GREECE UNDER THE ROMANS
[146 B.C.-540 A.D.]
We have brought the political history of ancient Greece down to a point which may be fitly regarded as its close; since in the changes which afterwards befell the country the people remained nearly passive. The events of the Mithridatic War—in which the Achæans and Lacedæmonians, and all Bœotia, except Thespiæ, are said to have declared themselves against Rome, and the royal army in Greece received a reinforcement of Lacedæmonian and Achæan troops—might serve to indicate that the national spirit was not wholly extinct, or that the Roman dominion was felt to be intolerably oppressive. But Athens certainly no more deserved Sulla’s bloody vengeance for the resistance into which she was forced by the tyranny of Athenion, than for the credulity with which she had listened to his lying promises.
No historical fact is more clearly ascertained than that from this epoch the nation was continually wasting away. Strabo,[e] who visited Greece but a little more than a century later (B.C. 29), found desolation everywhere prevailing. Beside his special enumeration of ruined towns and deserted sites, and his emphatic silence as to the present, while he explores the faint vestiges or doubtful traditions of the past, the description of almost every region furnishes occasion for some general remark illustrating the melancholy truth. Messenia was for the most part deserted, and the population of Laconia very scanty in comparison with its ancient condition; for beside Sparta it contained but thirty small towns in the room of the hundred for which it had once been celebrated. Of Arcadia it was not worth while to say much, on account of its utter decay. There was scarcely any part of the land in tillage, but vast sheep-walks, and abundant pasture for herds of cattle, especially horses; and so the solitude of Ætolia and Acarnania had become no less favourable to the rearing of horses than Thessaly. Both Acarnania and Ætolia—he repeats elsewhere—are now utterly worn out and exhausted; as are many of the other nations. Of the towns of Doris scarcely a trace was left; the case was the same with the Ænianes. Thebes had sunk to an insignificant village; and the other Bœotian cities in proportion—that is, as he elsewhere explains himself, they were reduced to ruins and names, all but Tanagra and Thespiæ, which, compared with the others, were tolerably well preserved.
It has been usual in modern times to attribute this decline of population to the loss of independence, to the withering influence of a foreign yoke—in a word, to Roman misrule. And it would be bold and probably an error, to assert, that it was wholly unconnected with the nature of the government to which Greece was subject as a Roman province. It is too well known what that government was—how seldom it was uprightly administered, how easily, even in the purest hands, it became the instrument of oppression. The ordinary burdens were heavy. The fisherman of Gyaros, who was sent ambassador to Augustus, to complain that a tax of 150 drachmæ was laid upon his island which could hardly pay two-thirds of that sum, afforded but a specimen of a common grievance. Greece was not exempt from those abuses which provoked the massacre of the Romans in Asia at the outbreak of the Mithridatic War. And even if we had no express information on the subject, we might have concluded that it did not escape the still more oppressive arbitrary exactions of corrupt magistrates, and their greedy officers. “Who does not know,” Cicero asks, “that the Achæans pay a large sum yearly to L. Piso?” It was notorious that he had received one hundred talents from them, beside plunder and extortion of other kinds. The picture which Cicero draws of the evils inflicted by L. Piso upon Greece is no doubt rhetorically overcharged; but it is one of utter impoverishment, exhaustion, and ruin. And here we may remark that the privileges of the free cities included in the province afforded no security against the rapacity and oppression of a Piso or a Verres. The Lacedæmonians, Strabo observes, were peculiarly favoured, and remained free, paying nothing but voluntary offerings. But these were among the most burdensome imposts; and so Athens, which enjoyed the like immunity, was nevertheless, according to Cicero’s phrase, torn to pieces by Piso. To this it must be added that the oligarchical institutions everywhere established—and even Athens was forced so to qualify her democracy that little more than the name seems to have been left—tended to promote the accumulation of property in few hands; as we read that the whole island of Cephallenia was subject to C. Antonius as his private estate.
Nevertheless it seems certain, that when these are represented as the main causes of the decline of population in Greece, which followed the loss of her independence, their importance has been greatly exaggerated, while others much more efficacious have been overlooked or disparaged. For on the one hand it is clear that this decline did not begin at that epoch, but had been going on for many generations before. A comparison of the forces brought into the field to meet the Celtic invasion by the states of northern Greece with those which they furnished in the Persian War, would be sufficient to prove the fact with regard to them; the evil lay deeper than the ravages of war. And we have now the evidence of Polybius, that in the period either immediately preceding, or immediately subsequent to the establishment of the Roman government—a period which he describes as one of concord and comparative prosperity, when the wounds which had been inflicted on the peninsula were beginning to heal—even then the population was rapidly shrinking, through causes quite independent of any external agency, and intimately connected with the moral character and habits of the society itself.
