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

by Theodor Mommsen

Misgovernment of the provincial administration.The self–mastery of Hellenism cannot manifest itself in the field of public life with the purity and beauty which it presents in the quiet homestead, after which history happily does not inquire any more than it inquires after history. When we turn to public affairs, there is more to be told of misrule than of rule, both as regards the Roman government and the Greek autonomy. There was no want of goodwill on the part of the former, in so far as Roman Philhellenism dominated the imperial period even much more decidedly than the republican. It expresses itself everywhere in great matters as in small, in the prosecution of the Hellenising of the Eastern provinces and the recognition of a double official language for the empire, as well as in the courteous forms in which the government dealt, and enjoined its officials to deal, even with the pettiest Greek community.[175] Nor did the emperors fail to favour this province with gifts and buildings; and, though most things of this sort came to Athens, Hadrian at any rate constructed a great aqueduct for the benefit of Corinth, and Pius the hospital at Epidaurus. But the considerate treatment of the Greeks in general, and the special kindness which was shown by the imperial government to Hellas proper, because it was accounted in a certain sense as, like Italy, “motherland,” did not redound to the true benefit either of the government or of the country. The annual changes of the chief magistrates, and the remiss control of the central position, made all the senatorial provinces, so far as rule by governors went, feel rather the oppression than the blessing of unity of administration, and doubly so in proportion to their smallness and their poverty. Even under Augustus himself these evils prevailed to such a degree that it was one of the first acts of the reign of his successor to take Greece as well as Macedonia into his own power,[176] as it was alleged, temporarily, but in fact for the whole duration of his reign. It was very constitutional, but perhaps not quite so wise on the part of the emperor Claudius, when he came to power, that he re–established the old arrangement. Thenceforward the matter remained on this footing, and Achaia was administered by magistrates not nominated, but chosen by lot, till this form of administration fell altogether into abeyance.

Misgovernment of the free towns.But the case was far worse with the communities of Greece exempted from the rule of the governor. The design of favouring these commonwealths—by freeing them from tribute and levy, and not less by the slightest possible restriction of the rights of the sovereign state—led at least in many cases to the opposite result. The intrinsic falseness of the institutions avenged itself. No doubt among the less privileged or better administered communities the communal autonomy may have fulfilled its aim; at least we do not learn that Sparta, Corinth, Patrae fared specially ill in this respect. Administration of Athens.But Athens was not made for self–administration, and affords the disheartening picture of a commonwealth pampered by the supreme power, and financially as well as morally ruined. By rights it ought to have found itself in a flourishing condition. If the Athenians were unsuccessful in uniting the nation under their hegemony, this city was the only one in Greece, as in Italy, which carried out completely the union of its territory: no city of antiquity elsewhere possessed a domain of its own, such as was Attica, of about 700 square miles, double the size of the island of Rügen. But even beyond Attica they retained what they possessed, as well after the Mithradatic war by favour of Sulla, as after the Pharsalian battle, in which they had taken the side of Pompeius, by the favour of Caesar—he asked them only how often they would still ruin themselves and trust to be saved by the renown of their ancestors. To the city there still belonged not merely the territory, formerly possessed by Haliartus, in Boeotia (ii. 329)ii. 309, but also on their own coast Salamis, the old starting–point of their dominion of the sea, and in the Thracian Sea the lucrative islands Scyros, Lemnos, and Imbros, as well as Delos in the Aegean; it is true this island, after the end of the republic, was no longer the central emporium of trade with the East, now that the traffic had been drawn away from it to the ports of the west coast of Italy, and this was an irreparable loss for the Athenians. Of the further grants, which they had the skill to draw by flattery from Antonius, Augustus, against whom they had taken part, took from them certainly Aegina and Eretria in Euboea, but they were allowed to retain the smaller islands of the Thracian Sea, Icus, Peparethus, Sciathus, and further Ceos confronting the promontory of Sunium; and Hadrian, moreover, gave to them the best part of the great island Cephallenia in the Ionian Sea. It was only by the emperor Severus, who bore them no good will, that a portion of these extraneous possessions was withdrawn from them. Hadrian further granted to the Athenians the delivery of a certain quantity of grain at the expense of the empire, and by the extension of this privilege, hitherto reserved for the capital, acknowledged Athens, as it were, as another imperial metropolis. Not less was the blissful institute of alimentary endowments, which Italy had enjoyed since Trajan’s time, extended by Hadrian to Athens, and the capital requisite for this purpose certainly presented to the Athenians from his purse. An aqueduct, which he likewise dedicated to his Athens, was only completed after his death by Pius. To this falls to be added the conflux of travellers and of students, and the endowments bestowed on the city in ever increasing number by Roman grandees and by foreign princes.

