Roads.It is in accordance with this state of things that virtually nothing was done for the roads of this province in the imperial period; Roman milestones have been found only in the immediate vicinity of Patrae and of Athens, and even these belong to the emperors of the end of the third and of the fourth century; evidently the earlier governments renounced the idea of restoring communications here. Hadrian alone undertook at least to make the equally important and short land–connection between Corinth and Megara—by way of the wretched pass of the “Scironian cliffs”—into a practicable road by means of huge embankments thrown into the sea.
Piercing of the Isthmus.The long–discussed plan of piercing the Corinthian isthmus, which the dictator Caesar had conceived, was subsequently attempted, first by the emperor Gaius and then by Nero. The latter even, on occasion of his abode in Greece, personally took the first step towards the canal, and caused 6000 Jewish captives to work at it for a series of months. In connection with the cutting operations resumed in our own day, considerable remains of these buildings have been brought to light, which show that the works were tolerably far advanced when they were broken off, probably not in consequence of the revolution that broke out some time afterwards in the West, but because here, just as with the similar Egyptian canal, in consequence of the difference of level that was erroneously assumed to exist between the two seas, there were apprehensions of the destruction of the island of Aegina and of further mischief on the completion of the canal. No doubt had this canal been completed, it would have shortened the course of traffic between Asia and Italy, but it would not have tended specially to benefit Greece itself.
Epirus.It has already been remarked ([p. 256]) that the regions to the north of Hellas, Thessaly, and Macedonia, and at least from Trajan’s time Epirus, were in the imperial period separated administratively from Greece. Of these the small Epirot province, which was administered by an imperial governor of the second rank, never recovered from the devastation to which it had been subjected in the course of the third Macedonian war (ii. 329)ii. 309.. The mountainous and poor interior possessed no city of note and a thinly–scattered population. Augustus had endeavoured to raise the not less desolated coast by the construction of two towns—by the completion of the colony of Roman citizens already resolved on by Caesar in Buthrotum overagainst Corcyra, which, however, attained no true prosperity, and by the founding of the Nicopolis.Greek town Nicopolis, just at the spot where the headquarters had been stationed before the decisive battle of Actium, at the southernmost point of Epirus, about an hour and a half north of Prevesa, according to the design of Augustus, at once a permanent memorial of the great naval victory and the centre of a newly flourishing Hellenic life. This foundation was new in its kind as Roman.[191] The words of a contemporary Greek poet, which we quote below, simply express what Augustus here did; he united the whole surrounding territory, southern Epirus, the opposite region of Acarnania with the island of Leucas, and even a portion of Aetolia into one urban domain, and transferred the inhabitants still left in the decaying townships there existing to the new city of Nicopolis, opposite to which on the Acarnanian shore the old temple of the Actian Apollo was magnificently renewed and enlarged.
Its character and privileges.A Roman city had never been founded in this way; this was the synoekismos of the successors of Alexander. Quite in the same way had king Cassander constituted the Macedonian towns Thessalonica and Cassandreia, Demetrius Poliorcetes the Thessalian town Demetrias, and Lysimachus the town of Lysimachia on the Thracian Chersonese out of a number of surrounding townships divested of their independence. In keeping with the Greek character of the foundation Nicopolis was, according to the intention of its founder, to become a Greek city on a great scale.[192] It obtained freedom and autonomy like Athens and Sparta, and was intended, as already stated, to wield the fifth part of the votes in the Amphictiony representing all Hellas, and to do so, like Athens, without alternating with other towns ([p. 254]). This new Actian shrine of Apollo was erected quite after the model of Olympia, with a quadriennial festival, which even bore the name of “Olympia” alongside of its own, had equal rank and equal privileges, and even its Actiads as the former had its Olympiads;[193] the town of Nicopolis stood related to it like the town of Elis to the Olympian temple.[194] Everything properly Italian was carefully avoided in the erection of the town as well as in the religious arrangements, however natural it might be to mould after the Roman fashion the “city of victory” so intimately associated with the founding of the empire. Whoever considers the arrangements of Augustus in Hellas in this connection, and especially this remarkable corner–stone, will not be able to resist the conviction that Augustus believed that a reorganisation of Hellas under the protection of the Roman principate was practicable, and wished to carry it out. The locality at least was well chosen for it, as at that time, before the foundation of Patrae, there was no larger city on the whole Greek west coast. But what Augustus may have hoped for at the commencement of his sole rule, he did not attain, and perhaps even subsequently abandoned, when he gave to Patrae the form of a Roman colony. Nicopolis remained, as the extensive ruins and the numerous coins show, comparatively populous and flourishing;[195] but its citizens do not appear to have taken a prominent part in commerce and manufactures or otherwise. Northern Epirus, which, like the adjoining Illyricum bordering on Macedonia, was in greater part inhabited by Albanian tribes and was not placed under Nicopolis, continued during the imperial period in its primitive condition, which still subsists in some measure at the present day. “Epirus and Illyricum,” says Strabo, “are in great part a desert; where men are found, they dwell in villages and in ruins of earlier towns; even the oracle of Dodona,”—laid waste in the Mithradatic war by the Thracians (iii. 312)iii. 296.,—“is extinct like everything else.”[196]