Ruins of the Erechtheum, Athens
The evil was not that the stream of population was violently absorbed, but that it flowed feebly, because there was an influence at work which tended to dry up the fountain-head. Marriages were rare and unfruitful through the prevalence of indifference or aversion toward the duties and enjoyments of domestic life. The historian traces this unhealthy state of feeling to a taste for luxury and ostentation. But this explanation, which could only apply to the wealthy, seems by no means adequate to the result. The real cause struck deeper, and was much more widely spread. Described in general terms, it was a want of reverence for the order of nature, for the natural revelation of the will of God; and the sanction of infanticide was by no means the most destructive, or the most loathsome form in which it manifested itself. This was the cancer which had been for many generations eating into the life of Greece.
How little the vices of the Roman government had to do with the decrease of population in Greece, becomes still more apparent as we follow its course through the history of the empire. The change from republican to monarchical institutions was in general beneficial to the provinces, and especially to Greece, which was not only exempt from the danger of arbitrary oppression, but was distinguished by many marks of imperial favour. Within the space of a few years, about the beginning of this period, three new colonies animated the south coast of the Corinthian Gulf. Pompey planted a settlement of pirates in the solitude of Dyme. His great rival restored Corinth, and, if he had lived longer, would perhaps have opened a canal through the Isthmus. Though the commerce, which at the fall of Corinth had been diverted to Delos, and afterwards dispersed by the Mithridatic War, may not have wholly returned into its ancient channel, still there can be no question that the advantages of this restoration were very largely felt throughout Greece. Augustus founded another populous Roman colony at Patræ, which enjoyed the privileges of a free city. Nicopolis indeed was rather designed as a monument of his victory, than to promote the prosperity of Greece: for it was peopled from the decayed towns of the adjacent regions, and the effect was to turn Acarnania and Ætolia into a wilderness.
Athens too had soon repaired the loss it suffered through Sulla’s massacre, though Piræus did not rise out of its ruins. But the Athenian population was recruited, as it had long been, by the lavish grant or cheap sale of the franchise. It was like the galley of Theseus, retaining nothing but the name and semblance of the old Athenian people, without any real natural identity of race; so that it was no exaggeration, when Piso called it a jumble of divers nations. The poverty indeed of the city, which had been a main cause of its unfortunate accession to the side of Mithridates, still continued, and was but slightly relieved by the bounty of benefactors like Pomponius and Herodes Atticus, or even by the growing influx of wealthy strangers who came to pursue rhetorical or philosophical studies there.
While its splendour was increased by the magnificent structures added to it by Hadrian and Herodes, perhaps the larger part of the freemen was never quite secure of their daily meal. Still the good will of the early emperors was unequivocally manifested. They seem always to have lent a favourable ear to the complaints and petitions of the province, and Nero went so far as to reward the Greeks for their skilful flattery of his musical talents by an entire and general exemption from provincial government, which may have compensated for the presents he exacted from them. The Greeks, it is said, abused their new privileges by discord and tumults, and Vespasian restored the proconsular administration, and above all the tribute—which was perhaps his real motive—with the remark that they had forgotten the use of liberty. But it is evident that on the whole, from the reign of Augustus to that of Trajan, the increase of the population was not checked by oppression or by any calamity. Yet at the end of this period we find Plutarch declaring, that Greece had shared more largely than any other country in the general failure of population which had been caused by the wars and civil conflicts of former times over almost all the world, so that it could then hardly furnish three thousand heavy-armed soldiers—the number raised by Megara alone for the Persian War; and his assertion is confirmed by the pictures drawn by another contemporary witness.
In times when the present was so void and cheerless, the future so dark and hopeless, it was natural that men should seek consolation in the past, even though it had been less full, than was the case among the Greeks, of power and beauty, prosperity and glory. Nor was it necessary then to evoke its images by learned toil out of the dust of libraries or archives. The whole land was covered with its monuments in the most faultless productions of human genius and art. There was no region so desolate, no corner so secluded, as to be destitute of them. Even the rapacity of the Romans could not exhaust these treasures. Though Mummius was said to have filled Italy with the sculptures which he carried away, it is probable that in the immense multitude which remained, their absence, in point of number, might be scarcely perceived. If Nero robbed Delphi of five hundred statues, there might still be more than two thousand left there.