Its difficulties.Yet the community was in constant distress. The right of citizenship was dealt with not merely in the way everywhere usual of giving and taking, but was made formally and openly a matter of traffic, so that Augustus interfered to prohibit the evil. Once and again the council of Athens resolved to sell this or that one of its islands; and not always was there found a rich man ready to make sacrifices like Julius Nicanor, who, under Augustus, bought back for the bankrupt Athenians the island of Salamis, thereby earning from its senate the honorary title of the “new Themistocles,” as well as, seeing that he also made verses, that of the “new Homer,” and—together with the noble councillors—from the public well–merited derision. The magnificent buildings with which Athens continued to embellish herself were obtained without exception from foreigners, among others from the rich kings Antiochus of Commagene and Herod of Judaea, but above all from the emperor Hadrian, who laid out a complete “new town” (novae Athenae) on the Ilisus, and—besides numberless other buildings, including the already mentioned Panhellenion—worthily brought to completion the wonder of the world, seven centuries after it had been begun, the gigantic building, commenced by Pisistratus, of the Olympieion, with its 120 columns partly still standing, the largest of all that are erect at the present day. This city itself was without money, not merely for its harbour–walls, which now certainly might be dispensed with, but even for its harbour. In Augustus’s time the Piraeus was a small village of a few houses, only visited for the sake of the masterpieces of painting in the halls of the temples. There was hardly any longer commerce or industry in Athens; or rather for the citizens as a body as well as individually there was but a single flourishing trade—begging.

Street–riots.Nor did the matter end with financial distress. The world doubtless had peace, but not the streets and squares of Athens. Even under Augustus an insurrection in Athens assumed such proportions that the Roman government had to take steps against the free city;[177] and though this event stands isolated, riots on the street on account of the price of bread and on other trifling occasions belonged in Athens to the order of the day. The prospect must not have been much better in numerous other free towns, of which there is less mention. To give criminal justice absolutely into the hands of such a burgess–body could hardly be justified; and yet it belonged de jure to the communities admitted to international federation, like Athens and Rhodes. When the Athenian Areopagus in the time of Augustus refused to release from punishment on the intercession of a Roman of rank a Greek condemned for forgery, it must have been within its right; but when the Cyzicenes under Tiberius imprisoned Roman burgesses, and under Claudius the Rhodians even nailed a Roman burgess to the cross, these were formal violations of law, and a similar occurrence under Augustus cost the Thessalians their autonomy. Arrogance and aggression are not excluded by absence of power—are not seldom even ventured on by weak clients. With all respect for great memories and sworn treaties, these free states could not but appear to every conscientious government not much less than an infringement of the general order of the empire, like the still more time–hallowed right of asylum in the temples.

Correctores.Ultimately the government acted with decision, and placed the free towns, as regards their economy, under the superintendence of officials of imperial nomination, who, at all events in the first instance, are described as extraordinary commissioners “for the correction of evils prevailing in the free towns,” and thence subsequently bear the designation “Correctores” as their title. The germs of this office may be traced back to the time of Trajan; we find them as standing officials in Achaia in the third century. These officials, appointed by the emperor, and acting alongside of the proconsuls, occur in no part of the Roman empire so early, and are in no case found so early permanent, as in Achaia, which half consisted of free cities.

