central position, made all the senatorial provinces, so far as rule by governors went, feel rather the oppression than the blessing of unity of administration, and doubly so in proportion to their smallness and their poverty. Even under Augustus himself these evils prevailed to such a degree that it was one of the first acts of the reign of his successor to take Greece as well as Macedonia into his own power,[176] as it was alleged, temporarily, but in fact for the whole duration of his reign. It was very constitutional, but perhaps not quite so wise on the part of the emperor Claudius, when he came to power, that he re-established the old arrangement. Thenceforward the matter remained on this footing, and Achaia was administered by magistrates not nominated, but chosen by lot, till this form of administration fell altogether into abeyance. [Sidenote: Misgovernment of the free towns.] [Sidenote: Administration of Athens.] But the case was far worse with the communities of Greece exempted from the rule of the governor. The design of favouring these commonwealths--by freeing them from tribute and levy, and not less by the slightest possible restriction of the rights of the sovereign state--led at least in many cases to the opposite result. The intrinsic falseness of the institutions avenged itself. No doubt among the less privileged or better administered communities the communal autonomy may have fulfilled its aim; at least we do not learn that Sparta, Corinth, Patrae fared specially ill in this respect. But Athens was not made for self-administration, and affords the disheartening picture of a commonwealth pampered by the supreme power, and financially as well as morally ruined. By rights it ought to have found itself in a flourishing condition. If the Athenians were unsuccessful in uniting the nation under their hegemony, this city was the only one in Greece, as in Italy, which carried out completely the union of its territory: no city of antiquity elsewhere possessed a domain of its own, such as was Attica, of about 700 square miles, double the size of the island of Rügen. But even beyond Attica they retained what they possessed, as well after the Mithradatic war by favour of Sulla, as after the Pharsalian battle, in which they had taken the side of Pompeius, by the favour of Caesar--he asked them only how often they would still ruin themselves and trust to be saved by the renown of their ancestors. To the city there still belonged not merely the territory, formerly possessed by Haliartus, in Boeotia (ii. 329) {ii. 309}, but also on their own coast Salamis, the old starting-point of their dominion of the sea, and in the Thracian Sea the lucrative islands Scyros, Lemnos, and Imbros, as well as Delos in the Aegean; it is true this island, after the end of the republic, was no longer the central emporium of trade with the East, now that the traffic had been drawn away from it to the ports of the west coast of Italy, and this was an irreparable