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HISTORY OF GREECE UNDER THE ROMANS
A HISTORICAL VIEW OF THE CONDITION OF THE GREEK NATION
FROM ITS CONQUEST BY THE HOMANS UNTIL THE EXTINCTION OF THE ROMAN POWER
IN THE EAST
B.C. 546 TO A.D 716.
By
GEORGE FINLAY
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. FROM THE CONQUEST OF GREECE TO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF
CONSTANTINOPLE AS CAPITAL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. B. C. 146—A. D. 330.
CHAPTER II. FROM THE ESTABLISHMENT OF CONSTANTINOPLE AS CAPITAL OF THE
ROMAN EMPIRE, TO THE ACCESSION OF JUSTINIAN. A. D. 330-527.
CHAPTER III. CONDITION OF THE GREEKS UNDER THE REIGN OF JUSTINIAN. A. D.
527-565.
CHAPTER IV. CONDITION OF THE GREEKS FROM THE DEATH OF JUSTINIAN TO
THE RESTORATION OF ROMAN POWER IN THE EAST BY HERACLIUS. A. D. 565-633.
CHAPTER V. CONDITION OF THE GREEKS FROM THE MOHAMMEDAN INVASION OF ISTRIA TO THE EXTINCTION OF THE ROMAN POWER IN THE EAST. A. D. 633-710
CHAPTER I.
FROM THE CONQUEST OF GREECE TO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF CONSTANTINOPLE AS
CAPITAL OF TIIE ROMAN EMPIRE. 13. C. 146—A. D. 330.
The conquests of Alexander the Great effected a permanent change in the
political condition of the Greek nation, and this change powerfully influenced
its moral and social state during the whole period of its subjection to the
Roman empire. The international system of policy by which Alexander connected
Greco with Western Asia and Egypt, was only effaced by the religion of
Mahomet, and the conquests of the Arabs. Though Alexander was
himself a Greek, both from education, and the prejudices cherished by the pride
of ancestry, still neither the people of Macedonia, nor the chief part of the
army, whose discipline and valour had secured his victories, was Greek, either
in language or feelings. Had Alexander, therefore, determined on organizing
his empire with the view of uniting the Macedonians and Persians in common
feelings of opposition to the Greek nation, there can be no doubt that he
could easily have accomplished the design. The Greeks mi "lit then have
found themselves enabled to adopt a very different course in their national
career from that which they were compelled to follow by the powerful influence
exercised over them by Alexander s conduct. Alexander himself, undoubtedly,
perceived that the greater numbers of the Persians, and their equality, if not
superiority, in civilization to the Macedonians, rendered it necessary for him
to seek some powerful ally to prevent the absorption of the Macedonians in the
Persian population, the loss of their language, manners, and nationality, and
the speedy change of his empire into the sovereignty of a mere Greco-Persian
dynasty. It did not escape his discernment, that the political institutions of
the Greeks created a principle of nationality capable of combating the
unalterable laws of the Medes and Persians.
Alexander was
the noblest model of a conqueror; his ambition aspired at eclipsing the glory
of his unparalleled victories by the universal prosperity which was to flow
from his civil government. New cities and extended commerce were to found an
era in the b world’s history.
Even the strength of his empire was to be based on a political principle which
he has the merit of discovering, and of which he proved the efficacy; this
principle was the amalgamation of his subjects into one people by permanent
institutions. All other conquerors have endeavored to augment their power by
the subjection of one race to another. The merit of Alexander is very much
increased by the nature of his position with regard to the Greek nation. The
Greeks were not favorably disposed either towards his empire or his person;
they would willingly have destroyed both as the surest way of securing their
own liberty. But the moral energy of the Greek national character did not
escape the observation of Alexander, and he resolved to render this quality
available for the preservation of his empire, by introducing into the East
those municipal institutions which gave it vigour, and thus facilitate the
infusion of some portion of the Hellenic character into the hearts of his
conquered subjects.
The moderation
of Alexander in the execution of his plans of reform and change is as
remarkable as the wisdom of his extensive projects. In order to mold the
Asiatics to his wishes, he did not attempt to enforce laws and constitutions
similar to those of Greece. He had profited too well by the lessons of
Aristotle to think of treating man as a machine. But he introduced Greek civilization
as an important element in his civil government, and established Greek colonies
with political rights throughout his conquests. It is true that he seized all
the unlimited power of the Persian
monarchs, but, at the same time, he strove to secure administrative
responsibility, and to establish free institutions in municipal government. Any
laws or constitution which Alexander could have promulgated to enforce his
system of consolidating the population of his empire into one body, would most
probably have been immediately repealed by his successors, in consequence of
the hostile feelings of the Macedonian army. But it was more difficult to
escape from the tendency imprinted on the administration by the systematic arrangements
which Alexander had introduced. He seems to have been fully aware of this fact,
though it is impossible to trace the whole series of measures he adopted to
accelerate the completion of his great project of creating a new state of
society, and a new nation, as well as a new empire, in the imperfect records
of his civil administration which have survived. His death left his own scheme
incomplete, yet his success was wonderful; for though his empire was
immediately dismembered, its numerous portions long retained a deep imprint of
that Greek civilization which he had introduced. The influence of his
philanthropic policy survived the kingdoms which his arms had founded, and
tempered the despotic sway of the Romans by its superior power over society;
nor was the influence of Alexander’s government utterly effaced in Asia until
Mahomet changed the government, the religion, and the frame of society in the
East.
The monarchs of
Egypt, Syria, Pergamum, and Bactriana, who were either Macedonians or Greeks,
respected the civil institutions, the language, and the religion of their
native subjects, however adverse they might be to Greek usages; and the
sovereigns of Bithynia, Pontus, Cappadocia, and Parthia, though native princes,
retained a deep tincture of Greek civilization after they had thrown off the
Macedonian yoke. They not only encouraged the arts, sciences, and literature of
Greece, but they even protected the peculiar political constitutions of the
Greek colonies settled in their dominions, though at variance with the Asiatic
views of monarchical government.
The Greeks and
Macedonians long continued separate nations, though a number of the causes
which ultimately produced their fusion began to exert some influence shortly
after the death of Alexander. The moral and social causes which enabled the
Greeks to acquire a complete superiority over the Macedonian race, and
ultimately to absorb it as a component element of their own nation, were the
same which afterwards enabled them to destroy the Roman influence in the East. For
several generations, the Greeks appeared the feebler party in their struggle
with the Macedonians. The new kingdoms, into which Alexander’s empire was
divided, were placed in very different circumstances from the older Greek
states. Two separate divisions were created in the Hellenic world, and the
Macedonian monarchies on the one hand, and the free Greeks on other, formed two
distinct international systems of policy. The Macedonian sovereigns had a
balance of power to maintain, in which the free states of Europe could only be
directly interested when the overwhelming influence of a conqueror placed
their independence in jeopardy. The multifarious diplomatic relations of the
free states among themselves required constant attention, not only to maintain
their political independence, but even to protect their property and civil
rights. These two great divisions of Hellenic society were often governed by
opposite views and feelings in morals
and politics, though their various members were continually placed in alliance
as well as collision by their struggles to preserve the balance of power of
their respective systems.
The immense
power and wealth of the Seleucids and Ptolemies rendered vain all the efforts
of the small European states to maintain the high military, civil, and literary
rank they had previously occupied. Their best soldiers, their wisest statesmen,
and their ablest authors, were induced to emigrate to a more profitable and
extensive scene of action. Alexandria became the capital of the Hellenic world.
Yet the history of the European states still continued to maintain its predominant
interest, and as a political lesson, the struggles of the Achaian League to
defend the independence of Greece against Macedonia and Rome, are not less
instructive than the annals of Athens and Sparta. The European Greeks at this
period perceived all the danger to which their liberties were exposed from the
wealth and power of the Asiatic monarchies, and they vainly endeavored to
effect a combination of all the free states into one federal body. Whatever
might have been the success of such a combination, it certainly offered the
only hope of preserving the liberty of Greece against the powerful states with
which the altered condition of the civilized world had brought her into
contact.
At the very
time when the Macedonian kings were attacking the independence of Greece, and
the Asiatic courts undermining the morals of the Greek nation, the Greek
colonies, whose independence, from their remote situation, was secured against
the attacks of the Eastern monarchs, were conquered by the Romans. Many
circumstances tending to weaken the Greeks, and over which they had no control,
followed one another with fatal celerity. The invasion of the Gauls, though
bravely repulsed, inflicted great losses on Greece. Shortly after, the Romans
completed the conquest of the Greek states in Italy. From that time the
Sicilian Greeks were too feeble to be anything but spectators of the fierce
struggle of the Romans and Carthaginians for the sovereignty of their island,
and though the city of Syracuse courageously defended its independence, the
struggle was a hopeless tribute to national glory. The cities of Cyrenaica had
been long subject to the Ptolemies, and the republics on the shores of the
Black Sea had been unable to maintain their liberties against the repeated
attacks of the sovereigns of Pontus and Bithynia.
Though the
Macedonians and Greeks were separated into two divisions by the opposite
interests of the Asiatic monarchies and the European republics, still they were
united by a powerful bond of national feelings. There was a strong similarity
in the education, religion, and social position of the individual citizen in
every state, whether Greek or Macedonian. Wherever Hellenic civilization was
received, the free citizens formed only one part of the population, whether the
other was composed of slaves or subjects; and this peculiarity placed their civil
interests as Greeks in a more important light than their political differences
as subjects of various states. The Macedonian Greeks of Asia and Egypt were a
ruling class, governed, it is true, by ail absolute sovereign, but having their
interest so identified with his, in the vital question of retaining the
administration of the country, that the Greeks, even in the absolute
monarchies, formed a favored and privileged class. In the Greek republics, the
case was not very dissimilar; there, too, a small body of free citizens ruled a
large slave or subject; population, whose numbers required not only constant
attention on the part of the rulers, but likewise a deep conviction of an
ineffaceable separation in interests and character, to preserve the ascendancy.
This peculiarity in the position of the Greeks cherished their exclusive nationality,
and created a feeling that the laws of honor and of nations forbade free men
ever to make common cause with slaves. The influence of this feeling was visible
for centuries on the laws and education of the free citizens of Greece, and it
was equally powerful wherever Hellenic civilization spread.
Alexander’s
conquests soon exercised a widely extended influence on the commerce,
literature, morals, and religion of the Greeks. A direct communication was
opened with India, with the center of Asia, and with the southern coast of
Africa. This immense extension of the commercial transactions of the Asiatic
and Egyptian Greeks diminished the relative wealth and importance of the
European states, while, at the same time, their stationary position assumed the
aspect of decline from the rapidly increasing power and civilization of Western
Europe. A considerable trade began to be carried on directly with the great commercial
depots of the East which had formerly afforded large profits to the Greeks of
Europe by passing through their hands. As soon as Rome rose to some degree of
power, its inhabitants, if not its franchised citizens, traded with the East,
as is proved by the existence of political relations between Rome and Rhodes,
more than three centuries before the Christian era. There can be no doubt that
the connection between the two states had its origin in the interests of trade.
New channels were opened for mercantile enterprise as direct communications
diminished the expense of transport. The increase of trade rendered piracy a
profitable occupation. Both the sovereigns of Egypt and the merchants of Rhodes
favored the pirates who plundered the Syrians and Phoenicians, so that trading
vessels could only navigate with, safety under the protection of powerful
states, in order to secure their property from extortion and plunder. These
alterations in commercial affairs proved every way disadvantageous to the small
republics of European Greece; and Alexandria and Rhodes soon occupied the
position once held by Corinth and Athens.
The literature
of a people is so intimately connected with the local circumstances which
influence education, taste, and morals, that it can never be transplanted
without undergoing a great alteration. It is not wonderful, therefore, that the
literature of the Greeks, after the extension of their dominion in the East,
should have undergone a great change; but it seems remarkable that this change
should have proved invariably injurious to all its peculiar excellences. It is singular, at the same
time, to find how little the Greeks occupied themselves in the examination of
the stores of knowledge possessed by the Eastern nations.
The situation and interests of the Asiatic and Egyptian Greeks must have
compelled many to learn the languages of the countries which they inhabited,
and the literature represented in the
literature of tlhe East was laid open to their investigation. They appear to
have availed themselves very sparingly of these advantages. Even in history and
geography, they made but small additions to the information already collected
by Herodotus, Ctesias, and Xenophon; and this supercilious neglect of foreign
literature has been the cause of depriving modern times of all records of the
powerful and civilized nations which flourished while Greece was in a state of
barbarism. Had the Macedonians or Romans treated the history and literature of
Greece with the contempt which the Greeks showed to the records of the
Phoenicians, Persians, and Egyptians, it is not probable that any very
extensive remains of later Greek literature would have reached us. At a subsequent period, when the Arabs had conquered the Syrian and Egyptian
Greeks, their neglect of the language and literature of Greece was severely
felt.
The munificence
of the Ptolemies, the Seleucids, and the kings of Pergamum, enabled their
capitals to eclipse the literary glory of the cities of Greece. The eminent men
of Europe sought their fortunes abroad; but when genius emigrated it could not
transplant those circumstances which created and sustained it. In Egypt and in
Syria, Greek literature lost its peculiar national character; and that divine
instinct in the portraiture of nature, which had been the charm and
characteristic of its earlier age, never emigrated. This deficiency forms,
indeed, the marked distinction between the literature of the Grecian and
Macedonian periods; and it was a natural consequence of the different situations
held by literary men. Among the Asiatic and Alexandrine population, literature
was a trade, knowledge was confined to the higher classes, and literary
productions were addressed to a public widely dispersed and dissimilar in many
tastes and habits. The authors who addressed themselves to such a public could
not escape a vagueness of expression on some subjects, and an affectation of
occult profundity on others. Learning and science, in so far as they could be
rendered available for upholding literary renown, were most studiously
cultivated, and most successfully employed; but deep feeling, warm enthusiasm,
and simple truth, were, from the very nature of the case, impossible.
The frame of
society in earlier times had been very different in the free states of Greece.
Literature and the fine arts then formed a portion of the usual education and
ordinary life of every citizen in the State; they were consequently completely
under the influence of public opinion, and received the impress of the national
mind which they reflected from the mirror of genius. The effects of this
popular character in Greek literature and art are evident, in the total freedom
of all the productions of Greece, in her best days, from anything that partakes
of mannerism or exaggeration. The truer to nature any production could be
rendered, which was to be offered to the attention of the people, the abler would
they be to appreciate its merits, and their applause would be obtained with
greater certainty; yet, at the same time, the farther the expression of nature
could be removed from vulgarity, the higher would be the degree of general
admiration. The sentiment necessary for the realization of ideal perfection,
which modern civilization vainly requires from those who work only for the
polished and artificial classes of a society broken into sections, arose in profusion,
under the free instinct of the popular mind to reverence simplicity and nature,
when combined with beauty and dignity.
The connection
of the Greeks with Assyria and Egypt, nevertheless, aided their progress in
mathematics and scientific knowledge; yet astrology was the only new object of
science which their Eastern studies added to the domain of the human intellect.
From the time Berosus introduced astrology into Cos, it spread with
inconceivable rapidity in Europe. It soon exercised a powerful influence over
the religious opinions of the higher classes, naturally inclined to fatalism,
and assisted in demoralizing the private and public character of the Greeks.
From the Greeks it spread with additional empiricism among the Romans: it even
maintained its ground against Christianity, with which it long strove to form
an alliance, and it has only been extirpated in modern times. The Romans, as
long as they clung to their national usages and religious feelings, endeavored
to resist the progress of a study so destructive to private and public virtue;
but it embodied opinions which were rapidly gaining ground. In the time of the Caesars,
astrology was generally believed, and extensively practised.
The general
corruption of morals which followed from the Macedonian conquests, was the
inevitable effect of the position in which mankind were everywhere placed. The
accumulated treasures of the Persian empire, which must have amounted to
between seventy and eighty millions sterling, were suddenly thrown into general
circulation. The Greeks profited greatly by the expenditure of these treasures,
and their social position became soon so completely changed by the facilities
afforded them of gaining high pay, and of enjoying luxury in the service of
foreign princes, that public opinion ceased to exercise a direct influence on
private character. The mixture of Macedonians, Greeks, and natives, in the
conquered countries of the East, was very incomplete, and they generally formed
distinct classes of society : this circumstance alone contributed to weaken
the feelings of moral responsibility, which are the most powerful preservatives
of virtue.
It is difficult
to imagine a state of society more completely destitute of moral restraint
than that in which the Asiatic Greeks lived. Public opinion was powerless to
enforce even an outward respect for virtue; military accomplishments, talents
for civil administration, literary eminence, and devotion to the power of an
arbitrary sovereign, were the direct roads to distinction and wealth; honesty
and virtue were very secondary qualities. In all countries or societies where a
class becomes predominant, a conventional character is formed, according to the
exigencies of the case, as the standard of an honorable man; and it is usually
very different, indeed, from what is really necessary to constitute a virtuous,
or even an honest citizen.
With regard to
the European Greeks, high rank at the Asiatic courts was often suddenly, and
indeed accidentally, placed within their reach, by qualities that had in
general only been cultivated as a means of obtaining a livelihood. It is not,
therefore, wonderful that wealth and power, obtained under such circumstances,
should have been wasted in luxury, and squandered in the gratification of
lawless passions.
Yet, in spite
of the complaints most justly recorded in history against the luxury, idleness,
avarice, and debauchery of the Greeks, it seems surprising that the people
resisted, so effectually as it did, the powerful means at work to accomplish
the national ruin. There never existed a people more perfectly at liberty to
gratify every passion. During two hundred and fifty years, the Greeks were the
dominant class in Asia; and the corrupting influence of this predominance was
extended to the whole frame of society, in their European as well as their
Asiatic possessions. The history of the Achaian League, and the endeavors of Agis
and Cleomenes to restore the ancient institutions of Sparta, prove that public
and private virtue were still admired and appreciated by the native Greeks. The
Romans, who were the loudest in condemning and satirizing the vices of the
Greek nation, proved far less able to resist the allurements of wealth and
power; and in the course of one century, their demoralization far exceeded the
corruption of the Greeks. The severe tone in which Polybius animadverts on the
vices of his countrymen, must always be contrasted with the picture of Roman
depravity in the pages of Suetonius and Tacitus, in order to form a correct
estimate of the moral position of the two nations. The Greeks afford a sad
spectacle of the debasing influence of wealth and power onthe higher classes;
but the Romans, after their Asiatic conquests, present the loathsome picture of
a whole people throwing aside all moral restraint, and openly wallowing in
those vices which the higher classes elsewhere have generally striven to
conceal.
The religion of
the Greeks was little more than a section of the political constitution of the
State. The power of religion depended on custom. Strictly speaking, therefore,
the Greeks never possessed anything more than a national form of worship, and
their religious feelings produced no very important influence on their moral
conduct. The conquests of Alexander effected as great a change in religion as
in manners.
The Greeks
willingly adopted the superstitious practices of the conquered nations, and,
without hesitation, paid their devotions at the shrines of foreign divinities;
but, strange to say, they never appear to have profoundly investigated either
the metaphysical opinions or the religious doctrines of the Eastern nations.
They treated with neglect the pure theism of Moses, and the sublime religious
system of Zoroaster, while they cultivated a knowledge of the astrology,
necromancy, and sorcery of the Chaldeans, Syrians, and Egyptians.
