bring to their own homes all the miseries of a most inhuman system of warfare. This state of public affairs caused the despair which induced the Acarnanians and the citizens of Abydos to adopt the heroic resolution not to survive the loss of their independence; but its more general effect was to spread public and private demoralization through all ranks of society. Peace alone, to the reflecting Greeks, seemed capable of restoring security of property, and of re-establishing due respect for the principles of justice; and peace seemed only attainable by submission to the Romans. The continuation of a state of war, which was rapidly laying the fortified towns in ruin, and consuming the resources of the land, was regarded by the independent Greeks as a far greater evil than Roman supremacy. So ardently was the termination of the contest desired, that a common proverb, expressive of a wish that the Romans might speedily prevail, was everywhere current. This saying, which was common after the conquest, has been preserved by Polybius: “If we had not been quickly ruined, we should not have been saved”.

It was some time before the Greeks had great reason to regret their fortune. A combination of causes, which could hardly have entered into the calculations of any politician, enabled them to preserve their national institutions, and to exercise all their former social influence, even after the annihilation of their political existence. Their vanity was flattered by their admitted superiority in arts and literature, and by the respect paid to their usages and prejudices by the Romans. Their political subjection was at first not very burdensome; and a considerable portion of the nation was allowed to retain the appearance of independence. Athens and Sparta were honoured with the title of allies of Rome. The nationality of the Greeks was so interwoven with their municipal institutions, that the Romans found it impossible to abolish the local administration; and an imperfect attempt, made at the time of the conquest of Achaia, was soon abandoned. These local institutions ultimately modified the Roman administration itself, long before the Roman Empire ceased to exist; and, even though the Greeks were compelled to adopt the civil law and judicial forms of Rome, its political authority in the East was guided by the feelings of the Greeks, and moulded according to Greek customs.

The social rank which the Greeks held in the eyes of their conquerors, at the time of their subjection, is not to be overlooked. The bulk of the Greek population in Europe consisted of landed proprietors, occupying a position which would have given some rank in Roman society. No class precisely similar existed at Rome, where a citizen that did not belong to the senate, the aristocracy, or the administration, was of very little account, for the people always remained in an inferior social rank. The higher classes at Rome always felt either contempt or hostility towards the populace of the city; and even when the emperors were induced to favour the people, from a wish to depress the great families of the aristocracy, they were unable to efface the general feeling of contempt with which the people was regarded. To the Greeks, — who had always maintained a higher social position, not only in Europe, but also in the kingdoms of the Seleucidae and the Ptolemies, — a high position was conceded by the Roman aristocracy, as it awakened no feelings either of hostility or jealousy. Polybius was an example.

 

 

Sect. II

Treatment of Greece after its Conquest

 

The Romans generally commenced by treating their provinces with mildness. The government of Sicily was arranged on a basis which certainly did not augment the burdens of the inhabitants. The tribute imposed on Macedonia was less than the amount of taxation which had been previously paid to the native kings; and there is no reason for supposing that the burdens of the Greeks, whose country was embraced in the province of Achaia, were increased by the conquest. The local municipal administration of the separate cities was allowed to exist, but, in order to enforce submission more readily, their constitutions were modified by fixing a census, which restricted the franchise in the democratic commonwealths. Some states were long allowed to retain their own political government, and were ranked as allies of the republic. It is impossible to trace the changes which the Romans gradually effected in the financial and administrative condition of Greece with chronological precision. Facts, often separated by a long series of years, require to be gleaned; and caution must be used in attributing to them a precise influence on the state of society at other periods. The Roman senate was evidently not without great jealousy and some fear of the Greeks; and great prudence was displayed in adopting a number of measures by which they were gradually weakened, and cautiously broken to the yoke of their conquerors. This caution proves that the despair of the Achaeans had produced a considerable effect on the Romans, who perceived that the Greek nation, if roused to a general combination, possessed the means of offering a determined and dangerous resistance. Crete was not reduced into the form of a Roman province until about eight years after the subjection of Achaia, and its conquest was not effected without difficulty by a consular army during a war which lasted three years. The resistance offered by the Cretans was so determined that the island was almost depopulated before it could be conquered. It was not until after the time of Augustus, when the conquest of every portion of the Greek nation had been completed, that the Romans began to view the Greeks in the contemptible light in which they are represented by later writers.

No attempt was made to introduce uniformity into the general government of the Grecian states; any such plan, indeed, would have been contrary to the principles of the Roman government, which had never aspired at establishing unity even in the administration of Italy. The attention of the Romans was directed to the means of ruling their various conquests in the most efficient manner, of concentrating all the military power in their own hands, and of levying the greatest amount of tribute which circumstances would permit. Thus, numerous cities in Greece, possessing but a very small territory, as Delphi, Thespiae, Tanagra, and Elatea, were allowed to retain that degree of independence, which secured to them the privilege of being governed by their own laws and usages, so late even as the times of the emperors. Rhodes also long preserved its own government as a free state, though it was completely dependent on Rome. The Romans adopted no theoretical principles which required them to enforce uniformity in the geographical divisions, or in the administrative arrangements of the provinces of their empire, particularly where local habits or laws opposed a barrier to any practical union.

The Roman government, however, early adopted measures tending to diminish the resources of the Greek allies, and the condition of the servile population which formed the bulk of the labouring classes was everywhere rendered very hard to be endured. Two insurrections of slaves occurred in Sicily, and contemporary with one of these there was a great rebellion of the slaves employed in the silver mines of Attica, and tumults among the slaves at Delos and in other parts of Greece. The Attic slaves seized the fortified town of Sunium, and committed extensive ravages before the government of Athens was able to overpower them. It is so natural for slaves to rebel when a favourable occasion presents itself, that it is hazardous to look beyond ordinary causes for any explanation of this insurrection, particularly as the declining state of the silver mines of Laurium, at this period, rendered the slaves less valuable, and would cause them to be worse treated, and more negligently guarded. Still the simultaneous rebellion of slaves, in these distant countries, seems not unconnected with the measures of the Roman government towards its subjects. For we learn from Diodorus that the fiscal oppression of the collectors of the tribute in Sicily was so great that free citizens were reduced to slavery and sold in the slave markets as far as Bithynia.

If we could place implicit faith in the testimony of so firm and partial an adherent of the Romans as Polybius, we must believe, that the Roman administration was at first characterized by a love of justice, and that the Roman magistrates were far less venal than the Greeks. If the Greeks, he says, are intrusted with a single talent of public money, though they give written security, and though legal witnesses be present, they will never act honestly; but if the largest sums be confided to the Romans engaged in the public service, their honourable conduct is secured simply by an oath. Under such circumstances, the people must have appreciated highly the advantages of the Roman domination, and contrasted the last years of their troubled and doubtful independence with the just and peaceful government of Rome, in a manner extremely favourable to their new masters. Less than a century of irresponsible power effected a wonderful change in the conduct of the Roman magistrates. Cicero declares, that the senate made a traffic of justice to the provincials. There is nothing so holy, that it cannot be violated, nothing so strong, that it cannot be destroyed by money, are his words. But as the government of Rome grew more oppressive, and the amount of the taxes levied on the provinces was more severely exacted, the increased power of the republic rendered any rebellion of the Greeks utterly hopeless. The complete separation in the administration of the various provinces, which were governed like so many separate kingdoms, viceroyalties, or pashalics, and the preservation of a distinct local government in each of the allied kingdoms and free states, rendered their management capable of modification, without any compromise of the general system of the republic; and this admirable fitness of its administration to the exigencies of the times, remained an attribute of the Roman state for many centuries. Each state in Greece, continuing in possession of as much of its peculiar political constitution as was compatible with the supremacy and fiscal views of a foreign conqueror, retained all its former jealousies towards its neighbours, and its interests were likely to be as often compromised by disputes with the surrounding Greek states as with the Roman government. Prudence and local interests would everywhere favour submission to Rome; national vanity alone would whisper incitements to venture on a struggle for independence.

 

 

Sect. III

Effects of the Mithridattc War on the State of Greece

 

For sixty years after the conquest of Achaia, the Greeks remained docile subjects of Rome. During that period, the policy of the government aided the tendencies of society towards the accumulation of property in the hands of few individuals. The number of Roman usurers increased, and the exactions of Roman publicans became more oppressive, but the rich were the principal sufferers; so that when the army of Mithridates invaded Greece, B. C. 86, while Rome appeared plunged in anarchy by the civil broils of the partisans of Marius and Sulla, the Greek aristocracy conceived the vain hope of recovering their independence. When they saw the king drive the Romans out of Asia and transport a large army into Europe, they expected him to rival the exploits of Hannibal, and to carry the war into Italy. But the people in general did not take much interest in the contest; they viewed it as a struggle for supremacy between the Romans and the King of Pontus; and public opinion favoured the former, as likely to prove the milder and more equitable masters. Many of the leading men in Greece, and the governments of most of those states and cities which retained their independence, declared in favour of Mithridates. Some Lacedaemonian and Achaian troops joined his army, and Athens engaged heartily in his party. As soon, however, as Sulla appeared in Greece with his army, every state hastened to submit to Rome, with the exception of the Athenians, who probably had some particular cause of dissatisfaction at this time. The vanity of the Athenians, puffed up by constant allusions to their ancient power, induced them to engage in a direct contest with the whole force of Rome. They were commanded by a demagogue and philosopher named Aristion, whom they had elected Strategos and intrusted with absolute power. The Roman legions were led by Sulla. The exclusive vanity of the Athenians, while it cherished in their hearts a more ardent love of liberty than had survived in the rest of Greece, blinded them to their own insignificancy when compared with the belligerents into whose quarrel they rashly thrust themselves. But though they rushed precipitately into the war, they conducted themselves in it with great constancy. Sulla was compelled to besiege Athens in person; and the defence of the city was conducted with such courage and obstinacy, that the task of subduing it proved one of great difficulty to a Roman army commanded by that celebrated warrior. When the defence grew hopeless, the Athenians sent a deputation to Sulla to open negotiations; but the orator beginning to recount the glories of their ancestors at Marathon, as an argument for mercy, the proud Roman cut short the discussion with the remark, that his country had sent him to Athens to punish rebels, not to study history. Athens was at last taken by assault, and it was treated by Sulla with unnecessary cruelty; the rapine of the troops was encouraged, instead of being checked, by their general. The majority of the citizens were slain; the carnage was so fearfully great, as to become memorable even in that age of bloodshed; the private movable property was seized by the soldiery, and Sulla assumed some merit to himself for not committing the rifled houses to the flames. He declared that he saved the city from destruction, and allowed Athens to continue to exist, only on account of its ancient glory. He carried off some of the columns of the temple of Jupiter Olympius, to ornament Rome; but as that temple was in an unfinished state, and he inflicted no injury on any public building, it seems probable that he only removed materials which were ready for transport, without pulling down any part of the edifice. From the treasury of the Parthenon, however, he carried off 40 talents of gold and 600 of silver. The fate of the Piraeus, which he utterly destroyed, was more severe than that of Athens. From Sulla’s campaign in Greece, the commencement of the ruin and depopulation of the country is to be dated. The destruction of property caused by his ravages in Attica was so great, that Athens from that time lost its commercial as well as its political importance. The race of Athenian citizens was almost extirpated, and a new population, composed of a heterogeneous mass of settlers, received the right of citizenships. Still as Sulla left Athens in possession of freedom and autonomia, with the rank of an allied city, the vitality of Greek institutions inspired the altered body; the ancient forms and laws continued to exist in their former purity, and the Areopagus is mentioned by Tacitus, in the reign of Tiberius, as nobly disregarding the powerful protection of Piso, who strove to influence its decisions and corrupt the administration of justice.

Athens was not the only city in Greece which suffered severely from the cruelty and rapacity of Sulla. He plundered Delos, Delphi, Olympia, and the sacred enclosure of Aesculapius, near Epidaurus; and he razed Anthedon, Larymna, and Halae to the ground. After he had defeated Archelaus, the general of Mithridates, at Chaeronea, he deprived Thebes of half its territory, which he consecrated to Apollo and Jupiter. The administration of the temporal affairs of the pagan deities was not so wisely conducted as the civil business of the municipalities. The Theban territory declined in wealth and population under the care of the two gods, and in the time of Pausanias the Cadmea or citadel was the only inhabited portion of ancient Thebes. Both parties, during the Mithridatic war, inflicted severe injuries on Greece, plundered the country, and destroyed property most wantonly. Many of the losses were never repaired. The foundations of national prosperity were undermined; and it henceforward became impossible to save from the annual consumption of the inhabitants the sums necessary to replace the accumulated capital of ages, which this short war had annihilated. In some cases the wealth of the communities became insufficient to keep the existing public works in repair.

 

 

Sect. IV

Ruin of the Country by the Pirates of Cilicia

 

The Greeks, far from continuing to enjoy permanent tranquillity under the powerful protection of Rome, found themselves exposed to the attacks of every enemy, against whom the policy of their masters did not require the employment of a regular army. The conquest of the eastern shores of the Mediterranean by the Romans destroyed the maritime police which had been enforced by the Greek states as long as they possessed an independent navy. Even Rhodes, after its services ceased to be indispensable, was watched with jealousy, though it had remained firmly attached to Rome and given asylum to numbers of Roman citizens who fled from Asia Minor to escape death at the hands of the partisans of Mithridates. The caution of the senate did not allow the provinces to maintain any considerable armed force, either by land or sea; and the guards whom the free cities were permitted to keep, were barely sufficient to protect the walls of their citadels. Armies of robbers and fleets of pirates, remains of the mercenary forces of the Asiatic monarchs, disbanded in consequence of the Roman victories, began to infest the coasts of Greece. As long as the provinces continued able to pay their taxes with regularity, and the trade of Rome did not suffer directly, little attention was paid to the sufferings of the Greeks.

The geographical configuration of European Greece, intersected, in every direction, by high and rugged mountains, and separated by deep gulfs and bays into a number of promontories and peninsulas, renders communication between the thickly peopled and fertile districts more difficult than in most other regions. The country opposes barriers to internal trade, and presents difficulties to the formation of plans of mutual defence between the different districts, which it requires care and judgment, on the part of the general government, to remove. The armed force that can instantly be collected at one point, must often be small; and this circumstance has marked out Greece as a suitable field where piratical bands may plunder, as they have it in their power to remove their forces to distant spots with great celerity. From the earliest ages of history to the present day, these circumstances, combined with the extensive trade which has always been carried on in the eastern part of the Mediterranean, have rendered the Grecian seas the scene of constant piracies. At many periods, the pirates have been able to assemble forces sufficient to give their expeditions the character of regular war ; and their pursuits have been so lucrative, and their success so great, that their profession has ceased to be viewed as a dishonourable occupation.

A system of piracy, which was carried on by considerable armies and large fleets, began to be formed soon after the conclusion of the Mithridatic war. The indefinite nature of the Roman power in the East, the weakness of the Asiatic monarchs and of the sovereigns of Egypt, the questionable nature of the protection which Rome accorded to her allies, and the general disarming of the European Greeks, all encouraged and facilitated the enterprises of these pirates. A political, as well as a military organization, was given to their forces by the seizure of several strong positions on the coast of Cilicia. From these stations they directed their expeditions over the greater part of the Mediterranean. The wealth which ages of prosperity had accumulated in the many towns and temples of Greece was now defenceless; the country was exposed to daily incursions, and a long list of the devastations of the Cilician pirates is recorded in history. Many even of the largest and wealthiest cities in Europe and Asia were successfully attacked and plundered, and the greater number of the celebrated temples of antiquity were robbed of their immense treasures. Samos, Clazomene, and Samothrace, the great temples at Hermione, Epidaurus, Taenarus, Calauria, Actium, Argos, and the Isthmus of Corinth, were all pillaged. To such an extent was this system of robbery carried, and so powerful and well-disciplined were the forces of the pirates, that it was at last necessary for Rome either to share with them the dominion of the sea, or to devote all her military energies to their destruction. In order to destroy these last remains of the mercenaries who had upheld the Macedonian empire in the East, Pompey was invested with extraordinary powers as commander-in-chief over the whole Mediterranean. An immense force was placed at his absolute disposal, and he was charged with a degree of authority over the officers of the republic, and the allies of the State, which had never before been intrusted to one individual. His success in the execution of this commission was considered one of his most brilliant military achievements; he captured ninety ships with brazen beaks, and took twenty thousand prisoners. Some of these prisoners were established in towns on the coast of Cilicia; and Soli, which he rebuilt, and peopled with these pirates, was honoured with the name of Pompeiopolis. The Romans, consequently, do not seem to have regarded them as having engaged in a disgraceful warfare, otherwise Pompey would hardly have ventured to make them his clients.

