get two sides of the picture. We see how things looked in the eyes of two literary Greeks, one of whom to be sure was bound to make the best of things and to make his rhetoric as acceptable as he could to his Greek hearers. We see also how things looked in the eyes of two official Romans, an Emperor and a proconsul who were among the best of their several classes, but whose very virtues laid them open to one special temptation. Both Trajan and Pliny loathed oppression and wrong of every kind, and they sincerely sought the welfare of all for whose welfare they were responsible. But for that very reason they were more likely to be led to constant meddling with the affairs of their subjects than rulers who might now and then be guilty of some gross piece of tyranny, but who for the most part left people alone in the time between one act of oppression and another. The colouring on the Greek and on the Roman side is very different; but the main outlines are the same in both pictures. In both cases we see cities which keep much--which in some cases keep everything--of the outward show of free commonwealths, but which do not dare to exercise their powers, even in very small matters, without the knowledge and good will of the Roman prince or his local representative. [7] See History of Federal Government, i. 136. The political treatise of the wise and kindly Plutarch[8] is one which cannot be read without sadness. To a Greek, a Bœotian, living in a land which had once been so great and which was so utterly fallen, the contrast between what had been and what was came more keenly home than it could come to his Asiatic contemporary. The cities of Diôn’s native Bithynia had never been so great in the past, and they were far more prosperous in the present, than the cities for whose would-be statesmen and orators the sage of Chairôneia had to give rules. But in both writers we find things looked at from the same general point of view. Local independence is assumed as the state of things which exists at least in theory. We read page after page of both Plutarch and Diôn without any hint that the commonwealths of which they were speaking had any superior beyond their own walls. Both write in a way in which no one would write for the instruction of a newly-chosen town-councillor in a modern state. It is for parliaments, not for town-councils, that the whole language is fitted. But ever and anon we come to some passage which shows us that the parliaments with which we are dealing are parliaments working in fetters, parliaments which can practically do nothing without the approval of a foreign superior. In our own land we find the nearest parallel in ecclesiastical bodies, and the likeness is increased by the fact that the range within which the Greek assemblies of that day were most active was that which concerned religious worship and that large class of subjects which in Greek ideas were connected with religious worship. A Convocation