A Roman city had never been founded in this way; this was the _synoekismos_ of the successors of Alexander. Quite in the same way had king Cassander constituted the Macedonian towns Thessalonica and Cassandreia, Demetrius Poliorcetes the Thessalian town Demetrias, and Lysimachus the town of Lysimachia on the Thracian Chersonese out of a number of surrounding townships divested of their independence. In keeping with the Greek character of the foundation Nicopolis was, according to the intention of its founder, to become a Greek city on a great scale.[192] It obtained freedom and autonomy like Athens and Sparta, and was intended, as already stated, to wield the fifth part of the votes in the Amphictiony representing all Hellas, and to do so, like Athens, without alternating with other towns (p. 254). This new Actian shrine of Apollo was erected quite after the model of Olympia, with a quadriennial festival, which even bore the name of "Olympia" alongside of its own, had equal rank and equal privileges, and even its Actiads as the former had its Olympiads;[193] the town of Nicopolis stood related to it like the town of Elis to the Olympian temple.[194] Everything properly Italian was carefully avoided in the erection of the town as well as in the religious arrangements, however natural it might be to mould after the Roman fashion the "city of victory" so intimately associated with the founding of the empire. Whoever considers the arrangements of Augustus in Hellas in this connection, and especially this remarkable corner-stone, will not be able to resist the conviction that Augustus believed that a reorganisation of Hellas under the protection of the Roman principate was practicable, and wished to carry it out. The locality at least was well chosen for it, as at that time, before the foundation of Patrae, there was no larger city on the whole Greek west coast. But what Augustus may have hoped for at the commencement of his sole rule, he did not attain, and perhaps even subsequently abandoned, when he gave to Patrae the form of a Roman colony. Nicopolis remained, as the extensive ruins and the numerous coins show, comparatively populous and flourishing;[195] but its citizens do not appear to have taken a prominent part in commerce and manufactures or otherwise. Northern Epirus, which, like the adjoining Illyricum bordering on Macedonia, was in greater part inhabited by Albanian tribes and was not placed under Nicopolis, continued during the imperial period in its primitive condition, which still subsists in some measure at the present day. "Epirus and Illyricum," says Strabo, "are in great part a desert; where men are found, they dwell in villages and in ruins of earlier towns; even the oracle of Dodona,"--laid waste in the Mithradatic war by the Thracians (iii. 312) {iii. 296.},--"is extinct like everything else."[196] * * * * * [Sidenote: Thessaly.]