The proceedings of the senate during the piratical war revealed to the Greeks the full extent of the disorganization which already prevailed in the Roman government. A few families who considered themselves above the law, and who submitted to no moral restraint, ruled both the senate and the people, so that the policy of the republic changed and vacillated according to the interests and passions of a small number of leading men in Rome. Some events during the conquest of Crete afford a remarkable instance of the incredible disorder in the republic, which foreshadowed the necessity of a single despot as the only escape from anarchy. While Pompey, with unlimited power over the shores and islands of the Mediterranean, was exterminating piracy and converting pirates into citizens, Metellus, under the authority of the senate, was engaged in conquering the island of Crete, in order to add it to the list of Roman provinces of which the senate alone named the governors. A conflict of authority arose between Pompey and Metellus. The latter was cruel and firm; the former mild but ambitious, and eager to render the whole maritime population of the East his dependents. He became jealous of the success of Metellus, and sent one of his lieutenants to stop the siege of the Cretan towns invested by the Roman army. But Metellus was not deterred by seeing the ensigns of Pompey’s authority displayed from the walls. He pursued his conquests, and neither Pompey nor the times were yet prepared for an open civil war between consular armies.

Crete had been filled with the strongholds of the pirates as well as Cilicia, and there is no doubt that their ranks were filled with Greeks who could find no other means of subsistence. Despair is said to have driven many of the citizens of the states conquered by the Romans to suicide; it must have forced a far greater number to embrace a life of piracy and robbery. The government of Rome was at this time subject to continual revolutions; and the Romans lost all respect for the rights of property either at home or abroad. Wealth and power were the only objects of pursuit, and the force of all moral ties was broken. Justice ceased to be administered, and men, in such cases, always assume the right of revenging their own wrongs. Those who considered themselves aggrieved by any act of oppression, or fancied they had received some severe injury, sought revenge in the way which presented itself most readily; and when the oppressor was secure against their attacks, they made society responsible. The state of public affairs was considered an apology for the ravages of the pirates even in those districts of Greece which suffered most severely from their lawless conduct. They probably spent liberally among the poor the treasures which they wrested from the rich; and so little, indeed, were they placed beyond the pale of society, that Pompey himself settled a colony of them at Dyme, in Achaia, where they seem to have prospered. Though piracy was not subsequently carried on so extensively as to merit a place in history, it was not entirely extirpated even by the fleet which the Roman emperors maintained in the East; and that cases still continued to occur in the Grecian seas is proved by public inscriptions. The carelessness of the senate in superintending the administration of the distant provinces caused a great increase of social corruption, and left crimes against the property and persons of the provincials often unpunished. Kidnapping by land and sea became a regular profession. The great slave-mart of Delos enabled the man-stealers to sell thousands in a single day. Even open brigandage was allowed to exist in the heart of the eastern provinces at the time of Rome’s greatest power. Strabo mentions several robber chiefs who maintained themselves in their fastnesses like independent princes.

 

Sect. V

Nature of the Roman Provincial Administration in Greece

 

The Romans reduced those countries where they met with resistance into the form of provinces, a procedure which was generally equivalent to abrogating the existing laws, and imposing on the vanquished a new system of civil as well as political administration. In the countries inhabited by the Greeks this policy underwent considerable modification. The Greeks, indeed, were so much farther advanced in civilization than the Romans, that it was no easy task for a Roman proconsul to effect any great change in the civil administration. He could not organize his government, without borrowing largely from the existing laws of the province. The constitution of Sicily, which was the first Greek province of the Roman dominions, presents a number of anomalies in the administration of its different districts. That portion of the island which had composed the kingdom of Hiero was allowed to retain its own laws, and paid the Romans the same amount of taxation which had been formerly levied by its own monarchs. The other portions of the island were subjected to various regulations concerning the amount of their taxes and the administration of justice. The province contained three allied cities, five colonies, five free and seventeen tributary cities. Macedonia, Epirus, and Achaia, when conquered, were treated very much in the same way, if we make due allowance for the increasing severity of the fiscal government of the Roman magistrates. Macedonia, before it was reduced to the condition of a province, was divided into four districts, each of which was governed by its own magistrates elected by the people. When Achaia was conquered, the walls of the towns were thrown down, the aristocracy was ruined, and the country impoverished by fines. But as soon as the Romans were convinced that Greece was too weak to be dangerous, the Achaeans were allowed to revive some of their old civic usages and federal institutions. As the province of Achaia embraced the Peloponnesus, northern Greece, and southern Epirus, the revival of local confederacies, and the privileges accorded to free cities and particular districts, really tended to disunite the Greeks, without affording them the means of increasing their national strength. Crete, Cyprus, Cyrene, and Asia Minor were subsequently reduced to provinces, and were allowed to retain much of their laws and usages. Thrace, even so late as the time of Tiberius, was governed by its own sovereign, as an ally of the Romans. Many cities within the bounds of the provinces retained their own peculiar laws, and, as far as their own citizens were concerned, they continued to possess the legislative as well as the executive power, by administering their own affairs, and executing justice within their limits, without being liable to the control of the proconsul.

As long as the republic continued to exist, the provinces were administered by proconsuls or praetors, chosen from among the members of the senate, and responsible to that body for their administration. The authority of these provincial governors was immense; they had the power of life and death over the Greeks, and the supreme control over all judicial, financial, and administrative business was vested in their hands. They had the right of naming and removing most of the judges and magistrates under their orders, and most of the fiscal arrangements regarding the provincials depended on their will. No power ever existed more liable to be abused; for while the representatives of the most absolute sovereigns have seldom been intrusted with more extensive authority, they have never incurred so little danger of being punished for its abuse. The only tribunal before which the proconsuls could be cited for any acts of injustice which they might commit was that very senate which had sent them out as its deputies, and received them back into its body as members.

When the imperial government was consolidated by Augustus, the command of the whole military force of the republic devolved on the emperor; but his constitutional position was not that of sovereign. The early emperors concentrated in their persons the offices of commander-in-chief of the military and naval forces of Rome, of minister of war and of finance, and of Pontifex Maximus, which gave them a sacred character, as head of the religion of the State, and their persons were inviolable, as they were invested with the tribunician power; but the senate and people were still possessed of the supreme legislative authority, and the senate continued to direct the civil branches of the executive ad-ministration. In consequence of this relation between the jurisdiction of the senate and the emperors, the provinces were divided into two classes: Those in which the military forces were stationed were placed under the direct orders of the emperor, and were governed by his lieutenants or legates; the other provinces, which did not require to be constantly occupied by the legions, remained dependent on the senate, as the chief civil authority in the State, and were governed by proconsuls or propraetors. Most of the countries inhabited by the Greeks were in that peaceable condition which placed them in the rank of senatorial provinces. Sicily, Macedonia, Epirus, Achaia, Crete, Cyrene, Bithynia, and Asia Minor remained under the control of the senate. Cyprus, from its situation as affording a convenient post for a military force to watch Cilicia, Syria, and Egypt, was at first classed among the imperial provinces; but Augustus subsequently exchanged it for the more important position of Dalmatia, where an army could be stationed to watch Rome, and separate Italy and the proconsular provinces of Greece.

The proconsuls and propraetors occupied a higher rank in the State than the imperial legates; but their situation deprived them of all hope of military distinction, the highest object of Roman ambition. This exclusion of the aristocracy from military pursuits, by the emperors, is not to be lost sight of in observing the change which took place in the Roman character. Avarice was the vice which succeeded in stifling feelings of self-abasement and disappointed ambition; and as the proconsuls were not objects of jealousy to the emperors, they were enabled to gratify their ruling passion without danger. They surrounded themselves with a splendid court; and a numerous train of followers, officials, and guards, who were at their orders, was maintained at the expense of their province. As they were themselves senators, they felt assured of finding favourable judges in the senate under any circumstances. Irresponsible government soon degenerates into tyranny, and the administration of the Roman proconsuls became as oppressive as that of the worst despots, and was loudly complained of by the provincials. The provinces under the government of the emperor were better administered. The imperial lieutenants, though inferior in rank to proconsuls, possessed a more extensive command, as they united in their persons the chief civil and military authority. The effect of their possessing more power was, that the limits of their authority, and the forms of their proceedings, were determined with greater precision — were more closely watched, and more strictly controlled by the military discipline to which they were subjected; while, at the same time, the constant dependence of all their actions on the immediate orders of the emperor and the various departments of which he was the head opposed more obstacles to arbitrary proceedings.

The expenses of the proconsular administration being paid by the provinces, it was chiefly by abuses augmenting their amount that the proconsuls were enabled to accumulate enormous fortunes during their short tenure of government. The burden was so heavily felt by Macedonia and Achaia, even as early as the reign of Tiberius, that the complaints of these two provinces induced that emperor to unite their administration with that of the imperial province of Moesia; but Claudius restored them to the senate. Thrace, when it was reduced to a Roman province by Vespasian, was also added to the imperial list. As the power of the emperors rose into absolute authority over the Roman world and the pageant of the republic faded away, all distinction between the different classes of provinces disappeared. They were distributed according to the wish of the reigning emperor, and their administration arbitrarily transferred to officers of whatever rank he thought fit to select. The Romans, indeed, had never affected much system in this, any more than in any other branch of their government. Pontius Pilate, when he condemned our Saviour, governed Judaea with the rank of procurator of Caesar; he was vested with the whole administrative, judicial, fiscal, and military authority, almost as completely as it could have been exercised by a proconsul, yet his title was only that of a finance officer, charged with the administration of those revenues which belonged to the imperial treasury.

The provincial governors usually named three or four deputies to carry on the business of the districts into which the province was divided, and each of these deputies was controlled and assisted by a local council. It may be remarked, that the condition of the inhabitants of the western portion of the Roman Empire was different from that of the eastern; in the west the people were generally treated as little better than serfs; they were not considered the absolute proprietors of the lands they cultivated. Hadrian first gave them a full right of property in their lands, and secured to them a regular system of law. In Greece, on the other hand, the people retained all their property and private rights. Some rare exceptions indeed occurred, as in the case of the Corinthian territory, which was confiscated for the benefit of the Roman state, and declared ager publicus after the destruction of the city by Mummius. Throughout all the countries inhabited by the Greeks, the provincial administration was necessarily modified by the circumstance of the conquered being much farther advanced in social civilization than their conquerors. To facilitate the task of governing and taxing the Greeks, the Romans found themselves compelled to retain much of the civil government, and many of the financial arrangements, which they found existing; and hence arose the marked difference which is observed in the administration of the eastern and western portions of the empire. When the great jurist Scaevola was proconsul of Asia, he published an edict for the administration of his province, by which he allowed the Greeks to have judges of their own nation, and to decide their suits according to their own laws; a concession equivalent to the restoration of their civil liberties in public opinion, according to Cicero, who copied it when he was proconsul of Cilicia. The existence of the free cities, of the local tribunals and provincial assemblies, and the respect paid to their laws, gave the Greek language an official character, and enabled the Greeks to acquire so great an influence in the administration of their country, as either to limit the despotic power of their Roman masters, or, when that proved impossible, to share its profits. But though the arbitrary decisions of the proconsuls received some check from the existence of fixed rules and permanent usages, still these barriers were insufficient to prevent the abuse of irresponsible authority. Those laws and customs which a proconsul dared not openly violate, he could generally nullify by some concealed measure of oppression. The avidity displayed by Brutus in endeavouring to make Cicero enforce payment of forty-eight per cent, interest when his debtors, the Salaminians of Cyprus, offered to pay the capital with twelve per cent, interest, proves with what injustice and oppression the Greeks were treated even by the mildest of the Roman aristocracy. The fact that throughout the Grecian provinces, as well as in the rest of the empire, the governors superintended the financial administration, and exercised the judicial power, is sufficient to explain the ruin and poverty which the Roman government produced. Before the wealth of the people had been utterly consumed, an equitable proconsul had it in his power to confer happiness on his provinces, and Cicero draws a very favourable picture of his own administration in Cilicia: but a few governors like Verres and Caius Antonius soon reduced a province to a state of poverty, from which it would have required ages of good government to enable it to recover. The private letters of Cicero afford repeated proofs that the majority of the officers employed by the Roman government openly violated every principle of justice to gratify their passions and their avarice. Many of them even condescended to engage in trade, and, like Brutus, became usurers.

The early years of the empire were certainly more popular than the latter years of the republic in the provinces. The emperors were anxious to strengthen themselves against the senate by securing the goodwill of the provincials, and they consequently exerted their authority to check the oppressive conduct of the senatorial officers, and to lighten the fiscal burdens of the people by a stricter administration of justice. Tiberius, Claudius, and Domitian, though Rome groaned under their tyranny, were remarkable for their zeal in correcting abuses in the administration of justice, and Hadrian established a council of jurisconsults and senators to assist him in reviewing the judicial business of the provinces as well as of the capital.

 

 

Sect. VI

Fiscal Administration of the Romans

 

The legal amount of the taxes, direct and indirect, levied by the Romans on the Greeks, was probably not greater than the sum paid to their national governments in the days of their independence. But a small amount of taxation arbitrarily imposed, unjustly collected, and injudiciously spent, weighs more heavily on the resources of the people, than immense burdens properly distributed and wisely employed. The wealth and resources of Greece had been greatest at the time when each city formed a separate state, and the inhabitants of each valley possessed the power of employing the taxes which they paid, for objects which ameliorated their own condition. The moment the centralization of political power enabled one city to appropriate the revenues of another to its wants, whether for its architectural embellishment or for its public games, theatrical representations, and religious ceremonies, the decline of the country commenced: but all the evil effects of centralization were not felt until the taxes were paid to foreigners. When the tributes were remitted to Rome, it was difficult to persuade absent administrators of the necessity of expending money on a road, a port, or an aqueduct, which had no direct connection with Roman interests. Had the Roman government acted according to the strictest principles of justice, Greece must have suffered from its dominion; but its avarice and corruption, after the commencement of the civil wars, knew no bounds. The extraordinary payments levied on the provinces soon equalled, and sometimes exceeded, the regular and legal taxes. Sparta and Athens, as allied states, were exempt from direct taxation; but, in order to preserve their liberty, they were compelled to make voluntary offerings to the Roman generals, who held the fate of the East in their hands, and these sometimes equalled the amount of any ordinary tribute. Cicero supplies ample proof of the extortions committed by the proconsuls, and no arrangements were adopted to restrain their avarice until the time of Augustus. It is, therefore, only under the empire that any accurate picture of the fiscal administration of the Romans in Greece can be attempted.

Until the time of Augustus, the Romans had maintained their armies by seizing and squandering the accumulated capital hoarded by all the nations of the world. They emptied the treasuries of all the kings and states they conquered; and when Julius Caesar marched to Rome, he dissipated that portion of the plunder of the world which had been laid up in the coffers of the republic. When that source of riches was exhausted, Augustus found himself compelled to seek for regular funds for maintaining the army: “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed”. A regular survey of the whole empire was made, and the land-tax was assessed according to a valuation taken of the annual income of every species of property. A capitation-tax was also imposed on all the provincials whom the land-tax did not affect.

