The Historians' History of the World 04

It has been usual in modern times to attribute this decline of population to the loss of independence, to the withering influence of a foreign yoke—in a word, to Roman misrule. And it would be bold and probably an error, to assert, that it was wholly unconnected with the nature of the government to which Greece was subject as a Roman province. It is too well known what that government was—how seldom it was uprightly administered, how easily, even in the purest hands, it became the instrument of oppression. The ordinary burdens were heavy. The fisherman of Gyaros, who was sent ambassador to Augustus, to complain that a tax of 150 drachmæ was laid upon his island which could hardly pay two-thirds of that sum, afforded but a specimen of a common grievance. Greece was not exempt from those abuses which provoked the massacre of the Romans in Asia at the outbreak of the Mithridatic War. And even if we had no express information on the subject, we might have concluded that it did not escape the still more oppressive arbitrary exactions of corrupt magistrates, and their greedy officers. “Who does not know,” Cicero asks, “that the Achæans pay a large sum yearly to L. Piso?” It was notorious that he had received one hundred talents from them, beside plunder and extortion of other kinds. The picture which Cicero draws of the evils inflicted by L. Piso upon Greece is no doubt rhetorically overcharged; but it is one of utter impoverishment, exhaustion, and ruin. And here we may remark that the privileges of the free cities included in the province afforded no security against the rapacity and oppression of a Piso or a Verres. The Lacedæmonians, Strabo observes, were peculiarly favoured, and remained free, paying nothing but voluntary offerings. But these were among the most burdensome imposts; and so Athens, which enjoyed the like immunity, was nevertheless, according to Cicero’s phrase, torn to pieces by Piso. To this it must be added that the oligarchical institutions everywhere established—and even Athens was forced so to qualify her democracy that little more than the name seems to have been left—tended to promote the accumulation of property in few hands; as we read that the whole island of Cephallenia was subject to C. Antonius as his private estate.

Nevertheless it seems certain, that when these are represented as the main causes of the decline of population in Greece, which followed the loss of her independence, their importance has been greatly exaggerated, while others much more efficacious have been overlooked or disparaged. For on the one hand it is clear that this decline did not begin at that epoch, but had been going on for many generations before. A comparison of the forces brought into the field to meet the Celtic invasion by the states of northern Greece with those which they furnished in the Persian War, would be sufficient to prove the fact with regard to them; the evil lay deeper than the ravages of war. And we have now the evidence of Polybius, that in the period either immediately preceding, or immediately subsequent to the establishment of the Roman government—a period which he describes as one of concord and comparative prosperity, when the wounds which had been inflicted on the peninsula were beginning to heal—even then the population was rapidly shrinking, through causes quite independent of any external agency, and intimately connected with the moral character and habits of the society itself.

Ruins of the Erechtheum, Athens

The evil was not that the stream of population was violently absorbed, but that it flowed feebly, because there was an influence at work which tended to dry up the fountain-head. Marriages were rare and unfruitful through the prevalence of indifference or aversion toward the duties and enjoyments of domestic life. The historian traces this unhealthy state of feeling to a taste for luxury and ostentation. But this explanation, which could only apply to the wealthy, seems by no means adequate to the result. The real cause struck deeper, and was much more widely spread. Described in general terms, it was a want of reverence for the order of nature, for the natural revelation of the will of God; and the sanction of infanticide was by no means the most destructive, or the most loathsome form in which it manifested itself. This was the cancer which had been for many generations eating into the life of Greece.