Greek polity.The Greek polity itself was not a spontaneous growth in this monarchical country, as it was in Hellas proper, but was introduced by the princes, who were more Hellenes than their subjects. What shape it had is little known; yet the civic presidency of politarchs uniformly recurring in Thessalonica, Edessa, Lete, and not met with elsewhere, leads us to infer a perceptible, and indeed in itself probable, diversity of the Macedonian urban constitution from that elsewhere usual in Hellas. The Greek cities, which the Romans found existing, retained their organisation and their rights; Thessalonica, the most considerable of them, also freedom and autonomy. There existed a league and a diet (κοινόν) of the Macedonian towns, similar to those in Achaia and Thessaly. It deserves mention, as an evidence of the continued working of the memories of the old and great times, that still in the middle of the third century after Christ the diet of Macedonia and individual Macedonian towns issued coins on which, in place of the head and the name of the reigning emperor, came those of Alexander the Great. The pretty numerous colonies of Roman burgesses which Augustus established in Macedonia, Byllis not far from Apollonia, Dyrrachium on the Adriatic, on the other coast Dium, Pella, Cassandreia, in the region of Thrace proper Philippi, were all of them older Greek towns, which obtained merely a number of new burgesses and a different legal position, and were called into life primarily by the need of providing quarters in a civilised and not greatly populous province for Italian soldiers who had served their time, and for whom there was no longer room in Italy itself. The granting of Italian rights certainly took place only to gild for the veterans their settlement abroad. That it was never intended to draw Macedonia into the development of Italian culture is evinced, apart from all else, by the fact that Thessalonica remained Greek and the capital of the country. By its side flourished Philippi, properly a mining town, constituted on account of the neighbouring gold mines, favoured by the emperors as the seat of the battle which definitively founded the monarchy, and on account of the numerous veterans who took part in it and subsequently settled there. A Roman, not colonial, municipal constitution was obtained already in the first period of the empire by Stobi, the already mentioned most northerly frontier–town of Macedonia towards Moesia, at the confluence of the Erigon with the Axius, in a commercial as in a military point of view an important position, and which, it may be conjectured, had already in the Macedonian time attained to Greek polity.
Economy. Roads and levy.In an economic point of view little was done on the part of the state for Macedonia under the emperors; at least there is no appearance of any special care on their part for this province, which was not put under their own administration. The military road already constructed under the republic right across the country from Dyrrachium to Thessalonica, one of the most important arteries of intercourse in the whole empire, called forth renewed effort, so far as we know, only from emperors of the third century, and first from Severus Antoninus; the towns adjacent to it, Lychnidus on the Ochrida–lake and Heraclea Lyncestis (Bitolia), were never of much account. Yet Macedonia was, economically, better situated than Greece. It far excelled it in fertility; as still at present the province of Thessalonica is relatively well cultivated and well peopled, so in the description of the empire from the time of Constantius, at all events when Constantinople was already in existence, Macedonia is reckoned among the specially wealthy districts. If for Achaia and Thessaly our documents concerning the Roman levy are absolutely silent, Macedonia on the other hand was drawn upon, in particular for the imperial guard, to a considerable extent, more strongly than the most of the Greek districts—on which, no doubt, the familiarity of the Macedonians with regular war–service and their excellent qualifications for it, and probably also the relatively small development of the urban system in this province, had an important bearing. Thessalonica, the metropolis of the province, and its most populous and most industrial town at this time, represented likewise under various forms in literature, has also secured to itself an honourable place in political history by the brave resistance which its citizens opposed to the barbarians in the terrible times of the Gothic invasions ([p. 248]).