The separation
of the higher and lower ranks of society, which only commenced among the Greeks
after their Asiatic conquests, produced a marked effect on the religious ideas
of the nation. Among the wealthy and the learned, indifference to all religions
rapidly gained ground. The philosophical speculations of Alexander’s age
tended towards scepticism; and the state of mankind, in the following century,
afforded practical proofs to the ancients of the insufficiency of virtue and
reason to insure happiness and success either in public or private life. The
consequence was, that the greater number embraced the belief in a blind
overruling destiny,—while a few became atheists. The absurdities of popular
paganism had been exposed and ridiculed, while its mythology had not yet been
explained by philosophical allegories. No system of philosophy, cui the other
hand, had sought to enforce its moral truths among the people, by declaring the
principle of man’s responsibility. The lower orders were without philosophy,
the higher without religion.
This separation
in the feelings and opinions of the different ranks of society, rendered the
value of public opinion comparatively insignificant to the philosophers; and
consequently, their doctrines were no longer addressed to the popular mind. The
education of the lower orders, which had always depended on the public lessons
they had received from voluntary teachers in the public places of resort, was
henceforward neglected; and the priests of the temples, the diviners and soothsayers,
became their instructors and guides. Under such guidance, the old mythological
fables, and the new wonders of the Eastern magicians, were employed as the
surest means of rendering the superstitious feelings of the people, and the
popular dread of supernatural influences, a source of profit to the priesthood.
While the educated became the votaries of Chaldeans and astrologers, the
ignorant were the admirers of Egyptians and conjurors.
The Greek
nation, immediately before the conquest of the Romans, was rich both in wealth
and numbers. Alexander had thrown the accumulated treasures of centuries into
circulation; the dismemberment of his empire prevented his successors from
draining the various countries of the world, to expend their resources on a
single city. The number of capitals and independent cities in the Grecian world
kept money in circulation, enabled trade to flourish, and caused the Greek
population to increase. The elements of national prosperity are so various and
complex, that a knowledge of the numbers of a people affords no certain
criterion for estimating their wealth and happiness; still, if it were possible
to obtain accurate accounts of the population of all the countries inhabited by
the Greeks after the death of Alexander, such knowledge would afford better
means of estimating the real progress or decline of social civilization, than
either the records which history has preserved of the results of wars and
negotiations, or than the memorials of art and literature. The population of
Greece, as of every other country, must have varied very much at different
periods; even the proportion of the slave to the free inhabitants can never
have long remained exactly the same. We are, unfortunately, so completely
ignorant of the relative density of the Greek population at different periods,
and so well assured that its absolute numbers depended on many causes which it
is now impossible to appreciate fully, that it would be a vain endeavor to
attempt to fix the period when the Greek race was most numerous. The empire of
the Greeks was most extensive during the century which elapsed immediately
after the death of Alexander; but it would be unsafe to draw, from that single
fact, any certain conclusion concerning the numbers of the Greek race at that
period, as compared with the following century.
The fallacy of
any inferences concerning the population of ancient times, which are drawn
from the numbers of the inhabitants in modern times, is apparent, when we
reflect on the rapid increase of mankind, in the greater part of Europe, in
late years. Gibbon estimates the population of the Roman empire, in the time of
Claudius, at one hundred and twenty millions, and he supposed modern Europe to
contain, at the time he wrote, one hundred and seven millions. Seventy years
have not elapsed, and yet the countries which he enumerated now contain upwards
of two hundred and ten millions. The variations which have taken place in the numbers of the Jews at
different periods, illustrate the vicissitudes to which an expatriated
population, like a large portion of the Greek nation, is always liable. The
Jews have often been far less—perhaps they have been frequently more numerous—than
they are at present, yet their numbers now seem to equal what they were at the
era of the greatest wealth, power, and glory of their nation under Solomon. A very judicious writer has estimated the population of continental Greece, Peloponnesus,
and the Ionian Islands, at three millions and a half, during the period which
elapsed from the Persian wars to the death of Alexander. Now, if we admit a
similar density of population in Crete, Cyprus, the islands of the Archipelago,
and the colonies on the coasts of Thrace and Asia Minor, this number would
require to be more than doubled. The population of European Greece declined
after the time of Alexander. Money became more abundant; it was easy for a Greek
to make his fortune abroad; increased wealth augmented the wants of the free
citizens, and the smaller states became incapable of supporting as large a free
population as in earlier times, when wants were fewer, and emigration difficult.
The size of properties and the number of slaves, therefore, increased. The
diminution which had taken place in the population of Greece must, however,
have been trifling, when compared with the immense increase in the Greek
population of Asia and Egypt; in Magna Graecia, Sicily, and Cyrene, the number of the Greeks
had not decreased. Greek civilization had extended itself from the banks of the
Indus to the Pillars of Hercules, and from the shores of the Palus Maeotis to
the island of Dioscorides. It may therefore be admitted, that the Greeks were,
at no earlier period of their history, more numerous than at the time the
Romans commenced the subjugation of the countries which they inhabited.
The history of
the Greeks under the Roman domination tends to correct the opinion, that
national changes are to be solely attributed to those remarkable occurrences
which occupy the most prominent place in the annals of states. It not
unfrequently happened that those events which produced the greatest change on
the fortunes of the Romans, exerted no very important or permanent influence on
the fate of the Greeks; while, on the other hand, some change in the state of
India, Bactria, Ethiopia, or Arabia, by altering the direction of commerce,
powerfully influenced their prosperity and future destinies. A revolution in
the commercial intercourse between
Europe and eastern Asia assisted in producing the great changes which took
place in the Greek nation, from the period of the subjection of Greece by the
Romans, to that of the conquest of the semi-Greek provinces which had belonged
to the Macedonian empire, by the Saracens. The history of mankind
requires a more accurate illustration than has yet been undertaken, of the
causes of the general degradation of all the political governments with which
we are acquainted, during this eventful period; but the task belongs to universal
history. To obtain a correct view of the social condition of the European
nations in the darkest periods of the middle ages, it is necessary to examine
society through a Greek as well as a Roman medium, and to weigh the experience
and the passions of the East against the force and the prejudices of the West.
It will then be found, that many germs of that civilization which seemed to
have arisen in the dark ages as a natural development of society, were really
borrowed from the Greek people and the Byzantine empire, in which a Greco-Macedonian
civilization long pervaded society.
SECT. I. IMMEDIATE CAUSES
OF THE CONQUEST OF GREECE BY THE
ROMANS.
The great
difference which existed in the social condition of the Greeks and Romans
during the whole of their national existence, must be kept in view, in order to
form a just idea of their relative position when ruled by the same government.
The Romans formed a nation with the organization of a single city; their
political government, always partaking of its municipal origin, was a type of concentration
in administrative power, and was enabled to pursue its objects with undeviating
steadiness of purpose. The Greeks were a people composed of a number of rival
states, whose attention was incessantly diverted to various objects. The great
end of existence among the Romans was war; they were the children of Mars, and
they reverenced their progenitor with the most fervent enthusiasm.
Agriculture itself was only honored from necessity. Among the Greeks, civil
virtues were called into action by the multifarious exigencies of society, and
were honored and deified by the nation. Linked together by an international
system of independent states, the Greeks regarded war as a means of obtaining
some definite object, in accordance with the established balance of power. A
state of peace was, in their view, the natural state of mankind. The Romans
regarded war as their permanent occupation; their national and individual
ambition was exclusively directed to conquest. The subjection of their enemies,
or a perpetual struggle for supremacy, was the only alternative that war
presented to their minds.
The success of
the Roman arms, and the conquest of Greece, were the natural results of
concentrated national feelings, and superior military organization, contending
with an ill-cemented political league, and an inferior military system. The
Roman was instructed to regard himself merely as a component part of the
republic, and to view Rome as placed in opposition to the rest of mankind. The
Greek, though he possessed the moral feeling of nationality quite as powerfully
as the Roman, could not concentrate equal political energy. The Greeks after
the period of the Macedonian conquests, occupied the double position of members
of a widely spread and dominant people, and of citizens of independent states.
Their minds were enlarged by this extension of their sphere of civilization;
but what they gained in general
feelings of philanthropy, they appear to have lost in patriotic attachment to
the interest of their native states.
It would be a
vain exercise of ingenuity to speculate on the course of events, and on the
progress of civilization in the ancient world, had the national spirit of
Greece been awakened in her struggle with Rome, and the war between the two
peoples involved the question of Greek nationality, as well as political
independence. On the one hand, Greece and Rome might be supposed existing as
rival states, mutually aiding the progress of mankind by their emulation; on
the other, the extinction of the Greek people, as well as the destruction of
their political government, might be regarded as a not improbable event. No
strong national feeling was, however, raised in Greece by the wars with Rome,
and the contest remained only a political one in the eyes of the people;
consequently, even if the military power of the belligerents had been more
nearly balanced than it really was, the struggle could hardly have terminated
in any other way than by the subjugation of the Greeks.
It seems at first
sight more difficult to explain the causes of the facility with which the
Greeks accommodated themselves to the Roman sway, and of the rapidity with
which they sank into political insignificancy, than the ease with which they
were vanquished in the field. The fact, however, is undeniable, that the
conquest was generally viewed with satisfaction by the great body of the
inhabitants of Greece, who considered the destruction of the numerous small
independent governments in the country, as a necessary step towards improving
their own condition. The political constitutions even of the most democratic
states of Greece excluded so large a portion of the inhabitants from all share
in the public administration, and after the introduction of large mercenary armies,
military service became so severe a burden on the free citizens, that the
majority looked with indifference on the loss of their independence, when that
loss appeared to insure a permanent state of peace. The selfishness of the
Greek aristocracy, which was prominently displayed at every period of history,
proved peculiarly injurious in the latter days of Greek independence. The
aristocracy of the Greek cities and states indulged their ambition and cupidity
to the ruin of their country. The selfishness of the Roman aristocracy was
possibly as great, but it was very different. It found gratification in increasing
the power and glory of Rome, and it identified itself with pride and patriotism;
Greek selfishness, on the contrary, submitted to every meanness from which an
aristocracy usually recoils, in order to gratify its passions, to which it even
sacrificed its country. Greece had arrived at that period of civilizations,
when political questions were determined by financial reasons, and the hope of
a diminution of the public burdens was a powerful argument in favor of
submission to Rome. When the Romans conquered Macedonia, they fixed the tribute
at one half the amount which had been paid to the Macedonian kings.
At the period
of the Roman conquest, public opinion had been vitiated, as well as weakened,
by the power and corrupt influence of the Asiatic monarchies. Many of the Greek
princes employed large sums in purchasing the military services and civic
flatteries of the free states. The political and military leaders throughout
Greece were thus, by means of foreign alliances, rendered masters of resources
far beyond what the unassisted revenues of the free states could have placed at their disposal. It soon became
evident that the fate of many of the free states depended on their alliances
with the kings of Macedonia, Egypt, Syria, and Pergamum; and the citizens could
not avoid the despairing conclusion that no exertion on their part could
produce any decisive effect in securing the tranquility of Greece. They could
only increase their own taxes, and bring to their own homes all the miseries of
a most inhuman system of warfare. This state of public affairs caused the despair
which induced the Acarnanians, and the citizens of Abydos, to adopt the
heroic resolution not to survive the loss of their independence; but its more
general effect was to spread public and private demoralization through all
ranks of society. Peace alone, to the reflecting Greeks, seemed capable of
restoring security of property, and of re-establishing due respect for the
principles of justice; and peace seemed only attainable by submission to the
Romans. The continuation of a state of war, which was rapidly laying the
fortified towns in ruin, and consuming the resources of the land, was regarded
by the independent Greeks as a far greater evil than the acknowledgment, of the
Roman supremacy. So ardently was the termination of the contest desired by the
great body of the people, that a common proverb, expressive of a wish that the
Romans might speedily prevail, was everywhere current. This saying, which was
common after the conquest, has been preserved by Polybius : “If we had not been
quickly ruined, we should not have been saved.”
It was some
time before the Greeks had great reason to regret their fortune. A combination
of causes, which could hardly have entered into the calculations of any n.
politician, enabled them to preserve their national institutions, and to
exercise all their former social influence, even after the annihilation of
their political existence. Their vanity was flattered by their admitted
superiority in arts and literature, and by the respect paid to their usages and
prejudices by the Romans. Their political subjection was at first not very
burdensome; and a considerable portion of the nation was allowed to retain the
appearance of independence. Athens and Sparta were honored with the title of
allies of Rome. The nationality of the Greeks was so interwoven with their
municipal institutions, that the Romans found it impossible to abolish the
local administration; and an imperfect attempt, made at the time of the
conquest of Achaia, was soon abandoned. These local institutions ultimately
modified the Roman administration itself, long before the Roman empire ceased
to exist; and, even though the Greeks were compelled to adopt the civil law
and judicial forms of Rome, its political authority in the East was guided by
the feelings of the Greeks, and molded according to Greek customs.
The social rank
which the Greeks held in the eyes of their conquerors, at the time of their
subjection, is not to be overlooked. The bulk of the Greek population in
Europe consisted of landed proprietors, occupying a position which would have
given some rank in Roman society. No class precisely similar existed at Rome,
where a citizen that did not belong to the senate, the aristocracy, or the
administration, was of very little account, for the people always remained in
an inferior social rank. The higher classes at Rome always felt either contempt or hostility towards the
populace of the city; and even when the emperors were induced to favor the
people, from a wish to depress the great families of the aristocracy, they were
unable to efface the general feeling of contempt with which the people was
regarded. To the Greeks,—who had always maintained a higher social position,
not only in Europe, but also in the kingdoms of the Seleucids and the
Ptolemies,—a high position was conceded by the Roman aristocracy, as it
awakened no feelings either of hostility or jealousy. Polybius was an example.
SECT. II. TREATMENT OF GREECE AFTER ITS CONQUEST.
The Romans
generally commenced by treating their provinces with mildness. The government
of Sicily was arranged on a basis which certainly did not augment the burdens on
the inhabitants. The tribute imposed on Macedonia was less than the amount of
taxation which she had paid to her own kings; and there is no reason for
supposing that the burdens of the Greeks, whose country was embraced in the province
of Achaia, were increased by the conquest. The local municipal administration
of the separate cities was allowed to exist, but, in order to enforce submission
more readily, their constitutions were modified by fixing a census, which restricted
the franchise in the democratic commonwealths. Some states were long
allowed to retain their own political government, and were ranked as allies of
the republic. It is impossible to trace the changes which the Romans gradually
effected in the financial and administrative condition of Greece with
chronological precision. Facts, often separated by a long series of years,
require to be gleaned; and caution must be used in attributing to them a
precise influence on the state of society at other periods. The Roman senate
was evidently not without great jealousy and some fear of the Greeks; and great
prudence was displayed in adopting a number of measures by which they were
gradually weakened, and cautiously broken to the yoke of their conquerors. This
caution proves that the despair of the Achaians had produced a considerable
effect on the Romans, who perceived that the Greek nation, if roused to a
general combination, possessed the means of offering a determined and dangerous
resistance. It was not until after the time of Augustus, when the conquest of
every portion of the Greek nation had been completed, that the Romans began to
view the Greeks in the contemptible light in which they are represented by the
writers of the capital. Crete was not reduced into the form of a province until
about eight years after the subjection of Achaia, and its conquest was not
effected without difficulty, after a war of three years, by the presence of a
consular army. The resistance it offered was so obstinate, that it was almost
depopulated ere the Romans could complete its conquest.
No attempt was
made to introduce uniformity into the general government of the Grecian states;
any such plan, indeed, would have been contrary to the principles of the Roman
government, which had never aspired at establishing unity even in the
administration of Italy. The attention of the Romans was directed to the means
of ruling their various conquests in the most efficient manner, of
concentrating all the military power in their own hands, and of levying the
greatest amount of tribute which circumstances would permit. Thus, numerous
cities in Greece, possessing but a very small territory, as Delphi, Tespiae,
Tanagra, and Elatrea, were allowed to retain that degree of independence, which
secured to them the privilege of being governed by their own laws and usages,
so late even as the times of the emperors, Rhodes also long preserved its own
government as a free state, though it was completely dependent on
Rome. The Romans adopted no theoretical principles which required them to
enforce uniformity in the geographical divisions, or in the administrative
arrangements of the provinces of their empire, particularly where local habits or
laws opposed a barrier to any practical union.
The Roman
government, however, soon adopted measures tending to diminish the resources of
the Greek states when received as allies of the republic. We are informed by
Diodorus, that in consequence of the tyranny of the collectors of the tribute
in Sicily, numbers of free citizens were reduced to slavery. These slaves were
sold even within the dominions of the king of Bithynia. This conduct of the
Romans produced an extensive insurrection of the slaves; and contemporary with
a seditious rising in Sicily, there occurred also a great rebellion of the
slaves employed in the silver mines of Attica. The Attic slaves seized the
fortified town of Sunium, and committed extensive ravages before the government
of Athens was able to overpower them. It is so natural for slaves to rebel when
a favorable occasion presents itself, that it is hazardous to look beyond
ordinary causes for any explanation of this insurrection, particularly as the
de- b. dining state of the silver mines of Laurimn, at this period, rendered
the slaves less valuable, and would cause them to be worse treated, and more
negligently guarded. Still the simultaneous rebellion of slaves, in these two
distant Greek countries, seems not unconnected with the measures of the Roman
government towards its subjects.
If we could
place implicit faith in the testimony of so firm and partial an adherent of the
Romans as Polybius, we must believe, that the Roman administration was at
first characterized by a love of justice, and that the Roman magistrates were
far less venal than the Greeks. If the Greeks, he says, are entrusted with a
single talent of public money, though they give written security, and though
legal witnesses be present, they will never act honestly; but if the largest
sums be confided to the Romans engaged in the public service, their honorable
conduct is secured simply by an oath. Under such circumstances, the
people must have appreciated highly the advantages of the Roman domination,
and contrasted the last years of their troubled and doubtful independence with
the just and peaceful government of Rome, in a manner extremely favorable to
their new masters. Less than a century of irresponsible power effected a
wonderful change in the conduct of the Roman magistrates. Cicero declares, that
the senate made a traffic of justice to the provincials. There is nothing so
holy, that it cannot be violated, nothing so strong, that it cannot be
destroyed by money, are his words. But as the government of Rome
grew more oppressive, and the amount of the taxes levied on the provinces was
more severely exacted, the increased power of the republic rendered any
rebellion of the Greeks utterly hopeless. The complete separation in the administration of the various provinces, which
were governed like so many separate kingdoms, viceroyalties, or pashalics, and
the preservation of a distinct local government in each of the allied kingdoms
and free states, rendered their management capable of modification, without any
compromise of the general system of the republic; and this admirable fitness of
its administration to the exigencies of the limes, remained an attribute of the
Roman state for many centuries. Each state in Greece, continuing in possession
of as much of its peculiar political constitution as was compatible with the
supremacy and fiscal views of a foreign conqueror, retained all its former
jealousies towards its neighbors, and its interests were likely to be as often
compromised by disputes with the surrounding
Greek states as with the Roman government. Prudence and local interests
would everywhere favor submission to Rome; national vanity alone would whisper
incitements to venture on a struggle for independence.
SECT. III. EFFECTS OF THE
MITHRIDATIC WAR ON THE STATE OF
GREECE.
