The work of the hundred and fifty years which were to pass before Rome came to obey the rule of a single man was largely to change this power of influence into a power of direct dominion, in a word to change allied and dependent states into subject provinces. Let us look again in the later years of that same second century. Italy has extended herself, if not in formal language, if not in legal right, yet in the common speech of men, over all the lands within the Alps. Gaul is now the land beyond the Alps where Rome, now protector of Massalia, has won a mighty province, a province binding together Italy and Spain, and keeping her old ally as it were in ward. Spain has largely become a Roman land; it has altogether become a Roman possession, save only those mountain districts which so many conquerors, each in turn, have found it so hard to conquer. Africa is a province; Carthage is a wilderness; Numidia and Mauretania are helpless dependencies. East of the Hadriatic, not a few lands and cities, Athens, Sparta, Rhodes, Byzantium, the wise confederates of Lykia, still keep their formal independence. But direct dominion has widely advanced; if not as yet actually the rule, yet it is the fate which has overwhelmed the greatest powers; the kingdom of Macedonia is now the province of Macedonia; the kingdom of Pergamon, so lately enlarged out of Seleukid spoils, is now the province of Asia; Achaia, with Corinth lying waste, is, whether formally a province or not, at least so utterly dependent as to make the question as to its political state a question merely formal. Syria, Egypt, all the kingdoms of Asia, must count as vassals of Rome. If absolute freedom lives on anywhere in the Mediterranean world, it is where freedom is the shame of Rome rather than her glory; the independence which Rhodes and Athens keep but in name is kept in all its fulness by the pirates of Crete and the pirates of Kilikia. * * * * *