[Footnote 283: This was soon withdrawn by Vespasian, but apparently with circumspection. In the first century A.C. the administration seems to have been unoppressive (Mahaffy, _Greek World_, pp. 233, 237).] [Footnote 284: Hertzberg (_Gesch. Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der Römer_, Th. ii, Kap. 2, p. 189) rejects the statement of Finlay that Greece reached the lowest degree of misery and depopulation under the Flavian emperors ("about the time of Vespasian" is the first expression in the revised ed. i, 80). But Finlay contradicts himself: cp. p. 66. Hertzberg again (iii, 116) speaks of a "furchtbar zunehmende sociale Noth des dritten Jahrhunderts" at Athens, without making the fact clear. See below.] [Footnote 285: This is noted by Finlay (i, 143) in regard to the later surrender of a large Mesopotamian territory by Jovian to Shapur II, when the whole Greek population of the ceded districts was forced to emigrate.] [Footnote 286: Cp. Finlay, i, 264, 267-69.] [Footnote 287: Finlay, i, 141. See p. 142 as to the recognition of the military importance of Greece by Julian.] [Footnote 288: Cp. Finlay, i, 161. as to the ruin wrought at the end of the fourth century by Alaric; and pp. 253, 297, 303, 316, as to that wrought in the sixth century by Huns, Sclavonians, and Avars.] [Footnote 289: Sôtêriaotai is one of the group-names preserved.] [Footnote 290: They are already seen established in the laws of Solon.] [Footnote 291: Foucart, _Des associations religieuses chez les Grecs_, 1873, pp. 5-10.] [Footnote 292: They may have begun as early as the Peloponnesian war (Foucart, p. 66).] [Footnote 293: Finlay, i, 85-86, _notes_.] [Footnote 294: _Id._ i, 289.] [Footnote 295: _Id._ p. 309; cp. pp. 328, 329.] [Footnote 296: A fair idea of the facts may be had by combining the narratives of Gibbon, Finlay, and Mr. Oman (_The Byzantine Empire_, ch. x). Gibbon and Mr. Oman ignore the threat to make Carthage the capital; Gibbon ignores the point as to the stoppage of the grain supply; Finlay ignores the Church loan; Mr. Oman (p. 133) represents it as voluntary, whereas Gibbon shows it to have been compulsory (ch. 46. Bohn ed. v, 179, _note_). Mr. Bury alone (_History of the Later Roman Empire_, 1889, ii, 217-21) gives a fairly complete view of the situation. He specifies a famine and a pestilence as following on the stoppage of the grain supply.] [Footnote 297: Finlay, i, 425.] [Footnote 298: _Id._ ii, 37.] [Footnote 299: Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, p. 12.] [Footnote 300: Oman, as cited, pp. 147, 148. The conventional claim, as made by Robertson and echoed by Guizot, was partly disallowed even by Milman, and countered by the clerical editor of the Bohn ed. of Gibbon (ii, 50-54). But such conventional formulas are always subject to resuscitation.]