For sixty years after the conquest of
Achaia, the Greeks remained docile subjects of Rome. But during that period,
the policy of the government aided the tendencies of society towards the accumulation
of property in the hands of few individuals. The number of Roman usurers
increased, and the exactions of Roman publicans in collecting the taxes became
more oppressive, so that when the army of Mithridates invaded Greece, B. C. 86, while Rome appeared plunged in anarchy by the civil
broils of the partisans of Marius and Sylla, the
Greeks in office conceived the vain hope of recovering their independence. When
they saw the king drive the Romans out of Asia and transport a large army into
Europe, they expected him to rival the exploits of Hannibal, and to carry the
war into Italy. But the people in general did not take much interest in the
contest; they viewed it as a struggle for supremacy between the Romans and the
King of Pontus; and public opinion favoured the
former, as likely to prove the milder and more equitable masters. Many of the
leading men in Greece, and the governments of most of those states and cities
which retained their independence, declared in favour of Mithridates. Some Lacedaemonian and Achaean
troops joined his army, and Athens engaged heartily in his party. As soon, however,
as Sylla appeared in Greece with his army, every
state hastened to submit to Rome, with the exception of the Athenians, who
probably had some particular cause of dissatisfaction at this time. The vanity
of the Athenians, puffed up by constant allusions to their fame, induced them
to engage in a direct contest with the whole force of Rome. They were commanded
by a demagogue and philosopher named Aristion, whom
they had elected Strategos and intrusted with absolute power. The Roman legions were led by Sylla. The
exclusive vanity of the Athenians, while it cherished in their hearts a more
ardent love of liberty than had survived in the rest of Greece, blinded them to
their own insignificancy when compared with the belligerents into whose quarrel
they rashly thrust themselves. But though they rushed precipitately into the Avar, they conducted themselves in it with great constancy. Sylla was compelled to besiege Athens in person; and
the defence of the city was conducted with such courage
and obstinacy, that the task of subduing it proved one of great difficulty to a
Roman army, commanded by that celebrated warrior. When the defence grew hopeless, the Athenians sent a deputation to Sylla to open negotiations; but the orator beginning to recount the glories of their
ancestors at Marathon, as an argument for mercy, the proud Roman cut short the
discussion with the remark, that his country had sent him to Athens to punish
rebels, not study history. Athens was at last taken by assault, and it was
treated by Sylla with unnecessary cruelty; the
rapine of the troops was encouraged, instead of being checked, by their
general. The majority of the citizens was slain; the carnage was so fearfully
great, as to become memorable even in that age of bloodshed; the private
movable property was seized by the soldiery, and Sylla assumed some merit to himself for not committing the rifled houses to the flames.
He declared that he saved the city from destruction, and allowed Athens to
continue to exist, only on account of its ancient glory. He carried off some of
the columns of the temple of Jupiter Olympius, to
ornament Rome; but as that temple was in an unfinished state, and he inflicted
no injury on any public building, it seems probable that he only removed
materials which were ready for transport, without pulling down any part of the
edifice. From the treasury of the Parthenon, however, he carried off 40 talents
of gold and 600 of silver. The fate of the Piraeus, which he utterly destroyed,
was more severe than that of Athens. From Sylla’s campaign in Greece, the commencement of the ruin and depopulation of the
country is to be dated. The destruction of property caused by his ravages in
Attica was so great, that Athens from that time lost its commercial as well as
its political b. importance. The race of Athenian citizens was almost extirpated, and a new population, composed of a heterogeneous mass of settlers,
received the right of citizenship. Still as Sylla left Athens in possession of freedom and autonomy, with the rank of an allied
city, the vitality of Greek institutions inspired the altered body; the ancient
forms and laws continued to exist in their former purity, and the Areopagus is mentioned by Tacitus, in the reign of
Tiberius, as nobly disregarding the powerful protection of Piso,
who strove to influence its decisions, and corrupt the administration of
justice.
Athens Was not the only city in Greece
which suffered severely from the cruelty and rapacity of Sylla.
He plundered Delos, Delphi, Olympia, and the sacred enclosure of Aesculapius,
near Epidaurus; and he razed Anthedon, Larymna, and Hake to the ground. After he had defeated Archelaus, the general of Mithridates,
at Cheronea, he deprived Thebes of half its
territory, which he consecrated to Apollo and Jupiter. The administration of
the temporal affairs of the pagan deities was not so wisely conducted as the
civil business of the municipalities. The Theban territory declined in wealth
and population, and in the time of Pausanias the Cadmea or citadel was the only inhabited portion of ancient Thebes. Both parties,
during the Mithridatic war, inflicted severe injuries
on Greece, plundered the country, and destroyed property most wantonly. Many of
the losses were never repaired. The foundations of national prosperity were
undermined; and it henceforward became impossible to save from the annual consumption
of the inhabitants the sums necessary to replace the accumulated capital of
ages, which this short war had annihilated. In some cases the wealth of the
communities became insufficient to keep the existing public works in repair.
SECT. IV. RUIN OF THE COUNTRY BY THE PIRATES OF
CILICIA.
The Greeks, far from continuing to enjoy
permanent tranquillity under the powerful protection
of Rome, found themselves exposed to the attacks of every enemy, against whom
the policy of their masters did not require the employment of a regular army.
The conquest of the eastern shores of the Mediterranean by the Romans
destroyed the maritime police which had been enforced by the Greek states as
long as they possessed an independent navy. But even Rhodes, after its services
ceased to be indispensable, was watched with jealousy by the Romans, though it
had remained firmly attached to Rome and given asylum to numbers of Roman
citizens who fled from Asia Minor to escape death at the hands of the partisans
of Mithridates. The caution of the senate did not
allow the provinces to maintain any considerable armed force, either by land
or sea ; and the guards whom the free cities were permitted to keep, were
barely sufficient to protect the walls of their citadels. Armies of robbers,
and fleets of pirates, remains of the mercenary forces of the Asiatic monarchs,
disbanded in consequence of the Roman victories, began to infest the coasts of
Greece. As long as the provinces continued able to pay their taxes with regularity,
and the trade of Rome did not suffer directly, little attention was paid to the
sufferings of the Greeks.
The geographical configuration of European
Greece, intersected, in every direction, by high and rugged mountains, and
separated by deep gulfs and bays into a number of promontories and peninsulas,
renders communication between the thickly peopled and fertile districts more
difficult than in most other regions. The country opposes barriers to internal
trade, and presents difficulties to the formation of plans of mutual defence between the different districts, which it requires
care and judgment, on the part of the general government, to remove. The armed
force that can instantly be collected at one point, must often be small; and
this circumstance has marked out Greece as a suitable field where piratical
bands may plunder, as they have it in their power to remove their forces to
distant spots with great celerity. From the earliest ages of history to the
present day, these circumstances, combined with the extensive trade which has
always been carried on in the eastern part of the Mediterranean, have rendered
the Grecian seas the scene of constant piracies. At many periods, the pirates
have been able to assemble forces sufficient to give their expeditions the
character of regular War ; and their pursuits have been so lucrative, and
their success so great, that their profession has ceased to be viewed as a dishonourable occupation.
A system of piracy, which was carried on
by considerable armies and large fleets, began to be formed soon after the
conclusion of the Mithridatic war. The indefinite
nature of the Roman power in the East, the weakness of the Asiatic monarchs and
of the sovereigns of Egypt, the questionable nature of the protection which
Rome accorded to her allies, and the general disarming of the European Greeks, all encouraged and facilitated the enterprises
of these pirates. A ‘political, as well as a military organisation,
was given to their forces, by the seizure of several strong positions on the
coast of Cilicia. From these stations they directed their expeditions over the
greater part of the Mediterranean. The immense wealth which ages of
prosperity had accumulated in the small towns and numerous temples of Greece
was now defenceless; the country was exposed to daily
incursions, and a long list . of the devastations of the Cilician pirates is
recorded in history. Many even of the largest and wealthiest cities in Europe
and Asia were successfully attacked and plundered, and the greater number of
the celebrated temples of antiquity were robbed of their immense treasures.
Samos, Clazomene, and Samothrace, the great temples
at Hermione, Epidaurus, Taenarus, Calauria, Actium,
Argos, and the Isthmus of Corinth, were all pillaged. To such an extent was
this system of robbery carried, and so powerful and well-disciplined were the
forces of the pirates, that it was at last necessary for Rome either to share
with them the dominion of the sea, or to devote all her military energies to
their destruction. In order to carry on war with this band,—the last remains of
the mercenaries who had upheld the Macedonian empire in the East,—Pompey was
invested with extraordinary powers as commander-in-chief over the whole
Mediterranean. An immense force was placed at his absolute disposal, and he was
charged with a degree of authority over the officers of the republic, and the
allies of the State, which had never before been intrusted to one individual. His success in the execution of this commission was considered
one of his most brilliant military achievements; he captured ninety ships with
brazen beaks, and took twenty thousand prisoners. Some of these prisoners b.
were established in towns on the coast of Cilicia; and Soli, which he rebuilt,
and peopled with these pirates, was honoured with the
name of Pompeiopolis. The Romans, consequently, do
not seem to have regarded these pirates as having engaged in a disgraceful warfare,
otherwise Pompey would hardly have ventured to make them his clients.
The proceedings of the senate during the
piratical war, revealed to the Greeks the full extent of the disorganisation which already prevailed in the Roman
government. The administration was in a state of anarchy; a few families who
considered themselves above the law, and who submitted to no moral restraint,
ruled both the senate and the people, so that the policy of the republic
changed and vacillated according to the interests and passions of a small
number of leading men in Rome. Some events during the conquest of Crete afford
a remarkable instance of the incredible disorder in the republic, which foreshadowed
the necessity of a single despot as the only escape from anarchy. While Pompey,
with unlimited power over the shores and islands of the Mediterranean, was
exterminating piracy and converting pirates into citizens, Metellus, under the
authority of the senate, was engaged in conquering the island of Crete, in
order to add it to the list of Roman provinces of which the senate alone named
the governors. A conflict of authority arose between Pompey and Metellus. The
latter was cruel and firm; the former mild but ambitious, and eager to render
the whole maritime population of the east his dependents. He became jealous of
the success of Metellus, and sent one of his lieutenants to stop the siege of
the Cretan towns invested by the Roman army. But Metellus was not deterred by
seeing the ensigns of Pompey’s authority displayed from the walls. He pursued his conquests, and neither Pompey
nor the times were yet prepared for an open civil war between consular armies.
Crete had been filled with the strongholds
of the pirates as well as Cilicia, and there is no doubt that the greater
number consisted of Greeks who could find no other means of subsistence.
Despair is said to have driven many of the citizens of the states conquered by the Romans to suicide; it must certainly have forced a far
greater number to embrace a life of piracy and robbery. The government of Rome
was at this time subject to continual revolutions; and in the disorders
produced by the civil wars, the Romans lost all respect for the rights of
property either at home or abroad. Wealth and power were the only objects of
pursuit, and the force of all moral ties was broken. Justice ceased to be
administered, and men, in such cases, always assume the right of revenging
their own wrongs. Those who considered themselves aggrieved by any act of
oppression, or fancied they had received some severe injury, sought revenge in
the way which presented itself most readily; and when the oppressor was secure
against their attacks, they made society responsible. The state of public
affairs was considered an apology for the ravages of the pirates even in
those districts of Greece which suffered most severely from their lawless
conduct. They probably spent liberally among the poor the treasures which they
wrested from the rich; and so little, indeed, were they placed beyond the pale
of society, that Pompey himself settled a colony of them at Dyme,
in Achaia, where they seem to have prospered. Though piracy was not
subsequently carried on so extensively as to merit a place in history, it was
not entirely extirpated even by the fleet which the Roman emperors maintained
in the East; and that cases still continued to occur in the Grecian seas is
proved by public inscriptions. The carelessness of the senate in
superintending the administration of the distant provinces caused a great
increase of social corruption, and left crimes against the property and persons
of the provincials often unpunished. Kidnapping by land and sea became a
regular profession. The great slave-mart of Delos enabled the man-stealers to
sell thousands in a single day. Even open brigandage was allowed to exist in
the heart of the eastern provinces at the time of Rome’s greatest power.
Strabo mentions several robber chiefs who maintained themselves in their fastnesses like independent princes.
The Romans reduced those countries where
they met with resistance into the form of provinces, a procedure which was
generally equivalent to abrogating the existing laws, and imposing on the
vanquished a new system of civil as well as political administration. In the
countries inhabited by the Greeks this policy underwent considerable
modification. The Greeks, indeed, were so much farther advanced in civilisation than the Romans, that it was no easy task for
a Roman proconsul to effect any great change in the civil administration. He
could not organise his government, without borrowing
largely from the existing laws of the province.
The constitution of Sicily, which was the first Greek province of the Roman
dominions, presents a number of anomalies in the administration of its different
districts. That portion of the island which had composed the
kingdom of Hiero was allowed to retain its own laws,
and paid the Romans the same amount of taxation which had been formerly levied
by its own monarchs. The other portions of the island were subjected to
various regulations concerning the amount of their taxes, and the
administration of justice. The province contained three allied cities, five
colonies, five free, and seventeen tributary cities. Macedonia,
Epirus, and Achaia, when conquered, were treated very much in the same way, if
we make due allowance for the increasing severity of the fiscal government of
the Roman magistrates. Macedonia, before it was reduced to the condition of a
province, was divided into four districts, each of which was governed by its
own magistrates elected by the people. When Achaia was conquered, the walls
of the towns were thrown down, the aristocracy was ruined, and the country
impoverished by fines. But as soon as the Romans were convinced that Greece was
too weak to be dangerous, the Achaians were allowed
to revive some of their old civic usages and federal institutions. As the
province of Achaia embraced the Peloponnesus, northern Greece, and southern
Epirus, the revival of local confederacies, and the privileges accorded to free
cities and particular districts, really tended to disunite the Greeks, without
affording them the means of increasing their national strength. Crete,
Cyprus, Cyrene, and Asia Minor, were subsequently reduced to provinces, and
were allowed to retain much of their laws and usages. Thrace, even so late
as the time of Tiberius, was governed by its own sovereign, as an ally of the
Romans. Many cities within the bounds of the provinces retained their own
peculiar laws, and, as far as their own citizens were concerned, they continued
to possess the legislative as well as the executive power, by administering
their own affairs, and executing justice within their limits, without being
liable to the control of the proconsul.
As long as the republic continued to
exist, the provinces were administered by proconsuls or praetors, chosen from
among the members of the senate, and responsible to that body for their
administration. The authority of these provincial governors was immense they
had the power of life and death over the Greeks, and the supreme control over
all judicial, financial, and administrative business, was vested in their
hands. They had the right of naming and removing most of the judges and
magistrates under their orders, and most of the fiscal arrangements regarding
the provincials depended on their will. No power ever existed more liable to
be abused ; for while the representatives of the most absolute sovereigns have
seldom been intrusted with more extensive authority,
they have never incurred so little danger of being punished for its abuse. The
only tribunal before which the proconsuls could I be cited for any acts of
injustice which they might commit was that very senate which had sent them out
as its deputies, and received them back into its body as members.
When the
imperial government was consolidated by Augustus, the command of the whole
military force of the republic devolved on the emperor; but his constitutional
position was not that of sovereign. The early emperors concentrated in their
persons the offices of commander-in-chief of the military and naval forces of
Rome, of minister of war and of finance, and of Pontifex Maximus, which gave them a sacred character, as head of the religion of the
State, and their persons were inviolable,
as they were invested with the tribunitian power; but
the senate and people were still possessed of the supreme legislative
authority, and the senate continued to direct the civil branches of the
executive administration. In consequence of this relation between the
jurisdiction of the senate and the emperors, the provinces were divided into
two classes : Those in which the military forces were stationed were placed
under the direct orders of the emperor, and were governed by his lieutenants or
legates; the other provinces, which did not require to be constantly occupied
by the legions, remained dependent on the senate, as the chief civil authority
in the State, governed by proconsuls or propraetors.
Most of the countries inhabited by the Greeks were in that peaceable condition
which placed them in the rank of senatorial provinces. Sicily, Macedonia,
Epirus, Achaia, Crete, Cyrene, Bithynia, and Asia Minor, remained under the
control of the senate. Cyprus, from its situation as affording a convenient
post for a military force to watch Cilicia, Syria, and Egypt, was at first
classed among the imperial provinces; but Augustus subsequently exchanged it
for the more important position of Dalmatia, where an army could be stationed
to watch Rome, and separate Italy and the proconsular provinces of Greece.
The proconsuls and propraetors occupied a higher rank in the State than the imperial legates; the splendour of their courts, and the numerous train by which they
were attended, were maintained at the expense of their provinces. Their
situation deprived them of all hope of military distinction, the highest object
of Roman ambition. This exclusion of the aristocracy from military pursuits, by
the emperors, is not to be lost sight of in observing the change which took
place in the Roman character. Avarice was the vice which succeeded in stifling
their feelings of self-abasement and disappointed ambition; and as the
proconsuls were not objects of jealousy to the emperors, they were enabled to
gratify their ruling passion without danger.
As they were created from among the senate
in succession, they felt assured of finding favourable judges under any circumstances. Irresponsible government soon degenerates into
tyranny; the administration of the Roman proconsuls soon became as oppressive
as that of the worst despots, and was loudly complained of by the provincials.
The provinces under the government of the emperor were better administered.
The imperial lieutenants, though inferior in rank to proconsuls, possessed a
more extensive command, as they united in their persons the chief civil and
military authority. The effect of their possessing more power was, that the
limits of their authority, and the forms of their proceedings, were determined
with greater precision—were more closely watched, and more strictly controlled
by the military discipline to which they were subjected; while, at the same
time, the constant dependence of all their actions on the immediate orders of
the emperor, and the various departments of which he was the head, forbade all
arbitrary proceedings.
The expenses of the proconsular administration were paid by the provinces, and it was chiefly by abuses
augmenting their amount that the proconsuls were enabled to accumulate enormous
fortunes during their short tenure of
government. The burden was so heavily felt by Macedonia and Achaia, even as
early as the reign of Tiberius, that the complaints of these two provinces
induced that emperor to unite their administration with that of the imperial
province of Moesia; but Claudius restored them to the senate. Thrace,
when it was reduced to a Roman province by Vespasian, was also added to the
imperial list. As the power of the emperors rose into absolute authority over
the Roman world, and the pageant of the republic faded away, all distinction
between the different classes of provinces disappeared. They were distributed
according to the wish of the reigning emperor, and their administration
arbitrarily transferred to officers of whatever rank he thought fit to select.
The Romans, indeed, had never affected much system in this, any more than in
any other branch of their government. Pontius Pilate, when he condemned our
Saviour, governed Judaea with the rank of procurator of Caesar; he was vested
with the whole administrative, judicial, fiscal, and military authority,
almost as completely as it could have been exercised by a proconsul, yet his
title was only that of a finance officer, charged with the administration of
those revenues which belonged to the imperial treasury.
The provincial governors usually named
three or four deputies to carry on the business of the districts into which the
province was divided, and each of these deputies was controlled and assisted
by a local council. It may be remarked, that the condition of the inhabitants
of the western portion of the Roman empire was different from that of the
eastern; the people were generally treated as little better than serfs; they
were not considered the absolute proprietors of the lands they cultivated.
Adrian first gave them a full right of property in their lands, and secured to
them a regular system of law. In Greece, on the other hand, the people retained
all their property and private rights. A rare exception, indeed, occurred in
the case of the Corinthian territory, which was confiscated for the benefit of
the Roman state, and declared ager p ublicus after
the destruction of the city by Mummius. Throughout
all the countries inhabited by the Greeks, the provincial administration was
necessarily modified by the circumstance of the conquered being much farther
advanced in social civilisation than their
conquerors. To facilitate the task of governing and taxing the
Greeks, the Romans found themselves compelled to retain much of the civil
government, and many of the financial arrangements, which they found existing; and hence arose the marked difference which is observed in the administration
of the eastern and western portions of the empire. When the great jurist Scaevola was proconsul of Asia, he published an edict for
the administration of his province, by which he allowed the Greeks to have
judges of their own nation, and to decide their suits according to their own
laws; a concession equivalent to the restoration of their civil liberties in
public opinion, according to Cicero, who copied it when he was proconsul of
Cilicia. The existence of the free cities, of the local tribunals and
provincial assemblies, and the respect paid to their laws, gave the Greek
language an official character, and enabled the Greeks to acquire so great an
influence in the administration of their country, as either to limit the extent
of the despotic power of their Roman masters, or, when that proved impossible,
to share its profits. But though the arbitrary decisions of the proconsuls received some check from the
existence of fixed rules and permanent usages, still these barriers were
insufficient to prevent the abuse of irresponsible authority. Those laws and
customs which a proconsul dared not openly violate, he could generally nullify
by some concealed measure of oppression. The avidity displayed by Brutus in endeavouring to make Cicero enforce payment of forty-eight
per cent interest when his debtors, the Salaminians of Cyprus, offered to pay the capital with twelve per cent interest, proves
with what injustice and oppression the Greeks were treated even by the mildest
of the Roman aristocracy. The fact that throughout the Grecian provinces, as
well as in the rest of the empire, the governors superintended the financial
administration, and exercised the judicial power, is sufficient to explain the
ruin and poverty which the Roman government produced. Before the wealth of the
people had been utterly consumed, an equitable proconsul had it in his power to
confer happiness on his provinces, and Cicero draws a very favourable picture of his own administration in Cilicia : but a few
governors like Verres and Caius Antonius soon reduced
a province to a state of poverty, from which it would have acquired ages of
good government to enable it to recover. The private letters of Cicero afford
repeated proofs that the majority of the officers employed by the Roman
government openly violated every principle of justice to gratify their
passions and their avarice. Many of them even condescended to engage in trade,
and, like Brutus, became usurers.
