The Historians' History of the World 04 [Greece to the Roman Conquest]

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

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