The ordinary provincial taxes in the East were this land-tax, which generally amounted to a tenth of the produce, though, in some cases, it constituted a fifth, and in others fell to a twentieth. The land-tax was rendered uniform in all the provinces and converted at last into a money payment, by Marcus Aurelius. It was not assessed annually: but a valuation was made at stated periods for a determinate number of years, and the annual amount was called the Indictio before the time of Constantine, when the importance of this fiscal measure to the well-being of the inhabitants of the Roman empire is attested by the cycle of indictions becoming the ordinary chronological record of time. Italy itself was subjected to the land-tax and capitation by Galerius, A.D. 306, but the first indiction of the cycle of fifteen years used for chronological notation commenced on the 1st of September 312. The subjects of the empire paid also a tax on cattle, and a variety of duties on importation and exportation, which were levied even on the conveyance of goods from one province to another. In Greece, the free cities also retained the right of levying local duties on their citizens. Contributions of provisions and manufactures were likewise exacted for feeding and clothing the troops stationed in the provinces. Even under Augustus, who devoted his personal attention to reforming the financial administration of the empire, the proconsuls and provincial governors continued to avail themselves of their position, as a means of gratifying their avarice. Licinus accumulated immense riches in Gaul. Tiberius perceived that the weight of the Roman fiscal system was pressing too severely on the provinces, and he rebuked the prefect of Egypt for remitting too large a sum to Rome, as the amount proved he had overtaxed his province. The mere fact of a prefect’s possessing the power of increasing or diminishing the amount of his remittances to the treasury, is enough to condemn the arbitrary nature of the Roman fiscal administration. The prefect was told by the emperor that a good shepherd should shear, not flay, his sheep. But no rulers ever estimated correctly the amount of taxes that their subjects could advantageously pay; and Tiberius received a lesson on the financial system of his empire from Baton, King of Dalmatia, who, on being asked the cause of a rebellion, replied, that it arose from the emperor’s sending wolves to guard his flocks instead of shepherds.

The financial policy of the Roman republic was to transfer as much of the money circulating in the provinces, and of the precious metals in the hands of private individuals, as it was possible, into the coffers of the State. The city of Rome formed a drain for the wealth of all the provinces, and the whole empire was impoverished for its support. When Caligula expressed the wish that the Roman people had only one neck, in order that he might destroy them all at a single blow, the idea found a responsive echo in many a breast. There was a wise moral in the sentiment uttered in his frenzy; and many felt that the dispersion of the immense pauper population of Rome, which was nourished in idleness by the public revenues, would have been a great benefit to the rest of the empire. The desire of seizing wealth wherever it could be found continued to be long the dominant feeling in the personal policy of the emperors, as well as the proconsuls. The provincial governors enriched themselves by plundering their subjects, and the emperors filled their treasuries by accusing the senators of those crimes which entailed confiscation of their fortunes. From the earliest periods of Roman history, down to the time of Justinian, confiscation of private property was considered an ordinary and important branch of the imperial revenue. When Alexander the Great conquered Asia, the treasures which he dispersed increased the commerce of the world, created new cities, and augmented the general wealth of mankind. The Romans collected far greater riches from their conquests than Alexander had done, as they pushed their exactions much farther; but the rude state of society, in which they lived at the time of their first great successes, prevented their perceiving, that by carrying off or destroying all the movable capital in their conquests, they must ultimately diminish the amount of their own revenues. The wealth brought away from the countries inhabited by the Greeks was incredible; for the Romans pillaged the conquered, as the Spaniards plundered Mexico and Peru, and ruled them as the Turks subsequently governed Greece. The riches which centuries of industry had accumulated in Syracuse, Tarentum, Epirus, Macedonia, and Greece, and the immense sums seized in the treasuries of the kings of Cyprus, Pergamus, Syria, and Egypt, were removed to Rome, and consumed in a way which virtually converted them into premiums for neglecting agriculture. They were dispersed in paying an immense army, in feeding an idle populace, which was thus withdrawn from all productive occupations, and in maintaining the household of the emperor, the senators, and the imperial freedmen. The consequence of the arrangements adopted for provisioning Rome was felt over the whole empire, and seriously affected the prosperity of the most distant provinces. It is necessary to notice them, in order to understand perfectly the financial system of the empire during three centuries.

The citizens of Rome were considered entitled to a share of the revenues of the provinces which they had conquered, and which were long regarded in the light of a landed estate of the republic. The Roman State was held to be under an obligation of supporting all who were liable to military service, if they were poor and without profitable employment. The history of the public distributions of grain, and of the measures adopted for securing ample supplies to the market, at low prices, forms an important chapter in the social and political records of the Roman people. An immense quantity of grain was distributed in this way, which was received as tribute from the provinces. Caesar found three hundred and twenty thousand persons receiving this gratuity. It is true he reduced the number one half. The grain was drawn from Sicily, Africa, and Egypt, and its distribution enabled the poor to live in idleness, while the arrangements adopted by the Roman government, for selling grain at a low price, rendered the cultivation of land around Rome unprofitable to its proprietors. A large sum was annually employed by the State in purchasing grain in the provinces, and in transporting it to Rome, where it was sold to the bakers at a fixed price. A premium was also paid to the private importers of grain, in order to insure an abundant supply. In this manner a very large sum was expended to keep bread cheap in a city where a variety of circumstances tended to make it dear. This singular system of annihilating capital, and ruining agriculture and industry, was so deeply rooted in the Roman administration, that similar gratuitous distributions of grain were established at Antioch and Alexandria, and other cities, and they were introduced at Constantinople when that city became the capital of the empire.

It is not surprising that Greece suffered severely under a government equally tyrannical in its conduct and unjust in its legislation. In almost every department of public business the interests of the State were placed in opposition to those of the people, and even when the letter of the law was mild, its administration was burdensome. The customs of Rome were moderate, and consisted of a duty of five per cent, on exports and imports. Where the customs were so reasonable, commerce ought to have flourished; but the real amount levied under an unjust government bears no relation to the nominal payment. The government of Turkey has ruined the commerce of its subjects, with duties equally moderate. The Romans despised commerce; they considered merchants as little better than cheats, and concluded that they were always in the wrong when they sought to avoid making any payment to government. The provinces in the eastern part of the Mediterranean are inhabited by a mercantile population. The wants of many parts can only be supplied by sea; and as the various provinces and small independent states were often separated by double lines of custom-houses, the subsistence of the population was frequently at the mercy of the revenue officers. The customs payable to Rome were let to farmers, who possessed extensive powers for their collection, and a special tribunal existed for the enforcement of their claims; these farmers of the customs were consequently powerful tyrants in all the countries round the Aegean Sea.

The ordinary duty on the transport of goods from one province to another amounted to two and a half per cent.; but some kinds of merchandise were subjected to a tax of an eighth, which appears to have been levied when the article first entered the Roman Empire.

The provincial contributions pressed as heavily on the Greeks as the general taxes. The expense of the household of the proconsuls was very great; they had also the right of placing the troops in winter quarters, in whatever towns they thought fit. This power was rendered a profitable means of extorting money from the wealthy districts. Cicero mentions that the island of Cyprus paid two hundred talents — about forty-five thousand pounds annually — in order to purchase exemption from this burden. The power of the fiscal agents, charged to collect the extraordinary contributions in the provinces, was unlimited. One of the ordinary punishments for infringing the revenue laws was confiscation, — a punishment which was converted by the collectors of the revenue into a systematic means of extortion. A regular trade in usury was established, in order to force proprietors to sell their property; and accusations were brought forward in the fiscal courts, merely to levy fines, or compel the accused to incur debts. Free Greeks were constantly sold as slaves because they were unable to pay the amount of taxation to which they were liable. The establishment of posts, which Augustus instituted for the transmission of military orders, was soon converted into a burden on the provinces, instead of being rendered a public benefit, by allowing private individuals to make use of its services. The enlisting of recruits was another source of abuse. Privileges and monopolies were granted to merchants and manufacturers; the industry of a province was ruined, to raise a sum of money for an emperor or a favourite.

The free cities and allied states were treated with as much injustice as the provinces, though their position enabled them to escape many of the public burdens. The crowns of gold, which had once been given by cities and provinces as a testimony of gratitude, were converted into a forced gift, and at last extorted as a tax of a fixed amount.

In addition to the direct weight of the public burdens, their severity was increased by the exemption which Roman citizens enjoyed from the land-tax, the customs, and the municipal burdens, in the provinces, the free cities, and the allied states. This exemption filled Greece with traders and usurers, who obtained the right of citizenship as a speculation, merely to evade the payment of the local taxes. The Roman magistrates had the power of granting this immunity; and as they were in the habit of participating in the profits even of their enfranchised slaves, there can be no doubt that a regular traffic in citizenship was established, and this cause exercised considerable influence in accelerating the ruin of the allied states and free cities, by defrauding them of their local privileges and revenues. When Nero wished to render himself popular in Greece, he extended the immunity from tribute to all the Greeks; but Vespasian found the financial affairs of the empire in such disorder that he was compelled to revoke all grants of exemption to the provinces. Virtue, in the old times of Rome, meant valour; liberty, in the time of Nero, signified freedom from taxation. Of this liberty Vespasian deprived Greece, Byzantium, Samos, Rhodes, and Lycia.

The financial administration of the Romans inflicted, if possible, a severer blow on the moral constitution of society than on the material prosperity of the country. It divided the population of Greece into two classes, one possessing the title of Roman citizens, — a title often purchased by their wealth, and which implied freedom from taxation; — the other consisting of the Greeks who, from poverty, were unable to purchase the envied privilege, and thus by their very poverty were compelled to bear the whole weight of the public burdens laid on the province. The rich and poor were thus ranged in two separate castes of society.

By the Roman constitution, the knights were intrusted with the management of the finances of the State. They were a body in whose eyes wealth, on which their rank substantially depended, possessed an undue value. The prominent feature of their character was avarice, notwithstanding the praises of their justice which Cicero has left us. The knights acted as collectors of the revenues, but they also frequently farmed the taxes of a province for a term of years, subletting portions, and they formed companies for farming the customs besides employing capital in public or private loans. They were favoured by the policy of Rome; while their own riches, and their secondary position in political affairs, served to screen them from attacks in the forum. For a long period, too, all the judges were selected from their order, and consequently knights alone decided those commercial questions which most seriously affected their individual profits.

The heads of the financial administration in Greece were thus placed in a moral position unfavourable to an equitable collection of the revenues. The case of Brutus, who attempted to oblige the Salaminians of Cyprus to pay him compound interest, at the rate of four per cent, a month, shows that avarice and extortion were not generally considered dishonourable in the eyes of the Roman aristocracy. The practices of selling the right of citizenship, of raising unjust fiscal prosecutions to extort fines, and enforce confiscation to increase landed estates, have been already mentioned. They produced effects which have found a place in history. The existence of all these crimes is well known; their effects may be observed in the fact that a single citizen, Julius Eurycles, had in the time of Augustus rendered himself proprietor of the whole island of Cythera, and caused a rebellion in Laconia by the severity of his extortions. During the republic the authority of Romans of high rank was so great in the provinces that no Greek ventured to dispute their commands. Caius Antonius, the colleague of Cicero in the consulship, resided at Cephalonia when he was banished for extortion, and Strabo informs us that this criminal treated the inhabitants as if the island had been his private property.

Roman citizens in Greece escaped the oppressive powers of the fiscal agents, not only in those cases wherein they were by law exempt from provincial taxes, but also because they possessed the means of defending themselves against injustice by the right of carrying their causes to Rome for judgment by appeal. These privileges rendered the number of Roman citizens engaged in mercantile speculation and trade very great. A considerable multitude of the inhabitants of Rome had, from the earliest times, been employed in trade and commerce, without obtaining the right of citizenship at home. They did not fail to settle in numbers in all the Roman conquests, and, in the provinces, they were correctly called Romans. They always enjoyed from the republic the fullest protection, and soon acquired the rights of citizenship. Even Roman citizens were sometimes so numerous in the provinces that they could furnish not a few recruits to the legions. Their numbers were so great at the commencement of the Mithridatic war (B. C. 88) that eighty thousand were put to death in Asia when the king took up arms against the Romans. The greater part undoubtedly consisted of merchants, traders, and money-dealers. The Greeks at last obtained the right of Roman citizenship in such multitudes, that Nero may have made no very enormous sacrifice of public revenue when he conferred liberty, or freedom from tribute, on all the Greeks.

It is unnecessary to dwell at any length on the effects of the system of general oppression and partial privileges which has been described. Honest industry was useless in trade, and political intrigue was the easiest mode of obtaining some privilege or monopoly which ensured the speedy accumulation of a large fortuned

In enumerating the causes of the impoverishment and depopulation of the Roman Empire, the depreciation of the coinage must not be overlooked. Considerable changes were made in the Roman mint by Augustus, but the great depreciation which destroyed capital, diminished the demand for labour, and accelerated the depopulation of the provinces, dates from the reign of Caracalla.

Augustus fixed the standard at 40 gold pieces (aurei) to a pound of pure gold and he coined 84 denarii from a pound of silver, but he did not always observe strictly the standard which he had established. And in the interval between his reign and that of Nero coins of less than the legal standard were frequently minted. Nero reduced the standard to 45 aurei to a pound of gold and coined 96 denarii from a pound of silver, retaining the proportion of 25 denarii to an aureus. Caracalla again reduced the standard, coining 50 aurei from a pound of gold and making a great addition of alloy in the silver coinage. Great irregularities were not uncommon in the Roman mint at every period under the republic and the empire. Indeed, order and system appear to have been introduced very slowly into some branches of the Roman administration, and great irregularities were of constant recurrence in the mint. Temporary necessities caused the legal standard to be at times lowered and at others violated even in the best days of the republic, and the arbitrary power of the emperors is more completely exhibited in the coinage than in the historical records of the empire. Before the time of Nero aurei were coined of 45 to a pound, and before the time of Caracalla of 50 to a pound.

In the time of Diocletian a great change was made in the coinage when every other branch of the administration was reformed. The standard was fixed at 60 aurei to a pound of pure gold, but this rate was not preserved for any length of time, and in the reign of Constantine the Great 72 gold pieces were coined from a pound of metal. Order and unity were at last introduced into the fabric of the Roman government, but, as too often happens in the history of human institutions, we find these benefits obtained by the loss of local rights and personal liberty. The gold standard adopted by Constantine became one of the immutable institutions of the Roman Empire, and it was retained until the eastern empire was extinguished by the conquest of Constantinople in 1204. These pieces, called at first solidi, and known afterwards to the western nations by the name of byzants, were minted without change in the weight and purity of the metal for a period of nearly 900 years.

The public taxes and the tribute of the provinces were generally exacted in gold. It was therefore the interest of the emperors to maintain the purity of the gold coinage. But as large payments were made by weight, a profit could often be made by issuing from the mint coins of less than the standard weight, and that this fraud was often perpetrated by the emperors is attested by the existence of innumerable well- preserved gold coins.

The silver coinage was in a different condition from the gold. From the time of Augustus to that of Caracalla it formed the ordinary circulating medium in the eastern part of the empire, and several cities possessed the right of coining silver in their local mints. Both the imperial and the local mints often derived an illicit gain by diminishing the weight or debasing the purity of the silver coins. Augustus, as has been already mentioned, coined 84 denarii from a pound of silver and Nero 96. Hadrian, though he made no change in the legal standard, permitted the mint to issue silver coins of less than the standard purity, and many of his successors imitated his bad example. The relative value of the aureus and the denarius underwent a change as soon as a considerable quantity of the silver coinage, whether issued by the imperial or local mints, was of debased metal, and aurei of standard weight were sold by the money-changers at an agio. The emperors appear to have defrauded those they paid in silver by issuing base denarii as well as cheated those they paid in gold by counting out light aurei.

When Caracalla coined fifty aurei to the pound, he seems to have proposed restoring the relative value of the gold and silver money. To do this it was necessary to issue a new silver coin of which twenty-five should be equal to the new aureus. Instead of restoring the denarius to its true proportion in weight and purity, he issued the larger piece, in which the emperor is represented with a radiated crown, called argenteus. These contain a considerable portion of alloy, and were minted at the rate of sixty to a pound of the new silver standard. The proportion adopted by Caracalla for the silver coinage was not observed. A deterioration is apparent even during the reigns of Alexander Severus, Maximinus, and Gordianus Pius, though these emperors evidently made some efforts to arrest the depreciation of the ordinary circulating medium by large issues of copper sestertii of full weight. They appear to have hoped to sustain the value of the silver currency by keeping up the value of the copper coin which circulated as its fractions.

