Part 2

The land now enjoyed a long period of peace, and began to recover from the effects of the civil wars. A further boon was the transference of Achaia from the jurisdiction of the Senate to that of the Emperor soon after the accession of Tiberius, who, whatever his private vices may have been, was most considerate in his treatment of the provincials. He sternly repressed attempts at extortion, kept his governors in office for long terms, and, when an earthquake injured the city of Aigion on the gulf of Corinth, excused the citizens from the payment of taxes for three years. The restriction of the much-abused right of asylum in various temples, such as that of Poseidon on the island of Tenos, and the delimitation of the Messenian and Lacedæmonian boundary, showed the interest of the Roman Government in Greek affairs; and the cult of the Imperial family, which was now developed in Greece, was perhaps due to gratitude no less than to the natural obsequience of a conquered race. The visit of the Emperor’s nephew, Germanicus, to Athens delighted the Athenians and scandalised Roman officialdom by the Imperial traveller’s disregard of etiquette; and it was insinuated by a prejudiced Roman even at that early period that these voluble burgesses, who talked so much about their past history, were not really the descendants of the ancient Greeks, but “the offscourings of the nations.” So deep was the impression made by the courtesy of Germanicus that, several years later, an impostor, who pretended to be his son Drusus, found a ready following in Greece, which he traversed from the Cyclades to Nikopolis. It became the custom, too, to banish distinguished Romans, who had incurred the Emperor’s displeasure, to an Ægean island, and Amorgos, Kythnos, Seriphos, and Gyaros were the equivalent of Botany Bay. The last two islets in particular were regarded with intense horror, and Juvenal has selected them as types of the worst punishment that could befall one of his countrymen[8]. Caligula, less moderate than Tiberius in his treatment of the Greeks, carried off the famous statue of Eros from Thespiæ, for which his unaccomplished plan of cutting the Isthmus of Corinth was no compensation. Claudius restored the stolen statue, and in 44 A.D. handed over the province of Achaia to the Senate—an arrangement which, with one brief interval, continued to be the practice of the Roman Government for the future. Meanwhile, alike under Senatorial and Imperial administration, the Greeks had acquired Roman tastes and had even adopted in many cases Roman names. If old-fashioned Romans complained that Rome had become “a Greek city,” where glib Hellenic freedmen had the ear of the Emperor and starving Greeklings were ready to practise any and every profession, the conservatives in Greece lamented the introduction of such peculiarly Roman sports as the gladiatorial shows, of which the remains of the Roman amphitheatre at Corinth are a memorial. The conquering and the conquered races had reacted on one another; the Romans had become more literary; the Greeks had become more material.

It was at this period, about 54 A.D., that an event occurred which profoundly modified the future of the Greek race. In, or a little before, that year St Paul arrived at Athens, and, stirred by the idolatry of the city, delivered his famous speech in the midst of the Areopagos. The unvarnished narrative of the Acts of the Apostles does not disguise the failure of the great teacher’s first attempt to convert the argumentative Greeks, to whom the new gospel seemed “foolishness.” But “Dionysios the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them,” believed, thus forming the small beginnings of the Church which grew up there in later days. From Athens the Apostle proceeded to Corinth, where he stayed “a year and six months.” The capital of Achaia and mart of Greece was a fine field for his missionary labours. The Roman colony, which had now been in existence almost a century, had become the home of commerce and the luxury which usually accompanies it. The superb situation, commanding the two seas, had attracted a cosmopolitan population, including many Jews, and the vices of the East and the West seemed to meet on the Isthmus—the Port Said of the Roman Empire. We may trace in the language of the two Epistles, which the Apostle addressed to the Corinthians later on, the main characteristics of the seat of Roman rule in Greece. The allusions to the fights with wild beasts, to the Isthmian games, to the long hair of the Corinthian dandies, to the easy virtue of the Corinthian women, all show what was the daily life of the most flourishing city of Greece in the middle of the first century. Yet even at Corinth many were persuaded by the arguments of the tent-maker, and a Christian community was founded at the port of Kenchreæ on the Saronic Gulf. At the outset the converts were of humble origin, like “the house of Stephanas, the first fruits of Achaia”; but Gaius, Tertius, Quartus, and “Erastus, the chamberlain of the city,” were persons of better position. That a man like Gallio, the brother of Seneca the philosopher and uncle of Lucan the poet, a man whom the other great poet of the day, Statius, has described as “sweetness” itself, was at that time governor of Achaia, shows the importance attached by the Romans to their Greek province. St Paul had not the profound classical learning of the governor’s talented family, but the two Epistles to the Thessalonians, which he wrote during this first stay at Corinth, have conferred an undying