the balance of their gilded arguments was so perfect that the original objection to Phrygia being given to any Eastern potentate was the only issue which could still be supported with conviction. Yet the government still declined to annex. Its hesitancy was probably due to its unwillingness to see a new Eastern province handed over to the equestrian tax-farmers, to whom Caius Gracchus had just given the province of Asia. The fall of Gracchus made an independent judgment by the people impossible, and, even had it been practicable for the Comitia to decide, their judgment must have been so perplexed by rival interests and arguments that they would probably have acquiesced in the equivocal decision of the senate. This decision was that Phrygia should be free.[550] It was to be open to the Roman capitalist as a trader, but not as a collector; it was not to be the scene of official corruption or regal aggrandisement. It was to be an aggregate of protected states possessing no central government of its own. Yet some central control was essential; and this was perhaps secured by attaching Phrygia to the province of Asia in the same loose condition of dependence in which Achaea had been attached to Macedonia. In one other particular the settlement of Aquillius was not final. We shall find that motives of maritime security soon forced Rome to create a province of Cilicia, and it seems that for this purpose a portion of the gift which had been just made to the kings of Cappadocia was subsequently resumed by Rome. The old Pergamene possessions in Western Cilicia were probably joined to some towns of Pamphylia to form the kernel of the new province. When Rome had divested herself of the superfluous accessories of her bequest, a noble residue still remained. Mysia, Lydia and Caria with their magnificent coast cities, rich in art, and inexhaustible in wealth, formed, with most of the islands off the coast,[551] that "corrupting" province which became the Favourite resort of the refined and the desperate resource of the needy. Its treasures were to add a new word to the Roman vocabulary of wealth;[552] its luxury was to give a new stimulus to the art of living and to add a new craving or two to the insatiable appetite for enjoyment; while the servility of its population was to create a new type of Roman ruler in the man who for one glorious year wielded the power of a Pergamene despot, without the restraint of kingly traditions or the continence induced by an assured tenure of rule.