The proportion of alloy in the silver coinage was rapidly increased after the time of Gordianus Pius, and at last Gallienus put an end to the silver coinage by issuing plated money and copper pieces washed with tin as a substitute for silver. Thus a base denarius of his latter years was of less value than an as of the former part of his reign, which ought to have been its sixteenth part.

Gallienus threw the whole coinage of the empire into confusion. He repeatedly reduced the size of the aureus according to his temporary exigencies, but he preserved the standard purity of the metal, for while he paid his own debts by tale he exacted payment of the tribute of the provinces by weight. The intolerable oppression of his monetary frauds and exactions, added to the disorder that prevailed in every branch of the imperial government, goaded the provinces into rebellion. The rise of the thirty tyrants, as the rebel emperors were called, must in some degree be connected with the depreciation of the coinage, for the troops as well as the provincials were sufferers by the frauds of his mint. The troops were ready to support any emperor who would pay them a donative in coin of full weight, and the provincials were ready to support any rebel who could resist the transmission of the gold in the province to Rome.

The depreciation of the ordinary currency during the reign of Gallienus has no parallel in history unless it be found in the recent depreciations of the Othoman currency. Five hundred of the washed denarii or argentei of his latter coinage were required to purchase an aureus, while government compelled its subjects to receive these base coins at the rate of twenty-five to an aureus.

The emperors defrauded their subjects, but the masters of the mint and the corporation of moneyers shared the profits of these frauds, and rendered the debasement of the coinage and the agio on gold a source of gain independent of the government. When Aurelian endeavoured to restore the unity of the empire it was necessary for him to re-establish uniformity in the currency. But when he attempted to reform the abuses in the imperial mint, the masters of the mint and the corporation of moneyers openly rebelled, and their power and numbers were so great that he is said to have lost seven thousand men in suppressing their revolt.

The depreciation in the value of the circulating medium during the fifty years between the reign of Caracalla and the death of Gallienus annihilated a great part of the trading capital in the Roman Empire, and rendered it impossible to carry on commercial transactions not only with foreign countries but even with distant provinces. Every payment was liable to be greatly diminished in real value, even when it was nominally the same. This state of things at last induced capitalists to hoard their coins of pure gold and silver for better days; and as these better days did not occur, all memory of many hoards was lost, and the buried treasures, consisting of select coins, have often remained concealed until the present time. Thus the frauds of the Roman emperors have filled the cabinets of collectors and the national museums of modem Europe with well-preserved coins.

The special effects of the depreciation of the Roman coinage on the wealth of Greece cannot be traced in detail, for no facts are recorded by historians which connect it prominently with any private or public event. The local mints ceased to exist, when even their copper coins became of greater intrinsic value than the money of the imperial mint of which they were nominally fractions. The as of the provincial city was more valuable than the denarius of the capital. Zosimus informs us that this monetary confusion produced commercial anarchy, and it requires no historian to tell us that political anarchy is a natural consequence of national bankruptcy. The laws which regulate the distribution, the accumulation and the destruction of wealth, the demand for labour and the gains of industry, attest that the depreciation of the currency was one of the most powerful causes of the impoverishment and depopulation of the Roman empire in the third century, and there can be no doubt that Greece suffered severely from its operation.

 

Sect. VII

Depopulation of Greece caused by the Roman Government

 

Experience proves that the same law of the progress of society which gives to an increasing population a tendency to outgrow the means of subsistence, compels a declining one to press on the limits of taxation. A government may push taxation up to that point when it arrests all increase in the means of subsistence; but the moment this stationary condition of society is produced, the people will begin to consume a portion of the wealth previously absorbed by the public taxes, and the revenues of the country will have a tendency to decrease; or, what is the same thing, in so far as the political law is concerned, the government will find greater difficulty in collecting the same amount of revenue, and, if it succeed, will cause a diminution in the population.

The depopulation of the Roman provinces was, however, not caused entirely by the financial oppression of the government. In order to secure new conquests against rebellion, the armed population was generally exterminated, or reduced to slavery. If the people displayed a spirit of independence, they were regarded as robbers, and destroyed without mercy; and this cruelty was so engrafted into the system of the Roman administration that Augustus treated the Salassi in this manner, when their disorders could easily have been effectually prevented by milder measures. At the time the Romans first engaged in war with the Macedonians and Greeks, the contest was of so doubtful a nature that the Romans were not likely to relax the usual policy which they adopted for weakening their foes; Macedonia, Epirus, Aetolia, and Achaia, were therefore treated with the greatest severity at the time of their conquest. Aemilius Paulus, in order to secure the submission of Epirus, destroyed seventy cities, and sold one hundred and fifty thousand of the inhabitants as slaves. The policy which considered a reduction of the population necessary for securing obedience, would not fail to adopt efficient measures to prevent its again becoming either numerous or wealthy. The utter destruction of Carthage, and the extermination of the Carthaginians, is a fact which has no parallel in the history of any other civilized stated Mummius razed Corinth to the ground, and sold its whole population as slaves. Delos was the great emporium of the trade of the East about the time of the conquest of Greece; it was plundered by the troops of Mithridates, and again by the orders of Sulla. It only recovered its former state of prosperity under the Romans as a slave-market. Sulla utterly destroyed several cities of Boeotia, and depopulated Athens, the Piraeus, and Thebes. The inhabitants of Megara were nearly exterminated by Julius Caesar; and a considerable number of cities in Achaia, Aetolia, and Acarnania, were laid waste by order of Augustus, and their inhabitants were settled in the newly established Roman colonies of Nicopolis and Patrae. Brutus levied five years’ tribute in advance from the inhabitants of Asia Minor. His severity made the people of Xanthus prefer extermination to submission. Cassius, after he had taken Rhodes, treated it in the most tyrannical manner, and displayed a truly Roman spirit of fiscal rapacity. The celebrated letter of Sulpicius to Cicero, so familiar to the lovers of poetry from the paraphrase of Lord Byron, affords irrefragable testimony to the rapid decline of Greece under the Roman government.

During the civil wars, the troops which Greece still possessed were compelled to range themselves on one side or the other. The Aetolians and Acarnanians joined Caesar; the Athenians, Lacedaemonians, and Boeotians, ranged themselves as partisans of Pompey. The Athenians, and most of the other Greeks, afterwards espoused the cause of Brutus and Cassius; but the Lacedaemonians sent a body of two thousand men to serve as auxiliaries of Octavius. The destruction of property caused by the progress through Greece of the various bodies of troops, whose passions were inflamed by the disorders of the civil war, was not compensated by the favours conferred on a few cities by Caesar, Antony, and Augustus. The remission of a few taxes, or the present of additional revenues to an oligarchical magistracy, could exercise no influence on the general prosperity of the country.

The depopulation caused by war alone might have been very soon repaired, had the government of Greece been wisely administered. But there are conditions of society which render it difficult to replace capital or recruit population when either of them has undergone any considerable diminution. Attica appears never to have recovered from the ravages committed by Philip V of Macedon as early as the year B.C. 200, when he burned down the buildings and groves of Cynosarges and the Lyceum in the immediate vicinity of Athens, and the temples, olive-trees, and vineyards over the whole country. The Athenians had even then lost the social and moral energy necessary for repairing the damage produced by a great national calamity. They could no longer pursue a life of agricultural employment: their condition had degenerated into that of a mere city population, and the thoughts and feelings of Greek freemen were those of a town mob. In such circumstances the ravages of an enemy permanently diminished the resources of the country, for in a land like Greece, ages of labour and the accumulated savings of generations are required to cover the arid limestone mountains with olive and fig trees, and to construct the cisterns and canals of irrigation which are necessary to render a dry soil capable of yielding abundant supplies of food. In Athens bad government, social corruption, literary presumption, and national conceit, were nourished by liberal donations from foreign princes, who repaid flattery by feeding a worthless city population. Servility became more productive than honest industry, and the depopulation which resulted from wars and revolutions continued when Greece enjoyed peace under the domination of Rome. The statues of the gods erected in temples which had fallen into ruins, sculptured dedications and marble tombs, monuments of a wealthy and dense rural population of free citizens in the agricultural demes of Attica, were seen in the times of Hadrian, as the turbaned tombstone may now be seen in Turkey near the solitary desolation of the ruined mosque, testifying the rapid depopulation and destruction of vested capital which is now going on in the Othoman empire. A Roman writer says, that in Attica there were more gods and heroes than living men. It is impossible to point out, in precise detail, all the various measures by which the Roman administration undermined the physical and moral strength of the Greek nation; it is sufficient to establish the fact, that too much was exacted from the body of the people in the shape of public burdens, and that the neglect of all its duties on the part of the government gradually diminished the productive resources of the country. Works of utility were neglected; bands of robbers were allowed to infest the provinces for long periods without molestation. The extortions of the Roman magistrates, however, were more injurious, and rendered property more insecure, than the violence of the banditti. The public acts of robbery are those only which have been preserved by history; but for each open attack on public property, hundreds of private families were reduced to poverty, and thousands of free Greeks sold as slaves. Fulvius despoiled the temples of Ambracia of their most valuable ornaments, and even carried away the statues of the gods. Verres, on his passage through Greece to his post in Cilicia, carried off a quantity of gold from the temple of Minerva at Athens. Piso, while proconsul of Macedonia, plundered both it and Greece, and allowed them to be ravaged by Thracian banditti. Even under the cautious and conciliatory administration of Augustus, the oppressive conduct of the Romans caused seditions, both in Laconia — which was a favoured district, from its having taken part with the emperor against Antony— and in Attica, where the weakness to which the city was reduced seemed to render any expression of discontent impossible. The Greeks had not, in the time of Augustus, entirely lost their ancient spirit and valour, and though comparatively feeble, their conduct was an object of some solicitude to the Roman government.

The moral causes of depopulation were perhaps even more powerful than the political. They had been long in operation, and had produced great changes in the Greek character before the Roman conquest; and as some similar social evils were acting on the Romans themselves, the moral condition of Greece was not improved by the Roman government. The most prevalent evil was a spirit of self-indulgence and utter indifference to the duty of man in private life, which made every rank averse to marriage, and unwilling to assume the responsibility of educating a family. The Greeks never adorned the vestibules of their houses with the statues and busts of their ancestors; their inordinate self-conceit taught them to concentrate their admiration on themselves. And the Romans, even with the family pride which led to this noble practice, were constantly losing the glories of their race by conferring their name on adopted scions of other houses. The religion, and often the philosophy, of the ancients encouraged vicious indulgence, and the general rule of society in the first century of the Roman Empire was to live with concubines selected from a class of female slaves educated for this station. The land, which had formerly maintained a thousand free citizens capable of marching to defend their country as hoplites, was now regarded as affording a scanty provision for the household of a single proprietor who considered himself too poor to marry. His estate was cultivated by a tribe of slaves, while he amused himself with the music of the theatre, or the equally idle sounds of the philosophic schools. The desire to occupy larger properties than their ancestors had cultivated, has already been noticed as an effect of the riches obtained by the Macedonian conquests; and its influence as a moral check on the population of Greece has been adverted to. This cause of depopulation increased under the Roman government. The love of immense parks, splendid villas and luxurious living, fostered vice and celibacy to such an extent in the higher ranks, that the wealthy families became gradually extinct. The line of distinction between the rich and the poor was constantly becoming more marked. The rich formed an aristocratic class, the poor were sinking into a dependent grade in society; they were fast approaching the state of coloni or serfs. In this state of society, neither class shows a tendency to in- crease. It appears indeed to be a law of human society, that all classes of mankind which are separated, by superior wealth and privileges, from the body of the people, and by their oligarchical constitution, liable to a rapid decline. As the privileges which they enjoy have created an unnatural position in life, vice is increased beyond that limit which is consistent with the duration of society. The fact has been long observed with regard to the oligarchies of Sparta and Rome. It had its effect even on the more extended citizenship of Athens, and it even affected, in our times, the two hundred thousand electors who formed the oligarchy of France during the reign of Louis Philippe.

 

 

Sect. VIII

 Roman Colonies established in Greece.

 

Two Roman colonies, Corinth and Patrae, were established in Greece. They soon became the principal cities, and were for ages the centres of the political administration. Their influence on Greek society was very great, yet Latin continued to be the spoken language of the inhabitants, and their institutions and local government remained exclusively Roman until the decree of Caracalla extended the Roman franchise to all Greece.

The site of Corinth was devoted to the gods when Mummius destroyed the city and exterminated its inhabitants. From that time it remained desolate until, after an interval of more than a hundred years, Julius Caesar repeopled it with a colony of Romans. The advantages of its position, its rich territory, its impregnable citadel, its narrow isthmus, and its ports on two seas, made it equally valuable as a military and naval station, and as a commercial mart. Caesar refortified the Acro-Corinth, repaired the temples, rebuilt the city, restored the ports, and established a numerous population of veteran legionaries and industrious freedmen in the new city. Corinth became once more flourishing and populous. Its colonial coinage from the time of Julius to that of Gordian III is abundant, and often beautiful. It attests the extent of its trade and the taste of its inhabitants. But the new Corinth was not a Greek city. The mother of so many Hellenic colonies was now a foreign colony in Hellas. Her institutions were Roman, her language was Latin, her manners were tinctured with the lupine ferocity of the race of Romulus. Shows of gladiators were the delight of her amphitheatre; and though she shed a strong light over fallen Greece, it was only a lurid reflection of the splendour of Rome.

The position of Corinth was admirably suited for a military station to overlook the proceedings of the Greeks who were opposed to Caesar’s government. The measure was evidently one of precaution, and very little was done to give it the show of having originated in a wish to revive the prosperity of Greece. The population of the new Corinth was allowed to collect building materials, and search for wealth, in any way, how offensive soever it might be to the feelings of the Greeks. The tombs, which had alone escaped the fury of Mummius, were destroyed to construct the new buildings, and excavated for the rich ornaments and valuable sepulchral vases which they often contained. So systematically did the Romans pursue this profession of violating the tombs, that it became a source of very considerable wealth to the colony, and Rome was filled with works of archaic art. The facilities which the position of Corinth afforded for maritime communications, not only with every part of Greece, but also with Italy and Asia Minor, rendered it the seat of the Roman provincial administration, and the usual residence of the proconsul of Achaia.

The policy of Augustus towards Greece was openly one of precaution. The Greeks still continued to occupy the attention of the ruling class at Rome, more perhaps than their declining power warranted; they had not yet sunk into the political insignificancy which they were destined to reach in the days of Juvenal and Tacitus. Augustus reduced the power of all those Greek states that retained any influence, whether they had joined his own party or favoured Antony. Athens was deprived of its authority over Eretria and Aegina, and forbidden to increase its local revenues by selling the right of citizenship. Lacedaemon was also weakened by the establishment of the independent community of the free Laconians, a confederation of twenty-four maritime cities, whose population, consisting chiefly of perioikoi, had hitherto paid taxes to Sparta. Augustus, it is true, assigned the island of Cythera, and a few places on the Messenian frontier, to the Lacedaemonian state; but the gift was a very slight compensation for the loss sustained in a political point of view, whatever it might have been in a financial.

Augustus established a Roman colony at Patrae to extinguish the smouldering nationality of Achaia, and to keep open a gate through which a Roman force might at any time pour into Greece. Patrae then lay in ruins, and the proprietors of its territory dwelt in the villages around. Augustus repaired the city, and re-peopled it with Roman citizens, freedmen, and the veterans of the twenty-second legion. To fill up the void in the numbers of the middle and lower orders of the free population, necessary for the immediate formation of a large city, the inhabitants of some neighbouring Greek towns were compelled to abandon their dwellings and reside in Patrae. The local government of the colony was endowed with municipal revenues taken from several Achaean and Locrian cities which were deprived of their civic existence. Patrae was often the residence of the proconsul of Achaia, and it flourished for ages both as a Roman administrative station and as a port possessing great commercial resources. Its colonial coinage, though neither so abundant nor so elegant in its fabric as that of Corinth, extends from the time of Augustus to that of Gordian III. As in all Roman colonies, the political institutions of Rome were closely imitated at Corinth and Patrae. Their highest magistrates were duumviri, who represented the consulate, and who were annually elected; or, perhaps, it would be more correct to say, were selected for a nominal election by the imperial authorities. Other magistrates were elected, and some were appointed to perform those duties in the colonies which were similar to the functions of the great office-bearers in Rome. And as the model of the Roman government was originally that of a single city, the resemblance was easily maintained. Under the emperors, however, the colonies gradually sank into ordinary corporations for the transaction of administrative and fiscal business, under the immediate control of the Roman proconsuls and provincial governors.

