We have already traced the process by which old Greece and the neighbouring lands of Macedonia and Epeiros gradually sank, first practically, and then formally, into parts of the Roman dominion. It would be hard to say at what particular moment many of the Greek cities and islands sank from the relation of obedient allies into that of acknowledged subjects. ♦Their late formal annexation.♦ We have seen that some of them, as Rhodes and Byzantion, were not formally annexed till the reign of Vespasian. The Greek cities on the Euxine do not seem to have been formally annexed at all till a late period of the Eastern Empire. Other outlying Greek lands and cities became so mixed up with the history of some of the Asiatic kingdoms that they will come in for a mention along with them. ♦Conquest of Crete, B.C. 67,♦ _Crete_ kept its independence to become a nest of pirates, and to be specially conquered. It then formed one province with the then recent conquest of _Kyrênê_, the one great Greek settlement in Africa, which had become an appanage of the Macedonian kings of Egypt. The same had been the fate of _Cyprus_, an island which had always been partly Greek, and which had been further Hellenized under its Macedonian kings. ♦of Cyprus, B.C. 58.♦ Cyprus too became a province. Thus, before Rome lost her own freedom, she had become the formal or practical mistress of all the earlier abodes of freedom. Men could not yet foresee that a time would come when _Greek_ and _Roman_ should be words having the same meaning, and when the place and name of Rome herself should be transferred to one of the Greek cities which Vespasian formally reduced from alliance to bondage. ♦The Asiatic Provinces.♦