Thrace.If Macedonia was a half–Greek, Thrace was a non–Greek land. Of the great but for us vanished Thracian stock we have formerly ([p. 207]) spoken. Into its domain Hellenism came simply from without; and it will not be superfluous in the first instance to glance back and to set forth how often Hellenism had previously knocked at the gates of the most southerly region which this stock possessed, and which we still name after it, and how little it had hitherto penetrated into the interior, in order to make clear what was left for Rome here to overtake and what it did overtake.Philip and Alexander.Philip, the father of Alexander, first subjected Thrace, and founded not merely Calybe in the neighbourhood of Byzantium, but also in the heart of the land the town which thenceforth bore his name. Alexander, here too the precursor of Roman policy, arrived at and crossed the Danube, and made this stream the northern boundary of his empire; the Thracians in his army played by no means the least part in the subjugation of Asia. After his death the Hellespont seemed as though it would become one of the great centres of the new formation of states, and the wide domain from thence to the Danube[200] as though it would become the northern half of a Greek empire, and would promise for the capital of Lysimachus, the former governor ofLysimachus.Thrace—the town of Lysimachia, newly established in the Thracian Chersonese—a like future as for the capitals of the marshals of Syria and Egypt. But this result was not attained; the independence of this kingdom did not survive the fall of its first ruler (281 B.C., 473 U.C.). In the century which elapsed from that time to the establishment of the ascendancy of Rome in the East, attempts were made, sometimes by the Seleucids, sometimes by the Ptolemies, sometimes by the Attalids, to bring the European possessions of Lysimachus under their power, but all of them without lasting result. Empire of Tylis. The empire of Tylis in the Haemus, which the Celts not long after the death of Alexander, and nearly at the same time with their permanent settlement in Asia Minor, had founded in the Moeso–Thracian territory, destroyed the seed of Greek civilisation within its sphere, and itself succumbed during the Hannibalic war to the assaults of the Thracians, who extirpated these intruders to the last man. Thenceforth there was not in Thrace any leading power at all; the relations subsisting between the Greek coast–towns and the princes of the several tribes, which would probably correspond approximately to those before Alexander’s time, are illustrated by the description which Polybius gives of the most important of these towns: “Where the Byzantines had sowed, there the Thracian barbarians reaped, and against these neither the sword nor money is of avail; if the citizens kill one of the princes, three others thereupon invade their territory, and, if they buy off one, five more demand the like annual payment.”
Later Macedonian rulers.The efforts on the part of the later Macedonian rulers to gain once more a firm footing in Thrace, and in particular to bring under their power the Greek towns of the south coast, were opposed by the Romans, partly in order to keep down the development of Macedonia’s power generally, partly in order not to allow the important “royal road” leading to the East—that along which Xerxes marched to Greece and the Scipios marched against Antiochus—to fall in all its extent into Macedonian hands. Already, after the battle at Cynoscephalae, the frontier–line was drawn nearly such as it thenceforth remained. The two last Macedonian rulers made several attempts, either directly to establish themselves in Thrace or to attach to themselves its individual rulers by treaties; the last Philip even gained over Philippopolis once more, and put into it a garrison, which, it is true, the Odrysae soon drove out afresh. Neither he nor his son succeeded in placing matters on a permanent footing; and the independence conceded by Rome to the Thracians after the breaking up of Macedonia destroyed whatever Hellenic germs might still be left there. Thrace itself became—in part already in the republican, and more decidedly in the imperial period—a Roman vassal–principality, and then in 46 a Roman province ([p. 211]); but the Hellenising of the land had not passed beyond the fringe of Greek colonial towns, which in the earliest period had been established round this coast, and in course of time had sunk rather than risen. Powerful and permanent as was the hold of Macedonian civilisation on the East, as weak and perishable was its contact with Thrace; Philip and Alexander themselves appear to have reluctantly undertaken, and to have but lightly valued, their settlements in this land.[201] Till far into the imperial period the land remained with the natives; the Greek towns that were still left along the coast, almost all on the decline, remained without any Greek land in their rear.
Greek towns in Thrace and on the Black Sea.This belt of Hellenic towns stretching from the Macedonian frontier to the Tauric Chersonese was of very unequal texture. In the south it was close and compact from Abdera onward to Byzantium on the Dardanelles; yet none of these towns held a prominent position in later times with the exception of Byzantium, which through the fertility of its territory, its productive tunny fisheries, its uncommonly favourable position for trade, its industrial diligence, and the energy of its citizens—heightened merely and hardened by its exposed situation—was enabled to defy even the worst times of Hellenic anarchy. Far more scantily had the settlements developed themselves on the west coast of the Black Sea; among those subsequently belonging to the Roman province of Thrace Mesembria alone was of some importance; among those subsequently Moesian Odessus (Varna) and Tomis (Küstendje). Beyond the mouths of the Danube and the boundary of the Roman empire, on the northern shore of the Pontus, there lay amidst the barbarian land Tyra[202] and Olbia; further on, the old and great Greek mercantile cities in what is now the Crimea—Heraclea or Chersonesus and Panticapaeum—formed a stately copestone.