literary interest on the capital of Roman Greece. Silas and Timotheus joined the Apostle at that place; and after his departure the learned Alexandrian, Apollos, carried on the work of Christianity among the Corinthians. But the germs of those theological parties, which were destined later on to divide the Greek Christians, had already been planted in the congenial soil of Achaia. The Christian community of Corinth, with the fatal tendency to faction which has ever marked the Hellenic race, was soon split up into sections, which followed, one St Paul, another Apollos, another the supposed injunctions of St Peter, another the simple faith of Christ. Even women, and that, too, unveiled, like the Laises of Corinth, had taken upon themselves to speak at Christian gatherings, and drinking and the other sensual crimes of that luxurious city had proved temptations too strong for some of the new converts. This state of things provoked the two Epistles to the Corinthians and the second visit of the Apostle to the then Greek capital, where he remained three months, writing on this occasion also two Epistles from Greece—that to the Romans and that to the Galatians. For the sake of the greater security which the land route afforded, he returned to Asia through Northern Greece, accompanied among others by St Luke, whose traditional connection with Greece may be traced in the wax figure of the Virgin, said to be his work, in the monastery of Megaspelæon, and in the much later Roman tomb venerated as his, at Thebes. With the exception of his delay at Fair Havens on the south coast of Crete, we are not told by the writer of the Acts that St Paul ever set foot on Greek territory again; but he left Titus in that island “to ordain elders in every city,” and contemplated spending a winter at Nikopolis. A tradition, unsupported, however, by good evidence, has been preserved to the effect that he was liberated from his Roman imprisonment, and it has been supposed that he employed part of the time that remained before his death in revisiting Corinth and Crete. His “kinsmen,” Jason and Sosipater, bishops of Tarsus and Ikonium, preached the Word at Corfù, where one of them was martyred, and where one of the two oldest churches of the island still preserves their names[9]. The Greek journey of the pagan philosopher, Apollonios of Tyana, who tried to restore the ancient life of Hellas and to check the Romanising tendencies of the age, took place only a few years after the first appearance of the Apostle of the Gentiles in Greece.

Another visitor of a very different kind next arrived in the classic land. Nero had already displayed his taste for the fine arts by despatching an emissary to Greece with the object of collecting statues for the adornment of his palace and capital. Delphi, Olympia and Athens, where, in the phrase of a contemporary satirist, “it was easier to meet a god than a man,” furnished an ample booty, and the Thespians again lost, this time for ever, the statue of Eros. But Nero was not content with the sculpture of Greece; he yearned to display his manifold talents before a Greek audience, “the only one,” as he said, “worthy of himself and his accomplishments.” Accordingly, in 66, he crossed over to Kassopo in Corfù, and began his theatrical tour by singing before the altar of Zeus there. Such was the zeal of the Imperial pot-hunter, that he commanded all the national games to be celebrated in the same year, so that he might have the satisfaction of winning prizes at them all in the same tour. In order to exhibit his musical gifts, he ordered the insertion of a new item in the time-honoured programme at Olympia, where he built himself a house, and at Corinth broke the Isthmian rules by contending in both tragedy and comedy. As a charioteer he eclipsed all previous performances by driving ten horses abreast, upsetting his car and still receiving the prize from the venal judges; as a victor, he had the effrontery to proclaim his own victory, and the number of his wreaths might have done credit to a royal funeral. In return for their compliance, the Greeks were informed by the voice of the Emperor himself on the day of the Isthmian games that they were once more free from the jurisdiction of the Senate and exempt from the payment of taxes[10]. The name of freedom and the practical advantage of fiscal immunity appealed with force to the patriotic and commercial sides of the Greek character, and outweighed the extortions of the Emperor and his suite to such a degree that Nero became a popular hero, in whose honour medals were struck and statues erected. To signalise yet further his stay in Greece, he bade the long projected canal to be dug across the Isthmus. This time the work was actually begun, and a prominent philosopher, who had incurred the Imperial displeasure, was seen digging away with a gang of other convicts. Nero himself dug the first sod with a golden spade, and carried away the first spadefuls of earth in a basket on his shoulders. But the task, of which traces may still be seen, was soon abandoned, and the dangers which threatened his throne recalled the Emperor to Italy. But first he consulted the Oracle of Delphi, which fully maintained its ancient reputation for obscurity and accuracy, but was bidden henceforth to be dumb. The two most celebrated seats of Greek antiquity, Athens and Sparta, he left, however, unvisited—Sparta, because he disapproved of its institutions; Athens, because he, the matricide, feared the vengeance of the Furies, whose fabled shrine was beneath the Areopagos[11].

