fter a time Macedon and Achaia were made by the Romans into provinces, each of which had a governor who had been one year in a magistrate’s office at Rome, and then was sent out to rule in a province for three or for five years.
In 146, nearly a hundred years after the ruin of Corinth, Julius Cæsar built it up again in great strength and beauty, and made it the capital of Achaia. As it stood where the Isthmus was only six miles across, and had a beautiful harbour on each side, travellers who did not wish to go round the dangerous headlands of the Peloponnesus used to land on one side and embark on the other. Thus Corinth become one of the great stations for troops, and also a mart for all kinds of merchandise, and was always full of strangers, both Greeks and Jews.
The Romans, as conquerors, had rights to be tried only by their own magistrates and laws, and these laws were generally just. They were, however, very hard
on subject nations; and, therefore, the best thing that could happen to a man was to be made a Roman citizen, and this was always done to persons of rank, by way of compliment—sometimes to whole cities.
Athens had never had a great statesman or soldier in her since the time of Phocion, but her philosophers and orators still went on discoursing in the schools, and for four hundred years at least Athens was a sort of university town, where the rich young men from Rome, Carthage, Alexandria, Asia Minor, and Syria came to see the grand old buildings and works of art, and to finish their education. For though the great men of Greece were all dead, their works, both in stone and in writing, still remained, and were the models of all the world, and their language was spoken all over the East.
The Romans’ own tongue, Latin, was used at home, of course, but every gentleman knew Greek equally well, and all the Syrians, Jews, and Egyptians who had much intercourse with them used Greek as the language sure to be known—much as French is now used all over Europe.
But there was an answer coming to all those strainings and yearnings after God and His truth which had made those old Greek writings beautiful. There is a story that one night a ship’s crew, passing near a lonely island in the Ægean Sea, sacred to the gods, heard a great wailing and crying aloud of spirit voices, exclaiming, “Great Pan is dead.”
Pan was the heathen god of nature, to whom sacred places were dedicated, and this strange crying was at the very night after a day when, far away in Judæa, the sun had been darkened at noon, and the rocks were rent, and One who was dying on a cross had said, “It is finished.” For the victory over Satan and all his spirits was won by death.
Some fifteen years later than that day, as Paul, a Jew of Tarsus, in Asia Minor, with the right of Roman citizenship, and a Greek education, was spreading the knowledge of that victory over the East—while he slept at the new Troy built by Alexander, there stood by his bed, in a vision by night, a man of Macedon, saying, “Come over and help us.”