The real embodiment of this poetically transfigured conception of life is Plutarch of Chaeronea, one of the most charming, most fully informed, and withal most effective writers of antiquity. Sprung from a family of means in that small Boeotian country-town, and introduced to the full Hellenic culture, first at home and then at Athens and at Alexandria; familiar, moreover, with Roman affairs through his studies and manifold personal relations, as well as by his travels in Italy, he disdained to enter into the service of the state or to adopt the professional career after the usual manner of gifted Greeks; he remained faithful to his home, enjoying domestic life, in the finest sense of the word, with his excellent wife and his children, and with his friends, male and female; contenting himself with the offices and honours which his own Boeotia was able to offer to him, and with the moderate property which he had inherited. In this Chaeronean the contrast between the Hellenes and the Hellenised finds expression; such a type of Greek life was not possible in Smyrna or in Antioch; it belonged to the soil like the honey of Hymettus. There are men enough of more powerful talents and of deeper natures, but hardly any second author has known in so happy a measure how to reconcile himself serenely to necessity, and how to impress upon his writings the stamp of his tranquillity of spirit and his blessedness of life. [Sidenote: Misgovernment of the provincial administration.] The self-mastery of Hellenism cannot manifest itself in the field of public life with the purity and beauty which it presents in the quiet homestead, after which history happily does not inquire any more than it inquires after history. When we turn to public affairs, there is more to be told of misrule than of rule, both as regards the Roman government and the Greek autonomy. There was no want of goodwill on the part of the former, in so far as Roman Philhellenism dominated the imperial period even much more decidedly than the republican. It expresses itself everywhere in great matters as in small, in the prosecution of the Hellenising of the Eastern provinces and the recognition of a double official language for the empire, as well as in the courteous forms in which the government dealt, and enjoined its officials to deal, even with the pettiest Greek community.[175] Nor did the emperors fail to favour this province with gifts and buildings; and, though most things of this sort came to Athens, Hadrian at any rate constructed a great aqueduct for the benefit of Corinth, and Pius the hospital at Epidaurus. But the considerate treatment of the Greeks in general, and the special kindness which was shown by the imperial government to Hellas proper, because it was accounted in a certain sense as, like Italy, "motherland," did not redound to the true benefit either of the government or of the country. The annual changes of the chief magistrates, and the remiss control of the