Thessaly.Thessaly, in itself a purely Hellenic district as well as Aetolia and Acarnania, was in the imperial period separated administratively from the province of Achaia and placed under the governor of Macedonia. What holds true of northern Greece applies also to Thessaly. The freedom and autonomy which Caesar had allowed generally to the Thessalians, or rather had not withdrawn from them, seem to have been withdrawn, on account of misuse, from them by Augustus, so that subsequently Pharsalus alone retained this legal position;[197] Roman colonists were not settled in the district. It retained its separate diet in Larisa, and civic self–administration was left with the Thessalians, as with the dependent Greeks in Achaia. Thessaly was far the most fertile region of the whole peninsula, and still exported grain in the fourth century; nevertheless Dio of Prusa says that even the Peneus flows through waste land; and in the imperial period money was coined in this region only to a very small extent. Hadrian and Diocletian exerted themselves to restore the roads of the country, but they alone, so far as we see, of the Roman emperors did so.
Macedonia.Macedonia, as a Roman administrative district under the empire, was materially curtailed as compared with the Macedonia of the republic. Certainly, like the latter, it reached from sea to sea, inasmuch as the coast as well of the Aegean Sea from the region of Thessaly belonging to Macedonia as far as the mouth of the Nestus (Mesta), as of the Adriatic from the Aous[198] as far as the Drilon (Drin), was reckoned to this district; the latter territory, not properly Macedonian but Illyrian land, but already in the republican period assigned to the governor of Macedonia (iii. 44)iii. 42., remained with the province also during the time of the empire. But we have already stated that Greece south of Oeta was separated from it. The northern frontier towards Moesia and the east frontier towards Thrace remained indeed in so far unaltered, as the province in the imperial period reached as far as the Macedonia proper of the republic had reached, viz. on the north almost as far as the vale of the Erigon, eastward as far as the river Nestus; but while in the time of the republic the Dardani and the Thracians, and all the tribes of the north and north–east adjoining the Macedonian territory, had to do with this governor in their circumstances of peaceful or warlike contact, and in so far it could be said that the Macedonian boundary reached as far as the Roman lances, the Macedonian governor of the imperial period bore sway only over the district assigned to him, which no longer bordered on neighbours half or wholly independent. As the defence of the frontier was transferred in the first instance to the kingdom of the Thracians which had come under allegiance to Rome, and soon to the governor of the new province Moesia, the governor of Macedonia was from the outset relieved of his command. There was hardly any fighting on Macedonian soil under the empire; only the barbarian Dardani on the upper Axius (Vardar) still at times pillaged the peaceful neighbouring province. There is no report, moreover, from this province of any local revolts.
Nationalities.From the more southerly Greek districts this—the most northerly—stood aloof as well in its national basis as in the stage of its civilisation. While the Macedonians proper on the lower course of the Haliacmon (Vistritza) and the Axius (Vardar), as far as the Strymon, were an originally Greek stock, whose diversity from the more southern Hellenes had no further significance for the present epoch, and while the Hellenic colonisation embraced within its sphere both coasts—on the west with Apollonia and Dyrrachium, on the east in particular with the townships of the Chalcidian peninsula—the interior of the province, on the other hand, was filled with a confused mass of non–Greek peoples, which must have differed from the present state of things in the same region more as to elements than as to results. After the Celts who had pushed forward into this region, the Scordisci, had been driven back by the generals of the Roman republic, the interior of Macedonia fell to the share especially of Illyrian stocks in the west and north, of Thracian in the east. Of both we have already spoken previously; here they come into consideration only so far as the Greek organisation, at least the urban, was probably introduced—as in the earlier,[199] so also in the imperial period—among these stocks only in a very limited measure. On the whole, an energetic impulse of urban development never pervaded the interior of Macedonia; the more remote districts hardly reached—at least as in a real sense—beyond the village–system.