republic. … 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 characterised by a love of justice, and that the Roman magistrates were far less venal than the Greeks. … 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. … 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. … For sixty years after the conquest of Achaia, the Greeks remained docile subjects of Rome. … 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. … See MITHRIDATIC WARS; and ATHENS: B. C. 87-86. Both parties, during the Mithridatic war, inflicted severe injuries on Greece. … 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." _G. Finlay, Greece under the Romans, chapter 1._ "Scarcely had the storm of Roman war passed by, when the Cilician pirates, finding the coasts of Greece peculiarly favorable for their marauding incursions, and tempted by the wealth accumulated in the cities and temples, commenced their depredations on so gigantic a scale that Rome felt obliged to put forth all her military forces for their suppression. The exploits of Pompey the Great, who was clothed with autocratic power to destroy this gigantic evil, fill the brightest chapter in the history of that celebrated but too unfortunate commander. … See CILICIA, PIRATES OF. The civil wars in which the great Republic expired had the fields of Greece for their theatre. Under the tramp of contending armies, her fertile plains were desolated, and Roman blood, in a cause not her own; again and again moistened her soil. See ROME: B. C. 48, 44-42, and 31.