The last emperor of the Claudian house, one of the race of spoiled poets and so far at all events a born Philhellene, went further than Augustus had gone in this direction. In gratitude for the recognition which his artistic contributions had met with in the native land of the Muses, Nero, like Titus Flamininus formerly (ii. 262) {ii. 247.}--and that once more in Corinth at the Isthmian games--declared the Greeks collectively to be rid of Roman government, free from tribute, and, like the Italians, subject to no governor. At once there arose throughout Greece movements, which would have been civil wars, if these people could have achieved anything more than brawling; and after a few months Vespasian re-established the provincial constitution,[159] so far as it went, with the dry remark that the Greeks had unlearned the art of being free. [Sidenote: Rights of the freed towns.] The legal position of the communities set free remained in substance the same as under the republic. They retained, so far as Roman burgesses were not in question, the full control of justice; only, the general enactments as to appeals to the emperor on the one hand and to the senatorial authorities on the other seem to have also included the free towns.[160] Above all, they retained full self-determination and self-administration. Athens, for example, exercised in the imperial period the right of coinage, without even putting the emperor's head on its coins, and even on Spartan coins of the first imperial period it is frequently wanting. In Athens even the old reckoning by _drachmae_ and _oboli_ continued; only that, it is true, the local Attic _drachma_ of this period was nothing but small money current on the spot, and as to value circulated as _obolus_ of the Attic imperial _drachma_ or of the Roman _denarius_. Even the formal exercise of the right of war and peace was in individual treaties granted to such states.[161] Numerous institutions quite at variance with the Italian municipal organisation remained in existence, such as the annual change of the members of council and the daily allowance-moneys of these and the jurymen, which, at least at Rhodes, were still paid in the imperial period. As a matter of course, the Roman government nevertheless exercised continuously a regulative influence over the constitution even of the freed communities. Thus, for example, the Athenian constitution was, whether at the end of the republic or by Caesar or Augustus, modified in such a way that the right of bringing a proposal before the burgesses belonged no longer to every burgess, but, as according to the Roman arrangement, only to definite officials; and among the great number of officials, who were mere figures, the conduct of business was placed in the hands of a single one--the _Strategos_. Certainly in this way various further reforms were carried out, the presence of which, in dependent as in independent Greece, we everywhere discern, without being able