to determine the time and occasion of the reform. Thus the right, or rather the wrong, of asylums, which, as survivals of a lawless period, had now become pious retreats for bad debtors and criminals, was certainly, if not set aside, at least restricted in this province also. The institution of _proxenia_--originally an appropriate arrangement, that may be compared to our foreign consulates, but politically dangerous through the bestowal of full civil rights and often also of the privilege of exemption from taxes on the friendly foreigner, especially considering the extent to which it was granted--was set aside by the Roman government, apparently only at the beginning of the imperial period; in room of which thereupon came, after the Italian fashion, the empty city-patronate, which did not come into contact with the system of taxation. Lastly, the Roman government, as wielding supreme sovereignty over these dependent republics just as over the client-princes, always regarded it as its right, and exercised the power, to cancel the free constitution in case of misuse, and to take the town into its own administration. But partly the sworn agreement, partly the powerlessness of these nominally allied states, gave to these treaties a greater stability than is discernible in the relation to the client-princes. [Sidenote: Diets of the Greek cities.] While the freed communities of Achaia retained their previous legal position under the empire, Augustus conferred on those communities of the province, in which freedom was not granted or possessed, a new and better legal position. As he had given to the Greeks of Europe a common centre in the reorganised Delphic Amphictiony, he allowed also all the towns of the province of Achaia, so far as they were placed under Roman administration, to constitute themselves as a collective union, and to meet annually in Argos, the most considerable town of non-free Greece, as a national assembly.[162] Thereby not merely was the Achaean league, dissolved after the Achaean war, reconstituted, but also the enlarged Boeotian union formerly mentioned (p. 259) was engrafted on it. Probably it was just by the laying together of these two domains that the demarcation of the province of Achaia was brought about. The new union of the Achaeans, Boeotians, Locrians, Phocians, Dorians, and Euboeans,[163] or, as it is usually designated like the province, the union of the Achaeans, presumably had rights neither more nor less than the other provincial diets of the empire. A certain control of the Roman officials must have been intended in the case, and for that reason the towns not placed under the proconsul, like Athens and Sparta, must have been excluded from it. This diet withal, like all similar ones, must have found the centre of its activity chiefly in the common _cultus_ embracing the whole land. But, while in the other provinces this _cultus_ of the land preponderantly attached itself