The early years of the empire were
certainly more popular than the latter years of the republic in the provinces.
The emperors were anxious to strengthen themselves against the senate by
securing the goodwill of the provincials, and they consequently exerted their
authority to check the oppressive conduct of the senatorial officers, and to
lighten the fiscal burdens of the people by a stricter administration of
justice. Tiberius, Claudius, and Domitian, though Rome groaned under their
tyranny, were remarkable for their zeal in correcting abuses in the administration
of justice, and Hadrian established a council of jurisconsults and senators to assist him in reviewing the judicial business of the provinces
as well as of the capital.
SECT. VI. FISCAL ADMINISTRATION OF THE ROMANS.
The legal amount of the taxes, direct and
indirect, levied by the Romans on the Greeks, was probably not greater than
the sum paid to their national governments in the days of their independence.
But a small amount of taxation arbitrarily imposed, unjustly collected, and
injudiciously spent, weighs more heavily on the resources of the people, than
immense burdens properly, distributed and wisely employed. The wealth and resources
of Greece had been greatest at the time when each city formed a separate state,
and the inhabitants of each valley possessed the power of employing the taxes
which they paid, for objects which ameliorated their own condition. The moment
the centralisation of political power enabled one
city to appropriate the revenues of another to its wants, whether for its architectural
embellishment or for its public games, theatrical representations, and religious ceremonies, the decline of the country
commenced : but all the evil effects of centralisation were not felt until the taxes were paid to foreigners. When the tributes
were remitted to Rome, it was difficult to persuade absent administrators of
the necessity of expending money on a road, a port, or an aqueduct, which had
no direct connection with Roman interests. Had the Roman government acted
according to the strictest principles of justice, Greece must have suffered
from its dominion; but its avarice and corruption, after the commencement of
the civil wars, knew no bounds. The extraordinary payments levied on the
provinces soon equalled, and sometimes exceeded, the
regular and legal taxes. Sparta and Athens, as allied states, were exempt from
direct taxation; but, in order to preserve their liberty, they were compelled
to make voluntary offerings to the Roman generals, who held the fate of the
East in their hands, and these sometimes equalled the
amount of any ordinary tribute. Cicero supplies ample proof of the extortions
committed by the proconsuls, and no arrangements were adopted to restrain their
avarice until the time of Augustus. It is, therefore, only under the empire
that any accurate picture of the fiscal administration of the Romans in Greece
can be attempted.
Until the time of Augustus, the Romans had
maintained their armies by seizing and squandering the accumulated capital
hoarded by all the nations of the world. They emptied the treasuries of all the
kings and states they conquered; and when Julius Caesar marched to Rome, he
dissipated that portion of the plunder of the world which had been laid up in
the coffers of the republic. When that source of riches was exhausted, Augustus
found himself compelled to n. seek for regular funds for maintaining the army:
‘‘And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree
from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed". A regular
survey of the whole empire was made, and the land-tax was assessed according to
a valuation taken of the annual income of every species of property. A
capitation-tax was also imposed on all the provincials whom the land-tax did
not affect.
The ordinary provincial taxes in the East
were this land-tax, which generally amounted to a tenth of the produce, though,
in some cases, it constituted a fifth, and in others fell to a twentieth. The
land-tax was rendered uniform in all the provinces, and converted at last into
a money payment, by Marcus Aurelius. It was not assessed annually : but a
valuation was made at stated periods for a determinate number of years, and the
annual amount was called the Indictio before the time
of Constantine, when the importance of this fiscal measure on the well-being of
the inhabitants of the Roman empire is attested by the cycle of indictions becoming the ordinary chronological record of
time. Italy itself was subjected to the land-tax and capitation by Galerius, A.
D. 306. The subjects of the empire paid also a tax on cattle, and a
variety of duties on importation and exportation, which were levied even on
the conveyance of goods from one province to another. In Greece, the free
cities also retained the right of levying local duties on their citizens.
Contributions of provisions and manufactures were likewise exacted for feeding
and clothing the troops stationed in
the provinces. Even under Augustus, who devoted his personal attention to
reforming the financial administration of the empire, the proconsuls and
provincial governors ventured to avail themselves of their position, as a
means of gratifying their avarice. Licinus accumulated immense riches in Gaul. Tiberius perceived that the weight of the
Roman fiscal system was pressing too severely on the provinces, and he rebuked the
prefect of Egypt, for remitting too large a sum to Rome, as the amount proved
he had overtaxed his province. The mere fact of a prefect’s possessing the
power of increasing or diminishing the amount of his remittances to the
treasury, is enough to condemn the arbitrary nature of the Roman fiscal
administration. The prefect was told by the emperor that a good shepherd should
shear, not flay, his sheep. But no rulers ever estimated correctly the amount
of taxes that their subjects could advantageously pay; and Tiberius received a
lesson on the financial system of his empire from Battas,
King of Dalmatia, who, on being asked the cause of a rebellion, replied, that
it arose from the emperor’s sending wolves to guard his flocks instead of
shepherds.
The financial policy of the Roman republic
was to transfer as much of the money circulating in the provinces, and of the
precious metals in the hands of private individuals, as it was possible, into
the coffers of the State. The city of Rome formed a drain for the wealth of all
the provinces, and the whole empire was impoverished for its support. When
Caligula expressed the wish that the Roman people had only one neck, in order
that he might destroy them all at a single blow, the idea found a responsive
echo in many a breast. There was a wise moral in the sentiment uttered in his
frenzy; and many felt that the dispersion of the immense pauper population of
Rome, which was nourished in idleness by the public revenues, would have been a
great benefit to the rest of the empire. The desire of seizing
wealth wherever it could be found continued to be long the dominant feeling in
the personal policy of the emperors, as well as the proconsuls. The provincial
governors enriched themselves by plundering their subjects, and the emperors
filled their treasuries by accusing the senators of those crimes which entailed
confiscation of their fortunes. From the earliest periods of Roman history,
down to the thne of Justinian, confiscation of
private property was considered an ordinary and important branch of the
imperial revenue. When Alexander the Great conquered Asia, the treasures which
he dispersed increased the commerce of the world, created new cities, and
augmented the general wealth of mankind. The Romans collected far greater
riches from their conquests than Alexander had done, as they pushed their
exactions much farther; but the rude state of society, in which they lived at
the time of their first great successes, prevented their perceiving, that by
carrying off or destroying all the movable capital in their conquests, they
must ultimately diminish the amount of their own
revenues. The wealth brought away from the countries inhabited by the Greeks
was incredible; for the Romans pillaged the conquered, as the Spaniards
plundered Mexico and Peru, and ruled them as the Turks subsequently governed
Greece. The riches which centuries of industry had accumulated in Syracuse, Tarentum, Epirus, Macedonia, and
Greece, and the immense sums seized in the treasuries of the kings of Cyprus, Pergamus, Syria, and Egypt, were removed to Rome, and
consumed in a way which virtually converted them into premiums for neglecting
agriculture. They were dispersed in paying an immense army, in feeding an idle
populace, which was thus withdrawn from all productive occupations, and in
maintaining the household of the emperor, the senators, and the imperial
freedmen. The consequence of the arrangements adopted for provisioning Rome
was felt over the whole empire, and seriously affected the prosperity of the
most distant provinces. It is necessary to notice them, in order to understand
perfectly the financial system of the empire during three centuries.
The citizens of Rome were considered
entitled to a share of the revenues of the provinces which they had conquered,
and which were long regarded in the light of a landed estate of the republic.
The Roman State was held to be under an obligation of supporting all who were
liable to military service, if they were poor and without profitable
employment. The history of the public distributions of grain, and of the
measures adopted for securing ample supplies to the market, at low prices, form
an important chapter in the social and political records of the Roman people. An immense quantity of grain was distributed in this way, which was received
as tribute from the provinces. Caesar found three hundred and twenty thousand
persons receiving this gratuity. It is true he reduced the number one half.
The greater part of this grain was drawn from Sicily, Africa, and Egypt. This
distribution enabled the poor to live in idleness, and was of itself extremely
injurious to industry; while the arrangements adopted by the Roman government,
for b. selling grain at a low price, rendered the cultivation of land around
Rome unprofitable to its proprietors. A large sum was annually employed by the
State in purchasing grain in the provinces, and in transporting it to Rome,
where it was sold to the bakers at a fixed price. A premium was also paid to
the private importers of grain, in order to insure an abundant supply. In this
manner a very large sum was expended to keep bread cheap in a city where a
variety of circumstances tended to make it dear. This singular system of
annihilating capital, and ruining agriculture and industry, was so deeply
rooted in the Roman administration, that similar gratuitous distributions of
grain were established at Antioch and Alexandria, and other cities, and they
were introduced at Constantinople when that city became the capital of the
empire.
It is not surprising that Greece suffered
severely under a government equally tyrannical in its conduct and unjust in its
legislation. In almost every department of public business the interests of
the State were placed in opposition to those of the people; even when the
letter of the law was mild, its administration was burdensome. The customs of
Rome were moderate, and consisted of a duty of five per cent on exports and
imports. Where the customs were so reasonable, commerce ought to have
flourished; but the real amount levied under an unjust government bears no
relation to the nominal payment. The government of Turkey has ruined the
commerce of its subjects, with duties equally moderate. The Romans despised commerce; they considered merchants as
little better than cheats, and concluded that they were always in the wrong
when they sought to avoid making any payment to government. The provinces in
the eastern part of the Mediterranean are inhabited by a mercantile population.
The wants of many parts can only be supplied by sea; and as the various
provinces and small independent states were often separated by double lines of
custom-houses, the subsistence of the population was frequently at the mercy of
the revenue officers. The customs payable to Rome were let
to farmers, who possessed extensive powers for their collection, and a special
tribunal existed for the enforcement of their claims; these farmers of the
customs were consequently powerful tyrants in all the countries round the Aegean Sea.
The ordinary duty on the transport of
goods from one province to another amounted to two and a half per cent; but
some kinds of merchandise were subjected to a tax of an eighth, which appears
to have been levied when the article first entered the Roman empire.
The provincial contributions pressed as
heavily on the Greeks as the general taxes. The expense of the household of the
proconsuls was very great; they had also the right of placing the troops in
winter quarters, in whatever towns they thought fit. This power was rendered a
profitable means of extorting money from the wealthy districts. Cicero mentions
that the island of Cyprus paid two hundred talents—about forty-five thousand
pounds annually—in order to purchase exemption from this burden. The power of the fiscal agents, charged to collect the extraordinary contributions in the
provinces, was unlimited. One of the ordinary punishments for
infringing the revenue laws was confiscation,—a punishment which was converted
by the collectors of the revenue into a systematic means of extortion. A
regular trade in usury was established, in order to force proprietors to sell
their property; and accusations were brought forward in the fiscal courts,
merely to levy fines, or compel the accused to incur debts. Free Greeks were
constantly sold as slaves because they were unable to pay the amount of
taxation to which they were liable. The establishment of posts, which Augustus
instituted for the transmission of military orders, was soon converted into a
burden to the provinces, instead of being gradually rendered a public benefit,
by allowing private individuals to make use of its services. The enlisting of
recruits was another source of abuse. Privileges and monopolies
were granted to merchants and manufacturers; the industry of a province was
ruined, to raise a sum of money for an emperor or a favourite, and
we find Trajan himself encouraging fraud by a monopoly.
The free cities and allied states were
treated with as much injustice as the provinces, though their position enabled
them to escape many of the public burdens. The crowns of gold,
which had once been given by cities and provinces as a testimony of gratitude,
were converted into a forced gift, and at last extorted as a tax of a fixed
amount.
In addition to the direct weight of the
public burdens, their severity was increased by the exemption which Roman
citizens enjoyed from the land-tax, the customs, and the municipal burdens, in
the provinces, the free cities, and the allied states. This exemption filled
Greece with traders and usurers, who obtained the right of citizenship as a
speculation, merely to evade the payment of the local taxes. The Roman
magistrates had the power of granting this immunity; and as they were in the
habit of participating in the profits even of their enfranchised slaves, there
can be no doubt that a regular traffic in citizenship was established, and
this cause exercised considerable influence in accelerating the ruin of the
allied states and free cities, by defrauding them of their local privileges and
revenues. When Nero wished to render himself popular in Greece, he extended
the immunity from tribute to all the Greeks; but Vespasian found the financial
affairs of the empire in such disorder that he was compelled to revoke all
grants of exemption to the provinces. Virtue, in the old times of Rome, meant valour; liberty, in the time of Nero, signified freedom
from taxation. Of this liberty Vespasian deprived Greece, Byzantium, Samos,
Rhodes, and Lycia.
The financial administration of the Romans
inflicted, if possible, a severer blow on the moral constitution of society
than on the material prosperity of the country. It divided the population of
Greece into two classes, one possessing the title of Roman citizens,—a title often
purchased by their wealth, and which implied freedom from taxation;—the other
consisting of the Greeks who, from poverty, were unable to purchase the envied
privilege, and thus by their very poverty were compelled to bear the whole
weight of the public burdens laid on the province. The rich and poor were thus
ranged in two separate castes of society.
By the Roman constitution, the knights
were intrusted with the
management of the finances of the State. They were a body in
whose eyes wealth, on which their rank substantially depended, possessed an
undue value. The prominent feature of their character was avarice,
notwithstanding the praises of their justice which Cicero has left us. The
knights not only acted as collectors of the revenues, but they also frequently
farmed the taxes of a province for a term of years, subletting portions. They
formed companies for farming the customs, and for employing capital in public
or private loans. They were favoured by the policy of
Rome; while their own riches, and their secondary position in political
affairs, served to screen them from attacks in the forum. For a long period,
too, all the judges were selected from their order, and consequently knights
alone decided those commercial questions which most seriously affected their
individual profits.
The heads of the financial administration
in Greece were thus placed in a moral position unfavourable to an equitable collection of the revenues. The case of Brutus, who attempted
to oblige the Salaminians of Cyprus to pay him
compound interest, at the rate of four per cent a month, shows that avarice and
extortion were not generally considered dishonourable in the eyes of the Roman aristocracy. The practices of selling the
right of citizenship, of raising unjust fiscal prosecutions to extort fines,
and enforce confiscation to increase landed estates, have been already
mentioned. They produced effects which have found a place in history. The
existence of all these crimes is well known ; their effects may be observed in
the fact that a single citizen, in the time of Augustus, had already rendered
himself proprietor of the whole island of Cythera, and was able to raise a
rebellion in Laconia by the severity of his extortions. His name was Julius Eurycles, and the circumstances are mentioned by Strabo. And the island of Cephallenia had been held by Caius Antonins as his private property, though he resided there
as a j criminal banished for extortion.
The Roman citizens in Greece escaped the
oppressive powers of the fiscal agents, not only in those cases wherein they
were by law exempt from the payment , of the provincial taxes, but also because
they possessed the means of defending themselves against injustice by the right
of carrying their causes to Rome for judgment by appeal. These privileges soon
rendered the number of Roman citizens engaged in mercantile speculation and
trade very great in Greece. A considerable multitude of the inhabitants of
Rome had, from the earliest times, been employed in trade and commerce, without
obtaining the right of citizenship at home. They did not fail to settle in
numbers in all the Roman conquests, and, in the provinces, they were correctly
called Romans. They always enjoyed from the republic the fullest protection,
and soon acquired the rights of citizenship. Even the Roman citizens were
sometimes so numerous in the provinces that they could furnish not a few
recruits to the legions. Their numbers were so great at the
commencement of the Mithridatic war (b. c. 88) that
eighty thousand were put to death in Asia when the king took up arms against
the Romans. The greater part undoubtedly consisted of merchants, traders, and
money-dealers. The Greeks at last obtained the right of Roman citizenship in
such multitudes, that Nero may have made no very enormous sacrifice of public
revenue when he conferred liberty, or freedom from tribute, on all the Greeks.
It is unnecessary to dwell at any length on the effects of the extensive system of general oppression and partial privileges which has been described. Honest industry was useless in trade, and political intrigue was the easiest mode of making a large fortune, even in commerce. A rapid decline in the wealth of Greece, and a great diminution in the numbers of the population, took place. So early as the time of Augustus many of the richest cities of Greece were in a ruinous condition, some of the most fertile regions depopulated, and the inexhaustible supply of wealth, which the Romans supposed they would find in the provinces, began to fail.
SECT.
VII.—DEPOPULATION OF GREECE CAUSED BY THE ROMAN GOVERNMENT.
Experience proves that the same law of the
progress of society wicli gives to an increasing
population a tendency to outgrow the means of subsistence, compels a declining
one to press on the limits of taxation. A government may push taxation up to
that point Avhen it arrests all increase in the means
of subsistence; but the moment this stationary condition of society is
produced, the people Avill begin to consume a portion
of the wealth previously absorbed by the public taxes, and the revenues of the
country will have a tendency to decrease ; or, Avhat is the same tiling in so far as the political laAV is coucerned, the government Avill find greater difficulty in collecting the same amount of revenue, and, if it
succeed, will cause a diminution in the population.
The depopulation of the Roman provinces
was, however, not caused entirely by the financial oppression of the
government. In order to secure new conquests against rebellion, the armed
population was generally exterminated, or reduced to slavery. If the people
displayed a spirit of independence, they were regarded as robbers, and
destroyed without mercy; and this cruelty was so engrafted into the system of
the Roman administration that Augustus treated the Salassi in j this manner, when their disorders could easily
have been effectually prevented by milder measures. At the time the
Romans first engaged in war with the Macedonians and Greeks, the contest was of
so doubtful a nature that the Romans were not likely to relax the usual policy
which they adopted for weakening their foes ; Macedonia, Epirus, iEtolia, and Acliaia, were
therefore treated with the greatest severity at the time of their conquest. iEmilius Paulus, in order to secure the submission of
Epirus, destroyed seventy cities, and sold one hundred and fifty thousand of
the inhabitants as slaves. The policy which considered a reduction of the
population necessary for securing obedience, would not fail to adopt efficient
measures to prevent its again becoming either numerous or wealthy. The utter
destruction of Carthage, and the extermination of the Carthaginians, is a fact
which has no parallel in the history of any other civilised state.Mummius razed Corinth to the
ground, and sold its whole population as slaves. Delos was the great emporium
of the trade of the East about the time of the conquest of Greece ; it was
plundered by the troops of Mithridates, and again by
the orders of Sylla. It only recovered its former
state of prosperity under the Romans as a slave-market. Sylla utterly destroyed several cities of Boeotia, and depopulated Athens, the
Piraeus, and Thebes. The inhabitants of Megara were nearly ex- b. terminated by
Julius Ccesar: and a considerable number of the cities of Achaia, ./Etolia, and Acarnania, were laid waste by order of Augustus, that their
inhabitants might be compelled to dwell in the newly established Roman colonies
of Nicopolis and Patras. Brutus levied five years’ tribute in
advance from the inhabitants of Asia Minor. His severity made the people of
Xanthus prefer extermination to submission. Cassius, after he had taken Rhodes,
treated it in the most tyrannical manner, and displayed a truly Roman spirit of
fiscal rapacity. The celebrated letter of Sulpicius to Cicero, so
familiar to the lovers of poetry from the paraphrase of Lord Byron, affords
irrefragable testimony to the rapid decline of Greece under the Roman
government.
