Nero’s liberation of Greece.The last emperor of the Claudian house, one of the race of spoiled poets and so far at all events a born Philhellene, went further than Augustus had gone in this direction. In gratitude for the recognition which his artistic contributions had met with in the native land of the Muses, Nero, like Titus Flamininus formerly (ii. 262)ii. 247.—and that once more in Corinth at the Isthmian games—declared the Greeks collectively to be rid of Roman government, free from tribute, and, like the Italians, subject to no governor. At once there arose throughout Greece movements, which would have been civil wars, if these people could have achieved anything more than brawling; and after a few months Vespasian re–established the provincial constitution,[159] so far as it went, with the dry remark that the Greeks had unlearned the art of being free.
Rights of the freed towns.The legal position of the communities set free remained in substance the same as under the republic. They retained, so far as Roman burgesses were not in question, the full control of justice; only, the general enactments as to appeals to the emperor on the one hand and to the senatorial authorities on the other seem to have also included the free towns.[160] Above all, they retained full self–determination and self–administration. Athens, for example, exercised in the imperial period the right of coinage, without even putting the emperor’s head on its coins, and even on Spartan coins of the first imperial period it is frequently wanting. In Athens even the old reckoning by drachmae and oboli continued; only that, it is true, the local Attic drachma of this period was nothing but small money current on the spot, and as to value circulated as obolus of the Attic imperial drachma or of the Roman denarius. Even the formal exercise of the right of war and peace was in individual treaties granted to such states.[161] Numerous institutions quite at variance with the Italian municipal organisation remained in existence, such as the annual change of the members of council and the daily allowance–moneys of these and the jurymen, which, at least at Rhodes, were still paid in the imperial period. As a matter of course, the Roman government nevertheless exercised continuously a regulative influence over the constitution even of the freed communities. Thus, for example, the Athenian constitution was, whether at the end of the republic or by Caesar or Augustus, modified in such a way that the right of bringing a proposal before the burgesses belonged no longer to every burgess, but, as according to the Roman arrangement, only to definite officials; and among the great number of officials, who were mere figures, the conduct of business was placed in the hands of a single one—the Strategos. Certainly in this way various further reforms were carried out, the presence of which, in dependent as in independent Greece, we everywhere discern, without being able to determine the time and occasion of the reform. Thus the right, or rather the wrong, of asylums, which, as survivals of a lawless period, had now become pious retreats for bad debtors and criminals, was certainly, if not set aside, at least restricted in this province also. The institution of proxenia—originally an appropriate arrangement, that may be compared to our foreign consulates, but politically dangerous through the bestowal of full civil rights and often also of the privilege of exemption from taxes on the friendly foreigner, especially considering the extent to which it was granted—was set aside by the Roman government, apparently only at the beginning of the imperial period; in room of which thereupon came, after the Italian fashion, the empty city–patronate, which did not come into contact with the system of taxation. Lastly, the Roman government, as wielding supreme sovereignty over these dependent republics just as over the client–princes, always regarded it as its right, and exercised the power, to cancel the free constitution in case of misuse, and to take the town into its own administration. But partly the sworn agreement, partly the powerlessness of these nominally allied states, gave to these treaties a greater stability than is discernible in the relation to the client–princes.
Diets of the Greek cities.While the freed communities of Achaia retained their previous legal position under the empire, Augustus conferred on those communities of the province, in which freedom was not granted or possessed, a new and better legal position. As he had given to the Greeks of Europe a common centre in the reorganised Delphic Amphictiony, he allowed also all the towns of the province of Achaia, so far as they were placed under Roman administration, to constitute themselves as a collective union, and to meet annually in Argos, the most considerable town of non–free Greece, as a national assembly.[162] Thereby not merely was the Achaean league, dissolved after the Achaean war, reconstituted, but also the enlarged Boeotian union formerly mentioned ([p. 259]) was engrafted on it. Probably it was just by the laying together of these two domains that the demarcation of the province of Achaia was brought about. The new union of the Achaeans, Boeotians, Locrians, Phocians, Dorians, and Euboeans,[163] or, as it is usually designated like the province, the union of the Achaeans, presumably had rights neither more nor less than the other provincial diets of the empire. A certain control of the Roman officials must have been intended in the case, and for that reason the towns not placed under the proconsul, like Athens and Sparta, must have been excluded from it. This diet withal, like all similar ones, must have found the centre of its activity chiefly in the common cultus embracing the whole land. But, while in the other provinces this cultus of the land preponderantly attached itself to Rome, the diet of Achaia was rather a focus of Hellenism, and was perhaps meant to be so. Already under the Julian emperors it regarded itself as the true representative of the Greek nation, and assigned to its president the name of Helladarch, to itself even that of “the Panhellenes.”[164] The assembly thus deviated from its provincial basis, and its modest administrative functions fell into the background.
