[5] Καὶ περὶ πολέμου δὲ καὶ εἰρήνης καὶ συμμαχίας ἐβουλεύοντο πρότερον, νῦν δ' οὐκ εἰκὸς, ἀλλ' ἐπὶ τοῖς Ῥωμαίοις ταῦτ' ἀνάγκη κεῖσθαι, πλὴν εἰ ἐκείνων ἐπιτρεψάντων ἢ ὑπὲρ αὐτῶν εἴη χρήσιμον. That is to say, the right had never been formally taken away; only it practically could not be exercised. [6] In writing this article I have had several times in my thoughts a controversy on “Home Rule under the Roman Empire,” which will be found in two numbers of _Macmillan’s Magazine_ for November 1882 and March 1883. This controversy is instructive in many ways, specially as showing how utterly, and how contentedly, large parts of Roman history and Roman literature may be passed by, even by a scholar who enjoys a high repute in other branches of those subjects. The comparison between the Lykian League and the city of London comes from the second of the two articles. Its author could hardly have read the description of the League in Strabo. The Lykian League, as embracing a considerable territory, has, from its geographical side, more in common with the kingdoms and principalities which lived on under Roman vassalage, than with the single city-commonwealths which supply the examples which most naturally occur to us. It must have been beyond the power of any single proconsul in a peaceful time seriously to interfere with the liberties of Lykia. It is true that the federal states of Greece still lived on for Pausanias to see them at work; and two generations earlier the sacred convocation of the Amphiktyons had drawn a new life from the measure of redistribution ordained by the Emperor Augustus.[7] But we may be sure that no confederation of old Greece kept anything like such a measure of political life as that which Strabo saw at work in Lykia. What little life there still was in the Greek world abode in the single cities, and there was doubtless more life among the Greek cities of Asia than in those of old Greece. Of Lykia in Strabo’s day we have only Strabo’s general description; we have no detailed illustrations of the working of the political system; least of all have we any speeches, any letters, any political treatises, either from Lykian orators or philosophers or from Roman magistrates who had dealings with the Lykian League or its cities. Let us leap on to the age of Trajan, and we shall find that that age is rich in materials for the political life of the Achaian and Bithynian provinces and of the free cities which lay within their geographical boundaries. We have four highly instructive contemporary writers, two Greek and two Latin, one of the latter being the renowned Emperor himself. We have from Plutarch a treatise on the duties of a Greek statesman of his day. We have from Diôn Chrysostom several speeches actually delivered in the assemblies of Greek cities in the reign of Trajan. We have the correspondence of Trajan himself with the younger Pliny when Pliny was proconsul of Bithynia. We thus