Under Roman protection.All these settlements enjoyed Roman protection, after the Romans had become generally the leading power on the Graeco–Asiatic continent; and the strong arm, which often came down heavily on the Hellenic land proper, prevented here at least disasters like the destruction of Lysimachia. The protection of these Greeks devolved in the republican period partly on the governor of Macedonia, partly on the governor of Bithynia, after this became Roman; Byzantium subsequently remained with Bithynia.[203] We may add that in the imperial period, after the erection of the governorship of Moesia and subsequently of that of Thrace, the supplying of protection devolved on these.
Protection and favour were granted by Rome to these Greeks from the first; but neither the republic nor the earlier imperial period made efforts for the extension of Hellenism.[204] After Thrace had become Roman, it was divided into land–districts;[205] and almost down to the end of the first century there is no record of the laying out of a town there, with the exception of two colonies of Claudius and Vespasian—Apri in the interior not far from Perinthus, and Deultus on the most northern coast.[206] Philippopolis and other towns with civic rights. Domitian began by introducing the Greek urban constitution into the interior, at first for the capital of the country, Philippopolis. Under Trajan a series of other Thracian townships obtained like civic rights; Topirus not far from Abdera, Nicopolis on the Nestus, Plotinopolis on the Hebrus, Pautalia near Köstendil, Serdica now Sofia, Augusta Traiana near Alt–Zagora, a second Nicopolis on the northern slope of Haemus,[207] besides, on the coast, Traianopolis at the mouth of the Hebrus; further, under Hadrian Adrianopolis, the modern Adrianople. All these towns were not colonies of foreigners but polities of Greek organisation, composed after the model set up by Augustus in the Epirot Nicopolis; it was a civilising and Hellenising of the province from above downwards. A Thracian diet existed thenceforth in Philippopolis just as in the properly Greek provinces. This last offshoot of Hellenism was not the weakest. The country was rich and charming—a coin of the town Pautalia praises the fourfold blessing of the ears of grain, of the grapes, of the silver, and of the gold; and Philippopolis as well as the beautiful valley of the Tundja were the home of rose–culture and of rose–oil—and the vigour of the Thracian type was not broken. Here was developed a dense and prosperous population; we have already mentioned the largeness of the levy in Thrace, and few territories stand on an equality with Thrace at this epoch in the activity of the urban mints. When Philippopolis succumbed in the year 251 to the Goths ([p. 240]), it is said to have numbered 100,000 inhabitants. The energetic part taken by the Byzantines in favour of the emperor of the Greek East, Pescennius Niger, and the several years’ resistance which the town even after his defeat opposed to the victor, show the resources and the courage of these Thracian townsmen. If the Byzantines here, too, succumbed and lost even for a season their civic rights, the time, for which the rise of the Thracian land paved the way, was soon to set in, when Byzantium should become the new Hellenic Rome and the chief capital of the remodelled empire.
