In my last lecture I strove to draw a picture of the Mediterranean lands at the moment when the Greek world, as the Greek world had been shaped by Macedonian conquest, a world of kingdoms, federations, and single cities, a busy and intricate system full of the deepest political lessons at every step, was suddenly startled by the invasion of a power from the West. That power had already slowly risen to the first place in its own Western world; it now sprang as in a moment to the first place in the East; but, having thus sprung to the first place, it was content to fall back on its former slow and piecemeal course. Generations had to pass away before the paramount influence in the Greek world which Rome won at a single grasp was fully changed into immediate dominion over every land and city to which its influence had spread. Very early in the second century B.C. Rome was already the paramount power in the Greek world. She had not a single province east of Hadria; but cities, confederations, kingdoms, all knew that she was practically their mistress. Late in the first century A.D. Rome had many provinces east of Hadria; her immediate dominion had become the rule, and even nominal independence was the exception; but there were still free Greek cities which Vespasian deemed it prudent to bring under his immediate dominion, and there were not a few other free Greek cities which Vespasian left to give Trajan an opportunity of respecting the faith of treaties. The first step in short was sudden and swift; every later step was slow; but the first step carried every later step with it as its necessary consequence. In the interval between the First and Second Punic Wars, Rome appeared east of the Hadriatic as the deliverer of Greek cities from the pirates of Illyricum. That was in truth the first step in that eastward march by which, five hundred and fifty years later, Rome herself, in her own person, followed in the wake of her dominion, and transferred her seat from the seven hills by the Tiber to the seven hills by the Bosporos. Or shall we say that the first step was taken at a far earlier time? The position of Rome as an Italian state, ruling over Greek allies and subjects, but in return deeply affected by Greek influences of every kind, had begun while Rome still dwelled in her own peninsula. Before she crossed the Hadriatic, she had begun to put on the character of that compound power, politically Roman, intellectually Greek, whose calling it was to leaven the world. The extension which was marked, in the later half of the third century, by the Roman alliance with Apollônia, Epidamnos, and Korkyra, was an extension only geographical. The ally or mistress, whichever name we choose, of Naples, Tarentum, and Syracuse, the undoubted mistress of the greater half of Sicily, had already begun to put on the character of a Greek power before she drew sword for or against any city of the elder Greece. Rome had entered the ranks of the _Hellênismos_ before