Hand in hand with the ritual union of the European Greeks went the administrative breaking up of the Graeco-Macedonian governorship of the republic. It did not depend on the partition of the imperial administration between emperor and senate, as this whole territory and not less the adjacent Danubian regions were assigned in the original partition to the senate; as little did military considerations here intervene, seeing that the whole peninsula up to the frontier of Thrace was--as protected partly by this region, partly by the garrisons on the Danube--always reckoned to belong to the pacified interior. If the Peloponnesus and the Attico-Boeotian mainland obtained at that time its own proconsul and was separated from Macedonia--which perhaps Caesar may have already designed--it may be presumed that in that course, along with the general tendency not to magnify the senatorial governorships the dominant consideration was that of separating the purely Hellenic domain from what was half-Hellenic. The boundary of the province of Achaia was at first Oeta, and, even after the Aetolians were subsequently attached to it,[149] it did not go beyond the Achelous and Thermopylae. [Sidenote: The Greek towns under the Roman republic.] These arrangements concerned the country as a whole. We turn now to the position which was given to the several urban communities under the Roman rule. The original design of the Romans--to attach the whole of the Greek urban communities to their own commonwealth, in a way similar to what had been done with the Italian--had undergone essential restrictions, in consequence of the resistance which these arrangements met with, especially in consequence of the insurrection of the Achaean league in the year 608 (iii. 47) {iii. 45.}, and of the falling away of most of the Greek towns to king Mithradates in the year 666 (iii. 313) {iii. 297.}. The city-leagues, the foundation of all development of power in Hellas as in Italy, and at first accepted by the Romans, were all of them--particularly the most important, the Peloponnesian, or, as it called itself, the Achaean--broken up, and the several cities were admonished to regulate their own public affairs. Moreover certain general rules were laid down by the leading power for the several communal constitutions, and according to this scheme these were reorganised in an anti-democratic sense. It was only within these limits that the individual community retained autonomy and a magistracy of its own. It retained also its own courts; but the Greek stood at the same time _de jure_ under the rods and axes of the praetor, and at least could be sentenced--on account of any offence which admitted of being regarded as rebellion against the leading power--by the Roman officials to a money-fine or banishment, or even capital punishment.[150] The communities taxed themselves; but they had throughout to pay to Rome a definite sum, on the whole, apparently, not on a high scale.