Lower Moesia.In the neighbouring province of lower Moesia a similar development took place, although on a smaller scale. The Greek coast–towns, the metropolis of which, at least in the Roman period, was Tomis, were, probably on the constituting of the Roman province of Moesia, grouped as the “Five–cities–league of the left shore of the Black Sea,” or as it was also called, “of the Greeks,” that is, the Greeks of this province.Tomis and the Pontic Pentapolis.Later there was annexed to this league, as a sixth town, that of Marcianopolis, constructed by Trajan not far from the coast on the Thracian frontier, and organised, like the Thracian towns, after the Greek model.[208] We have already observed that the camp–towns on the bank of the Danube, and generally the townships called into life by Rome in the interior, were instituted after the Italian model; lower Moesia was the only Roman province intersected by the linguistic boundary, inasmuch as the Tomitanian cities–league belonged to the Greek, the Danubian towns, like Durostorum and Oescus to the Latin, linguistic domain. In other respects essentially the same holds true of this Moesian cities–league, as was remarked regarding Thrace. We have a description of Tomis from the last years of Augustus, doubtless by one banished thither for punishment, but certainly true in substance. The population consists for the greater part of Getae and Sarmatae; they wear, like the Dacians on Trajan’s column, skins and trousers, long waving hair and unshorn beard, and appear in the street on horseback and armed with the bow, with the quiver on their shoulder, and the knife in their girdle. The few Greeks who are found among them have adopted the barbarian customs, including the trousers, and are able to express themselves as well or better in Getic than in Greek; he is lost, who cannot make himself intelligible in Getic, and no man understands a word of Latin. Before the gates rove predatory bands of the most various peoples, and their arrows not seldom fly over the protecting city–walls; he who ventures to till his field does it at the peril of his life, and ploughs in armour—at anyrate about the time of Caesar’s dictatorship; on occasion of the raid of Burebista, the town had fallen into the hands of the barbarians, and a few years before that exile came to Tomis, during the Dalmato–Pannonian insurrection, the fury of war had once more raged over this region. The coins and the inscriptions of that city accord well with these accounts, in so far as the metropolis of the “left–Pontic cities–league” in the pre–Roman period coined no silver, which several other of these towns did; and, in general, coins and inscriptions from the time before Trajan occur only in an isolated way. But in the second and third centuries it was remodelled and may be termed a foundation of Trajan with very much the same warrant as Marcianopolis, which likewise quickly attained to considerable development. The barrier formerly mentioned ([p. 227]) in the Dobrudscha served at the same time as a protecting wall for the town of Tomis. Behind this wall commerce and navigation were flourishing. There was in the town a society of Alexandrian merchants with its own chapel of Serapis;[209] in municipal liberality and municipal ambition the town was inferior to no Greek town of middle size; it was still even now bilingual, but in such a way that, alongside of the Greek language always retained on the coins, here on the border, where the two languages of the empire came into contact, the Latin is also often employed even in public monuments.
Tyra.Beyond the imperial frontier, between the mouths of the Danube and the Crimea, the Greek merchant had made few settlements on the coast; there were here only two Greek towns of note, both founded in remote times by Miletus, Tyra at the mouth of the river of the same name, the modern Dniester, and Olbia on the bay into which the Borysthenes (Dnieper) and the Hypanis (Bug) fall. The forlorn position of these Hellenes amidst the barbarians pressing around them, in the time of the Diadochi as well as during the earlier rule of the Roman republic, has already been described (iii. 297)iii. 282.. The emperors brought help. In the year 56, that is, in the exemplary beginning of Nero’s government, Tyra was annexed to the province of Moesia.Olbia.Of the more remote Olbia we possess a description from the age of Trajan;[210] the town was still bleeding from its old wounds; the wretched walls enclosed equally wretched houses, and the quarter then inhabited filled but a small portion of the old considerable city–circuit, of which individual towers that were left stood far off in the desolate plain; in the temples there was no statue of the gods which did not bear traces of the hands of the barbarians; the inhabitants had not forgotten their Hellenic character, but they dressed and fought after the manner of the Scythians, with whom they were daily in conflict. Just as often as by Greek names, they designated themselves by Scythian, i.e. by those of Sarmatian stocks akin to the Iranians;[211] in fact, in the royal house itself Sauromates was a common name. These towns were indebted doubtless for their very continued existence less to their own power than to the good–will or rather the self–interest of the natives. The tribes settled on this coast were neither in a position to carry on foreign trade from emporia of their own, nor could they dispense with it; in the Hellenic coast–towns they bought salt, articles of clothing and wine, and the more civilised princes protected in some measure the strangers against the attacks of the barbarians proper. The earlier rulers of Rome must have had scruples at undertaking the difficult protection of this remote settlement; nevertheless Pius, when the Scythians once more besieged them, sent to them Roman auxiliary troops, and compelled the barbarians to offer peace and furnish hostages. The town must have been incorporated directly with the empire by Severus, from whom onward Olbia struck coins with the image of the Roman rulers. As a matter of course this annexation extended only to the town–territories themselves, and it never was intended to bring the barbarian dwellers around Tyra and Olbia under the Roman sceptre. It has already been remarked ([p. 239]) that these towns were the first which, presumably under Alexander († 235), succumbed to the incipient Gothic invasion.