Clinging to memories of the past.The self–esteem of the Hellenes, well–warranted in itself and fostered by the attitude of the Roman government, and perhaps still more by that of the Roman public—the consciousness of intellectual primacy—called into life among them a cultus of the past, which was compounded of a faithful clinging to the memories of greater and happier times and a quaint reverting of matured civilisation to its in part very primitive beginnings.

Religion.To foreign worships, if we keep out of view the service of the Egyptian deities already earlier naturalised by trading intercourse, particularly that of Isis, the Greeks in Hellas proper sustained throughout the attitude of declining them; if this held least true in the case of Corinth, Corinth was also the least Greek town of Hellas. The old religion of the country was not protected by hearty faith, from which this age had long since broken off;[178] but the habits of home and the memory of the past clung to it by preference, and therefore it was not merely retained with tenacity, but it even became—in good part by the process of erudite retouching—always more rigid and more antique as time went on, always more a distinctive possession of such as made it a study.

Pedigrees.It was the same with the worship of pedigrees, in which the Hellenes of this age performed uncommon feats, and left the most aristocratic of the Romans far behind them. In Athens the family of the Eumolpidae played a prominent part at the reorganisation of the Eleusinian festival under Marcus. His son Commodus conferred on the head of the clan of the Kerykes the Roman franchise, and from him descended the brave and learned Athenian, who, almost like Thucydides, fought with the Goths and then described the Gothic war ([p. 246]). A contemporary of Marcus, the professor and consular Herodes Atticus, belonged to this same clan, and his court–poet sings of him, that the red shoe of the Roman patriciate well befitted the high–born Athenian, the descendant of Hermes and of Cecrops’s daughter Herse, while one of his panegyrists in prose celebrates him as Aeacides, and at the same time as a descendant of Miltiades and Cimon. But even Athens was far outbidden in this respect by Sparta; on several occasions we meet with Spartiates who boast of descent from the Dioscuri, Herakles, Poseidon, and of the priesthood of these ancestors hereditary for forty generations and more in their house. It is significant of this nobility, that it in the main presents itself only with the end of the second century; the heraldic draughtsmen who projected these genealogical tables cannot have been very punctilious as to vouchers either in Athens or in Sparta.

Language; archaism and barbarism.The same tendency appears in the treatment of the language or rather of the dialects. While at this time in the other Greek–speaking lands and also in Hellas the so–called common Greek, debased in the main from the Attic dialect, predominated in ordinary intercourse, not merely did the written language of this epoch strive to set aside prevalent faults and innovations, but in many cases dialectic peculiarities were again taken up in opposition to common usage, and here, where it was least of all warranted, the old particularism was in semblance brought back. On the statues which the Thespians set up to the Muses in the grove of Helicon, there were inscribed in good Boeotian the names Orania and Thalea, while the epigrams belonging to them, composed by a poet of Roman name, called them in good Ionic Uranie and Thaleie, and the non–learned Boeotians, if they knew them, like all other Greeks called them Urania and Thaleia. By the Spartans especially incredible things were done in this way, and not seldom more was written for the shade of Lycurgus than for the Aelii and Aurelii living at the time.[179] Moreover, the correct use of the language at this period appears gradually losing ground even in Hellas; archaisms and barbarisms often stand peacefully side by side in the documents of the imperial period. The population of Athens, much mixed with foreigners, has at no time specially distinguished itself in this respect,[180] and, although the civic documents keep themselves comparatively pure, yet from the time of Augustus the gradually increasing corruption of language here also makes itself felt. The strict grammarians of the time filled whole books with the linguistic slips with which the much celebrated rhetorician Herodes Atticus just mentioned and the other famous school–orators of the second century were chargeable,[181] quite apart from the quaint artificiality and the affected point of their discourse. But barbarism proper as regards language and writing set in in Athens and all Greece, just as in Rome, with Septimius Severus.[182]