Greece suffered very severely during the
civil wars. The troops which she still possessed were compelled to range
themselves on one side or the other. The ilitolians and Acarnanians joined Cresar;
the Athenians, Lacedcemonians, and Boeotians, ranged
themselves as partisans of Pompey. The Athenians, and most of the other Greeks,
afterwards espoused the cause of Brutus and Cassius ; but the Lacedsemonians sent a body of two thousand men to serve as
auxiliaries to Octavius. The destruction of property causcd by the progress through Greece of the various bodies of troops, whose passions
were inflamed by the disorders of the civil war, was not compensated by the favours conferred on a few cities by Csesar, Antony, and Augustus.
The remission of a few taxes, or the present of additional revenues to an
oligarchical magistracy, could exercise no influence on the general prosperity
of the country.
The depopulation caused by war alone might
have been very soon repaired, had the government of Greece been wisely
administered. Yet Attica appears never to have recovered from the ravages
committed by Philip V. of Macedon as early as the year b. c. 200, when he
burned down the buildings and groves of Cynos- arges and the Lyceum in the immediate vicinity of Athens,
and the temples, olive-trees, and vineyards, over the whole country. The Athenians had even then lost the social and moral energy necessary for
repairing the damage produced by a great national calamity. They could 110
longer pursue a life of agricultural employment : their condition had degenerated
into that of a mere city population, and the thoughts and feelings of Greek
freemen were those of a town mob. In such circumstances the ravages of an enemy
permanently diminished the resources of the country, for in a land like Greece,
ages of labour, and the accumulated savings of
generations, are required to make the arid limestone mountains capable of
yielding- considerable supplies of food, to cover them with olive and fig
trees, and to construct cisterns and canals of irrigation. In
Athens bad government, social corruption, literary presumption, and national
conceit, were nourished by liberal donations from foreign princes, who repaid
base flattery by feeding a worthless city population. Servility became more
productive than honest industry. This degradation of honest labour,
and the depopulation of the country which resulted from it, continued when
Greece enjoyed peace under the domination of Rome. The statues of the gods
erected in temples which had fallen into ruins, sculptured A'_
dedications and marble tombs, monuments of a wealthy and dense rural population
of free citizens in the agricultural demes of Attica, were seen in the times
of Hadrian, as the turbaned tombstone may now be seen in Turkey near the
solitary desolation of the ruined mosque, testifying the rapid depopulation and
destruction of vested capital which is now going 011 in the Othoman empire. A Roman writer says, that in Attica there
were more< K)ds and heroes than liviiio- men.
It is impossible to point out, in precise detail, all the various measures by which the Roman administration undermined the physical and moral strength of the Greek nation ; it is sufficient to establish the fact, that too much was exacted from the body of the people in the shape of public burdens, and that the neglect of all its duties on the part of the government gradually diminished the productive resources of the country. While 110 useful public works were repaired, bands of robbers were allowed to infest the provinces for long periods without molestation. The extortions of the Roman magistrates, however, were more injurious, and rendered property more insecure, than the violence of the banditti. The public acts of robbery are those only which have been preserved by history ; but for each open attack 011 public property, hundreds of private families were reduced to poverty, and thou sands of free Greeks sold as slaves. Fulvius despoiled the temples of Ambraeia of their most valuable ornaments, and even carried away the statues of the gods. Verrcs, on his passage through Greece to his post in Cilicia, carried off a quantity of gold from the temple of Minerva at Athens. Piso, while proconsul of Macedonia, plundered botli it and Greece, and left both to be ravaged by Thracian banditti. Even under the cautious and conciliatory administration of Augustus, the oppressive conduct of the Romans caused seditions, both in Laconia—which was a favoured district, from its having taken part with the emperor against Antony—and in Attica, where the weakness; to which the city was reduced seemed to render any expression of discontent impossible. The Greeks had not, in the time of Augustus, entirely lost their ancient spirit and valour, and though comparatively feeble, their conduct was an object of some solicitude to the Roman government.
The moral causes of depopulation were
perhaps even , more powerful than the political. They had been long ' in
operation, and had produced great changes in the Greek character before the
Roman conquest ; and as i some similar social evils
were acting on the Romans ! themselves, the moral condition of Greece was not j
improved by the Roman government. The most prevalent evil was a spirit of
self-indulgence and utter indifference to the duty of man in private life,
which made every rank averse to marriage, and unwilling to assume the
responsibility of educating a family. The Greeks never adorned the vestibules
of their houses with the statues and busts of their ancestors; their inordinate
self-conceit taught them to concentrate their admiration 011 themselves. And
the Romans, even with the family pride which led to this noble practice, were
constantly losing the glories of their race by conferring their name on
adopted scions of other houses. The religion, and often the philosophy, of the
ancients encouraged vicious indulgence, and the general rule of society
in the first century of the Roman empire, was b. to live with concubines
selected from a class of female. slaves educated for this
station. The land, which had formerly maintained a thousand free citizens
capable of marching to defend their country as hoplites, was now regarded as
affording a scanty provision for the household of a single proprietor who
considered himself too poor to marry. His estate was cultivated by a tribe of
slaves, while he amused himself with the music of the theatre, or the equally
idle sounds of the 'philosophic schools. The desire of the population to occupy
larger properties than their ancestors had i cultivated, has already been noticed as an effect of the (riches obtained by
the Macedonian conquests ; and its (influence as a moral check on the amount of
the [population of Greece has been adverted to.1 This ^ powerful
cause of depopulation increased under the Roman government. The love of immense
parks, j splendid villas, and luxurious living, fostered vice and 1 celibacy to
such an extent in the higher ranks, that the wealthy families of the empire
became gradually extinct. The line of distinction between the rich and the
poor was constantly becoming more marked. The rich formed an aristocratic
class, the poor were sinking towards a dependent grade in society; they were
fast approaching the state of coloni or serfs. In
this state of society, neither class shows a tendency to increase. It appears
indeed to be a law of human society, that all classes of mankind which are separated,
by superior wealth and privileges, from the body of the people, are, by their
oligarchical constitution, liable to a rapid decline. As the privileges which
:hey enjoy have created an unnatural position in life, rice is increased beyond
that limit which is consistent »vith the duration of
society. The fact has been long observed
with regard to the oligarchies of Sparta and Rome. It had its effect even on
the more extended citizenship of Athens, and it even affected, in our times,
the two hundred thousand electors who formed the oligarchy of France during the
reign of Louis Philippe.
SECT.
VIII.—ROMAN COLONIES ESTABLISHED IN GREECE.
Two Roman colonies, Corinth and Patras, were established in Greece, which soon became the
principal cities, and were for ages the centres of
the political administration. Their influence on Greek society was very great,
yet Latin continued to be the spoken language of the inhabitants, and their
institutions and local government remained Roman until the decree of Caracalla
extended the Roman franchise to all Greece.
The site of Corinth had been devoted to
the gods when Mummius destroyed the city and
exterminated its inhabitants. From that time it remained desolate until Julius Csesar repeopled it with a colony
of Romans. The advantages of its position, its rich territory, its impregnable
citadel, its narrow isthmus, and its ports on two seas, made it equally
valuable as a military and naval station, and as a commercial mart. Csesar refortified the Acro-Corinth,
repaired the temples, rebuilt the city, restored the ports, and established a
numerous population of veteran legionaries and industrious freed-men in the
new city. Corinth became once more flourishing and popidous.
Its colonial coinage from the time of Julius to that of Gordian III. is
abundant, and often beautiful. It attests tlie extent of its trade and the
taste of its inhabitants. But the new Corinth was not a Greek city. The mother
of so many Hellenic colonies was now a foreign colony in Hellas. Her
institutions were Roman, her language was Latin, her manners were tinctured
with the lupine ferocity of the race of Romulus. Shows of gladiators were the
delight of her amphitheatre ; and though she shed a
strong light over fallen Greece, it was only a lurid reflection of the splendour of Rome.
The position of Corinth was admirably
suited for a i military station to overlook the
proceedings of the i Greeks who were opposed to
Cesar’s government. The measure was evidently one of precaution, and very
little was done to give it the show of having originated in a wish to revive
the prosperity of Greece. The population of the new Corinth was allowed to
collect building materials, and search for wealth, in anyway, how offensive soever it mi^ht be to the
feelings of the Greeks.
The tombs, which had alone escaped the
fury of Mum- mius, were destroyed to construct the
new buildings, and excavated for the rich ornaments and valuable sepulchral
vases which they often contained. So systematically did the Romans pursue this
profession of violating the tombs, that it became a source of very considerable
wealth to the colony, and Rome was filled with works of archaic art. The
facilities which the position of Corinth afforded for maritime communications,
not only with every part of Greece, but also with Italy and Asia Minor,
rendered it the seat of the Roman provincial administration, and the usual
residence of the proconsul of Achaia.
The policy of
Augustus towards Greece was openly 1 one of precaution. The Greeks still
continued to occupy \ the attention of the ruling class at Rome, more perhaps j
than their declining power warranted ; they had not r yet sunk into the
political insignificancy which they were destined to reach in the days of
Juvenal and Tacitus. Augustus reduced the power of all those Greek states that
retained any influence, whether they had joined his own party or favoured Antony. Athens j was deprived of its authority
over Eretria and Egina, and forbidden to increase its
local revenues by selling the right of citizenship.1 Laceda3mon was also weakened by the establishment of
the independent community of the free Laconians, a
confederation of twenty- four maritime cities, whose population, consisting
chiefly of perioikoi, had hitherto paid taxes to
Sparta. Augustus, it is true, assigned the island of Cythera, and a few places
on the Messenian frontier, to the Lacedaemonian state ; but the gift was a
very slight compensation for the loss sustained in a political point of view,
whatever it might have been in a financial.
Augustus established a Roman colony at Patras to extinguish the smouldering nationality of Achaia, and to keep open a gate through which a Roman force might at any time pour into Greece. Patras then lay in ruins, and the proprietors of its territory dwelt in the villages around. Augustus repaired the city, and re-peopled it with Roman citizens, freedmen, and the veterans of the twenty-second legion. To fill up the void in the numbers of the middle and lower orders of the free population, necessary for the immediate formation of a large city, the inhabitants of some neighbouring Greek towns were compelled to abandon their dwellings and reside in Patras. The local government of the colony was endowed with municipal revenues taken from several Achaian and Locrian cities which were deprived of their b. civic existence. Patras was often the residence of the proconsul of Acliaia, and it flourished for ages both as a Roman administrative station and as a port possessing great commercial resources. Its colonial coinage, though neither so abundant nor so elegant in its fabric as that of Corinth, extends from the time of Augustus to that of Gordian III. As in all Roman colonies, the political institutions of Rome were closely imitated at Corinth and Patras. Their highest magistrates were duumviri, who represented the consulate, and who Avere annually elected ; or, perhaps, it would be more correct to say, Avere selected for a nominal election by the imperial authorities. Other magistrates were elected, and some were appointed to perform those duties in the colonies which were similar to the functions of the great office-bearers in Rome. And as the model of the Roman government was originally that of a single city, the resemblance was easily maintained. Under the emperors, however, the colonies gradually sank into ordinary corporations for the transaction of administrative and fiscal business, under the immediate control of the Roman proconsuls and provincial governors.
Augustus also founded a new city called
Nicopolis, to commemorate the victory of Actium, but it was as much a triumphal
monument as a political establishment. Its organisation was that of a Greek city, not of a Roman colony ; and its quinquennial festival of the Actia was instituted on the model of
the great games of Greece, and placed under the superintendence of the
Lacedaemonians. Its population consisted of Greeks compelled to desert their
native cities in Epirus, Acarnania,
and iEtolia. Its territory was extensive, and it was admitted into the Amphictyonic council as a Greek state. The manner in which
Augustus peopled Nicopolis proves his indifference
to the feelings of humanity, and the imperfection of his knowledge in that
political science which enables a statesman to convert a small territory into a
flourishing State.
The principles of his colonisation contributed as directly to the decline and depopulation of Italy and Greece, as
the accidental tyranny or folly of any of his successors. The inhabitants of a
great part of iEtolia were torn from their abodes,
where they were residing i on their own property,
surrounded by their cattle, their olive-trees and vineyards, and compelled to
construct such dwellings as they were able, and find such means of livelihood
as presented themselves, at Nicopolis. ( The destruction of an immense amount
of vested capital in provincial buildings was the consequence ; the agriculture
of a whole province was ruined, and the population must have soon died away, in
the poverty which they would experience under the change of a city life.
Nicopolis long continued to be the principal city in Epirus. Its local coinage
extends from Augustus down to the reign of Gallienus. The legends are Greek,
and the fabric rude. The peculiar privileges conferred on the three
colonies of Corinth, Patras, and Nicopolis, and the
close connection in Avliich they were placed with the
imperial government, enabled them to flourish for centuries amidst the general
poverty which the despotic system of the Roman provincial administration spread
over the rest of Greece.
SECT. IX.—POLITICAL CONDITION OF GREECE FROM THE TIME OF AUGUSTUS TO THAT
OF CARACALLA.
Two descriptions of Greece have been
preserved, which afford vivid pictures of the impoverished condition of the
country during two centuries of the Roman government. Strabo has left us an
account of the depopulated aspect of Greece, shortly after the foundation of
the colonies of Patras and Nicopolis. Pausanias has
described, with melancholy exactness, the desolate appearance of many
celebrated cities, during the time of the Antonines. Governors and
proconsuls were sent to administer the government of Greece who were ignorant
of the Greek language. The taxes imposed on the country, and the
burden of the provincial administration, drained off all the wealth of the
people ; and those necessary public works, which required a large expenditure
for their maintenance and preservation, were allowed to deteriorate and fall
gradually into ruin. The emperors, at times, indeed, attempted, by a few
isolated acts of mercy, to alleviate the sufferings of the Greeks. Tiberius, as
we have already mentioned, united the provinces of Achaia and Macedonia to the
imperial government of Mcesia, in order to deliver
them from the weight of the proconsular administration. His successor restored them to the senate. When
Nero visited Greece to receive a crown at the Olympic games, he recompensed the
Greeks for flattering his music by declaring them free from tribute. The immunities
which he conferred produced some serious disputes between the various states,
concerning the collection of their municipal taxes; and Vespasian rendered
these disputes a pretext for annulling the freedom conferred by Nero. The free
cities of Greece still possessed not only the
administration of considerable revenues, but also the power of raising money,
by local taxes, for the maintenance of their temples, schools, universities,
aqueducts, roads, ports, and public buildings. Trajan carefully avoided
destroying any of the : municipal privileges of the Greeks, and he endeavoured to improve their condition by his just and
equitable administration yet his policy
was adverse to the increase of local institutions.
Hadrian opened a new line of policy to the
sovereigns of Rome, and avowed the determination of reforming the institutions
of the Romans, and adapting his govern- ! ment to the
altered state of society in the empire. He i perceived that the central government Avas weakening
! its power, and diminishing its resources, by acts of injustice, which
rendered property everywhere insecure. He remedied the evils which resulted
from the irregular dispensation of the laws by the provincial governors, and
effected reforms which certainly exercised a favourable influence on the condition of the inhabitants of the provinces. His reign laid
the foundation of that regular and systematic administration of justice in the
Roman empire, which gradually absorbed all the local judicatures of the
Greeks, and, by forming a numerous and well-educated
society of lawyers, guided by uniform rules, raised up a partial barrier
against arbitrary power. In order to lighten the weight of taxation, Hadrian
abandoned all the arrears of taxes accumulated in preceding years. His general system of administrative reforms was pursued by the Antonines, and perfected by the edict of Caracalla, which
conferred the rank of Roman citizens on all the free inhabitants of the empire.
Hadrian certainly deserves the merit of having first seen the necessity of
securing the imperial government, by effacing the badges of servitude from the
provincials, and connecting the interests of the majority of the landed
proprietors throughout the 'Roman empire, with the existence of the imperial administration.
He was the first who laid aside the prejudices of a Roman, and secured to the
provincials that legal rank in the constitution of the empire which [placed
their rights on a level with those of Roman citizens, and for this he was hated
by the senate.
Hadrian, from personal taste, cultivated
Greek literature, and admired Grecian art. He left traces of his love of
improvement in every portion of the empire, through which he kept constantly
travelling; but Greece, and especially Attica, received an extraordinary share
of the imperial favour. It is difficult to estimate
how far his conduct immediately affected the general well-being of the
population, or to point out the precise manner of its operation on society; but
it is evident that the impulse given to improvement by his example and his
administration, produced some tendency to ameliorate the condition of the
Greeks. Grcece had, perhaps, sunk to its lowest state
of poverty and depopulation under the financial administration of the Flavian
family, and it enjoyed the advantage of good government under Hadrian. The
extraordinary improvements which the Roman emperors might have effected in the
empire, by a judicious employment of the public revenues, may be estimated from
the imense public works executed by Hadrian. At
Athens he completed the temple of Jupiter Olympius,
which Iliad been commenced by Pisistratus, and of which six- Jteen columns still exist to astonish the spectator by
[their size and beauty. He built temples to Juno and to Jupiter Panhellenius, and ornamented the
city with a magnificent pantheon, a library, and a gymnasium. He commenced an
aqueduct to convey an abundant stream of water from Cephisia,
which was completed by Antoninus. At Megara, he rebuilt the temple of, Apollo.
He constructed an aqueduct which conveyed the waters of the lake Stymphalus to Corinth, and he * erected new baths in that
city. But the surest proof ' that his improvements were directed by a judicious
spirit is to be found in his attention to the roads. No- i thing could tend more to advance the prosperity of this j mountainous country
than removing the difficulties of' intercourse between its various provinces ;
for there is no country where the expense of transport presents a greater
barrier to trade, or where the difficulty of internal communications forms a
more serious impediment to improvement in the social condition of the agricultural
population. He rendered the road from Northern Greece to the Peloponnesus, by
the Scironian rocks, easy and commodious for wheeled
carriages. Great, however, as these improvements were, he conferred one still
greater 011 the Greeks, as a nation, by commencing the task of moulding their various local customs and laws into one general
system, founded on the basis of the Roman jurisprudence ;l and while he ingrafted the law of the Romans on the
stock of society in Greece, he did not seek to destroy the municipal
institutions of the people. The policy of Hadrian, in raising the Greeks to an
equality of civil rights with the Romans, sanctioned whatever remained of the
Macedonian institutions throughout the East; and as soon as the edict of
Caracalla had conferred on all the subjects of the empire the rights of Roman
citizenship, the Greeks became, in reality, the dominant people in the Eastern portion of the Roman empire, and Greek institutions ultimately
ruled society under the supremacy of Roman law.