Augustus also founded a new city called Nicopolis, to commemorate the victory of Actium, but it was as much a triumphal monument as a political establishment. Its organization was that of a Greek city, not of a Roman colony; and its quinquennial festival of the Actia was instituted on the model of the great games of Greece, and placed under the superintendence of the Lacedaemonians. Its population consisted of Greeks who were compelled to desert their native cities in Epirus, Acarnania, and Aetolia. Its territory was extensive, and it was admitted into the Amphictyonic council as a Greek state. The manner in which Augustus peopled Nicopolis proves his indifference to the feelings of humanity, and the imperfection of his knowledge in that political science which enables a statesman to convert a small territory into a flourishing State.

The principles of his colonization contributed as directly to the decline and depopulation of Italy and Greece, as the accidental tyranny or folly of any of his successors. The inhabitants of a great part of Aetolia were torn from their abodes, where they were residing on their own property, surrounded by their cattle, their olive-trees and vineyards, and compelled to construct such dwellings as they were able, and find such means of livelihood as presented themselves, at Nicopolis. The destruction of an immense amount of vested capital in provincial buildings was the consequence; the agriculture of a whole province was ruined, and a considerable agricultural population must have pined in poverty or perished from want in the changed circumstances of a city life. Nicopolis long continued to be the principal city in Epirus. Its local coinage extends from Augustus down to the reign of Gallienus. The legends are Greek, and the fabric rude. The peculiar privileges conferred on the three colonies of Corinth, Patrae, and Nicopolis, and the close connection in which they were placed with the imperial government, enabled them to flourish for centuries amidst the general poverty which the despotic system of the Roman provincial administration spread over the rest of Greece.

 

 

Sect. IX

Political Condition of Greece from the time of Augustus to that of Caracalla.

 

Two descriptions of Greece have been preserved, which afford vivid pictures of the impoverished condition of the country during two centuries of the Roman government. Strabo has left us an account of the aspect of Greece, shortly after the foundation of the colonies of Patrae and Nicopolis. Pausanias has described, with melancholy exactness, the desolate appearance of many celebrated cities, during the time of the Antonines. Governors and proconsuls were sent to administer the government who were ignorant of the Greek language. The taxes imposed on the country, and the expenses of the provincial administration, drained off all the wealth of the people; and those necessary public works, which required a large expenditure for their maintenance and preservation, were allowed to fall gradually into ruin. The emperors, at times, indeed, attempted, by a few isolated acts of mercy, to alleviate the sufferings of the Greeks. Tiberius, as we have already mentioned, united the provinces of Achaia and Macedonia to the imperial government of Moesia, in order to deliver them from the weight of the proconsular administration. His successor restored them to the senate. When Nero visited Greece to receive a crown at the Olympic Games, he recompensed the Greeks for their flatteries by declaring them free from tribute. The immunities which he conferred produced some serious disputes be- tween the various states, concerning the collection of their municipal taxes; and Vespasian rendered these disputes a pretext for annulling the freedom conferred by Nero. The free cities of Greece still possessed not only the administration of considerable revenues, but also the power of raising money, by local taxes, for the maintenance of their temples, schools, universities, aqueducts, roads, ports, and public buildings. Trajan carefully avoided destroying any of the municipal privileges of the Greeks, and he endeavoured to improve their condition by his just and equitable administration; yet his policy was adverse to the increase of local institutions.

Hadrian opened a new line of policy to the sovereigns of Rome, and avowed the determination of reforming the institutions of the Romans, and adapting his government to the altered state of society in the empire. He perceived that the central government was weakening its power, and diminishing its resources, by acts of injustice, which rendered property everywhere insecure. He remedied the evils which resulted from the irregular dispensation of the laws by the provincial governors, and effected reforms which certainly exercised a favourable influence on the condition of the inhabitants of the provinces. His reign laid the foundation of that regular and systematic administration of justice in the Roman empire, which gradually absorbed all the local judicatures of the Greeks, and, by forming a numerous and well-educated society of lawyers, guided by uniform rules, raised up a partial barrier against arbitrary power. In order to lighten the weight of taxation, Hadrian abandoned all the arrears of taxes accumulated in preceding years. His general system of administrative reforms was pursued by the Antonines, and perfected by the edict of Caracalla, which conferred the rank of Roman citizens on all the free inhabitants of the empire. Hadrian certainly deserves the merit of having first seen the necessity of securing the imperial government, by effacing all badges of servitude from the provincials, and connecting the interests of the landed proprietors throughout the Roman empire with the existence of the imperial administration. He secured to the provincials that legal rank in the constitution of the empire which placed their rights on a level with those of Roman citizens, and for this he was hated by the senate.

Hadrian, from personal taste, cultivated Greek literature, and admired Grecian art. He left traces of his love of improvement in every portion of the empire, through which he kept constantly travelling; but Greece, and especially Attica, received an extraordinary share of the imperial favour. It is difficult to estimate how far his conduct immediately affected the general well-being of the population, or to point out the precise manner of its operation on society; but it is evident that the impulse given to improvement by his example and his administration, produced some tendency to ameliorate the condition of the Greeks. Greece had, perhaps, sunk to its lowest state of poverty and depopulation under the financial administration of the Flavian family, and it displayed many signs of reviving prosperity, while it enjoyed the advantage of good government under Hadrian. The extraordinary improvements which the Roman emperors might have effected, by a judicious employment of the public revenues, may be estimated from the immense public works executed by Hadrian. At Athens he completed the temple of Jupiter Olympius, which had been commenced by Pisistratus, and of which sixteen columns still exist to astonish the spectator by their size and beauty. He built temples to Juno and to Jupiter Panhellenius, and ornamented the city with a magnificent pantheon, a library, and a gymnasium. He commenced an aqueduct to convey an abundant stream of water from Cephisia, which was completed by Antoninus. At Megara, he rebuilt the temple of Apollo. He constructed an aqueduct which conveyed the waters of the lake Stymphalus to Corinth, and he erected new baths in that city. But the surest proof that his improvements were directed by a judicious spirit is to be found in his attention to the roads. Nothing could tend more to advance the prosperity of this, mountainous country than removing the difficulties of intercourse between its various provinces; for there is no country where the expense of transport presents a greater barrier to trade, or where the obstacles to internal communication form a more serious impediment to improvement in the social condition of the agricultural population. He rendered the road from Northern Greece to the Peloponnesus, by the Scironian rocks, easy and commodious for wheeled carriages. Great, however, as these improvements were, he conferred one still greater on the Greeks, as a nation, by commencing the task of moulding their various local customs and laws into one general system, founded on the basis of Roman jurisprudence; and while he ingrafted the law of the Romans on the stock of society in Greece, he did not seek to destroy the municipal institutions of the people. The policy of Hadrian, in raising the Greeks to an equality of civil rights with the Romans, sanctioned whatever remained of the Macedonian institutions throughout the East; and as soon as the edict of Caracalla had conferred on all the subjects of the empire the rights of Roman citizenship, the Greeks became, in reality, the dominant people in the Eastern portion of the empire, and Greek institutions ultimately ruled society under the supremacy of Roman law.

It is curious that Antoninus, who adopted all the views of Hadrian with regard to the annihilation of the exclusive supremacy of the Roman citizens, should have thought it worth his attention to point out the supposed ancient connection between Rome and Arcadia. He was the first Roman who commemorated this fanciful relationship between Greece and Rome by any public act. He conferred on Pallantium, the Arcadian city from which Evander was supposed to have led a Greek colony to the banks of the Tiber, all the privileges ever granted to the most favoured municipalities in the Roman Empire. The habits and character of Marcus Aurelius led him to regard the Greeks with the greatest favour; and had his reign been more peaceful, and left his time more at his own disposal, the sophists and philosophers of Greece would, in all probability, have profited by his leisure. He rebuilt the temple of Eleusis, which had been burnt to the ground; he improved the schools of Athens, and increased the salaries of the professors, who then rendered that city the most celebrated university in the civilized world. Herodes Atticus, whose splendid public edifices in Greece rivalled the works of Hadrian, gained great influence by his eminence in literature and taste, as well as by his enormous wealth. It was the golden age of rhetoricians, whose services were rewarded not only with liberal salaries and donations in money, but even with such magisterial authority and honour as the Greek cities could confer. Herodes Atticus had been selected by Antoninus Pius to give lessons in eloquence to Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, and he was treated with distinction by Marcus Aurelius, until it was necessary to reprove his oppressive and tyrannical conduct to the Athenians. The friendship of the emperor did not save him from disgrace, though his freedmen alone were punished.

Little can be collected concerning the condition of Greece under the successors of Marcus Aurelius. The Roman government was occupied with wars, which seldom directly affected the provinces occupied by the Greeks. Literature and science were little regarded by the soldiers of fortune who mounted the imperial throne; and Greece, forgotten and neglected, appears to have enjoyed a degree of tranquillity and repose, which enabled her to profit by the improvements in the imperial government which Hadrian had introduced and the decree of Caracalla had ratified.

The institutions of the Greeks, which were unconnected with the exercise of the supreme executive power, were generally allowed to exist, even by the most jealous of the emperors. When these institutions disappeared, their destruction was effected by the progressive change which time gradually introduced into Greek society, and not by any violence on the part of the Roman government. It is difficult, indeed, to trace the limits of the state and city administration in matters of taxation, or the exact extent of their control over their local funds. Some cities possessed independence, and others were free from tribute; and these privileges gave the Greek nation a political position in the empire, which prevented their being confounded with the other provincials in the East, until the reign of Justinian. As the Greek cities in Thrace, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt preserved these important privileges, it is not wonderful that, in Greece, the whole frame of the ancient social institutions was preserved.

Pausanias found the Amphictyonic council still holding its meetings, three centuries after the Roman conquest. The deputies of the Achaean, Boeotian, and Phocic commonwealths continued to meet for the purpose of transacting the business of their confederacies. The Athenians were allowed to maintain an armed guard in the island of Delos. The Olympic, Pythic, and Isthmian games were regularly celebrated. The Areopagus at Athens, and the Gerontia at Sparta, still exercised their functions. The different cities and provinces affected the use of their peculiar dialects, and the inhabitants of Sparta continued to imitate the Laconism of antiquity in their public despatches, though their altered manners rendered it ridiculous. The mountaineers of Attica, in the time of Antoninus, spoke a purer language than the populace of the city of Athens, which still bore evidence of its heterogeneous origin after the massacre of Sulla. Had the financial burdens of the Roman government not weighed too heavily on the population, the rivalry of the Greeks, actively directed to local improvements and to commerce, instead of being too exclusively and ostentatiously devoted to philosophy, literature, and the arts, might have proved more useful and honourable to their country. But the moral supports of the old framework of society were destroyed before the edict of Caracalla had emancipated Greece; and when tranquillity arrived, they were only capable of enjoying the felicity of having been forgotten by their tyrants.

 

Sect. X.

The Greeks and Romans never showed any disposition to unite and form one people.

 

The habits and tastes of the Greeks and Romans were so different, that their familiar intercourse produced a feeling of antipathy in the two nations. The Roman writers, from prejudice and jealousy, of which they were themselves, perhaps, unconscious, have transmitted to us a very incorrect picture of the state of the Greeks during the first centuries of the empire. They did not observe, with attention, the marked distinction between the Asiatic and Alexandrine Greeks and the natives of Hellas. The European population, pursuing the quiet life of landed proprietors, or engaged in the pursuits of commerce and agriculture, was considered, by Roman prejudice, as unworthy of notice. Lucian, himself a Greek, indeed contrasts the tranquil and respectable manner of life at Athens with the folly and luxury of Rome; but the Romans looked on provincials as little better than serfs (coloni) and merchants were, in their eyes, only tolerated cheats. The Greek character was estimated from the conduct of the adventurers, who thronged from the wealthy and corrupted cities of the East to seek their fortunes at Rome, and who, from motives of fashion and taste, were unduly favoured by the wealthy aristocracy. The most distinguished of these Greeks were literary men, professors of philosophy, rhetoric, grammar, mathematics, and music. Great numbers were engaged as private teachers; and this class was regarded with some respect by the Roman nobility, from its intimate connection with their families. The great mass of the Greeks residing at Rome were, however, employed in connection with the public and private amusements of the capital, and were found engaged in every profession, from the directors of the theatres and opera-houses, down to the swindlers who frequented the haunts of vice. The testimony of the Latin authors may be received as sufficiently accurate concerning the light in which the Greeks were regarded at Rome, and as a not incorrect portraiture of the Greek population of the capital.

The expressions of the Romans, when speaking of the Greeks, often display nothing more than the manner in which the proud aristocracy of the empire regarded all foreigners, those even whom they admitted to their personal intimacy. The Greeks were confounded with the great body of strangers from the Eastern nations, in one general sentence of condemnation; and not unnaturally, for the Greek language served as the ordinary means of communication with all foreigners from the East. The magicians, conjurers, and astrologers of Syria, Egypt, and Chaldea, were naturally mixed up, both in society and public opinion, with the adventurers of Greece, and contributed to form the despicable type which was unjustly enough transferred from the fortune-hunters at Rome to the whole Greek nation. It is hardly necessary to observe that Greek literature, as cultivated at Rome during this period, had no connection with the national feelings of the Greek people. As far as the Greeks themselves were concerned, learning was an honourable and lucrative occupation to its successful professors; but in the estimation of the higher classes at Rome, Greek literature was merely an ornamental exercise of the mind,— a fashion of the wealthy. This ignorance of Greece and the Greeks induced Juvenal to draw his conclusive proof of the utter falsity of the Greek character, and of the fabulous nature of all Greek history, from his own doubts concerning a fact which is avouched by the testimony of Herodotus and Thucydides; but as a retort to the Graecia mendax of the Roman satirist, the observation of Lucian may be cited — that the Romans spoke truth only once in their lives, and that was when they made their wills.

The Greeks repaid the scorn of the Romans with greater and not more reasonable contempt. When the two nations first came into collision, the Romans were certainly far less polished than the Greeks, though they were much superior to them in virtue and courage. They acknowledged their inferiority, and readily derived lessons of instruction from a people unable to resist their arms. The obligation was always recognised. And Roman gratitude inflated Greek vanity to such a degree, that the conquered never perceived that their masters became at last as much their superiors in literary genius as in political and military science. The Greeks seem always to have remained ignorant that there were Roman writers whose works would, by successive generations and distant nations, be placed almost in the same rank as their own classic authors. The rhetorical contemporaries of Tacitus and of Juvenal never suspected that the original genius of those writers had extended the domain of literature, nor could any critic have persuaded them that Horace had already surpassed the popularity of their own poets by a graceful union of social elegance with calm sagacity.

A single example of the supercilious egoism of the Greeks will be sufficient to show the extent of their presumption during their political degradation as Roman provincials. When Apollonius of Tyana, the pythagorean philosopher, who excited the admiration of the Hellenic world during the first century, visited Smyrna, he was invited to attend the Panionian Assembly. On reading the decree of the council, he observed that it was signed by men who had adopted Roman names, and he immediately addressed a letter to the Panionians blaming their barbarism. He reproached them for laying aside the names of their ancestors, for quitting the names of heroes and legislators to assume such names as Lucullus and Fabricius. Now, when we remember that this rebuke was gravely uttered by a native of the Cappadocian city of Tyana, to a corporation of degenerate Asiatic Greeks, it forms a curious monument of the delusions of national vanity.