The civil war, which raged in Italy between the death of Nero and the accession of Vespasian, had little influence upon Greece, except that it gave an adventurer, who bore a striking resemblance to the late Emperor and shared his musical tastes, the opportunity of personating him. But this pretender, who had made himself master of the island of Kythnos, was soon suppressed[12], and Vespasian, as he visited Greece on his way from the East to Rome, could calmly study the condition of that country. The stern old soldier, who, in spite of his Greek culture, had fallen asleep during Nero’s recitations, had no sympathy with Greek antiquities, and maintained that the Hellenes did not know how to use their newly-restored freedom, which had involved the impoverished Roman exchequer in the loss of the Greek taxes. He accordingly restored the organisation and fiscal arrangements which had been in force before Nero’s proclamation, only that the province of Achaia under the Flavian dynasty no longer included Thessaly, Epeiros, and Akarnania. For a long time Greece had no political history; but we know that Domitian, like Tiberius, was as considerate towards the provincials as he was tyrannical to the Roman nobles; that he cherished a special cult for the goddess Athena; and that he deigned to allow himself to be nominated as Archon Eponymos of Athens for the year 93—an instance which shows the continuance of an institution which had been founded nearly eight centuries earlier. Trajan’s direct connection with Greece was limited to a stay at Athens on the way to the Parthian war, but he counted among his friends the most celebrated Greek author of that age, the famous Plutarch, who passed a great part of his time in the small Bœotian town of Chaironeia, where his so-called “chair,” obviously the end seat of one of the rows in the theatre, may still be seen in the little church. Like Polybios in the first period of the Roman conquest, Plutarch served as a link to unite the Greeks and their masters. At once an Hellenic patriot and an admirer of Rome, he combined love of the past independence of his country with a shrewd sense of the advantages of Roman rule in the existing circumstances. True, the Greece of his time was very different from that of the Golden Age. While the single city of Megara had sent 3000 heavy armed men to the battle of Platæa, the whole province of Achaia could not raise a larger number in his days. Depopulation was going on apace; Eubœa was almost desolate, and the inland towns of the mainland were mostly losing their trade, which was gravitating to the coasts. The expenditure of the Greek taxes at Rome led to the want of funds for public objects, and the Roman system of making immunity from taxation a principle of Roman citizenship divided the Greeks into two classes, the rich and the poor. The former led luxurious lives, built expensive houses, added acre to acre, and fell into the hands of the foreign money-lenders of Corinth or Patras. The latter sank lower and lower in the social scale, and it was noticed that, while the Greek women had become more beautiful, the classic grace of Hellenic manhood had declined. But Greece continued to exercise her perennial charm on the cultured traveller. In spite of the Thessalian brigands, tourists journeyed to see the Vale of Tempe, and a race of loquacious guides arose, whose business it was to explain the history of Delphi. Men of the highest rank were proud to be made Athenian citizens, and one of them, Antiochos Philopappos, grandson of the last king of Kommagene, was commemorated in the last years of Trajan by the monument which is to-day one of the most conspicuous in all Athens.