The expressive silence of these memorials was interpreted by legends which lived in the mind and the heart of the people; and so long as any inhabitants remained in a place, a guide was to be found thoroughly versed in this traditional lore. The town of Panopeus at the northern foot of Parnassus, though celebrated by Homer as a royal residence, had been reduced, when it was visited by Pausanias,[f] to a miserable assemblage of huts, in which the traveller could find nothing to deserve the name of a city, as it contained neither an archive, nor a gymnasium, nor a theatre, nor a market-place, nor a fountain; but the people remembered that they were not of Phocian, but of Phlegyan origin: they could show the grave which covered the vast bulk of the great Tityus, and the remnants of the clay out of which Prometheus had moulded the human race. Relics of like antiquity were at the same period reverently treasured in most parts of Greece. The memory of the past was still more effectually preserved by a great variety of festivals, games, public sacrifices, and other religious solemnities. After the extinction of the national independence, the battle of Platæa did not cease to be commemorated by the Feast of Liberty; as notwithstanding the absence of all political interests, the forms of deliberation were kept up in the Amphictyonic, the Achæan, Phocian, and Bœotian councils. The heroes both of the mythical and the historical age were still honoured with anniversary rites—Aratus and Demosthenes, and the slain at Marathon, no less than Ajax and Achilles, Temenus, Phoroneus, and Melampus.
The religion of the Greeks, which was so intimately associated with almost all their social pleasures and their most important affairs, had never lost its hold on the great body of the nation. We hear much of the change wrought in the state of religious feeling by the speculations of the sophists, and the later kindred philosophical schools, by the frequent examples of sacrilegious violence, by the progress of luxury, and the growing corruption of manners. But the effect seems to have been confined to a not very large circle of the higher classes. With the common people paganism continued, probably as long as it subsisted at all, to be not a mere hereditary usage, but a personal, living, breathing, and active faith. In the age of the Antonines the Attic husbandmen still believed in the potent agency of their hero Marathon, as the Arcadian herdsmen fancied that they could hear the piping of Pan on the top of Mænalus. The national misfortunes, as they led the Greeks to cling the more fondly to their recollections of the past, tended to strengthen the influence of the old religion, and rendered them the less disposed to admit a new faith which shocked their patriotic pride and dispelled many pleasing illusions, while it ran counter to all their tastes and habits, and deprived them of their principal enjoyments. Accordingly, it seems that Christianity, notwithstanding the consolations it offered for all that it took away, made very slow progress beyond the cities in which it was first planted; and its ascendency was not firmly established long before the beginning of a period in which a series of new calamities threatened the very existence of the nation.
The result of the Persian invasion in the mind of the victorious people had been a feeling of exulting self-confidence, which fostered the development of all its powers and resources. The terror of the Celtic inroad was followed by a sense of security earned in a great measure by an honourable struggle. Far different was the impression left by the irruption of Alaric, when Greece was at length delivered from his presence. The progress of the barbarians had been stopped by no resistance before they reached the utmost limits of the land. They retreated indeed before Stilicho, but not broken or discomfited, carrying off all their booty to take undisturbed possession of another, not a distant province. It was long indeed before the Greeks experienced a repetition of this calamity, but henceforth they lived in the consciousness that they were continually exposed to it. They neither had strength to defend themselves, nor could rely on their rulers for protection.
The safety of Greece was one of the last objects which occupied the attention of the court of Constantinople. In the utter uncertainty how soon a fresh invader might tread in the steps of Alaric, every rumour of the movements of the hordes which successively crossed the Danube, might well spread alarm, even in the remotest corners of Peloponnesus. The direction which they might take could be as little calculated as the course of lightning. Who could have foreseen that Attila and Theodoric would be diverted from their career to fall upon other prey—that Genseric after his repulse before Tænarus would not renew his invasion—that the Bulgarians would be so long detained by the plunder of the northern provinces? In the reign of Justinian the advances of the barbarians became more and more threatening, and in the year 540 northern Greece was again devastated by a mixed swarm of Huns and other equally ferocious spoilers, chiefly of the Slavonic race.
The strengthened fortifications of the Isthmus indeed withstood this flood, though they could not shelter the Peloponnesians from the earthquakes and the pestilence, which during this unhappy period were constantly wasting the scanty remains of the Hellenic population which had escaped or survived the inroads of the barbarians. Justinian’s enormous line of fortresses revealed the imminence of the danger, but could not long avert it. In the course of the seventh and eighth centuries the worst forebodings were realised; after many transient incursions the country was permanently occupied by Slavonic settlers. The extent of the transformation which ensued is most clearly proved by the number of the new names which succeeded to those of the ancient geography. But it is also described by historians in terms which have suggested the belief that the native population was utterly swept away, and that the modern Greeks are the descendants of barbarous tribes which subsequently became subject to the empire, and received the language and religion which they have since retained from Byzantine missionaries and Anatolian colonists; and such is the obscurity which hangs over the final destiny of the most renowned nation of the earth, that it is much easier to show the weakness of the grounds on which this hypothesis has been reared, than to prove that it is very wide of the truth.[d]