The Romans were never very deeply imbued with a passionate admiration for Grecian art, with which every rank in Greece was animated. The national pride and personal vanity of the conquerors, it is true, often coveted the possession of the most celebrated works of art, which were transported to Rome as much on account of their celebrity as their merit, for the painting and sculpture which they could procure as articles of commercial industry were sufficient to gratify Roman taste. This was peculiarly fortunate for Greece, since there can be no doubt that, if the Romans had been as enthusiastic lovers of art as they were indefatigable hunters after riches, they would not have hesitated to regard all those works of art, which were the public property of the Grecian states, as belonging to the Roman commonwealth by the right of conquest. It was only because the avarice of the people would have received little gratification from the seizure, that Greece was allowed to retain her statues and paintings when she was plundered of her gold and silver. The great dissimilarity of manners between the two nations appears in the aversion with which many distinguished senators viewed the introduction of the works of Grecian art by Marcellus and Mummius, after the conquests of Syracuse and Corinth. This aversion unquestionably contributed much to save Greece from the general confiscation of her treasures of art, to which her people clung with the most passionate attachment. Cicero says that no Greek city would consent to sell a painting, a statue, or a work of art, but that, on the contrary, all were ready to become purchasers. The inhabitants of Pergamus resisted the attempt of Acratus, a commissioner sent by Nero, to carry off the most celebrated works of art from the cities of Asia. The feeling of art, in the two peoples, is not inaptly illustrated, by comparing the conduct of the Rhodian republic with that of the Emperor Augustus. When the Rhodians were besieged by Demetrius Poliorcetes, they refused to destroy his statues, and those of his father, which had been erected in their agora. But when Augustus conquered Egypt he ordered all the statues of Antony to be destroyed, and, with a meanness somewhat at variance with patrician dignity, he accepted a bribe of one thousand talents from the Alexandrines to spare the statues of Cleopatra. The Greeks honoured art even more than the Romans loved vengeance. Works of art were carried away by those Roman governors who spared nothing they could pillage in their provinces; but these spoliations were always regarded in the light of direct robberies; and Fulvius Nobilior, Verres, and Piso, who distinguished themselves in this species of violence, were considered as the most infamous of the Roman magistrates.

It is true that Sulla carried off the ivory statue of Minerva from the temple of Alalcomenae, and that Augustus removed that of the great temple of Tegea, as a punishment because that city espoused the party of Antony. But these very exceptions prove how sparingly the Romans availed themselves of their rights of conquest; or history would have recorded the remarkable statues which they had allowed to remain in Greece, rather than signalized as exceptions the few which they transported to Rome. When Caligula and Nero were permitted to govern the world according to the impulses of insanity, they ordered many celebrated works of art to be conveyed to Rome — among these, the celebrated Cupid of Praxiteles was twice removed. It was restored to Thespiae by Claudius; but, on being again taken away by Nero, it perished in a conflagration. After the great conflagration at Rome, in which innumerable works of art perished, Nero transported five hundred brazen statues from Delphi, to adorn the capital and replace the loss it had suffered, and he ordered all the cities of Greece and Asia Minor to be systematically plundered. Very little is subsequently recorded concerning this species of plunder, which Hadrian and his two immediate successors would hardly have permitted. From the great number of the most celebrated works of ancient art which Pausanias enumerates in his tour through Greece, it is evident that no extensive injury had then occurred, even to the oldest buildings. After the reign of Commodus, the Roman emperors paid but little attention to art; and unless the value of the materials caused the destruction of ancient works, they were allowed to stand undisturbed until the buildings around them crumbled into dust. During the period of nearly a century which elapsed from the time of Pausanias until the first irruption of the Goths into Greece, it is certain that the temples and public buildings of the inhabited cities were very little changed in their general aspect, from the appearance which they had presented when the Roman legions first entered Hellas.

 

Sect. XI

State of Society among the Greeks

 

To give a complete account of the state of society among the Greeks under the Roman Empire, it would be necessary to enter into many details concerning the social and political institutions of the Romans, for both exercised great influence in Greece. To avoid so extensive a field, it will be necessary to give only a cursory sketch of those social peculiarities whose influence, though apparent in the annals of the Roman Empire, did not permanently affect the political history of the empire. The state of civilization, the popular objects of pursuit, even the views of national advancement, continued, under the imperial government, to be very different, and often opposite, in different divisions of the Greek nation.

The inhabitants of Hellas had sunk into a quiet and secluded population. The schools of Athens were still famous, and Greece was visited by numbers of fashionable and learned travellers from other countries, as Italy now is; but the citizens dwelt in their own little world, clinging to antiquated forms and usages, and to old superstitions, — holding little intercourse, and having little community of feeling, either with the rest of the empire or with the other divisions of the Hellenic race.

The maritime cities of Europe, Asia Minor, and the Archipelago contained a considerable population, chiefly occupied in commerce and manufactures, and taking little interest in the politics of Rome, or in the literature of Greece. Though the Greeks looked on trade with more favour than the Romans, declining wealth and unjust laws were rapidly tending to depreciate the mercantile character, and to render the occupation less respectable, even in the commercial cities. It is not inappropriate to notice one instance of Roman commercial legislation. Julius Caesar, among his projects of reform, thought fit to revive an old Roman law, which prohibited any citizen from having in his possession a larger sum than sixty thousand sesterces in the precious metals. This law was, of course, neglected; but under Tiberius it was made a pretext by informers to levy various fines and confiscations in Greece and Syria. The commerce of the eastern part of the Mediterranean which had once consisted of commodities of general consumption, declined, under the fiscal avarice of the Romans, into an export trade of some articles of luxury to the larger cities of the west of Europe. The wines of the Archipelago, the carpets of Pergamus, the cambric of Cos, and the dyed woollens of Laconia, are particularly mentioned. The decrease of trade is not to be overlooked as one of the causes of the decline and depopulation of the Roman Empire; for wealth depended even more on commerce in ancient times, than it does in modern, on account of the imperfect means of transport, and the impolitic laws relating to the exportation of grain from many provinces to Rome, where its gratuitous distribution to a large part of the population, and its frequent sale below the cost of production in Italy deranged all commercial operations.

The division of the Greek nation which occupied the most important social position in the empire, consisted of the remains of the Macedonian and Greek colonies in Asia Minor, Egypt, and Syria. These countries were filled with Greeks; and the cities of Alexandria and Antioch, the second and third in the empire in size, population, and wealth, were chiefly peopled by Greeks. The influence of Alexandria alone on the Roman Empire, and on European civilization, would require a treatise, in order to do justice to the subject. Its schools of philosophy produced modifications of Christianity in the East, and attempted to infuse a new life into the torpid members of paganism by means of gnosticism and neoplatonism. The feuds between the Jews and Christians, which arose out of its local quarrels, were bequeathed to following centuries; and in Western Europe, we still debase Christianity by the admixture of those prejudices which had their rise in the amphitheatre of Alexandria. Its wealth and population excited the jealousy of Augustus, who deprived it of its municipal institutions, and rendered it a prey to the factions of the amphitheatre, the curse of Roman civic anarchy. The populace, unrestrained by any system of order founded on corporate institutions, and without any social guidance derived from any acknowledged municipal authority, was abandoned to the passions of the wildest democracy, whenever they were crowded together. Hadrian was struck with the activity and industry of the Alexandrines; and though he does not appear to have admired their character, he saw that the increase of privileges to some organized classes of the population was the true way to lessen the influence of the mob.

Antioch and the other Greek cities of the East preserved their municipal privileges; and the Greek population in Asia Minor, Egypt, and Syria, remained everywhere completely separated from the original inhabitants. Their corporate organization often afforded them an opportunity of interfering with the details of the public administration, and their intriguing and seditious spirit enabled them to defend their rights and interests. When the free population of the provinces acquired the rights of Roman citizenship, the Greeks of these countries, who formed the majority of the privileged classes, and were already in possession of the principal share of the local administration, became soon possessed of the whole authority of the Roman government. They appeared as the real representatives of the State, excluded the native population from power, and, consequently, rendered it more dissatisfied than formerly. In the East, therefore, after the publication of Caracalla’s edict, the Greeks became again the dominant people, as they had been before the Roman conquest. In spite of the equality of all the provincials in the eye of the law, a violent opposition was created between them and the native population in Syria, Egypt, and a large part of Asia Minor, where various nations still retained their own customs and languages. The Greeks, in a large portion of the eastern half of the empire, occupied a position nearly similar to that of the Romans in the western. The same causes produced similar effects, and from the period when the Greeks became a privileged and dominant class, administering the severe fiscal supremacy of the Roman government, instead of ruling with the more tolerant habits of their Macedonian predecessors, their numbers and influence began to decline. Like the Romans of Italy, Gaul, and Spain, the Greeks of Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia destroyed themselves, perishing from the corruption which they engendered by the abuse of their power.

The secluded position of the inhabitants of ancient Hellas almost conceals their social condition from the view of the political historian. The principal causes of the decline of Greece have been already explained; but the tone of society, and the manner of living adopted by the upper and middle ranks, accelerated the progress of national decay. It has been already remarked, that the increase of wealth consequent on the Macedonian conquests had tended to augment the size of private properties, and to add to the numbers of slaves in Greece. Under the Romans, the general riches of the country were indeed very much diminished; but individuals were enabled to acquire fortunes greater than had been possessed by the ancient monarchs, and to possess estates larger than the territories of many celebrated republics. Julius Eurycles owned a province, and Herodes Atticus could have purchased a kingdom. While a few individuals could amass unbounded wealth, the bulk of the people were prevented from acquiring even a moderate independency; and when Plutarch says that Greece, in his time, could not arm more than three thousand hoplitae, though the small states of Sicyon and Megara each furnished that number at the battle of Plataea, it is necessary to remember the change which had taken place in the size of private properties, as well as the altered state of society, for both tended to diminish the numbers of the free population. The taxes of Greece were remitted to Rome, and expended beyond the limits of the province. The most useful public works were neglected, except when a benevolent emperor like Hadrian, or a wealthy individual like Herodes Atticus, thought fit to direct some portion of their expenditure to what was useful as well as ornamental. Under a continuance of such circumstances, Greece was drained of money and capital.

The poverty of Greece was farther increased by the gradual rise in the value of the precious metals, — an evil which began to be generally felt about the time of Nero, and which affected Greece with great severity, from the altered distribution of wealth in the country, and the loss of its foreign commerce, Greece had once been rich in mines, which had been a source of wealth and prosperity to Siphnos and Athens, and had laid the foundation of the power of Philip of Macedon. Gold and silver mines, when their produce is regarded as articles of commerce, are a surer basis of wealth than mines of lead and copper. The evils which have arisen in countries where gold and silver have been produced, have proceeded from the fiscal regulations of the government. The fiscal measures of the Romans soon rendered it a ruinous speculation for private individuals to attempt working mines of the precious metals, and, in the hands of the State, they soon proved unprofitable. Many mines were exhausted; and even though the value of the precious metals was enhanced, some, beyond the influence of the Roman power, were abandoned from those causes which, after the second century of the Christian era, produced a sensible diminution in the commercial transactions of the old hemisphere.

Greece suffered in the general decay; her commerce and manufactures, being confined to supplying the consumption of a diminished and impoverished population, sank into insignificancy. In a declining state of society, where political, financial, and commercial causes combine to diminish the wealth of a nation, it is difficult for individuals to alter their manner of life, and to restrict their expenditure, with the promptitude necessary to escape impoverishment. It is indeed seldom in their power to estimate the progress of the decay; and a reasonable jointure, or a necessary mortgage, may ruin a family.

In this declining state of society, complaints of excessive luxury are generally prevalent, and the Greek writers of the second century are filled with lamentations on this subject. Such complaints alone do not prove that the majority of the higher classes were living in a manner injurious to society, either from their effeminacy or vicious expenditure. They only show that the greater part of the incomes of private persons was consumed by their personal expenditure; and that a due proportion was not set apart for creating new productive property, in order to replace the deterioration, which time is ever causing in that which already exists. People of property, when their annual incomes proved insufficient for their personal expenditure, began to borrow money, instead of trying to diminish their expenses. An accumulation of debts became general throughout the country, and formed a great evil in the time of Plutarch. These debts were partly caused by the oppression of the Roman government, and by the chicanery of the fiscal officers, always pressing for ready money, and were generally contracted to Roman money-lenders. It was in this way that the Roman administration produced its most injurious effects in the provinces, by affording to capitalists the means of accumulating enormous wealth, and by forcing the proprietors of land into abject poverty. The property of Greek debtors was at last transferred, to a very great extent, to their Roman creditors. This transference, which, in a homogeneous society, might have invigorated the upper classes, by substituting an industrious timocracy for an idle aristocracy, had a very different effect. It introduced new feelings of rivalry and extravagance, by filling the country with foreign landlords. The Greeks could not long' maintain the struggle, and they sank gradually lower and lower in wealth, until their poverty introduced an altered state of society, and taught them the prudential and industrious habits of farmers, in which tranquil position they escape, not only from the eye of history, but even from antiquarian research.

It is difficult to convey a correct notion of the evils and demoralization produced by private debts in the ancient world, though they often appear as one of the most powerful agents in political revolutions, and were a constant subject of attention to the statesman, the lawgiver, and the political philosopher. Modern society has completely annihilated their political effects. The greater facilities afforded to the transference of landed property, and the ease with which capital now circulates, have given an extension to the operations of banking which has remedied this peculiar defect in society. It must be noticed, too, that the ancients regarded landed property as the accessory of the citizen, even when its amount determined his rank in the commonwealth: but the moderns view the proprietor as the accessory of the landed property; and the political franchise, being inherent in the estate, is lost by the citizen who alienates his property.

In closing this view of the state of the Greek people under the imperial government, if is impossible not to feel that Greece cannot be included in the general assertion of Gibbon, that if a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. It may be doubted whether the Roman government ever relaxed the systematic oppression under which the agricultural and commercial population of its provinces groaned; and even Hadrian himself can hardly claim greater merit than that of having humanely administered a system radically bad, and endeavoured to correct its most prominent features of injustice. Greece, indeed, reached its lowest degree of misery and depopulation about the time of Vespasian; but still there is ample testimony in the pages of contemporary writers, to prove that the desolate state of the country was not materially improved for a long period, and that only partial signs of amelioration were apparent in the period so much vaunted by Gibbon. The liberality of Hadrian, and the munificence of Herodes Atticus, were isolated examples, and could not change the constitution of Rome. Many splendid edifices of antiquity were repaired by these two benefactors of Greece, but many works of public utility remained neglected on account of the poverty of the diminished population of the country ; and most of the works of Hadrian and Herodes Atticus contributed little more to the well-being of the people than the wages of the labour expended on their construction. The roads and aqueducts of Hadrian are wise exceptions, —as they diminished the expenses of transport, and afforded increased facilities for production. Still the sumptuous edifices, of which remains still exist, indicate that the object of building was the erection of magnificent monuments of art— to commemorate the taste and splendour of the founder, not to increase the resources of the land or improve the condition of the industrious classes.

The condition of a declining population by no means implies that any portion of the people is actually suffering from want of the necessaries of life. A sudden change in the direction of commerce, and a considerable decrease in the demand for the productions of manufacturing industry, must indeed, at the time when such events occur, deprive numbers of their usual means of subsistence, and create great misery, before the population suffers the ultimate diminution which these causes necessitate. Such events may occur in an improving as well as in a declining society. But, when the bulk of a country’s productions is drawn from its own soil, and consumed by its own inhabitants, the population may be in a declining condition, without the circumstance being suspected for some time, either at home or abroad. The chief cause of the deterioration of the national resources will then arise from the members of society consuming too great a proportion of their annual income, without dedicating a due portion of their revenues to reproduction; in short, from expending their incomes, without creating new sources of wealth, or taking any measures to prevent the diminution of the old. Greece suffered from all the causes alluded to; her commerce and manufactures were transferred to other lands; and, when the change was completed, her inhabitants resolved to enjoy life, instead of labouring to replace the wealth which their country had lost. This diminution in the wealth of the people ultimately produced changes in society, which laid the foundation for a great step in the improvement of the human species. Poverty rendered slavery less frequent, and destroyed many of the channels by which the slave trade had flourished. The condition of the slaves also underwent several modifications, as the barrier between the slave and the citizen was broken down by the necessity in which the poor classes of freemen were placed of working at the same employments as slaves in order to obtain the means of subsistence. At this favourable conjuncture Christianity stepped in, to prevent avarice from ever recovering the ground which humanity had gained.