The reign of Hadrian was a very happy period for the Greeks. A lover of both ancient and contemporary Hellas, which he visited several times, the Imperial traveller left his mark all over the country. We may gather from Pausanias, whose own wanderings began at this period, that there was scarcely a single Greek city of importance which had not received some benefit from this Emperor. Coins of Patras describe him as “the restorer of Achaia,” Megara regarded him as her “second founder,” Mantineia had to thank him for the restoration of her classical name. Alive to the want of through communication between the Peloponnese and Central Greece, he built a safe road along the Skironian cliffs, where now the tourist looks down on the azure sea from the train that takes him from Megara to Corinth. He provided the latter city with water by means of an aqueduct from Lake Stymphalos, and began the aqueduct at Athens which was completed by his successor. But this was only one of his many Athenian improvements. His affection for Athens, where he lived as a Greek among Greeks and had held the office of Archon Eponymos, like Domitian, led him to assign the revenues of Cephalonia to the Athenian treasury, to regulate the oil-trade, that important branch of Attic commerce, his edict about which may still be read on the gate of Athena Archegetis, to repair the theatre of Dionysos, and to present the city with a Pantheon, a library, contained within the Stoa which still bears his name and of which part is still standing, and a gymnasium. He also built there a temple of Hera, and completed that of Zeus Olympios, which had been begun by Peisistratos more than six centuries before and had provided Sulla with spoil. The still standing columns of this magnificent building formed the nucleus of the “new Athens,” which he founded outside “the old city of Theseus,” and to which the Arch of Hadrian, as the inscriptions upon it show, was intended as the entrance. With another of his foundations, the temple of Zeus Panhellenios, was connected the institution of the Panhellenic festival, which represented the unity of the Greek race and, like the more ancient games, had a religious basis. Hadrian called into existence a synod of “Panhellenes,” composed of members of the Greek communities on both sides of the Ægean, who met at Athens and whose treasurer was styled “Hellenotamias,” or “steward of the Hellenes”—a title borrowed from the classical Confederacy of Delos. In name, indeed, the golden age of Athens seemed to have returned, and the enthusiastic Athenians heaped one honour after another upon the head of the great Philhellene. They adored him as a god, and the President of the Panhellenic synod became his priest; his statues rose all over the city, his name was bestowed upon one of the months, a thirteenth tribe was formed and called after him, and the thirteen wedges of the repaired theatre of Dionysos contained each a bust of Hadrian; even an unworthy favourite of the Emperor was dubbed a deity with the same ease that we convert a charitable tradesman into a peer.

Hadrian’s two immediate successors continued his Philhellenic policy. Antoninus Pius erected new buildings for the use of the visitors to that fashionable health-resort, the Hieron of Epidauros; and in graceful recognition of the legend, according to which the founders of the first settlement on the Palatine were emigrants from Pallantion in Arkadia, raised that village to the rank of a city, with the privileges of self-government and immunity from taxes. Marcus Aurelius seemed to have realised the Utopian ideal of Plato, that philosophers should be kings or kings philosophers. The Imperial author of the _Meditations_ wrote in Greek, had sat at the feet of Greek teachers, and greatly admired the products of the Greek intellect. But his reign was disturbed by warlike alarms, and it is noteworthy that at this period the first of those barbarian tribes from the North, which inflicted so much injury upon Greece in later centuries, penetrated into that country. The Greeks showed, however, that they had not in the long years of peace, forgotten how to defend themselves. At Elateia the Kostobokes—such was the name of the marauders—received a check from a local force and withdrew beyond the frontier[13]. In spite of his distant campaigns, Marcus Aurelius found time to visit Athens, restored the temple at Eleusis, was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries, and founded in 176 the Athenian University. It was, indeed, the heyday of Academic life, and Athens was under the Antonines the happy hunting-ground of professors, who received salaries from the Imperial exchequer, and enjoyed the privilege of exemption from costly public duties. One of their number, Herodes Atticus of Marathon, has, by his splendid gifts to the city, perpetuated his fame to our own time. His vast wealth, united to his renown as a professor of rhetoric, not only made him the most prominent man in Athens, where he held the post of President of the new Panhellenic synod, but gained him the Roman consulship, the friendship of Hadrian, and the honour of instructing the early years of Marcus Aurelius. When Verus, the colleague of the latter in the Imperial dignity, visited Athens, it was as the guest of the sophist of Marathon; when the University was founded, it was Herodes who selected the professors. The charm of his villas at Kephisia, then, as now, the suburban pleasaunce of the dust-choked Athenians, and in his native village, has been extolled by one of his pupils, while the Odeion which still bears his name was erected by him to the memory of his second wife[14]. He also restored the Stadion, which had been built by Lykourgos about five centuries earlier, and within its precincts his body was interred. There still exist remains of his temple of Fortune, a goddess of whom he had varied experiences. For his vast wealth and the sense of their own inferiority caused the Athenians to revile their benefactor, and as many of them owed him money, he was naturally regarded as their enemy until his death. Many other Greek cities benefited by his liberality; he built a theatre at Corinth and restored the bathing establishment at Thermopylæ; and he was even accused of making life too easy for his fellow-countrymen because he provided Olympia with pure water by means of an aqueduct, of which the Exedra is still visible.