While the imperial rule in its whole wide range encountered the devastations of a twenty years' civil war, and in many places its consequences were never entirely healed, probably no domain was so severely affected by them as the Greek peninsula. Fate had so arranged, that the three great decisive battles of this epoch--Pharsalus, Philippi, Actium--were fought on its soil or on its coast; and the military operations, which with both parties led up to these battles, had here above all demanded their sacrifices of human life and human happiness. Even Plutarch was told by his great-grandfather how the officers of Antonius had compelled the citizens of Chaeronea, when they no longer possessed slaves or beasts of burden, to drag their last grain on their own shoulders to the nearest port to be shipped for the army; and how thereupon, just as the second convoy was about to depart, the accounts of the battle of Actium arrived as glad news of relief. The first thing that Caesar did after the victory was to distribute the enemy's stores of grain that had fallen into his power among the famishing population of Greece. This heaviest measure of suffering fell upon a specially weak power of resistance. Already, more than a century before the battle of Actium, Polybius had stated that unfruitfulness in marriage and diminution of the population had in his time come over all Greece, without any diseases or severe wars befalling the land. Now these scourges had emerged in fearful fashion; and Greece remained desolate for all time to come. Plutarch thinks that throughout the Roman empire the population had fallen off in consequence of the devastating wars, but most of all in Greece, which was not now in a position to furnish from the better circles of the citizens the 3000 hoplites, with which once the smallest of the Greek districts, Megara, had fought at Plataeae.[168] Caesar and Augustus had attempted to remedy this depopulation, which alarmed even the government, by the despatch of Italian colonists, and, in fact, the two most flourishing towns of Greece were these very colonies; the later governments did not repeat such consignments. The background to the charming Euboean peasant-idyll of Dio of Prusa is formed by a depopulated town, in which numerous houses stand empty, flocks are fed at the council-hall and at the city register-house, two-thirds of the territory lie untilled for want of hands; and when the narrator reports this as falling within his own experience, he therewith assuredly describes not unaptly the circumstances of numerous small Greek country towns in the time of Trajan. "Thebes in Boeotia," says Strabo in the Augustan age, "is now hardly to be termed even a goodly village, and the same holds true of all the Boeotian towns, with the exception of Tanagra and Thespiae." But not merely did men dwindle away as regards number; the type also declined. "There are doubtless still beautiful