The Provinces of the Roman Empire, from Caesar to Diocletian. v. 1

by Theodor Mommsen

Province of Achaia.Hand in hand with the ritual union of the European Greeks went the administrative breaking up of the Graeco–Macedonian governorship of the republic. It did not depend on the partition of the imperial administration between emperor and senate, as this whole territory and not less the adjacent Danubian regions were assigned in the original partition to the senate; as little did military considerations here intervene, seeing that the whole peninsula up to the frontier of Thrace was—as protected partly by this region, partly by the garrisons on the Danube—always reckoned to belong to the pacified interior. If the Peloponnesus and the Attico–Boeotian mainland obtained at that time its own proconsul and was separated from Macedonia—which perhaps Caesar may have already designed—it may be presumed that in that course, along with the general tendency not to magnify the senatorial governorships the dominant consideration was that of separating the purely Hellenic domain from what was half–Hellenic. The boundary of the province of Achaia was at first Oeta, and, even after the Aetolians were subsequently attached to it,[149] it did not go beyond the Achelous and Thermopylae.

The Greek towns under the Roman republic.These arrangements concerned the country as a whole. We turn now to the position which was given to the several urban communities under the Roman rule.

The original design of the Romans—to attach the whole of the Greek urban communities to their own commonwealth, in a way similar to what had been done with the Italian—had undergone essential restrictions, in consequence of the resistance which these arrangements met with, especially in consequence of the insurrection of the Achaean league in the year 608 (iii. 47)iii. 45., and of the falling away of most of the Greek towns to king Mithradates in the year 666 (iii. 313)iii. 297.. The city–leagues, the foundation of all development of power in Hellas as in Italy, and at first accepted by the Romans, were all of them—particularly the most important, the Peloponnesian, or, as it called itself, the Achaean—broken up, and the several cities were admonished to regulate their own public affairs. Moreover certain general rules were laid down by the leading power for the several communal constitutions, and according to this scheme these were reorganised in an anti–democratic sense. It was only within these limits that the individual community retained autonomy and a magistracy of its own. It retained also its own courts; but the Greek stood at the same time de jure under the rods and axes of the praetor, and at least could be sentenced—on account of any offence which admitted of being regarded as rebellion against the leading power—by the Roman officials to a money–fine or banishment, or even capital punishment.[150] The communities taxed themselves; but they had throughout to pay to Rome a definite sum, on the whole, apparently, not on a high scale. Garrisons were not assigned, as formerly in the Macedonian period, to the towns, for the troops stationed in Macedonia were in a position, should need arise, to move also into Greece. But a graver blame than that falling on the memory of Alexander through the destruction of Thebes rests on the Roman aristocracy for the razing of Corinth. The other measures, odious and exasperating as in part they were, particularly as imposed by foreign rule, might, taken as a whole, be unavoidable and have in various respects a salutary operation; they were the inevitable palinode of the original Roman policy—in part truly impolitic—of forgiving and forgetting towards the Hellenes. But in the treatment of Corinth mercantile selfishness had after an ill–omened fashion shown itself more powerful than all Philhellenism.

Freed communities under the Roman republic.Amidst all this, the fundamental idea of Roman policy—to confederate the Greek towns with the Italian—was never forgotten; just as Alexander never wished to rule Greece like Illyria and Egypt, so his Roman successors never completely applied the subject–relation to Greece, and even in the republican period essentially fell short of urging the strict rights of the war forced upon the Romans. Especially was this the case in dealing with Athens. No Greek city from the standpoint of Roman policy erred so gravely against Rome as this; its demeanour in the Mithradatic war would, had its case been that of any other commonwealth, have inevitably led to its being razed. But from the Philhellenic standpoint, doubtless, Athens was the masterpiece of the world, and for the genteel world of other lands similar leanings and memories were associated with it, as for our cultivated circles are connected with Pforta and Bonn. This consideration then, as formerly, prevailed. Athens was never placed under the fasces of the Roman governor, and never paid tribute to Rome; it always had a sworn alliance with Rome, and granted aid to the Romans only in an extraordinary and, at least as to form, voluntary fashion. The capitulation after the Sullan siege brought about doubtless a change in the constitution of the community, but the alliance was renewed,—in fact, even all extraneous possessions were given back, including the island of Delos itself, which, when Athens passed over to Mithradates, had broken off and constituted itself an independent commonwealth, and had been, by way of punishment for its fidelity towards Rome, pillaged and destroyed by the Pontic fleet.[151]