The Panhellenion of Hadrian in Athens.These Panhellenes therefore took to themselves this name by an abuse of language, and were simply tolerated by the government. But as Hadrian created a new Athens, so he created also a new Hellas. Under him the representatives of all the autonomous or non–autonomous towns of the province of Achaia were allowed to constitute themselves in Athens as united Greece, as the Panhellenes.[165] The national union, often dreamed of and never attained in better times, was thereby created, and what youth had wished for old age possessed in imperial fulness. It is true that the new Panhellenion did not obtain political prerogatives; but there was no lack of what imperial favour and imperial gold could give. There arose in Athens the temple of the new Zeus Panhellenios, and brilliant popular festivals and games were connected with this foundation, the carrying out of which pertained to the collegium of the Panhellenes, and primarily to the priest of Hadrian as the living god who founded them. One of the acts, which these performed every year, was the offering of sacrifice to Zeus the Deliverer at Plataeae, in memory of the Hellenes that fell there in battle against the Persians, on the anniversary of the battle, the 4th Boedromion: this marks its tendency.[166] Still more clearly was this shown in the fact that the Greek towns outside of Hellas, which appeared worthy of the national fellowship, had ideal certificates of Hellenism issued to them by the assembly in Athens.[167]
The decay of Hellas.While the imperial rule in its whole wide range encountered the devastations of a twenty years’ civil war, and in many places its consequences were never entirely healed, probably no domain was so severely affected by them as the Greek peninsula. Fate had so arranged, that the three great decisive battles of this epoch—Pharsalus, Philippi, Actium—were fought on its soil or on its coast; and the military operations, which with both parties led up to these battles, had here above all demanded their sacrifices of human life and human happiness. Even Plutarch was told by his great–grandfather how the officers of Antonius had compelled the citizens of Chaeronea, when they no longer possessed slaves or beasts of burden, to drag their last grain on their own shoulders to the nearest port to be shipped for the army; and how thereupon, just as the second convoy was about to depart, the accounts of the battle of Actium arrived as glad news of relief. The first thing that Caesar did after the victory was to distribute the enemy’s stores of grain that had fallen into his power among the famishing population of Greece. This heaviest measure of suffering fell upon a specially weak power of resistance. Decrease of the population.Already, more than a century before the battle of Actium, Polybius had stated that unfruitfulness in marriage and diminution of the population had in his time come over all Greece, without any diseases or severe wars befalling the land. Now these scourges had emerged in fearful fashion; and Greece remained desolate for all time to come. Plutarch thinks that throughout the Roman empire the population had fallen off in consequence of the devastating wars, but most of all in Greece, which was not now in a position to furnish from the better circles of the citizens the 3000 hoplites, with which once the smallest of the Greek districts, Megara, had fought at Plataeae.[168] Caesar and Augustus had attempted to remedy this depopulation, which alarmed even the government, by the despatch of Italian colonists, and, in fact, the two most flourishing towns of Greece were these very colonies; the later governments did not repeat such consignments. The background to the charming Euboean peasant–idyll of Dio of Prusa is formed by a depopulated town, in which numerous houses stand empty, flocks are fed at the council–hall and at the city register–house, two–thirds of the territory lie untilled for want of hands; and when the narrator reports this as falling within his own experience, he therewith assuredly describes not unaptly the circumstances of numerous small Greek country towns in the time of Trajan. “Thebes in Boeotia,” says Strabo in the Augustan age, “is now hardly to be termed even a goodly village, and the same holds true of all the Boeotian towns, with the exception of Tanagra and Thespiae.” But not merely did men dwindle away as regards number; the type also declined. “There are doubtless still beautiful women,” says one of the finest observers about the end of the first century,[169] “but beautiful men one sees no longer; the Olympian victors of more recent times appear, compared with the older, inferior and common, partly no doubt owing to the fault of the artists, but chiefly because they are just what they are.” The bodily training of the youth had been carried in this promised land of ephebi and athletes to such an extent, as if the very aim of the communal constitution were to rear the boys as gymnasts and the men as boxers; but, if no province possessed so many artists for the ring, none supplied so few soldiers to the imperial army. Even from the instruction of the Athenian youth—which in the olden time embraced spear–throwing, shooting with the bow, the use of missiles, the marching out and pitching of the camp—this playing at soldiers on the part of the boys now disappears. The Greek towns of the empire were virtually not taken account of in the levy, whether because their recruits appeared physically incapable, or because this element appeared dangerous in the army; it was an imperial pleasantry that the caricature of Alexander, Severus Antoninus, reinforced the Roman army for the conflict with the Persians by some companies of Spartiates.[170] Whatever was done for internal order and security must have emanated from the individual communities, as Roman troops were not stationed in the province; Athens, for example, maintained a garrison in the island of Delos, and probably a division of militia lay also in the citadel.[171] In the crises of the third century the general levy of Elateia ([p. 242]) and that of Athens ([p. 246]) valiantly repulsed the Costoboci and the Goths; and, after a worthier fashion than the grandchildren of the combatants of Thermopylae in Caracalla’s Persian war, in the Gothic the grandchildren of the victors of Marathon inscribed their names for the last time in the annals of ancient history. But, though such incidents must preclude us from treating the Greeks of this epoch absolutely as a decayed rabble, yet the decline of the population as regards number and vigour steadily continued even during the better imperial period, until, from the end of the second century, the diseases which severely visited these lands, likewise the inroads of land and sea pirates who particularly affected the east coast, and lastly, the collapse of the imperial power in the time of Gallienus, raised the chronic suffering into an acute catastrophe.
