It has already been remarked (p. 256) that the regions to the north of Hellas, Thessaly, and Macedonia, and at least from Trajan's time Epirus, were in the imperial period separated administratively from Greece. Of these the small Epirot province, which was administered by an imperial governor of the second rank, never recovered from the devastation to which it had been subjected in the course of the third Macedonian war (ii. 329) {ii. 309.}. The mountainous and poor interior possessed no city of note and a thinly-scattered population. Augustus had endeavoured to raise the not less desolated coast by the construction of two towns--by the completion of the colony of Roman citizens already resolved on by Caesar in Buthrotum overagainst Corcyra, which, however, attained no true prosperity, and by the founding of the Greek town Nicopolis, just at the spot where the headquarters had been stationed before the decisive battle of Actium, at the southernmost point of Epirus, about an hour and a half north of Prevesa, according to the design of Augustus, at once a permanent memorial of the great naval victory and the centre of a newly flourishing Hellenic life. This foundation was new in its kind as Roman.[191] The words of a contemporary Greek poet, which we quote below, simply express what Augustus here did; he united the whole surrounding territory, southern Epirus, the opposite region of Acarnania with the island of Leucas, and even a portion of Aetolia into one urban domain, and transferred the inhabitants still left in the decaying townships there existing to the new city of Nicopolis, opposite to which on the Acarnanian shore the old temple of the Actian Apollo was magnificently renewed and enlarged. [Sidenote: Its character and privileges.]