Under oppressive governments, the person sometimes becomes more insecure than property. This appears to have been the case under the Roman, as it has since been under the Turkish government; and the population, in such case, decreases much more rapidly than property is destroyed. The inhabitants of Greece under the Roman Empire found themselves possessed of buildings, gardens, vineyards, olive plantations, and all the agricultural produce which the accumulated capital of former ages had created, to an extent capable of maintaining a far more numerous population. The want of commerce, neglected roads, the rarity of the precious metals in circulation, and the difficulties thrown in the way of petty traffic by injudicious legislation, rendered the surplus produce of each separate district of little value. The inhabitants enjoyed the mere necessaries of life, and some of the luxuries of their climate, in great abundance; but when they sought to purchase the productions of art and foreign commerce, they felt themselves to be poor. Such a state of society inevitably introduces a system of wasting what is superfluous, and of neglecting to prepare new means of future production. In this condition of indifference and ease the population of Greece remained, until the weakness of the Roman government, the disorders of the army, and the diminution and disarming of the free population, opened a way for the northern nations into the heart of the empire.

 

Sect. XII

Influence of Religion and Philosophy on Society

 

The earliest records of the Greeks represent them as living completely free from the despotic authority of a priestly class. The natural consequence of this freedom was an indefinite latitude in the dogmas of the national faith: and the priesthood, as it existed, became a very incorrect interpreter of public opinion in religious questions. The belief in the gods of Olympus had been shaken as early as the age of Pericles, and underwent many modifications after the Macedonian conquests. From the time the Romans became masters of Greece, the majority of the educated were votaries of the different philosophical sects, —every one of which viewed the established religion as a mere popular delusion. But the Roman government, and the municipal authorities, continued to support the various religions of the different provinces in their legal rights, though the priesthood generally enjoyed this support rather in their character of constituted corporations than because they were regarded as spiritual guides. The amount of their revenues, and the extent of their civic rights and privileges, were the chief objects which engaged the attention of the magistrate.

The wealth and number of the religious establishments in Greece, and the large funds possessed by corporations, which were appropriated to public festivals, contributed in no small degree to encourage idleness among the people, and perpetuate a taste for extravagance. The great festivals of the Olympic, Pythic, and Isthmian games, in so far as they served to unite the whole Greek nation in a common place of assembly for national objects, were, indeed, productive of many advantages. They contributed to maintain a general standard of public opinion throughout the Hellenic race, and they kept up a feeling of nationality. But the dissipation occasioned by the multitude of local religious feasts and public amusements, produced the most injurious effects on society.

The privilege called the right of asylum, by which some ancient temples became sanctuaries where fugitive slaves were protected against the vengeance of their masters, where debtors could escape the pursuit of their creditors, and where the worst criminals defied the justice of the law, tended to encourage the open violation of every principle of justice. The fear of punishment, the strength of moral obligations, and the respect due to religion, were destroyed by the impunity thus openly granted to the most heinous crimes. This abuse had extended to such a degree under the Roman government, that the senate found it necessary, in the reign of Tiberius, to mitigate the evil; but superstition was too powerful to allow a complete reform, and many shrines were allowed to retain the right of asylum to a much later period.

Though ancient superstitions were still practised, old religious feelings were extinct. The oracles, which had once formed the most remarkable of the sacred institutions of the Greeks, had fallen into decay. It is, however, incorrect to suppose that the Pythoness ceased to deliver her responses from the time of our Saviour’s birth, for she was consulted by the emperors long after. Many oracles continued to be in considerable repute, even after the introduction of Christianity into Greece. Pausanias mentions the oracle of Mallos, in Cilicia, as the most veracious in his time. Claros and Didymi were famous, and much consulted in the time of Lucian; and even new oracles were commenced as a profitable speculation. The oracles continued to give their responses to fervent votaries, long after they had fallen into general neglect Julian endeavoured to revive their influence, and he consulted those of Delphi, Delos, and Dodona, concerning the result of his Persian expedition. He vainly attempted to restore Delphi, and Daphne, near Antioch, to their ancient splendour. Even so late as the reign of Theodosius the Great, those of Delphi, Didymi, and Jupiter Ammon, were in existence, but from that period they became utterly silent. The reverence which had formerly been paid to them was transferred to astrologers, who were consulted by all ranks and on all occasions. Tiberius, Otho, Hadrian, and Severus, are all mentioned as votaries of this mode of searching into the secrets of futurity. Yet hidden divination, to which astrology belonged, had been prohibited by the laws of the twelve tables, and was condemned both by express law and by the spirit of the Roman state religion. It was regarded, even by the Greeks, as an illicit and disgraceful practice.

During the first century of the Christian era, the worship of Serapis made great progress in every part of the Roman Empire. This worship inculcated the existence of another world, and of a future judgment. The fact deserves notice, as it indicates the annihilation of all reverence for the old system of paganism, and marks a desire in the public mind to search after those truths which the Christian dispensation soon after revealed. A moral rule of life with a religious sanction was a want which society began to feel when Christianity appeared to supply it.

The religion of the Greeks was so worthless as a guide in morals, that the destruction of priestly influence by the speculations of the philosophers produced no worse effect than completing a separation in the intellectual education of the higher and lower classes, which other causes had already produced. The systems of the priests and the philosophers were in direct opposition to one another, and philosophical enquiry undoubtedly did more for intellectual improvement than could have been effected by the authority of a religion so utterly destitute of intellectual power, and so compliant in its form, as that of Greece. The attention which the Greeks always paid to philosophy and metaphysical speculation, is a curious feature in their mental character, and owes its origin, in part, to the happy logical analogies of their native language; but, in the days of Grecian independence, this was only a distinctive characteristic of a small portion of the cultivated minds in the nation. From that peculiar condition of society which resulted from the existence of a number of small independent states, a larger portion of the nation was occupied with the higher branches of political business than has ever been the case in any other equally numerous body of mankind. Every city in Greece held the rank of a capital, and possessed its own statesmen and lawyers. The sense of this importance, and the weight of this responsibility, stimulated the Greeks to the extraordinary exertions of intellect with which their history is filled; for the strongest spur to exertion among men is the existence of a duty imposed as a voluntary obligation.

The habits of social intercourse, and the simple manner of life, which prevailed in the Greek republics, rendered the private conduct of every distinguished citizen as well known, and as constantly a subject of scrutiny to his fellow-citizens, as his public career. This powerful agency of public opinion served to enforce a conventional morality which, though lax in its ethics, was at least imperative in its demands. But when the international system of the Hellenic states was destroyed, when an altered condition of society had introduced greater privacy into the habits of social life, and put a stop to public intercourse among the citizens of the same region, by giving a marked prominence to the distinctions of rank and wealth, the private conduct of those who were engaged in public life was, in a great degree, withdrawn from the examination of the people; and the effect of public opinion was gradually weakened, as the grounds on which it was formed became less personal and characteristic.

Political circumstances began, about the same time, to weaken the efficacy of public opinion in affairs of government and administration. The want of some substitute, to replace its powerful influence on the everyday conduct of man, was so imperiously felt that one was eagerly sought for. Religion had long ceased to be a guide in morality; and men strove to find some feeling which would replace the forgotten fear of the gods, and that public opinion which could once inspire self-respect. It was hoped that philosophy could supply the want; and it was cultivated not only by the studious and the learned, but by the world at large, in the belief that the self-respect of the philosopher would prove a sure guide to pure morality, and inspire a deep sense of justice. The necessity of obtaining some permanent power over the moral conduct of mankind was naturally suggested to the Greeks by the political injustice under which they suffered; and the hope that philosophical studies would temper the minds of their masters to equity, and awaken feelings of humanity in their hearts, could not fail to exert considerable influence. When the Romans themselves had fallen into a state of moral and political degradation, lower even than that of the Greeks, it is not surprising that the educated classes should have cultivated philosophy with great eagerness, and with nearly similar views. The universal craving after justice and truth affords a key to the profound respect with which teachers of philosophy were regarded. Their authority and their character were so high that they mixed with all ranks, and preserved their power, in spite of all the ridicule of the satirists. The general purity of their lives, and the justice of their conduct, were acknowledged, though a few may have been corrupted by court favour; and pretenders may often have assumed a long beard and dirty garments, to act the ascetic or the jester with greater effect in the houses of the wealthy Romans. The inadequacy of any philosophical opinions to produce the results required of them was, at last, apparent in the changes and modifications which the various sects were constantly making in the tenets of their founders, and the vain attempts that were undertaken to graft the paganism of the past on the modern systems of philosophy. The great principle of truth, which all were eagerly searching after, seemed to elude their grasp; yet these investigations were not without great use in improving the intellectual and moral condition of the higher orders, and rendering life tolerable, when the tyranny and anarchy of the imperial government threatened the destruction of society. They prepared the minds of men for listening candidly to a purer religion, and rendered many of the votaries of philosophy ready converts to the doctrines of Christianity.

Philosophy lent a splendour to the Greek name; yet, with the exception of Athens, learning and philosophy were but little cultivated in European Greece. The poverty of the inhabitants, and the secluded position of the country, permitted few to dedicate their time to literary pursuits; and after the time of the Antonines, the wealthy cities of Asia, Syria, and Egypt, contained the real representatives of the intellectual supremacy of the Hellenic race. The Greeks of Europe, unnoticed by history, were carefully cherishing their national institutions; while, in the eyes of foreigners the Greek character and fame depended on the civilization of an expatriated population, already declining in number, and hastening to extinction. The social institutions of the Greeks have, therefore, been even more useful to them in a national point of view than their literature.

 

Sect. XIII

The Social Condition of the Greeks affected by the want of Colonies of Emigration

 

The want of foreign colonies, which admitted of a constant influx of new emigrants, must have exercised a powerful influence in arresting the progress of society in the Roman world. Rome never, like Phoenicia and Greece, permitted numerous bands of her citizens to depart from poverty in their own country, in order to better their fortunes and enjoy the benefits of self-government as independent communities in other lands. Her oligarchical constitution regarded the people as the property of the State. Roman civilization moved only in the train of the armies of Rome, and its progress was arrested when the career of conquest stopped. For several ages war operated as a stimulant to population at Rome, as colonization has served in modem times. It increased the general wealth by an influx of slave labour, and excited the active energies of the people, by opening a career of advancement. But the gains derived from an evil source cannot be productive of permanent good. Even before the policy of Augustus had established universal peace, and reduced the Roman army into a corps of gendarmerie or armed police for guarding the internal tranquillity of the provinces, or watching the frontiers, a combination of inherent defects in the constitution of the Roman state had begun to destroy the lower order of Roman citizens. The people required a new field of action when the old career of conquest was closed for ever, in order to engage their energies in active pursuits, and prevent them from pining away in poverty and idleness. The want of colonies of emigration, at this conjuncture, kept all the evil elements of the population fermenting within the State. The want of some distant spot connected with the past history of their race, but freed from the existing social restrictions which weighed heavily on the industrious, the ambitious, and the proud, was required by the Romans to relieve society and render political reforms possible. Various attempts were made to counteract the poverty and the want of occupation among the free labourers which was produced at Rome by every long cessation of war. C. Gracchus introduced the annual distributions of grain, which became one of the principal causes of the ruin of the republic; and Augustus established his colonies of legionaries over Italy in a manner that accelerated its depopulation.

Military colonies, colonial municipalities, and the practice adopted by the Roman citizens of seeking their fortunes in Spain, Gaul, and Britain, were an imperfect substitute for modern emigration, though they long tended to preserve an impulse towards improvement in the western portion of the Roman Empire. The policy of the emperors was directed to render society stationary; and it escaped the observation of profound statesmen, like Augustus and Tiberius, that the most efficient means of securing it from decline consisted in the formation of a regular demand on the population, by means of emigration. Foreign colonization was, however, adverse to all the prejudices of a Roman. The policy and religion of the State were equally opposed to the residence of any citizen beyond the bounds of the empire; and the constant diminution of the inhabitants of Italy, which accompanied the extended conquests of the republic, seemed to indicate that the first duty of the masters of Italy was to encourage an influx of population.

The decline in the population of Italy proceeded from evils inherent in the political system of the Roman government. They exercised their influence in the Grecian provinces of the empire, but they can only be traced with historical accuracy, in their details, close to the centre of the executive power. The system of administration in the republic had always tended to aggrandize the aristocracy, who talked much of glory, but thought constantly of wealth. When the conquests of Rome were extended over all the richest countries of the ancient world, the leading families accumulated incredible riches, — riches, indeed, far exceeding the wealth of modern sovereigns. Villas and parks were formed over all Italy on a scale of the most sumptuous grandeur, and land became more valuable as hunting-grounds than as productive farms. The same habits were introduced into the provinces. In the neighbourhood of Rome, agriculture was ruined by the public distributions of grain which was received as tribute from the provinces, and by the bounty granted to importing merchants in order to secure a low maximum price of bread. The public distributions at Alexandria and Antioch must have proved equally injurious. Another cause of the decline in the population of the empire was the great increase of the slaves which took place on the rapid conquests of the Romans, and the diffusion of the immense treasures suddenly acquired by their victories. There is always a considerable waste of productive industry among a slave population; and free labourers cease to exist, rather than perpetuate their race, if their labour be degraded to the same level in society as that of slaves. When the insecurity of property and person under the Roman government after the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and the corrupt state of society, are added to these various causes of decay, the decline and depopulation of the empire does not require farther explanation.

Yet society would not, probably, have declined as it did, under the weight of the Roman power, had the active, intelligent, and virtuous members of the middle classes possessed the means of escaping from a social position so calculated to excite feelings of despair. It is in vain to offer conjectures on the subject; for the vice in the Roman constitution which rendered all their military and state colonies merely sources of aggrandizement to the aristocracy, may have proceeded from some inherent defect in the social organization of the people, and, consequently, might have entailed ruin on any Roman society established beyond the authority of the senate or the emperors. The social organization of nations affects their vitality as much as their political constitution affects their power and fortunes.

The exclusively Roman feeling, which was adverse to all foreign colonization, was first attacked when Christianity spread itself beyond the limits of the empire. The fact that Christianity was not identical with citizenship, or, at least, with subjection to Rome, was a powerful cause of creating that adverse feeling towards the Christians which branded them as enemies of the human race; for, in the mouth of a Roman, the human race was a phrase for the empire of Rome, and the Christians were really persecuted by emperors like Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, because they were regarded as having no attachment to the Roman government, because their humanity was stronger than their citizenship.

 

Sect. XIV

Effects produced in Greece by the Inroads of the Goths

 

After the reign of Alexander Severus, the whole attention of the Roman government was absorbed by the necessity of defending the empire against the invasions of the northern nations. Two centuries of communication with the Roman world had extended the effects of incipient civilization throughout all the north of Europe. Trade had created new wants, and given a new impulse to society. This state of improvement always causes a rapid increase of population, and awakens a spirit of enterprise, which makes the apparent increase even greater than the real. The history of every people which has attained any eminence in the annals of mankind, has been marked by a similar period of activity. The Greeks, the Romans, and the Arabs, poured out a succession of armies, which must have astonished the nations which they attacked, quite as much as the apparently inexhaustible armies of the Goths amazed the degenerate Romans. Yet few events, in the whole course of history, seem more extraordinary than the success of the uncivilized Goths against the well-disciplined legions of imperial Rome, and their successful inroads into the thickly-peopled provinces of the Roman Empire. The causes of this success are evidently to be sought within the empire: the defenceless state of the population, which was everywhere carefully disarmed, the oppression of the provincials, the disorder in the finances, and the relaxation in the discipline of the troops, contributed more to the victories of the Goths than their own strength or military skill. If any national feeling, or common political interest, had connected the people, the army, and the sovereign, the Roman empire would have easily repulsed the attacks of all its enemies; nay, had the government not placed itself in direct opposition to the interests of its subjects, and arrested their natural progress by vicious legislation and corrupt administration, the barbarous inhabitants of Germany, Poland, and Russia, could have offered no more effective resistance to the advance of Roman colonization than those of Spain, Gaul, and Britain. But the task of extending the domain of civilization required to be supported by the energy of national feelings; it was far beyond the strength of the imperial or any other central government. The ablest of the despots who styled themselves the world’s masters, did not dare, though nourished in camps, to attempt a career of foreign conquest; these imperial soldiers were satisfied with the inglorious task of preserving the limits of the empire without diminution. Even Severus, after he had consolidated a systematic despotism, based on military power, did not succeed in extending the empire. This avowed inability of the Roman armies to make any further progress, invited the barbarians to attack the provinces. If a body of assailants proved successful in breaking through the Roman lines, they were sure of considerable plunder. If they were repulsed, they could generally evade pursuit. These incursions were at first the enterprises of armed bands and small tribes, but they became afterwards the employment of armies and nations. To the timid eye of the unwarlike and unarmed citizens of the empire, the whole population of the north appeared to be constantly on its march, to plunder and enslave the wealthy and peaceable inhabitants of the south.