It is curious that Antoninus, who adopted
all the views of Hadrian with regard to the annihilation of the exclusive
supremacy of the Roman citizens, should have thought it worth his attention to
point out the supposed ancient connection between Rome and Arcadia. He was the
first Roman who commemorated this fanciful relationship between Greece and
Rome by any public act. He conferred on Palantium,
the Arcadian city from which Evander was supposed to have led a Greek colony to
the banks of the Tiber, all the privileges ever granted to the most favoured municipalities in the Roman empire. The habits and
character of Marcus Aurelius led him to regard the Greeks with the greatest favour; and had his reign been more peaceful, and left his
time more at his own disposal, the sophists and philosophers of Greece would,
in all probability, have profited by his leisure. He rebuilt the temple of
Eleusis, which had been burnt to the ground ; he improved the schools of
Athens, and increased the salaries of the professors, who then rendered that
city the most celebrated university in the civilised world. Herodes Atticus, whose splendid public
edifices in Greece rivalled the works of Hadrian, gained great influence by his
eminence in literature and taste, as well as by his enormous wealth. It was the
golden age of rhetoricians, whose sendees to the
public were rewarded not only with liberal salaries and donations in money, but
even with such magisterial authority and honour as
the Greek cities could confer. Herodes Atticus had
been selected by Antoninus Pius to give lessons in eloquence to Marcus Aurelius
and Lucius Yerus, and he had been always treated with
distinction by Marcus Aurelius, until
the emperor felt it was a duty to punish his oppressive and tyrannical
conduct to the Athenians. < The friendship of the emperor did not save him
from < disgrace, though his freedmen alone were punished.
Little can be collected concerning the
condition of j Greece under the successors of Marcus Aurelius. The Roman
government was occupied with wars, which seldom directly affected the provinces
occupied by the Greeks. Literature and science were little regarded by the
soldiers of fortune who mounted the imperial throne and Greece, forgotten
and neglected, appears to have j enjoyed a degree of tranquillity and repose, which en- j abled her to profit by the improvements the imperial government which
Hadrian had introduced and the , decree of Caracalla had ratified.
The institutions of the Greeks, which were
unconnected with the exercise of the supreme executive power in the country,
were generally allowed to exist, even by the most jealous of the emperors. When
these institutions disappeared, their destruction was effected by the
progressive change which time gradually introduced into Greek society, and not
by any violence on the part of the Roman government. It is difficult, indeed,
to trace the limits of the state and city administration in matters of
taxation, or the exact extent of their control over their local funds. Some
cities possessed independence, and others were free from tribute ; and these
privileges gave the Greek nation a political position in the empire, which
prevented their being confounded with the other provincials in the East, until
the reign of Justinian. As the Greek cities in Thrace, Asia Minor, Syria, and
Egypt, preserved these important privileges, it is not wonderful that, in
Greece, the b. I whole frame of the ancient social institutions was preserved.
Pausanias found the Amphictyonic council still holding its meetings, three centuries after the Roman conquest.
The deputies of the Achaian, Boeotian, and Phocic commonwealths, continued to meet for the purpose
of transacting the business of their confederacies. The Athenians were allowed to maintain an armed guard in the island of
Delos. The Olympic, Pythic, and Isthmian games were
regularly celebrated. The Areopagus at Athens, and
the Gerontia at Sparta, still exercised their
functions. The
different cities and provinces affected the use of their peculiar dialects, and
the inhabitants of Sparta continued to imitate the J Laconism of antiquity in
their public despatches, though their altered manners
rendered it ridiculous. The (mountaineers of Attica, in the time of Antoninus, spoke ja purer language than the populace of the city of Athens,
which still bore evidence of its heterogeneous origin after the massacre of Sylla. Had the financial burdens of the Roman government
not weighed too heavily on the population, the rivalry of the Greeks, actively
directed to local improvements and to commerce,
instead of being too exclusively and ostentatiously devoted to philosophy,
literature, and the arts, might have proved more useful and honourable to their country. But the moral supports of the old framework of society were
destroyed before the edict of Caracalla had emancipated
Greece; and when tranquillity arrived, they were only capable of
enjoying the felicity of having been forgotten by their tyrants.
SECT. X.—THE GREEKS AND ROMANS NEVER
SHOWED ANY DISPOSITION TO UNITE AND FORM ONE PEOPLE.
The habits and tastes of the Greeks and
Romans were so different, that their familiar intercourse produced a feeling
of antipathy in the two nations. The Roman writers, from prejudice and
jealousy, of which they were themselves, perhaps, unconscious, have transmitted to us a very incorrect picture of the state of the Greeks during the
first centimes of the empire. They did not observe, with attention, the
marked distinction between the Asiatic and Alexandrine Greeks, and the natives
of Hellas. The European population, pursuing the quiet life of landed
proprietors, or engaged in the pursuits of commerce and agriculture, was considered,
by Roman prejudice, as unworthy of notice. Lucian, himself a Greek, indeed
contrasts the tranquil and respectable manner of life at Athens with the folly
and luxury of Rome; but the Romans looked on provincials as little
better than serfs (coioni), and merchants were, in
their eyes, only tolerated cheats. The Greek character was estimated from the
conduct of the adventurers, who thronged from the wealthy and corrupted cities
of the East to seek their fortunes at Rome, and who, from motives of fashion
and taste, were unduly favoured by the wealthy
aristocracy.
The most distinguished of these Greeks were literary b. imen, professors of philosophy, rhetoric, grammar mathematics, and music. Great numbers were engaged as private teachers ; and this class was regarded with some respect by the Roman nobility, from its intimate connection with their families. The great mass of the Greeks residing at Rome were, however, employed in connection with the public and private amusements of the capital, and were found engaged in every profession, from the directors of the theatres and opera-houses, down to the swindlers who frequented the haunts of vice. The testimony of the Latin authors may be received as sufficiently accurate concerning the light in which the Greeks were regarded at Rome, and as a not incorrect portraiture of the Greek population of the capital.
The expressions of the Romans, when
speaking of the Greeks, often display nothing more than the manner in which the
proud aristocracy of the empire regarded all foreigners, those even whom they
admitted to their personal intimacy. The Greeks were confounded with the great
body of strangers from the Eastern nations, in one general sentence of
condemnation ; and not unnaturally, for the Greek language served as the
ordinary I means of communication with all foreigners from theEast. The
magicians, conjurers, and astrologers of (Syria, Egypt, and Chaldrea,
were naturally mixed up, both in society and public opinion, with the
adventurers of Greece, and contributed to form the despicable type which was
unjustly enough transferred from the fortune-hunters at Rome to the whole
Greek nation.
It is hardly necessary to observe that
Greek literature, as cultivated at Rome during this period, had no connection
with the national feelings of the Greek people. As far as the Greeks themselves
were concerned, learn- ® ing was an honourable and lucrative occupation to its f successful
professors ; but in the estimation of the higher classes at Rome, Greek
literature was merely an ornamental exercise of the mind,—a fashion of the
wealthy. This
ignorance of Greece and the Greeks induced Juvenal to draw his conclusive proof
of the utter falsity of the Greek character, and of the fabulous nature of all
Greek history, from his own doubts ' concerning a fact which is avouched by the
testimony of Herodotus and Thucydides ; but as a retort to the Grcecia menclax of the Roman
satirist, the apter observation of Lucian may be
cited—that the Romans spoke truth only once in their lives, and that was when
they made their wills.
The Greeks repaid the scorn of the Romans
with i greater and not more reasonable contempt. When
the two nations first came into collision, the Romans were certainly far less
polished than the Greeks, though they I were much superior to them in virtue
and courage. They acknowledged their inferiority, and readily derived lessons
of instruction from a people unable to resist their arms. The obligation was
always recognised. And Roman gratitude inflated Greek vauity to such a degree, that the conquered never perceived that their masters
became at last as much their superiors in literary genius as in political and
military science. The Greeks seem always to have remained ignorant that there
were Roman writers whose works would, by successive generations and distant
nations, be placed almost in the same rank as their own classic authors.
The rhetorical contemporaries of Tacitus and of Juvenal never suspected that the original
genius of those writers had extended the domain of literature, nor could any
critic have persuaded them that Horace had already surpassed the popularity of
their own poets by a graceful union of social elegance with calm sagacity.
A single example of the supercilious
egoism of the Greeks will be sufficient to show the extent of their presumption
during their political degradation as Roman provincials. When Apollonius of Tyana, the Pythagorean philosopher, who excited the
admiration of the Hellenic world daring the first century, visited Smyrna, he
was invited to attend the Panionian Assembly. On
reading the decree of the council, he observed that it was signed by men who
had adopted Roman names, and he immediately addressed a letter to the Panionians blaming their barbarism. He reproached them for
laying aside the names of their ancestors, for quitting the names of heroes and
legislators to assume such names as Lucullus and Fabricius.
Now, when we remember that this rebuke was gravely uttered by a native of the
Cappadocian city of Tyana, to a corporation of
degenerate Asiatic Greeks, it forms a curious monument of the delusions of
national vanity.
The Romans were never very deeply imbued witli a passionate admiration for Grecian art, with which
every rank in Greece was animated. The national pride and personal vanity of
the conquerors, it is true, often coveted the possession of the most celebrated
works of art, which were transported to Rome as much on account of their
celebrity as their merit, for the painting and sculpture which they could
procure as articles of commercial industry were sufficient to gratify Roman taste.
This was peculiarly fortunate for Greece, since there can be 110
doubt that, if the Romans had been as enthusiastic lovers of art as they were
indefatigable hunters after riches, they would not have hesitated to regard all
those works of art, which were the public property of the Grecian states, as
belonging to the Roman commonwealth by the right of conquest. It was only
because the avarice of the people would have received little gratification from
the seizure, that Greece was allowed to retain her statues and paintings when
she was plundered of her gold and silver. The great dissimilarity of manners between the two nations
appears in the aversion with which many distinguished senators viewed the
introduction of the works of Grecian art, by Marcellus and Mummius,
after the conquests of Syracuse and Corinth. This aversion unquestionably
contributed much to save Greece from the general confiscation of her treasures
of art, to which the people clung with the most passionate attachment. Cicero
says that 110 Greek city of Europe or Asia would consent to sell a painting, or
a statue, or a work of art, but that, 011 the contrary, all were ready to
become purchasers. The inhabitants of Pergamus resisted the attempt of Acratus, a commissioner sent by Nero, to carry off the most
celebrated works of art from the cities of Asia. The feeling of art, in the two people, is not inaptly
illustrated, by comparing the conduct of the Rhodian republic with that of the Emperor Augustus. When the Rhodians were besieged by Demetrius Poliorcetes, they refused
to destroy his statues, and those of his father, which had been erected in
their agora. But when Augustus conquered Egypt he ordered all the statues of
Antony to be destroyed, and, with a meanness somewhat at variance with
patrician dignity, he accepted a bribe of one thousand talents from the
Alexandrines, to spare the statues of b. Cleopatra. The Greeks honoured art even more than the Romans loved vengeance. Works of art were, at times, carried away by those
Roman governors who spared nothing they could pillage in their provinces ; but
these spoliations were always regarded in the light of direct robberies ; and
Fulvius Nobilior, Verres,
and Piso, who had distinguished themselves in this
species of violence, were considered as the most infamous of the Roman magistrates.
It is true that Sylla carried off the ivory statue of Minerva from the temple of Alalcomeme,
and that Augustus removed that of the great temple of Tegea,
as a punishment to that city for espousing the party of Antony. But these very exceptions prove
how sparingly the Romans availed themselves of their rights of conquest; or
history would have recorded the remarkable statues which they had allowed to
remain in Greece, rather than signalised as
exceptions the few which they transported to Rome. When Caligula and Nero were
permitted to govern the world according to the impulses of insanity, they
ordered many celebrated works of art to be conveyed to Rome — among these, the
celebrated Cupid of Praxiteles was twice removed.
It was restored to Thespiss by Claudius; but, on being again taken away by Nero, it perished in a conflagration. After the great conflagration at Rome, in which innumerable works of art perished, Nero transported 500 brazen statues from Delphi, to adorn the capital and replace the loss it had suffered, and he ordered all cities of Greece and Asia Minor to be systematically plundered. Very little is subsequently recorded concerning this species of plunder, which ! i Hadrian and his two immediate successors would , hardly have permitted. From the great number of the most celebrated works of ancient art which Pausanias enumerates in his tour through Greece, it is evident that 110 extensive injury had then occurred, even to the oldest buildings. After the reimi of Commodus, the Roman emperors paid but little attention to art ; and unless the value of the materials caused the destruction of ancient works, they were allowed to stand undisturbed until the buildings around them crumbled into dust. During the period of nearly a century which elapsed from the time of Pausanias until the first irruption of the Goths into Greece, it is certain that the temples and public buildings of the inhabited cities were very little changed in their general aspect, from the appearance which they had presented when the Roman legions first entered Hellas.
SECT. XI. STATE
OF SOCIETY AMONG THE GREEKS.
In order to give a complete account of
the state of society among the Greeks under the Roman empire, it would be
necessary to enter into several dissertations connected with the political
history of the Romans. To avoid so extensive a field, it will be necessary to
give only a cursory sketch of those social peculiarities whose influence,
though apparent in the annals of the Roman empire, did not permanently affect
the political history of the empire. The state of civilisation,
the popular objects of pursuit, even the views of national advancement,
continued, under the imperial b. government, to be very different, and often
opposite, in different divisions of the Greek nation.
The inhabitants of Hellas had sunk into a
quiet and secluded population. The schools of Athens were still famous, and
Greece was visited by numbers of fashionable and learned travellers from other countries, as Italy now is; but the
citizens dwelt in their own little world, clinging to antiquated forms and
usages, and to old superstitions,—holding little intercourse, and having little
community of feeling, either with the rest of the empire or with the other
divisions of the Hellenic race.
The maritime cities of Europe, Asia Minor,
and the Archipelago, embraced a considerable population, chiefly occupied in
commerce and manufactures, and taking little interest in the polities of Rome,
or in the literature of Greece. All commerce was despised by the Romans; and
though the Greeks had looked on trade with more favour, yet the influence of declining wealth, and of
unjust laws, was rapidly tending to depreciate the mercantile character, and to
render the occupation less respectable, even in the commercial cities. It is not inappropriate to
notice one instance of Roman commercial legislation. Julius Cresar,
among his projects of reform, thought fit to revive an old Roman law, which
prohibited any citizen from having in his possession a larger sum than sixty thousand sesterces in the
precious metals. This law was, of course, neglected; but under Tiberius it was
made a pretext by informers to levy various fines and confiscations in Greece
and Syria. The commerce of this portion of the world, which had once consisted
of commodities of general j consumption, declined, under the fiscal avarice of the Romans,
into an export trade of some articles of luxuryto
the larger cities of the west of Europe. The wines of the Archipelago, the
carpets of Pergamus, the cambric of Cos, and the dyed woollens of Laconia, are particularly mentioned. The decline of trade is not to
be overlooked as one of the causes of the decline and depopulation of the
Roman empire; for wealth depended even more on commerce, in ancient times,
than it does in modern, from the imperfect means of transport, and
the impolitic laws relating to the exportation of grain to Rome, and its
gratuitous distribution and sale at a price below the cost of its production in
Italy.
The division of the Greek nation which
occupied the most important social position in the empire, consisted of the remains of the Macedonian and Greek colonies
in Asia Minor, Egypt, and Syria. These countries
were filled with Greeks; and the cities of Alexandria and Antioch, the second
and third in the empire in size, population, and wealth, were chiefly peopled
by Greeks. The influence of Alexandria alone on the Roman empire, and on
European civilisation, would require a treatise, in
order to do justice to the subject. Its schools of philosophy produced
modifications of Christianity in the East, and attempted to infuse a new life
into the torpid members of paganism by means of gnosticism and neoplatonism. The feuds between the Jews and
Christians, which its municipal disputes first created, were bequeathed to
following centuries; so that, in western Europe, we still debase Christianity
by the admixture of those prejudices which had their rise in the amphitheatre of Alexandria. Its wealth and population
excited the jealousy of Augustus, who deprived it of its municipal
institutions, and rendered it a prey to the factions of the amphitheatre,
the curse of b. Roman civic
anarchy. The populace, unrestrained l>y; any system of order
founded on ties of domestic and corporate institutions, and without any social
guidance derived from any acknowledged municipal rank, was abandoned to the
passions of the wildest democracy, whenever they were crowded together. Hadrian
was struck with the activity and industry of the Alexandrines; and though he
does not appear to have admired their character, he saw that the increase of
privileges to some organised classes of the
population was the true way to lessen the influence of the mob.
Antioch and the other Greek cities of the
East had preserved their municipal privileges ; and the Greek population in
Asia Minor, Egypt, and Syria, remained everywhere completely separated from the
original inhabitants. Their corporate organisation often afforded them an opportunity of interfering with the details of the
public administration, and their intriguing and seditious spirit enabled them
to defend their own rights and interests. When the free population of the
provinces acquired the rights of Roman citizenship, the Greeks of these
countries, who formed the majority of the privileged classes, and were already
in possession of the principal share of the local administration, became soon
possessed of the whole authority of the Roman government. They appeared as the
real representatives of the State, placed the native population in the
position of a party excluded from power, and, consequently, rendered it more
dissatisfied than formerly. In the East, therefore, after the publication of
Caracal la’s edict, the Greeks became again the
dominant people. In spite of the equality of all the provincials in the eye of
the law, a violent opposition was created between the Greeks and the native
population in Syria, Egypt, and a large part of Asia Minor, where various
nations still retained their own customs andti languages. The Greeks, in a large portion of
the eastern half of the empire, occupied a position nearly
similar to that of the Romans in the western. The same causes produced similar
effects, and from the period when the Greeks became a privileged
and dominant class, administering the severe fiscal supremacy of the Roman government,
instead of ruling with the more tolerant habits of their Macedonian predecessors,
their numbers and influence began to decline. Like the Romans of
Italy, Gaul, and Spain, the Greeks of Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia, destroyed
themselves.
It is now necessary to enter on a more
minute inquiry into the causes which affected the social condition j of the
native Greeks, since their secluded position in the empire almost conceals them
from the view of the political historian. The principal causes of the decline
of Greece have been already explained; but the tone of society in the country,
and the manner of living adopted by the upper and middle ranks, must not be
overlooked, in tracing the progress of national decay. During the disorders of
the civil wars, while the Roman generals were distributing the accumulated
treasures of numerous sovereigns in order to gain partisans, not only was the
value of the precious metals very much reduced, but enormous fortunes also were
made by many Greeks; and a scale of expense was adopted, by all those who were
connected with the administration, which individuals were rarely prudent
enough to diminish before their incomes had declined, and the value of money
had risen. It has been already remarked, that the increase of wealth consequent
on the Macedonian conquests, had tended to augment the size of private
properties, and to add to the numbers of slaves in Greece. Under the Romans,
the general jriches of the country were indeed very
much dimi- u. j nished ;
but individuals were enabled to acquire fortunes greater than had been
possessed by the ancient . imonarchs, and to possess
estates larger than the terri- i,toriesof many celebrated republics. Julius Eurycles owned a
province, and Herodes Atticus could have purchased a
kingdom. While a few individuals could amass unbounded wealth, the bulk of the
people were prevented from acquiring even a moderate independency ; and when
Plutarch says that Greece, in his time, could not arm more than three thousand hoplitce, though the small states of Sicyon and Megara each
furnished that number at the battle of Platea, it is
necessary to remember the change which had taken place in the size of private
properties, as well as the altered state of society, for both tended to
diminish the numbers of the free population. The taxes of Greece were remitted to Rome, and expended
beyond the limits of the province. The most useful public works were neglected,
except when a benevolent emperor like Hadrian, or a wealthy individual like Herodes Atticus, thought fit to direct some portion of
their expenditure to what was useful as well as ornamental. Under a
continuance of such circumstances, Greece was drained of money and capital.
