to the Euxine. It was designed that the armies in Pannonia should be in constant touch with the armies on the Rhine, and that operations in both quarters should be carried out in connection. Central Europe and the Germans who inhabited it presented a hard and urgent problem to the Roman government; but before telling how they attempted to solve it, it will be well to complete our survey of the subject and dependent lands.
Chapter VII.
Provincial Administration Under Augustus — The Eastern Provinces and Egypt
The Romans, who were the teachers of the peoples whom they conquered in the West, were themselves pupils in the East. In Gaul, in Spain, in northern Italy, in Illyricum they broke new ground and appeared as the pioneers of civilization; but in the eastern countries which came under their dominion they entered upon an inheritance, which they were called upon indeed to preserve and improve, but where there was no room for them to originate new ideas of development. Rome merely carried on the work of Alexander the Great and his successors, and she was proud to be entrusted with the task. She not only left Greek what was already Greek, but she endeavored to spread Greek civilization in those parts of her eastern lands where it had not taken root. The sole exception to this rule of policy was Sicily; and this was due to its geographical position.
The subject lands of the east naturally fall into four groups: (1) Macedonia and Greece; (2) Asia Minor, in connection with which may be considered the Tauric peninsula; (3) Syria and the neighboring vassal kingdoms; (4) Egypt, which stands by itself both geographically and because, strictly speaking, it was not a province.
SECT. I. — MACEDONIA, ACHAIA, AND THE FREE GREEK STATES
The institution of the Empire was attended by a change in the administration of Macedonia and Greece, which under the Republic had formed one large province. Augustus divided it into two smaller provinces, Macedonia and Achaia, both of which he assigned to the senate. This division, however, did not altogether coincide with the boundary between Greece and Macedonia. The province of Achaia was smaller than Hellas, and the new province of Macedonia larger than Macedonia proper. For Thessaly, Aetolia, Acarnania and Epirus were placed under the rule of the northern proconsul. Thus Mount Oeta, instead of Mount Olympus, was the boundary between Macedonia and Greece.
Imperial Macedonia was thus smaller in extent and importance than republican Macedonia. It also lost its military significance as a frontier district, through the extension of Roman rule over the neighboring lands north and east. Greek civilization, though it had flourished for centuries in the old cities on both the seas which wash the coasts of Macedonia, never penetrated far into the highlands. Eastward of Apollonia and Dyrrhachium, northward of Thessalonica and the Chalcidic peninsula, there were few Greek cities to form centres of culture. Augustus settled colonies of Roman citizens in many of the old Greek towns; in Dyrrhachium, the old Epidamnos, and in Byllis, on the Adriatic coast; in Thracian Philippi; in Pella; in Dium on the Thermaic gulf; in Cassandria on the bay of Pagasae. But his purpose was merely to provide for veteran soldiers, not to Romanize the province. In general, the towns retained their Macedonian constitutions and politarchs; and they formed a federation with a diet (koinon). The capital of the province was Thessalonica, and this alone stamped it as Greek.
Thessaly, although placed under the government of the proconsul of Macedonia, held a position quite apart from the lands north of Mount Olympus. It was a purely Greek district, and its cities formed a federation of their own, distinct from that of Macedonia. The diet used to meet in Larisa, whose fertile plain was so famous. Julius Caesar had accorded the right of free self-government to all the Thessalians, but, for some act of misconduct, Augustus withdrew the privilege; and the Thessalians, with the single exception of Pharsalus, were degraded from the position of allies to that of subjects.
The Roman government—whether republican or imperial—always treated the venerable cities of Greece with a consideration and tenderness, which they showed to no other conquered lands. The reverence which was inspired in the Romans by the city of virgin Pallas, by “patient Lacedaemon”, by oracular Delphi, is displayed not only in their literature, but in their government. Athens preserved a part of her dominion as well as her independence; she could still regard herself as a sovereign city.
Thus Greece fell politically into two parts: federate Greece and subject Greece. (1) First of the free federate states comes Athens, with the whole of Attica, and various other dependencies. On the mainland, she possessed Haliartos in Boeotia and the surrounding district; but, as in old days, most of her dominion was insular. Among the Cyclades, she had Ceos and Delos; in the northern Aegean, Lemnos, Imbros and Scyros. The island of Salamis was also recovered for her in the reign of Augustus, by the private liberality of a rich man, Julius Nicanor, whom the grateful Athenians named “the new Themistocles”. In spite of her privileged position, perhaps in consequence of it, Athens often gave the Roman government trouble; a revolt in the reign of Augustus is recorded. Next to Athens, in northern Greece, come three famous Boeotian towns, Thespiae, Tanagra, and Plataea; in Phocis likewise three, Delphi, Elatea, and Abae; in Locris, Amphissa. In the Peloponnesus, Sparta was permitted to retain her dominion over northern Laconia, while the inhabitants of the southern half of that country were formed into eighteen communities of “free Laconians”,Eleuthero-lacones. Dyme in Achaea was also a free city, and it is highly probable, though not certain, that Elis and Olympia belonged to the free communities. The Roman government interfered as little as possible with the affairs of these free states. Athens coined her own drachma; and obols, and the head of Caesar never appeared on her coins. But she and her fellows knew that their privileges might at any moment be withdrawn, as the example of the Thessalians taught them,
Patrae and Corinth, as Roman colonies, held a somewhat different position. Corinth, like Carthage, rose again under the auspices of Julius Caesar, as Colonia Julia (or Laus Julia), and rapidly recovered her prosperity, thanks to her geographical position. Patras, in Achaea, was founded by Augustus, who settled there a large number of Italian veterans and granted to the now town dominion over the Locrian haven Naupactus, which lay over against it on the opposite coast.
The rest of Greece (with the exception of the less developed districts in the west, Aetolia, Acarnania, Epirus) constituted the province of Achaia. The residence of the proconsul was at Corinth. The sense of national unity in these subject states was encouraged by Augustus. He revived the Achaean league, in an extended form, as the league of “Boeotians, Euboeans, Locrians, Phocians, and Dorians”, or briefly the league of the “Achaeans”. In later times it assumed the more pretentious name of the league of the Panhellenes. The assemblies of this association used to meet in Argos, which was thus in some measure recompensed for her exclusion from the list of free communities.
One important and singular state has still to be mentioned. On the northern lip of the mouth of the Ambracian gulf, near the scene of the great battle in which he won the lordship of the Roman world, Augustus founded a new city. Nicopolis, “the city of victory”, rose on the very spot where the main body of his army had been encamped. This foundation was not to be a Roman colony; it was to be a Greek city like Thessalonica, and it was founded, in the same way, bysynoecizing the small communities of the neighborhood. Nicopolis, like Athens and Sparta, was a free and sovereign state. Acarnania, the island of Leucas, the neighboring districts of Epirus, a part of Aetolia, were placed under her control. On the opposite promontory, a new temple of Apollo was built at Actium, and quinquennial games were instituted in honor of that god, on the model of the Olympian, and actually called “Olympian” as well as “Actian”. The cycle of four years was an “Actiad”.
Nicopolis and its dependencies belonged politically neither to Macedonia nor to Achaia; but they were more in touch with the southern than with the northern province. The great bond of union among the European Greeks, under Roman rule, was the Delphic Amphictyony, and in this assembly, as reorganized by Augustus, Nicopolis had a prominent place. The chief reform introduced by that Emperor was the extension of the institution to Macedonia and Nicopolis; but as many votes were assigned to the new city as to the whole of the Macedonian