The Historians' History of the World 04

The political institutions were of course, according to the senate’s decree, strictly oligarchical. And in this respect no alteration seems ever to have been granted by the Roman government. But in some other points the rigour of its original regulations was a few years afterward greatly relaxed. The fines imposed on the Achæans, and on the Bœotians and Eubœans, were remitted; the restraints on intercourse and commerce were withdrawn; and the federal unions which had been abolished were revived. The Romans in their official language seem to have described this renewal of the old forms as a restoration of liberty to Greece. But even if the monument in which this sounding phrase appears to be applied to it, did not itself illustrate the vigilance with which the exercise of political freedom was checked by the provincial government, we might be sure that these revived confederations answered no other purpose than that of affording an occasion for some periodical festivals, and some empty titles, soothing perhaps to the feelings of the people, but without the slightest effect on their welfare. The end of the Achæan War was the last stage of the lingering process by which Rome enclosed her victim in the coils of her insidious diplomacy, covered it with the slime of her sycophants and hirelings, crushed it when it began to struggle, and then calmly preyed upon its vitals.

GREECE UNDER THE ROMANS

[146 B.C.-540 A.D.]

We have brought the political history of ancient Greece down to a point which may be fitly regarded as its close; since in the changes which afterwards befell the country the people remained nearly passive. The events of the Mithridatic War—in which the Achæans and Lacedæmonians, and all Bœotia, except Thespiæ, are said to have declared themselves against Rome, and the royal army in Greece received a reinforcement of Lacedæmonian and Achæan troops—might serve to indicate that the national spirit was not wholly extinct, or that the Roman dominion was felt to be intolerably oppressive. But Athens certainly no more deserved Sulla’s bloody vengeance for the resistance into which she was forced by the tyranny of Athenion, than for the credulity with which she had listened to his lying promises.

No historical fact is more clearly ascertained than that from this epoch the nation was continually wasting away. Strabo,e who visited Greece but a little more than a century later (B.C. 29), found desolation everywhere prevailing. Beside his special enumeration of ruined towns and deserted sites, and his emphatic silence as to the present, while he explores the faint vestiges or doubtful traditions of the past, the description of almost every region furnishes occasion for some general remark illustrating the melancholy truth. Messenia was for the most part deserted, and the population of Laconia very scanty in comparison with its ancient condition; for beside Sparta it contained but thirty small towns in the room of the hundred for which it had once been celebrated. Of Arcadia it was not worth while to say much, on account of its utter decay. There was scarcely any part of the land in tillage, but vast sheep-walks, and abundant pasture for herds of cattle, especially horses; and so the solitude of Ætolia and Acarnania had become no less favourable to the rearing of horses than Thessaly. Both Acarnania and Ætolia—he repeats elsewhere—are now utterly worn out and exhausted; as are many of the other nations. Of the towns of Doris scarcely a trace was left; the case was the same with the Ænianes. Thebes had sunk to an insignificant village; and the other Bœotian cities in proportion—that is, as he elsewhere explains himself, they were reduced to ruins and names, all but Tanagra and Thespiæ, which, compared with the others, were tolerably well preserved.