The poverty of Greece was farther
increased by the gradual rise in the value of the precious metals,—an evil
which began to be generally felt about the time , of Nero, and which affected
Greece with great severity, from the altered distribution of wealth in the
country, and the loss of its foreign commerce. Greece had once jbeen rich in mines, which had been a source of wealth and
prosperity to Siphnos and Athens, and had laid isd the foundation of the power of Philip of Macedon. irri Gold and silver mines, when their produce is regarded tioi as articles of commerce, are a surer basis of wealth af] than mines of lead and copper. The evils which haveto arisen in countries where gold and silver have been so
produced, have proceeded from the fiscal regulations of the
government. The fiscal measures of the Romans r soon rendered it a ruinous
speculation for private in- ; dividuals to attempt
working mines of the precious metals, and, in the hands of the
State, they soon proved unprofitable. Many mines were exhausted ; and even ;
though the value of the precious metals was enhanced, some, beyond the
influence of the Roman power, were abandoned from those causes which, after the
second century of the Christian era, produced a sensible diminution in the commercial transactions of the old
hemisphere.
Greece suffered in the general decay; her
commerceand manufactures, being confined to
supplying the consumption of a diminished and
impoverished population, sank into insignificancy. It may be observed, that in
a declining state of society, where political, financial, and commercial causes
combine to diminish the wealth of a nation, it is difficult for individuals to
alter their manner of life, and to restrict their expenditure, with the
promptitude necessary to escape impoverishment.
It is indeed seldom in their power to
estimate the progress of the decay; and a reasonable jointure, or a necessary
mortgage, may ruin a family.
In this declining state of society,
complaints of excessive luxury are
generally prevalent, and the Greek writers of the second century are
filled with lamentations on this
subject. Such complaints, however, when i applied to
Greece, do not prove that the majority of the higher classes were living
in a manner injurious to society, either from their effeminacy or vicious expenditure.
They only show that the greater part of the incomes of private persons was
consumed by their personal expenditure; and that a due proportion was not ‘set
apart for creating new productive property, in order to replace the
deterioration, which time is ever causing in that which already exists. People
of property, when their annual incomes proved insufficient for their personal
expenditure, began to borrow money, instead of trying to diminish their
expenses. An accumulation of debts became general throughout the country, and I
formed a great evil in the time of Plutarch. These debts were partly caused by
the oppression of the Roman government, and by the chicanery of the fiscal
officers, always pressing for ready money, and were generally contracted to
Roman money-lenders. It was in this way that the Roman administration produced its
most iujurious effects in the provinces, by affording
to capitalists the means of accumulating enormous wealth, and by forcing the
proprietors of land into I abject poverty. The property of Greek debtors was at
last transferred, to a very great extent, to their Roman creditors. This
transference, which, in a homogeneous society, might have invigorated the upper
classes, by substituting an industrious timocracy for
an idle aristocracy, had a very different effect. It introduced new feelings
of rivalry and extravagance, by filling the country with foreign landlords.
The Greeks could not long maintain the struggle, and they sank gradually lower
and lower in wealth, until their poverty introduced an altered state of
society, and taught them the auk prudential and industrious habits of farmers,
in which if it tranquil position they escape, not only from the eye of can
history, but even from antiquarian research.
It is difficult to convey a correct notion
of the evils and demoralisation produced by private
debts in the ancient world, though they often appear as one of the most powerful
agents in political revolutions, and were to a constant subject of attention to
the statesman, the lawgiver, and the political philosopher. Modern society has
completely annihilated their political effects. The greater facilities afforded
to the transference of landed property, and the ease with which capital now
circulates, have given an extension to the operations of banking which lias remedied this peculiar defect in society. It must be
noticed, too, that the ancients regarded landed property as the accessory of
the citizen, even when its amount determined his rank in the commonwealth : but
the moderns view the proprietor as the accessory of the landed property; and
the political franchise, being inherent in the estate, is lost by the citizen
who alienates his property.
In closing this view of the state of the
Greek people under the imperial government, it is impossible not to feel that
Greece cannot be included in the general assertion of Gibbon, that “if a man
were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the
condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without
hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession
of Oommodus.” It may be doubted whether the Roman
government ever relaxed the systematic oppression under which the agricultural and commercial population its
provinces groaned; and even Hadrian himself an hardly claim greater merit than
that of having mmanely administered a system
radically bad, and endeavoured to correct its most
prominent features of Injustice. Greece, indeed, reached its lowest degree of misery and depopulation about the time of Vespasian; out still there is ample
testimony in the pages of contemporary writers, to
prove that the desolate state of the 301111 try was not materially improved for
a long period, ind that only partial signs of
amelioration were apparent in the period so much vaunted by Gibbon. The liberality of Hadrian, and
the munificence of Herodes Atticus,
were isolated examples, and could not change the constitution of Rome. Many
splendid edifices of intiquity were repaired by these
two benefactors of Greece, but many works of public utility remained neglected
on account of the poverty of the diminished population of the country; and
most of the works of Hadrian and Herodes Atticus
contributed little more to the well-being of the people than the wages of the labour expended on their construction. The roads and iqueducts of Hadrian are wise exceptions,— as they liminished the expenses of transport, and afforded increased
facilities for production. Still the sumptuous edifices, of which remains still
exist, indicate that the object of building was the erection of magnificent
monuments of art—to commemorate the taste and splendour of the founder, not to increase the resources uf the
land or improve the condition of the industrious classes.
The condition of a declining population by
no means implies that any portion of the people is actually suffering from want
of the necessaries of life. A sudden change in the direction of commerce, and a
considerable decrease in the demand for the productions of manufacturing
industry, must indeed, at the time when such events occur, deprive numbers
of their usual means of subsistence, and create great misery, before the population
suffers the ultimate diminution which these causes necessitate. Such events may
occur in an improving as well as in a declining society. But, when the bulk of
a country’s productions is drawn from its own soil, and consumed by its own
inhabitants, the population may be in a declining condition, without the
circumstance being suspected for some time, either at home or abroad. The chief
cause of the deterioration of the national resources will then arise from the members of society
consuming too great a proportion of their annual income, without dedicating a
due portion I of their revenues to reproduction ; in short, from expending
their incomes, without creating new sources of income, or striving to augment the
old. Greece suffered from all the causes alluded to ; her commerce and
manufactures were transferred to other lands; and, when the change was
completed, her inhabitants resolved to enjoy life, instead of labouring to replace the wealth which their country had lost. But this diminution in I the wealth of
the people requires to be noticed, as laying the foundation for a great step
in the improvement of the human species. Poverty rendered slavery less
frequent, and destroyed many of the channels by which the slave trade had
flourished. The condition of the slaves also underwent several modifications,
as the barrier between the slave and the citizen was broken down. At this favourable conjuncture Christianity stepped in, to prevent
avarice from ever recovering the ground which humanity had gained.
Under oppressive governments, the person
sometimes becomes more insecure than property. This appears b. to have been the
case under the Roman, as it has since been under the Turkish
government; and the population, in such cases, decreases much more rapidly than
property is destroyed. The inhabitants of Greece under the Roman empire found
themselves possessed of buildings, gardens, vineyards, olive plantations, and
all the agricultural produce which the accumulated capital of former ages had
created, to an extent capable of maintaining a far more numerous population.
The want of commerce, neglected roads, the rarity of the precious metals in
circulation, and the difficulties thrown in the way of petty traffic, by injudicious legislation, rendered the surplus produce of each
separate district of little value. The inhabitants enjoyed the mere necessaries
of life, and some of the luxuries of their climate, in great abundance; but
when they sought to purchase the productions of art and foreign commerce, they
felt themselves to be poor. Such a state of society inevitably introduces a
system of wasting what is superfluous, and of neglecting to prepare new means
of future production. In this condition of indifference and ease the
population of Greece remained, until the weakness of the Roman government, the
disorders of the army, and the diminution and disarming of the free
population, opened a way for the northern nations into the heart of the empire.
SECT. XII.—INFLUENCE OF RELIGION AND PHILOSOPY ON SOCIETY.
The earliest records of the Greeks
represent them as living completely free from the despotic authority of a
priestly class. The natural consequence of this freedom was an indefinite
latitude in the dogmas of the national faith: and
the priesthood, as it existed, became a very incorrect interpreter of public
opinion in religious questions. The belief in the
gods of Olympus had been shaken as early as the age of Pericles, and had
undergone many modifications after the Macedonian conquests. From the time the Romans became masters of Greece, the majority of
the educated were votaries of the different philosophical
sects,—every one of which viewed the established religion as a mere popular
delusion. But the Roman government, and the municipal authorities, continued to
support the various religions of the different provinces in their legal rights,
though the priesthood generally enjoyed this support rather in their character
of constituted corporations than because they were regarded as spiritual
guides. The amount of their revenues, and the extent of their civic rights and
privileges, were the chief objects which engaged the attention of the
magistrate.
The wealth and number of the religious
establishments in Greece, and the large funds
possessed by corporations, which were appropriated to public festivals,
contributed in no small degree to encourage idlenessamong the people, and perpetuate a taste for extravagance. The great festivals
of the Olympic, Pythic, and Isthmian games, in so far as they served to unite j
the whole Greek nation in a common place of assembly; for national objects,
were, indeed, productive of many advantages. They contributed to maintain a
general standard of public opinion throughout the Hellenic race, and they
kept up a feeling of nationality. But the dissipation occasioned by the
multitude of local religious feasts, and the extravagant public amusements
celebrated at the expense of the funds belongin to
the temples, produced the most injurious effects on society.
The privilege called the right of asylum, by which some ancient temples became sanctuaries where fugitive slaves were protected against the vengeance of their masters, where debtors could escape the pursuit of their creditors, and where the worst criminals defied the justice of the law, tended to encourage the open violation of every principle of justice. The fear of punishment, the strength of moral obligations, and the respect due to religion, were destroyed by the impunity thus openly granted to the most heinous crimes. This abuse had extended to such a degree under the Roman government, that the senate found it necessary, in the reign of Tiberius, to mitigate the evil; but superstition was too powerful to allow a complete reform, and many shrines were allowed to retain the right of asylum to a much later period.
Though ancient superstitions were still practised, old religious feelings were extinct. The
oracles, which had once formed the most remarkable of the sacred institutions of the Greeks, had fallen into decay. It is,
however, incorrect to suppose that the Pythoness ceased to deliver her
responses from the time of our Saviour’s birth, for
she was consulted by the emperors long after, Many oracles continued to be in considerable
repute, even after the introduction of Christianity into Greece, Pausanias
mentions the oracle of Malios, in Cilicia, as the
most veracious in his time. Claros and Didymi were
famous, and much consulted in the time of Lucian; and even new oracles were
commenced as a profitable speculation. The oracles continued to give their
responses to fervent votaries, long after they had fallen into general neglect.
Julian endeavoured to revive their influence, and he
consulted those of Delphi, Delos, and Dodona, concerning the result of his
Persian expedition. He vainly attempted to restore Delphi, and Daphne, near Antioch, to their
ancient splendour. Even so late as the reign of Theodosius the Great, those of Delphi, Didymi, and Jupiter Ammon, were in existence, but from
that period they became utterly silent. The reverence which had formerly been paid to them was
transferred to astrologers, who were consulted by all ranks and on all
occasions. Tiberius, Otho, Hadrian, and Sevems, are
all mentioned as votaries of this mode of searching into the secrets of
futurity. Yet hidden
divination, to which astrology belonged, had been prohibited by the laws of the
twelve tables, and was condemned both by express ; law and by the spirit of
the Roman state religion. It was regarded, even by the Greeks, as an illicit
and disgraceful practice.
During the first century of the Christian
era, the worship of Serapis made great progress in
every part K of the Roman empire. This worship inculcated the existence of
another world, and of a future judgment. The fact deserves notice, as it
indicates the annihilation of all reverence for the old system of paganism, and
marks a desire in the public mind to search after those truths which the Christian
dispensation soon after revealed. A moral rule of life with a religious
sanction was a want which society began to feel when Christi- b. anity appeared to supply it.
The speculations of the philosophers had
first shaken the respect of the Greeks for the religion of their ancestors.
The religion of the people was, however, so utterly worthless as a moral guide,
that the worst effect of the destruction of its influence was the separation
of the ethic and intellectual education of the higher and lower classes, which
ensued as soon as the systems of the philosophers and priests were brought into
direct opposition. In so far as the civilisation of
the Greek race was concerned, it was doubtless more effectually advanced by the
formation of a national philosophy than it could ever have been by the authority
of a religion so utterly destitute of intellectual power, and so compliant in
its form, as that of Greece. The attention which the Greeks always paid to
philosophy and metaphysical speculation, is a curious feature in their mental
character, and owes its origin, in part, to the happy logical analogies of
their native language; but, in the days of Grecian independence, this was only
a distinctive characteristic of a small portion of the cultivated minds in the
nation. From that peculiar condition of society which resulted from the
existence of a number of small independent states, a large portion of the
nation was occupied with the higher branches of political business than has
ever been the case in any other equally numerous body of mankind. Every city in
Greece held the rank of a capital, and possessed its own statesmen and lawyers.
The sense of this importance, and the weight of this responsibility,
stimulated the Greeks to the extraordinary exertions of intellect with which
their history is filled; for the strongest spur to exertion among men is the
existence of a duty imposed as a voluntary obligation.
The habits of social intercourse, and the
simple manner of life, which prevailed in the Greek republics,
Political circumstances began, about the
same time, to weaken the efficacy of public opinion in affairs of government
and administration. The want of some substitute, to replace its powerful
influence on the everyday conduct of man, was so imperiously felt that one
was eagerly sought for. Religion had long ceased to be a guide in morality;
and men strove to find some feeling which would replace the forgotten fear of
the gods, and that public opinion which could . once inspire self-respect.It was hoped that philosophy could supply the want; and it was cultivated not only I by the studious and the
learned, but by the world at large, in the belief that the self-respect of the
philosopher would prove a sure guide to pure morality, and inspire a deep
sense of justice. The necessity of obtaining some permanent power over the
moral conduct of mankind was naturally suggested to the Greeks by the political injustice under which they suffered; and the hope
that philosophical studies would temper the minds of their masters to equity,
and awaken feelings of humanity in their hearts, could not fail to exert
considerable influence. When the Romans themselves had fallen into a state of
moral and political degradation, lower even than that of the Greeks, it is not
surprising that the educated classes should have cultivated philosophy with
great eagerness, and with nearly similar views. The universal craving after
justice and truth affords a key to the profound respect with which teachers of
philosophy were regarded. Their authority and their character were so high that
they mixed with all ranks, and preserved their power, in spite of all the
ridicule of the satirists. The general purity of their lives, and , the justice
of their conduct, were acknowledged, though a few may have been corrupted by
court favour; and pretenders may often have assumed a
long beard and dirty garments, to act the ascetic or the jester with greater
effect in the houses of the wealthy Romans.
The
inadequacy of any philosophical opinions to produce the results required of
them was, at last, apparent in the changes and modifications which the various
sects were constantly making in the tenets of their founders, and the vain
attempts that were undertaken to graft the paganism of the past on the modern
systems of philosophy. The great principle of truth, which all were eagerly
searching after, seemed to elude their grasp ; yet these investigations were
not without great use in improving the intellectual and moral condition of the
higher orders, and rendering life tolerable, when the tyranny and anarchy of
the imperial government threatened the destruction of society. They prepared
the minds of men for listening candidly to a purer religion, and rendered many
of the votaries of philosophy ready converts to the doctrines of Christianity.
Philosophy lent a splendour to the Greek name; yet, with the exception of Athens, learning and philosophy
were but little cultivated in European Greece. The poverty of the inhabitants,
and the secluded position of the country, permitted few to dedicate their time
to literary pursuits; and after the time of the Antonines,
the wealthy cities of Asia, Syria, and Egypt, contained the real
representatives of the intellectual supremacy of the Hellenic race. The Greeks
of Europe, unnoticed by history, were carefully cherishing their national
institutions; while, in the eyes of foreigners the Greek character and fame
depended on the civilisation of an expatriated
population, already declining in number, and hastening to extinction. The
social institutions of the Greeks have, therefore, been even more useful to
them in a national point of view than their literature.
SECT. XIII. THE SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE GREEKS AFFECTED
BY THE WANT OF COLONIES OF EMIGRATION.
The want of foreign colonies, which
admitted of a constant influx of new emigrants, must have exercised a powerful
influence in arresting the progress of society in the Roman world. Rome never,
like Phoenicia and Greece, permitted numerous bands of her citizens to depart
from poverty in their own country, in order to better their fortunes and enjoy
the benefits of self-government as independent communities in other lands. Her
oligarchical constitution regarded the people as the property of the State. The civilisation of the Romans followed only in the train
of their armies, and stopped when the emperors ceased to pursue the b. system of conquest which had
previously engaged the energies and increased the population of the State. For
several ages war operated as a stimulant to population at Rome, as colonisation has served in modern times. It increased the
general wealth by an influx of slave labour; it
excited the active energies of the people, and it opened a career of
advancement. But the gains derived from an evil source cannot be productive of
permanent good. Even before the policy of Augustus had established universal
peace, and reduced the Roman army into a corps of gendarmerie or armed police
for guarding the internal tranquillity of the provinces,
or watching the frontiers, a combination of inherent defects in the
constitution of the Roman state had begun to destroy the lower order of Roman
citizens. The people
required a new field of action when the old career of conquest was closed for
ever, in order to engage their energies in active pursuits, and prevent them
from pining away in poverty and idleness. The want of colonies of emigration, at this conjuncture, kept all the evil elements of
the population fermenting within the State. The want of some distant spot
connected with the past history of their race, but freed from the existing
social restrictions which weighed heavily on the industrious, the ambitious,
and the proud, was required by the Romans to relieve society and render
political reforms possible. Various attempts were made to counteract the
poverty and the want of occupation among the free labourers which was produced
at Rome by every long cessation of war. C. Gracchus introduced the annual
distributions of grain, which became one of the principal causes of the ruin of
the republic; and Augustus established his colonies of legionaries over Italy
in a manner that accelerated its depopulation.
Foreign emigration was but ill replaced by
military colonies, by colonial municipalities, and by the practice adopted by
the Roman citizens of seeking their fortunes in Spain, Gaul, and Britain;
though that species of emigration long tended to preserve an impulse towards
improvement in the western portion of the Roman empire. The policy of the
emperors was directed to render society stationary; and it escaped the
observation of profound statesmen, like Augustus and Tiberius, that the most
efficient means of securing it from decline consisted in the formation of a
regular demand on the population, by permitting emigration. Foreign colonisation was, however, adverse to all the prejudices of
a Roman. The policy and religion of the State were equally opposed to the
residence of any citizen beyond the bounds of the empire ; and the constant
diminution of the inhabitants of Italy, which had accompanied the extended
conquests of the republic, indicated that the first duty of the masters of
Italy was to encourage an increase of the population, which they were not aware
could be promoted by emigration.
The decline in the population of Italy
proceeded from evils inherent in the political system of the Roman government.
They exercised their influence in the Grecian provinces of the empire, but they
can only be traced with historical accuracy, in their details, close to the centre of the executive power. The system of administration
in the republic had always tended to aggrandise the
aristocracy, who talked much of glory, but thought constantly of wealth. When
the conquests of Rome were extended over all the richest countries of the
ancient world, the leading families accumulated incredible riches, riches,
indeed, far exceeding the wealth of modern sovereigns. Villas and parks were formed over all Italy on a scale of the most sumptuous grandeur,
and land became more valuable as hunting grounds than as productive farms. The
same habits were introduced into the provinces. In the neighbourhood of Rome,
agriculture was ruined by the public distributions of grain which was received
as tribute from the provinces, and by the bounty granted to importing merchants
in order to secure a maximum price of bread. The public
distributions at Alexandria and Antioch must have proved equally injurious.
