As regards the scale of conducting such proceedings and the grossness of their forms the doings of the present day fall considerably behind those of the ancient world, as is natural, seeing that the seeming autonomy of the community, not sufficiently restrained by the idea of the State, bore unhindered sway in this domain, and the decreeing authorities throughout were the burgesses or the councils of petty towns. The consequences were pernicious on both sides; the municipal offices were given away more according to the ability to pay than according to the aptitude of the candidates; the banquets and largesses made the recipients none the richer, and often impoverished the donor; to the increased aversion for labour and the decay in the means of good families, this evil habit contributed its full share. The economy of the communities themselves also suffered severely under the spreading evil of adulation. No doubt the honours, with which the community thanked the individual benefactor, were measured in great part by the same rational principle of cheapness which governs at the present day similar decorative favours; and, when that was not the case, the benefactor frequently found himself ready, for example, personally to pay for the statue to be erected in his honour. But the same did not apply to the marks of honour which the community showed to foreigners of rank, above all to the governors and the emperors, and to the members of the imperial house. The tendency of the time to set value even on meaningless and enforced homage did not dominate the imperial court and the Roman senators so much as the circles of ambition in the petty town, but yet it did so in a very perceptible way; and, as a matter of course, the honours and the homage grew withal in the course of time through misuses to which they were put, and, further, in the same proportion as the worthlessness of the personages governing or taking part in the government. In this respect, as might be conceived, the supply of honours was always stronger than the demand for them, and those who correctly valued such marks of homage, in order to remain spared from it, were compelled to decline them, which seems to have been done often enough in individual cases,[187] but seldom with consistency--for Tiberius, the small number of statues erected to him may perhaps be recorded among his titles to honour. The disbursements for honorary memorials, which often went far beyond the simple statue, and for honorary embassies,[188] were a cancer, and became ever more so, in the municipal economy of all the provinces. But none perhaps expended uselessly sums so large in proportion to its slender ability to furnish them as the province of Hellas, the motherland of municipal honours as of rewards for the festal victor, and unexcelled at this period in one pre-eminence--that of menial humility and abject homage. [Sidenote: Trade and intercourse.]