Greek tone of feeling.The decay of Hellas, and the feelings which it called forth among the best men, come before us after a striking manner in the appeal which one of these, the Bithynian Dio, addressed about the time of Vespasian to the Rhodians. These were not unjustly regarded as the most excellent of the Hellenes. In no city were the lower population better cared for, and nowhere did that care bear more the stamp of giving not alms but work. When, after the great civil war, Augustus made all private debts irrecoverable at law in the East, the Rhodians alone rejected the dangerous favour. Although the great epoch of Rhodian commerce was over, there were still in Rhodes numerous flourishing branches of business and wealthy houses.[172] But many evils had invaded the place, and the philosopher demands that they be done away, not so much, as he says, for the sake of the Rhodians, as for the sake of the Hellenes in common. “Once upon a time the honour of Hellas rested on many, and many increased its renown—you, the Athenians, the Lacedaemonians, Thebes, Corinth for a time, at a remote period Argos. But now the others are as nothing; for some are totally decayed and destroyed, others conduct themselves as you know, and are dishonoured and destroyers of their old renown. You are surviving; you alone are still somewhat and are not utterly despised; for, after the way in which those go to work, all Hellenes would long ago have sunken more deeply than the Phrygians and the Thracians. As when a great and noble family is reduced to a single survivor, and the sin which this last of the house commits brings all his ancestors into dishonour, so you stand in Hellas. Believe not that you are the first of the Greeks; you are the only ones. If we look at those pitiful scoundrels, the great destinies of the past become themselves inconceivable; the stones and ruins of cities show more clearly the pride and the greatness of Hellas than these descendants not even worthy of Mysian ancestors; and better than with towns inhabited by such as these has it fared with those cities which lie in ruins, for their memory remains in honour and their well–acquired renown unstained—better burn the carcase than allow it to lie rotting.”[173]
The good old manners.We shall not disparage this noble spirit of a scholar who measured the petty present by the great past, and, as could not fail to be the case, looked at the one with indignant eyes and at the other in the transfigured glory of what had been, if we point out the fact that the good old Hellenic habits were at that time and even long afterwards not merely to be found in Rhodes, but were in many respects still everywhere alive. The inward independence, the well warranted self–esteem of the nation that was still standing at the head of civilisation had not disappeared in the Hellenes even of this age, amidst all the pliancy of subjection and all the humility of parasitism. The Romans borrowed the gods from the old Hellenes and the form of administration from the Alexandrines; they sought to master the Greek language and to Hellenise their own in measure and style. The Hellenes even of the imperial period did not pursue a like course; the national deities of Italy, like Silvanus and the Lares, were not adored in Greece, and it never entered into the mind of any Greek urban community to introduce at home the political organisation which their Polybius celebrates as the best. So far as the knowledge of Latin was a condition for the career of the higher as of the lower magistracies, the Greeks who entered upon this career acquired it; for, though practically it only occurred to the emperor Claudius to withdraw the Roman franchise from the Greeks who did not understand Latin, certainly the real execution of the rights and duties connected with it was possible only for one who was master of the imperial language. But, apart from public life, Latin was never so learned in Greece as Greek in Rome. Plutarch, who, as an author, joined as it were in marriage the two halves of the empire, and whose parallel biographies of famous Greeks and Romans recommended themselves and were effective above all by this juxtaposition, understood not very much more of Latin than Diderot of Russian, and at least, as he himself says, did not master the language; the Greek literati having a real command of Latin were either officials, like Appian and Dio Cassius, or neutrals, like king Juba.
