The bane of Hellenic existence lay in the limitation of its sphere; high ambition lacked a corresponding aim, and therefore the low and degrading ambition flourished luxuriantly. Even in Hellas there was no lack of native families of great wealth and considerable influence.[183] The country was doubtless on the whole poor, but there were houses of extensive possessions and old-established prosperity. In Sparta, for example, that of Lachares occupied, from Augustus down at least to the time of Hadrian, a position which in point of fact was not far removed from that of a prince. Antonius had caused Lachares to be put to death for exaction. Thereupon his son Eurycles was one of the most decided partisans of Augustus, and one of the bravest captains in the decisive naval battle, who had almost made the conquered general personally a captive; he received from the victor, among other rich gifts as private property, the island of Cythera (Cerigo). Later he played a prominent and hazardous part not merely in his native land, over which he must have exercised a permanent presidency, but also at the courts of Jerusalem and Caesarea, to which the respect paid to a Spartiate by the Orientals contributed not a little. For that reason brought to trial several times at the bar of the emperor, he was at length condemned and sent into exile; but death seasonably withdrew him from the consequences of the sentence, and his son Lacon came into the property, and substantially also, though in a more cautious form, into the position of power of his father. The family of the often-mentioned Herodes had a similar standing in Athens; we can trace it going back through four generations to the time of Caesar, and confiscation was decreed, just as over the Spartan Eurycles, over the grandfather of Herodes on account of his exorbitant position of power in Athens. The enormous landed estates which the grandson possessed in his poor native country, the extensive spaces applied for the sake of erecting tombs for his boy-favourites, excited the indignation even of the Roman governors. It may be presumed that there were powerful families of this sort in most districts of Hellas, and, while they as a rule decided matters at the diet of the province, they were not without connections and influence even in Rome. But although those legal bars, which excluded the Gaul and the Alexandrian even after obtaining the franchise from the imperial senate, hardly stood in the way of those Greeks of rank, but on the contrary the political and military career which offered itself to the Italian likewise stood open in law to the Hellenes, these in point of fact entered only at a late period and to a limited extent into the service of the state; partly, doubtless, because the Roman government of the earlier imperial period reluctantly admitted the Greeks as foreigners, partly because these themselves shunned the translation to Rome that was associated with entrance on