Another cause of the decline in the population of the empire was the great
increase of the slaves which took place on the rapid conquests of the Romans,
and the diffusion of the immense treasures suddenly acquired by their
victories. There is always a considerable waste of productive industry among a
slave population; and free labourers cease to exist, rather than perpetuate
their race, if their labour be degraded to the same
level in society as that of slaves. When the insecurity of property and person
under the Roman government after the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and the corrupt
state of society, are added to (these various causes of decay, the decline and
depopulation of the empire does not require farther explanation.
Yet society would not, probably, have
declined as it did, under the weight of the Roman power, had the active,
intelligent, and virtuous members of the middle classes possessed the means of
escaping from a social position so calculated to excite feelings of despair. It
is in vain to offer conjectures on the subject; for the mce in the Roman constitution which rendered all their military and state colonies
merely sources of aggrandisement to the aristocracy,
may have proceeded from some inherent defect in the social organisation of the people, and, consequently, might have entailed ruin on any Roman society
established beyond the authority of the senate or the emperors. The social organisation of nations affects their vitality as much as
their political constitution affects their power and fortunes.
The exclusively Roman feeling, which was
adverse to all foreign colonisation, was first
attacked when Christianity spread itself beyond the limits of the empire. The
fact that Christianity was not identical with citizenship, or, at least, with
subjection to Rome, was a powerful cause of creating that adverse feeling
towards the Christians which branded them as enemies of the human race; for,
in the mouth of a Roman, the human race was a phrase for the empire of Rome,
and the Christians were really persecuted by emperors like Trajan and Marcus
Aurelius, because they were regarded as having no attachment to the Roman
government, because their humanity was stronger than their citizenship.
SECT. XIV. — EFFECTS PRODUCED IN GREECE BY
THE INROADS OF THE GOTHS.
After the reign of Alexander Severus, the
whole attention of the Roman government was absorbed by the necessity of
defending the empire against the invasions of the northern nations. Two
centuries of communication with the Roman world had extended the effects of
incipient civilisation throughout all the north of
Europe. Trade had created new wants, and given a new impulse to society. This
state of improvement always causes a rapid increase of population, and awakens
a spirit of enterprise, which makes the apparent increase even greater than the
real. The history of every people which has attained any eminence in . the
annals of mankind, has been marked by a similar period of activity. The Greeks,
the Romans, and the Arabs, poured out a succession of armies, which must have
astonished the nations which they attacked, quite as much as the apparently
inexhaustible armies of the Goths amazed the degenerate Romans. Yet few events,
in the whole course of history, seem more extraordinary than the success of the uncivilised Goths against the well-disciplined
legions of imperial Rome, and their successful inroads into the thickly-peopled
provinces of the Roman empire. The causes of the success of the Goths are
evidently to be sought within the empire : the defenceless state of the population, which was everywhere carefully disarmed, the
oppression of the provincials, the disorder in the finances, and the
relaxation in the discipline of the troops, contributed more to their victories
than their own strength or military skill.
If any national feeling, or common
political interest, had connected the people, the army, and the sovereign, the
Roman empire would have easily repulsed the attacks of all its enemies; nay,
had the government not placed itself in direct opposition to the interests of
its subjects, and arrested their natural progress by vicious legislation and
corrupt administration, the barbarous inhabitants of Germany, Poland, and
Russia, could have offered no more effective resistance to the advance of Roman colonisation than those of Spain, Gaul, and Britain.
But the task of extending the domain of civilisation required to be supported by the energy of national feelings; it was far beyond
the strength of the imperial or any other central government. The ablest of
the despots who styled themselves the world’s masters, did not dare, though
nourished in camps, to attempt a career of foreign conquest; these imperial soldiers
were satisfied witli the inglorious task |i of preserving the limits of the empire without diminution. Even Severus,
after he had consolidated a systematic despotism, based on military power, did not
succeed in extending the empire. This avowed inability of the Roman armies to
make any further progress, invited the barbarians to attack the provinces. If a
body of assailants proved successful in breaking; through the Roman lines, they
were sure of considerable plunder. If they were repulsed, they could
generally evade pursuit. These incursions were at first the enterprises of
armed bands and small tribes, but they became afterwards the employment of
armies and} nations. To the timid eye of the unwarlike and unarmed citizens of the empire, the whole population of the north appeared to be constantly on its march, to plunder and enslave the wealthy and peaceable inhabitants of the south.
Various means of defence were employed by the reigning sovereigns. Alexander Severus secured the tranquillity of
the frontiers by paying subsidies to the barbarians; Decius fell, defending
the provinces against an immense army of Goths which had penetrated into the
heart of Moesia; and Gallus purchased the retreat of the victors by engaging to pay them an annual tribute. The disorder
in the Roman government increased, the succession of emperors became more
rapid, and the numbers of the invaders augmented. Various tribes and nations,
called, by the Greeks and Romans, Scythians and Goths, and belonging to the
great families now called the Sclavonic and Germanic
stock, under the names of East and West Goths, Vandals, Heruls, Borans, Karps, Peuks, and Urugunds, crossed the Danube. Their incursions were
pushed through,; Moesia into Thrace and Macedonia; an immense booty was carried
away, and a still greater amount of property was destroyed; thousands of the industrious inhabitants
were reduced to slavery, and a far greater number massacred by the cruelty of
the invaders.
The Greeks were awakened, by these
invasions, from the state of lethargy in which they had reposed for three
centuries. They began to repair the long neglected fortifications of their
towns, and muster their city guards and rural police, for a conflict in defence of their property. Cowardice had long been supposed,
by the Romans, to be an incurable vice of the Greeks, who had been compelled to
appear before the Romans with an obsequious and humble mien, and every
worthless Roman had thence arrogated to himself a fancied superiority. But the
truth is, that all the middle classes in the Roman world had, from the time of
Augustus, become averse to sacrificing their ease for the doubtful glory to be
gained in the imperial service. No patriotic feeling drew men to the camp; and
the allurements of ambition were stifled by obscurity of station and
hopelessness of promotion. The young nobility of Rome, when called upon to
serve in the legions, after the defeat of Varus,
displayed signs of cowardice unparalleled in the history of Greecc.
Like the Fellahs of modern Egypt, they cut off their
thumbs in order to escape military service. Greece could contribute but little
to the defence of the empire; but Caracalla had drawn
from Sparta some recruits whom he had formed into a Lacedemonian phalanx. Decius, before his defeat, intrusted the defence of Thermopylae
to Claudius, who was afterwards emperor, but who had only fifteen hundred
regular troops, in addition to the ordinary Greek militia of the cities.
The smallness of the number is curious; it
indicates the tranquil condition of the Hellenic population before the northern
nations penetrated into the heart of the empire.
The preparations for defending the country
were actively carried on, both in northern Greece and at the isthmus. In the
reign of Valerian the walls of Athens, which had not been put in a proper state
of defence from the time of Sylla,
were repaired, and the fortifications across the isthmus of Corinth were restored
and garrisoned by Peloponnesian troops. It was not long before the Greeks were called upon to
prove the efficiency of their warlike arrangements. A body of Goths, having established themselves along the
northern shores of the Black Sea, commenced a series of naval expeditions. They
soon penetrated through the Thracian Bosphorus, and, aided by additional bands
who had proceeded from the banks of the Danube by land, they marched into Asia
Minor, and plundered Chalcedon, Nicomedia, Nicea, and Prusa, a. d. 259.
This successful enterprise was soon followed by still more daring expeditions.
In the year 267, another fleet, consisting
of five hundred vessels, manned chiefly by the Goths and Heruls,
passed the Bosphorus and the Hellespont. They seized Byzantium and Chrysopolis, and advanced, plundering the islands and
coasts of the iEgcan Sea, and laying waste many of
the principal cities of the Peloponnesus. Cyzicus, Lemnos, Skyros, Corinth, Sparta, and Argos, are named as
having suffered by their ravages. From the time of Sylla’s conquest of Athens, a period of nearly three hundred and fifty years had
elapsed, during I which Attica had escaped the evils of war; yet when the
Athenians were called upon to defend their homes I against the Goths, they
displayed a spirit worthy of their ancient fame. An officer, named Cleodamus, had been sent by the government from Byzantium
to Athens, in order to repair the fortifications, but a division of these Goths
landed at the Piraeus, and succeeded in carrying Athens by storm,
before any means were taken for its defence. Dexippus, an Athenian of rank in the Roman service, soon
contrived to reassemble the garrison of the Acropolis; and by joining to it
such of the citizens as possessed some knowledge of military discipline, or
some spirit for warlike enterprise, he formed a little army of two thousand
men. Choosing a strong position in the Olive Grove, he circumscribed the movements
of the Goths, and so harassed them by a close blockade that they were soon
compelled to abandon Athens. Cleodamus, who was not
at Athens when it was surprised, had in the mean time assembled a fleet and gained a naval victory over a division of the barbarian
fleet. These
reverses were a prelude to the ruin of the Goths. A Roman fleet entered the Archipclago, and a Roman army, under the emperor Gallienus,
marched into Illyricum; the separate divisions of the Gothic expedition were
everywhere overtaken by these forces, and destroyed in detail. During this
invasion of the empire, one of the divisions of the Gothic army crossed the
Hellespont into Asia, and succeeded in plundering the cities of the Troad, and in destroying the celebrated temple of Diana of
Ephesus.
Dexippus was himself the historian of the Gothic invasion of Attica, but, unfortunately, little information on the subject can be collected from the fragments of his works which now exist. There is a celebrated anecdote connected with this incursion which throws some light on the state of the Athenian population, and on the conduct of the Gothic invaders of the empire. The fact of its currency is a proof of the easy circumstances in which the Athenians lived, of the literary idleness in which they indulged, and the general mildness of the assailants, whose sole object was plunder. It is said that the Goths, when they had captured Athens, were preparing to burn the splendid libraries which adorn the city, but that a Gothic soldier dissuaded them, by telling his countrymen that it was better that the Athenians should continue to waste their time in their halls and porticos over their books, than that they should begin to occupy themselves with warlike exercises. Gibbon, indeed, thinks the anecdote may be suspected as the fanciful conceit of a recent sophist; and he adds, that the sagacious counsellor reasoned like an ignorant barbarian. But the national degradation of the Greeks has co-existed with their pre-eminence in learning duringmany centuries, so that it appears that this ignorant barbarian reasoned like an able politician. Even the Greeks, who repeated the anecdote, seem to have thought that there was more sound sense in the arguments of b. the Goth than the great historian is willing to admit. Something more than mere reading and study is required to form the judgment. The cultivation of learning does not always bring with it the development of good sense. It does not always render men wiser, and it generally proves injurious to their bodily activity. When literary pursuits, therefore, become the exclusive object of national ambition, and distinction in the cultivation of literature and abstract science is more esteemed than sagacity and prudence in the everyday duties of life, effeminacy is undoubtedly more likely to prevail, than when literature is used as an instrument for advancing practical acquirements, and embellishing active occupations. The rude Goths themselves would probably have admired the poetry of Homer and of Pindar, though they despised the metaphysical learning of the schools of Athens.
The celebrity of Athens, and the presence
of the historian Dexippus, have given to this
incursion of the barbarians a prominent place in history; but many expeditions
are casually mentioned, which must have inflicted greater losses on the Greeks,
and spread devastation more widely over the country. These inroads must have
produced important changes in the condition of the Greek population, and given
a new impulse to society. The passions of men were called into action, and
the protection of their property often, depended on their own exertions.
Public spirit was again awakened, and many cities of Greece successfully
defended their walls against the immense armies of barbarians who broke into
the empire in the reign of Claudius. Tkessalonica and
Cassandra were attacked by land and sea. Thessaly and Greece were invaded; but
the walls of the towns were generally found in a state of repair, and the
inhabitants ready to defend them. The great victory obtained by the emperor
Claudius II., at Naissus, broke the power of the
Goths; and a Roman fleet in the Archipelago destroyed the remains of their
naval forces. The extermination of these invaders of Greece was completed by a
great plague which ravaged the East for fifteen years.
During the repeated invasions of the
barbarians, an immense number of slaves were either destroyed by war, or
carried away by the Goths beyond the Danube. Great facilities were likewise
afforded to dissatisfied slaves to escape and join the invaders. The numbers of
the slave population in Greece must, therefore, have undergone a reduction,
which could not prove otherwise than beneficial to those who remained, and
which must also have produced a very considerable change on the condition of
the poorer freemen, the value of whose labour must
have been considerably increased. The danger in which men of wealth lived,
necessitated an alteration in their mode of life; every one was compelled to think of defending his person, as well as his property; new
activity was infused into society; the losses caused by the ravages of the
Goths, and the mortality produced by the plague, appear to have caused a
general improvement in the circumstances of the inhabitants of Greece.
It must here be observed, that the first
great inroads of the northern nations, who succeeded in penetrating into the
heart of the Roman empire, were directed against the eastern provinces, and
that Greece suffered severely by the earliest invasions; yet the eastern portion
of tiie empire alone succeeded in driving back b. the
barbarians, and preserving its population free from any admixture of the Gothic race. This successful resistance was chiefly owing
to the national feelings and political organisation of the Greek people. The institutions which the Greeks retained prevented them
from remaining utterly helpless in the moment of danger; the magistrates
possessed a legitimate authority to take measures for any extraordinary
crisis, and citizens of wealth and talent could render their services useful,
without any violent departure from the usual forms of the local administration. The evil of anarchy was not,
in Greece, added to the misfortune of invasion. Fortunately for the Greeks, the
insignificancy of their military forces prevented the national feelings, which
these measures aroused, from giving umbrage either to the Roman emperors or to
their military officers in the provinces.
From the various accounts of the Gothic
wars of i this period which exist, it is evident that
the expeditions of the barbarians were, as yet, only undertaken j for the purpose
of plundering the provinces. The invaders entertained no idea of being able to establish themselves permanently within
the bounds of the empire. The celerity of their movements generally made their
numbers appear greater than they really were ; while the inferiority of their
arms and discipline rendered them an unequal match for a much smaller body of
the heavy-armed Romans. When the invaders met with a steady and well-combined
resistance, they were defeated without much difficulty; but whenever a moment
of neglect presented itself, their attacks were repeated with undiminished
courage. The victorious reigns of Claudius II., Aurelian, and Probus, prove the immense superiority of the Roman armies
when properly commanded ; but the custom, which was constantly gaining ground,
of recruiting the legions from among the barbarians, reveals the deplorable
state of depopulation and weakness to which three centuries of despotism and
bad administration had reduced the empire. On the one hand, the government feared the the spirit of its subjects, if intrusted with arms, far more than it dreaded the ravages of the barbarians; and on the
other, it was unwilling to reduce the number of the citizens paying taxes, by draughting too large a proportion of the industrious
classes into the army. The imperial fiscal system rendered it necessary to keep
all the provincial landed proprietors carefully disarmed, lest they should
revolt, and perhaps make an attempt to revive republican institutions; and the defence of the empire seemed, to the
Roman emperors, to demand the maintenance of a larger army than the population
of their own dominions, from which recruits were drawn, could supply.
SECT. XV.—CHANGES WHICH PRECEDED THE
ESTABLISHMENT OF CONSTANTINOPLE AS THE CAPITAL OP THE ROMAN EMPIRE.
The Romans had long been sensible that
their social vices threatened their empire with ruin, though they never
contemplated the possibility of their cowardice delivering it up a prey to
barbarous conquerors. Augustus made a vain attempt to stem the torrent of
corruption, by punishing immorality in the higher orders. But a privileged
class is generally sufficientlypowerful
to be able to form its own social code of morality, and protect
its own vices as long as it can maintain its existence. The immorality of the
Romans at last undermined the political fabric of the empire. Two centuries and
a half after the failure of Augustus, the emperor Decius endeavoured with as little effect to reform society. Neither of these sovereigns understood how to cure the
malady which was destroying the State. They attempted to improve society by
punishing individual nobles for general vices. They ought to have annihilated
the privileges which raised senators and nobles above the influence of law and
public opinion, and subjected them to nothing but the despotic power of the
emperor. St Paul, however, informs us that the whole frame of society was so
utterly corrupted that even this measure would have proved ineffectual. The people were as vicious as
the senate ; all ranks were suffering from a moral gangrene, which no human
art could heal. The dangerous abyss to which society was hastening did not
escape observation. The alarm gradually spread
through every class in the wide extent of the Roman world. A secret terror was
felt by the emperors, the senators, and even by the armies. Men’s minds were
changed, and a divine influence produced a reform of which man’s wisdom and
strength had proved incapable. From the death of Alexander Severus to the
accession of Diocletian, a great social alteration is visible in paganism ;
the aspect of the human mind seemed to have undergone a complete metamorphosis.
The spirit of , Christianity was floating in the atmosphere, and to its
influence we must attribute that moral change in the pagan world, during the latter
half of the third century, which tended to prolong the existence of the western
Roman empire.
Foreign invasions, the disorderly state of
the army, the weight of the taxes, and the irregular constitution of the
imperial government, produced at this time a general feeling that the army and
the State required a new organisation, in order to
adapt both to the exigencies of altered circumstances, and save the empire
from impending ruin. Aurelian, Probus, Diocletian,
and Constantine, appeared as reformers of the Roman empire. The history of
their reforms belongs to the records of the Roman constitution, as they were
conceived with very little reference to the institutions of the provinces;
and only some portion of the modifications then made in the form of the
imperial administration will fall within the scope of this work. But though
the administrative reforms produced little change in the condition of the Greek
population, the Greeks themselves actively contributed to effect a mighty
revolution in the whole frame of social life, by the organisation which they gave to the church from the moment they began to embrace the
Christian religion. It must not be overlooked, that the Greeks had organised a Christian church before Christianity became the
established religion of the empire.
Diocletian found that the Roman empire had
lost much of its internal cohesion, and that it could no longer be conveniently
governed from one administrative centre. He attempted
to remedy the increasing weakness of the coercive principle, by creating four centres of executive authority, controlled by a single
imperial legislative emperor. But no human skill could long preserve harmony
between four executive despots. Constantine restored the unity of the Roman
empire. His reign marks the period in which old Roman political feelings lost
their power, and the superstitious veneration for Rome herself ceased. The liberty afforded for new political ideas by the new social organisation was not overlooked by the Greeks.
The transference of the seat of government to Byzantium weakened the Roman
spirit in the public administration. The Romans, indeed, from the establishment
of the imperial government, had ceased to form a homogeneous people, or to be
connected by feelings of attachment and interest, to one common country; and
as soon as the rights of Roman citizenship had been conferred on the
provincials, Rome became a mere ideal country to the majority of Romans. The
Roman citizens, however, in many provinces, formed a civilised caste of society, dwelling among a number of ruder natives and slaves; they
were not melted into the mass of the population. In the Grecian provinces, no
such distinction prevailed. The Greeks, who had taken on themselves the name
and the position of Roman citizens, retained their own language, manners, and
institutions ; and as soon as Constantinople was founded and became the capital
of the empire, a struggle arose whether it was to become a Greek or a Latin
city.
Constantine himself does not appear to
have perceived this tendency of the Greek population to acquire a predominant
influence in the East by supplanting the language and manners of Rome, and lie
modelled his new capital entirely after Roman ideas and prejudices.
Constantinople was, at its foundation, a Roman city, and Latin was the language
of the higher ranks of its inhabitants. This fact must not be lost sight of;
for it affords an explanation of the opposition which is for ages apparent in
the feelings, as well as the interests, of the capital and of the Greek nation.
Constantinople was a creation of imperial favour; a
regard to its own advantage rendered it subservient to despotism, and, for a
long period, impervious to any national feeling. The inhabitants enjoyed
exemptions from taxation, and received distributions of grain and provisions,
so that the misery of the empire, and the desolation of the provinces, hardly
affected them. Left at leisure to enjoy the games of the circus, they were
bribed by government to pay little attention to the affairs of the empire. Such
was the position of the people of Constantinople at the time of its foundation,
and such it continued for many centuries.