Various means of defence were employed by the reigning sovereigns. Alexander Severus secured the tranquillity of the frontiers by paying subsidies to the barbarians: Decius fell, defending the provinces against an immense army of Goths which had penetrated into the heart of Moesia; and Trebonianus Gallus purchased the retreat of the victors by engaging to pay them an annual tribute. The disorder in the Roman government increased, the succession of emperors became more rapid, and the numbers of the invaders augmented. Various tribes and nations, called, by the Greeks and Romans, Scythians and Goths, and belonging to the great families of the Sclavonic and Germanic stock, under the names of East and West Goths, Vandals, Heruls, Borans, Karps, Peuks, and Urugunds, crossed the Danube. Their incursions were pushed through Moesia into Thrace and Macedonia; an immense booty was carried away, and a still greater amount of property was destroyed; thousands of the industrious inhabitants were reduced to slavery, and a far greater number massacred by the cruelty of the invaders.

The Greeks were awakened by these invasions from the state of lethargy in which they had reposed for three centuries. They began to repair the long neglected fortifications of their towns, and muster their city guards and rural police, for a conflict in defence of their property. Cowardice had long been supposed, by the Romans, to be an incurable vice of the Greeks, who had been compelled to appear before the Romans with an obsequious and humble mien, and every worthless Roman had thence arrogated to himself a fancied superiority. But the truth is, that all the middle classes in the Roman world had, from the time of Augustus, become averse to sacrificing their ease for the doubtful glory to be gained in the imperial service. No patriotic feeling drew men to the camp; and the allurements of ambition were stifled by obscurity of station and hopelessness of promotion. The young nobility of Rome, when called upon to serve in the legions, after the defeat of Varus, displayed signs of cowardice unparalleled in the history of Greece. Like the Fellahs of modern Egypt, they cut off their thumbs in order to escape military serviced Greece could contribute but little to the defence of the empire; but Caracalla had drawn from Sparta some recruits whom he formed into a Lacedaemonian phalanx. Decius, before his defeat, intrusted the defence of Thermopylae to Claudius, who was afterwards emperor, but who had only fifteen hundred regular troops, in addition to the ordinary Greek militia of the cities. The smallness of the number is curious; it indicates the tranquil condition of the Hellenic population before the northern nations penetrated into the heart of the empire.

The preparations for defending the country were actively carried on, both in northern Greece and at the Isthmus of Corinth. In the reign of Valerian the walls of Athens, which had not been put in a proper state of defence from the time of Sulla, were repaired, and the fortifications across the isthmus were restored and garrisoned by Peloponnesian troops. It was not long before the Greeks were called upon to prove the efficiency of their warlike arrangements. A body of Goths, having established themselves along the northern shores of the Black Sea, commenced a series of naval expeditions. They soon penetrated through the Thracian Bosphorus, and, aided by additional bands who had proceeded from the banks of the Danube by land, they marched into Asia Minor, and plundered Chalcedon, Nicomedia, Nicaea, and Prusa, A.D. 259. This successful enterprise was soon followed by still more daring expeditions.

In the year 267, another fleet, consisting of five hundred vessels, manned chiefly by the Goths and Heruls, passed the Bosphorus and the Hellespont They seized Byzantium and Chrysopolis, and advanced, plundering the islands and coasts of the Aegean Sea, and laying waste many of the principal cities of the Peloponnesus. Cyzicus, Lemnos, Skyros, Corinth, Sparta, and Argos, are named as having suffered by their ravages. From the time of Sulla's conquest of Athens, a period of nearly three hundred and fifty years had elapsed, during which Attica had escaped the evils of war; yet when the Athenians were called upon to defend their homes, they displayed a spirit worthy of their ancient fame. An officer, named Cleodemus, had been sent by the government from Byzantium to Athens, in order to repair the fortifications, but a division of these Goths landed at the Piraeus, and succeeded in carrying Athens by storm, before any means were taken for its defence. Dexippus, an Athenian of rank in the Roman service, soon contrived to reassemble the garrison of the Acropolis; and by joining to it such of the citizens as possessed some knowledge of military discipline, or some spirit for warlike enterprise, he formed a little army of two thousand men. Choosing a strong position in the Olive Grove, he circumscribed the movements of the Goths, and so harassed them by a close blockade that they were compelled to abandon Athens. Cleodemus, who was not at Athens when it was surprised, had in the meantime assembled a fleet and gained a naval victory over a division of the barbarian fleet. These reverses were a prelude to the ruin of the Goths. A Roman fleet entered the Archipelago, and a Roman army, under the emperor Gallienus, marched into Illyricum; the separate divisions of the Gothic expedition were everywhere overtaken by these forces, and destroyed in detail. During this invasion of the empire, one of the divisions of the Gothic army crossed the Hellespont into Asia, and succeeded in plundering the cities of the Troad, and in destroying the celebrated temple of Diana of Ephesus.

Dexippus was himself the historian of the Gothic invasion of Attica, but, unfortunately, little information on the subject can be collected from the fragments of his works which now exist. There is a celebrated anecdote connected with this incursion which throws some light on the state of the Athenian population, and on the conduct of the Gothic invaders of the empire. The fact of its currency is a proof of the easy circumstances in which the Athenians lived, of the literary idleness in which they indulged, and the general mildness of the assailants, whose sole object was plunder. It is said that the Goths, when they had captured Athens, were preparing to burn the splendid libraries which adorned the city; but that a Gothic soldier dissuaded them, by telling his countrymen that it was better that the Athenians should continue to waste their time in their halls and porticos over their books, than that they should begin to occupy themselves with warlike exercises. Gibbon, indeed, thinks the anecdote may be suspected as the fanciful conceit of a recent sophist; and he adds, that the sagacious counsellor reasoned like an ignorant barbarian. But the national degradation of the Greeks has co-existed with their pre-eminence in learning during many centuries, so that it appears that this ignorant barbarian reasoned like an able politician. Even the Greeks, who repeated the anecdote, seem to have thought that there was more sound sense in the arguments of the Goth than the great historian is willing to admit. Something more than mere reading and study is required to form the judgment. The cultivation of learning does not always bring with it the development of good sense. It does not always render men wiser, and it generally proves injurious to their bodily activity. When literary pursuits, therefore, become the exclusive object of national ambition, and distinction in the cultivation of literature and abstract science is more esteemed than sagacity and prudence in the everyday duties of life, effeminacy is undoubtedly more likely to prevail, than when literature is used as an instrument for advancing practical acquirements and embellishing active occupations. The rude Goths themselves would probably have admired the poetry of Homer and of Pindar, though they despised the metaphysical learning of the schools of Athens.

The celebrity of Athens, and the presence of the historian Dexippus, have given to this incursion of the barbarians a prominent place in history; but many expeditions are casually mentioned, which must have inflicted greater losses on the Greeks, and spread devastation more widely over the country. These inroads must have produced important changes in the condition of the Greek population, and given a new impulse to society. The passions of men were called into action, and the protection of their property often depended on their own exertions. Public spirit was again awakened, and many cities of Greece successfully defended their walls against the armies of barbarians who broke into the empire in the reign of Claudius. Thessalonica and Cassandra were attacked by land and sea. Thessaly and Greece were invaded; but the walls of the towns were generally found in a state of repair, and the inhabitants ready to defend them. The great victory obtained by the emperor Claudius II, at Naissus, broke the power of the Goths: and a Roman fleet in the Archipelago destroyed the remains of their naval forces. The extermination of these invaders was completed by a great plague which ravaged the East for fifteen years.

During the repeated invasions of the barbarians, an immense number of slaves were either destroyed or carried away beyond the Danube. Great facilities were likewise afforded for the escape of dissatisfied slaves. The numbers of the slave population in Greece must, therefore, have undergone a reduction, which could not prove otherwise than beneficial to those who remained, and which must also have produced a very considerable change on the condition of the poorer freemen, the value of whose labour must have been considerably increased. The danger in which men of wealth lived, necessitated an alteration in their mode of life; every one was compelled to think of defending his person, as well as his property; new activity was infused into society; and thus it seems that the losses caused by the ravages of the Goths, and the mortality produced by the plague, caused a general improvement in the circumstances of the inhabitants of Greece.

It must here be observed, that the first great inroads of the northern nations, who succeeded in penetrating into the heart of the Roman empire, were directed against the eastern provinces, and that Greece suffered severely by the earliest invasions; yet the eastern portion of the empire alone succeeded in driving back the barbarians, and preserving its population free from any admixture of the Gothic race. This successful resistance was chiefly owing to the national feelings and political organization of the Greek people. The institutions which the Greeks retained prevented them from remaining utterly helpless in the moment of danger; the magistrates possessed a legitimate authority to take measures for any extraordinary crisis, and citizens of wealth and talent could render their services useful, without any violent departure from the usual forms of the local administration. The evil of anarchy was not, in Greece, added to the misfortune of invasion. Fortunately for the Greeks, the insignificancy of their military forces prevented the national feelings, which these measures aroused, from giving umbrage either to the Roman emperors or to their military officers in the provinces.

From the various accounts of the Gothic wars of this period which exist, it is evident that the expeditions of the barbarians were, as yet, only undertaken for the purpose of plundering the provinces. The invaders entertained no idea of being able to establish themselves permanently within the bounds of the empire. The celerity of their movements generally made their numbers appear greater than they really were; while the inferiority of their arms and discipline rendered them an unequal match for a much smaller body of the heavy-armed Romans. When the invaders met with a steady and well-combined resistance, they were defeated without much difficulty; but whenever a moment of neglect presented itself, their attacks were repeated with undiminished courage. The victorious reigns of Claudius II, Aurelian, and Probus, prove the immense superiority of the Roman armies when properly commanded; but the custom, which was constantly gaining ground, of recruiting the legions from among the barbarians, reveals the deplorable state of depopulation and weakness to which three centuries of despotism and bad administration had reduced the empire. On the one hand, the government feared the spirit of its subjects, if intrusted with arms, far more than it dreaded the ravages of the barbarians; and on the other, it was unwilling to reduce the number of the citizens paying taxes, by draughting too large a proportion of the industrious classes into the army. The imperial fiscal system rendered it necessary to keep all the provincial landed proprietors carefully disarmed, lest they should revolt, and perhaps make an attempt to revive republican institutions; and the defence of the empire seemed, to the Roman emperors, to demand the maintenance of a larger army than the population of their own dominions, from which recruits were drawn, could supply.

 

Sect. XV

Changes which preceded the Establishment of Constantinople as the Capital of the Roman Empire

 

The Romans had long been sensible that their social vices threatened their empire with ruin, though they never contemplated the possibility of their cowardice delivering it up a prey to barbarous conquerors. Augustus made a vain attempt to stem the torrent of corruption, by punishing immorality in the higher orders. But a privileged class is generally sufficiently powerful to be able to form its own social code of morality, and protect its own vices as long as it can maintain its existence. The immorality of the Romans at last undermined the political fabric of the empire. Two centuries and a half after the failure of Augustus, the emperor Decius endeavoured with as little effect to reform society. Neither of these sovereigns understood how to cure the malady which was destroying the State. They attempted to improve society by punishing individual nobles for general vices. They ought to have annihilated the privileges which raised senators and nobles above the influence of law and public opinion, and subjected them to nothing but the despotic power of the emperor. St. Paul, however, informs us that the whole frame of society was so utterly corrupted that even this measure would have proved ineffectual. The people were as vicious as the senate; all ranks were suffering from a moral gangrene, which no human art could heal. The dangerous abyss to which society was hastening did not escape observation. The alarm gradually spread through every class in the wide extent of the Roman world. A secret terror was felt by the emperors, the senators, and even by the armies. Men’s minds were changed, and a divine influence produced a reform of which man’s wisdom and strength had proved incapable. From the death of Alexander Severus to the accession of Diocletian, a great social alteration is visible in paganism; the aspect of the human mind seemed to have undergone a complete metamorphosis. The spirit of Christianity was floating in the atmosphere, and to its influence we must attribute that moral change in the pagan world, during the latter half of the third century, which tended to prolong the existence of the Western Roman Empire.

Foreign invasions, the disorderly state of the army, the weight of the taxes, and the irregular constitution of the imperial government, produced at this time a general feeling that the army and the State required a new organization, in order to adapt both to the exigencies of altered circumstances, and save the empire from impending ruin. Aurelian, Probus, Diocletian, and Constantine, appeared as reformers of the Roman Empire. The history of their reforms belongs to the records of the Roman constitution, as they were conceived with very little reference to the institutions of the provinces; and only some portion of the modifications then made in the form of the imperial administration will fall within the scope of this work. But though the administrative reforms produced little change in the condition of the Greek population, the Greeks themselves actively contributed to effect a mighty revolution in the whole frame of social life, by the organization which they gave to the church from the moment they began to embrace the Christian religion. It must not be overlooked, that the Greeks organized a Christian church before Christianity became the established religion of the empire.

Diocletian found that the Roman Empire had lost much of its internal cohesion, and that it could no longer be conveniently governed from one administrative centre. He attempted to remedy the increasing weakness of the coercive principle, by creating four centres of executive authority, controlled by a single imperial legislative emperor. But no human skill could long preserve harmony between four executive despots. Constantine restored the unity of the Roman Empire. His reign marks the period in which old Roman political feelings lost their power, and the superstitious veneration for Rome herself ceased. The liberty afforded for new political ideas by the new social organization was not overlooked by the Greeks. The transference of the seat of government to Byzantium weakened the Roman spirit in the public administration. The Romans, indeed, from the establishment of the imperial government, had ceased to form a homogeneous people, or to be connected by feelings of attachment and interest to one common country; and as soon as the rights of Roman citizenship had been conferred on the provincials, Rome became a mere ideal country to the majority of Romans. The Roman citizens, however, in many provinces, formed a civilized caste of society, dwelling among a number of ruder natives and slaves; they were not melted into the mass of the population. In the Grecian provinces, no such distinction prevailed. The Greeks, who had taken on themselves the name and the position of Roman citizens, retained their own language, manners, and institutions; and as soon as Constantinople was founded and became the capital of the empire, a struggle arose whether it was to become a Greek or a Latin city.

Constantine himself does not appear to have perceived this tendency of the Greek population to acquire a predominant influence in the East by supplanting the language and manners of Rome, and he modelled his new capital entirely after Roman ideas and prejudices. Constantinople was, at its foundation, a Roman city, and Latin was the language of the higher ranks of its inhabitants. This fact must not be lost sight of; for it affords an explanation of the opposition which is for ages apparent in the feelings, as well as the interests, of the capital and of the Greek nation. Constantinople was a creation of imperial favour; a regard to its own advantage rendered it subservient to despotism, and, for a long period, impervious to any national feeling. The inhabitants enjoyed exemptions from taxation, and received distributions of grain and provisions, so that the misery of the empire, and the desolation of the provinces, hardly affected them. Left at leisure to enjoy the games of the circus, they were bribed by government to pay little attention to the affairs of the empire. Such was the position of the people of Constantinople at the time of its foundation, and such it continued for many centuries.