Really Greece was far less changed in itself than in its external position. The government of Athens was truly bad, but even in the time of Athenian greatness it had not been at all exemplary. “There is,” says Plutarch, “the same national type, the same disorders, earnest and jest, charm and malice, as among their ancestors.” This epoch, too, still exhibits in the life of the Greek people individual features which are worthy of its civilising leadership. The gladiatorial games, which spread from Italy everywhere, especially to Asia Minor and to Syria, found admission to Greece latest of all lands; for a considerable period they were confined to the half–Italian Corinth, and when the Athenians, in order not to be behind that city, introduced them also among themselves without listening to the voice of one of their best men, who asked them whether they would not first set up an altar to the God of compassion, several of the noblest turned indignantly away from the city of their fathers that so dishonoured itself. In no country of the ancient world were slaves treated with such humanity as in Hellas; it was not the law, but custom that forbade the Greek to sell his slaves to a non–Greek master, and so banished from this region the slave–trade proper. Only here in the imperial period do we find the non–free people provided for in the burgess–feasts and in largesses of oil to the burgesses.[174] Only here could one who was not free, like Epictetus under Trajan, in his more than modest outward existence in the Epirot Nicopolis, hold intercourse with respected men of senatorial rank, after the manner of Socrates with Critias and Alcibiades, so that they listened to his oral instructions as disciples to the master, and took notes of, and published, his conversations. The alleviations of slavery by the imperial law are essentially traceable to the influence of Greek views, e.g. with the emperor Marcus, who looked up to that Nicopolitan slave as his master and model.
Parallel between Roman and Athenian life.The author of a dialogue preserved among those of Lucian gives an unsurpassed description of the demeanour of the polished Athenian citizen, amidst his narrow circumstances, overagainst the genteel and rich travelling public of doubtful culture or else undoubted coarseness; how the rich foreigner has been weaned from appearing in the public bath with a host of attendants, as if he were not otherwise certain of his life in Athens and there were no peace in the land; and how he was weaned from showing himself on the street with his purple dress by people making the friendly inquiry whether it was not that of his mamma. He draws a parallel between Roman and Athenian existence; in the former the burdensome banquets and the still more burdensome brothels, the inconvenient convenience of the swarms of menials and the domestic luxury, the troubles of a dissolute life, the torments of ambition, all the superfluity, the multifariousness, the unrest of the doings of the capital; in the latter the charm of poverty, the free talk in the friendly circle, the leisure for intellectual enjoyment, the possibility of peace and of joy in life— “How couldest thou,” one Greek in Rome asks another, “leave the light of the sun, Hellas, and its happiness and its freedom for the sake of this crowd?” In this fundamental keynote all the more finely and purely organised natures of this epoch are agreed; the very best Hellenes would rather not exchange with the Romans. There is hardly anything equally pleasing in the literature of the imperial period with the already mentioned Euboean idyll of Dio; it depicts the existence of two families of hunters in the lonely forest, whose property consists of eight goats, a cow without a horn, and a fine calf, four sickles and three hunting–spears, who know nothing either of gold or of taxes, and who, when placed before the raging burgess–assembly of the city, are by the latter dismissed at length unmolested to joy and to freedom.
Plutarch.The real embodiment of this poetically transfigured conception of life is Plutarch of Chaeronea, one of the most charming, most fully informed, and withal most effective writers of antiquity. Sprung from a family of means in that small Boeotian country–town, and introduced to the full Hellenic culture, first at home and then at Athens and at Alexandria; familiar, moreover, with Roman affairs through his studies and manifold personal relations, as well as by his travels in Italy, he disdained to enter into the service of the state or to adopt the professional career after the usual manner of gifted Greeks; he remained faithful to his home, enjoying domestic life, in the finest sense of the word, with his excellent wife and his children, and with his friends, male and female; contenting himself with the offices and honours which his own Boeotia was able to offer to him, and with the moderate property which he had inherited. In this Chaeronean the contrast between the Hellenes and the Hellenised finds expression; such a type of Greek life was not possible in Smyrna or in Antioch; it belonged to the soil like the honey of Hymettus. There are men enough of more powerful talents and of deeper natures, but hardly any second author has known in so happy a measure how to reconcile himself serenely to necessity, and how to impress upon his writings the stamp of his tranquillity of spirit and his blessedness of life.