Sparta was treated with similar consideration, and that doubtless in good part on account of its great name. Some other towns of the freed communities to be afterwards named had this position already under the republic. Probably such exceptions occurred in every Roman province; but this was from the outset peculiar to the Greek territory, that precisely its two most noted cities were beyond the range of the subject–relation, which accordingly affected only the smaller commonwealths.

City–leagues under the republic.Even for the subject Greek cities alleviations were introduced already under the republic. The city–leagues, at first prohibited, gradually and very soon revived, especially the smaller and powerless ones, like the Boeotian;[152] with the becoming familiarised to foreign rule the oppositional tendencies disappeared which had brought about their abolition, and their close connection with the time–hallowed cultus carefully spared must have further told in their favour, as indeed it has already been observed that the Roman republic restored and protected the Amphictiony in its original non–political functions. Towards the end of the republican period the government seems even to have allowed the Boeotians to enter into a collective union with the small regions adjacent to the north and the island of Euboea.[153]

The copestone of the republican epoch was the atonement for the sack of Corinth made by the greatest of all Romans and of all Philhellenes, the dictator Caesar (iv. 574)iv. 544., and the renewal of the star of Hellas in the form of an independent community of Roman citizens, the new “Julian Honour.”

Achaia under the emperors.These were the relations which the imperial government at its outset found existing in Greece, and in these paths it went forward. The communities freed from the immediate interference of the provincial government and from the payment of tribute to the empire, with which the colonies of Roman burgesses in many respects stood on a level, comprehended far the largest and best part of the province of Achaia:Freed towns and Roman colonies.in the Peloponnesus, Sparta, with its territory diminished no doubt, but yet once more embracing the northern half of Laconia,[154] still the counterpart of Athens as well in its petrified, old–fashioned institutions as in its at least outwardly preserved organisation and bearing; further, the eighteen communities of the free Laconians, the southern half of the Laconian region, once Spartan subjects, organised by the Romans as an independent cities–league after the war against Nabis, and, like Sparta, invested with freedom by Augustus;[155] lastly, in the region of the Achaeans not only Dyme, which had been already furnished by Pompeius with pirate–colonists, and then had received new Roman settlers from Caesar,[156] but above all Patrae, which Augustus, on account of its position favourable for commerce, transformed from a declining hamlet,—partly by drawing together the small surrounding townships, partly by settlement of numerous Italian veterans—into the most populous and most flourishing city of the peninsula, and constituted as a Roman burgess–colony, under which was also placed Naupactus (the Italian Lepanto) on the opposite Locrian coast. On the Isthmus Corinth, as it had formerly become a victim to the advantages of its site, had now after its restoration rapidly risen, similarly to Carthage, and had become the richest in industry and in population of the cities of Greece, as well as the regular seat of government. As the Corinthians were the first Greeks who had recognised the Romans as countrymen by admission to the Isthmian games (ii. 79)ii. 75., so this town now, although a Roman burgess–community, took charge of this high Greek national festival. On the mainland there belonged to the freed districts not merely Athens, with its territory embracing all Attica and numerous islands of the Aegean Sea, but also Tanagra and Thespiae, at that time the two most considerable towns of the Boeotian country, as also Plataeae;[157] in Phocis Delphi, Abae, Elateia, as well as the most considerable of the Locrian towns, Amphissa. What the republic had begun Augustus completed in the arrangement just set forth, which was at least in its main outlines settled by him and was afterwards in substance maintained. Although the communities of the province subject to the proconsul preponderated, certainly as to number, and perhaps also as to the aggregate population, yet in a genuinely Philhellenic spirit the towns of Greece most distinguished by material importance or by great memories were set free.[158]