the Furies, whose fabled shrine was beneath the Areopagos[11]. The civil war, which raged in Italy between the death of Nero and the accession of Vespasian, had little influence upon Greece, except that it gave an adventurer, who bore a striking resemblance to the late Emperor and shared his musical tastes, the opportunity of personating him. But this pretender, who had made himself master of the island of Kythnos, was soon suppressed[12], and Vespasian, as he visited Greece on his way from the East to Rome, could calmly study the condition of that country. The stern old soldier, who, in spite of his Greek culture, had fallen asleep during Nero’s recitations, had no sympathy with Greek antiquities, and maintained that the Hellenes did not know how to use their newly-restored freedom, which had involved the impoverished Roman exchequer in the loss of the Greek taxes. He accordingly restored the organisation and fiscal arrangements which had been in force before Nero’s proclamation, only that the province of Achaia under the Flavian dynasty no longer included Thessaly, Epeiros, and Akarnania. For a long time Greece had no political history; but we know that Domitian, like Tiberius, was as considerate towards the provincials as he was tyrannical to the Roman nobles; that he cherished a special cult for the goddess Athena; and that he deigned to allow himself to be nominated as Archon Eponymos of Athens for the year 93—an instance which shows the continuance of an institution which had been founded nearly eight centuries earlier. Trajan’s direct connection with Greece was limited to a stay at Athens on the way to the Parthian war, but he counted among his friends the most celebrated Greek author of that age, the famous Plutarch, who passed a great part of his time in the small Bœotian town of Chaironeia, where his so-called “chair,” obviously the end seat of one of the rows in the theatre, may still be seen in the little church. Like Polybios in the first period of the Roman conquest, Plutarch served as a link to unite the Greeks and their masters. At once an Hellenic patriot and an admirer of Rome, he combined love of the past independence of his country with a shrewd sense of the advantages of Roman rule in the existing circumstances. True, the Greece of his time was very different from that of the Golden Age. While the single city of Megara had sent 3000 heavy armed men to the battle of Platæa, the whole province of Achaia could not raise a larger number in his days. Depopulation was going on apace; Eubœa was almost desolate, and the inland towns of the mainland were mostly losing their trade, which was gravitating to the coasts. The expenditure of the Greek taxes at Rome led to the want of funds for public objects, and the Roman system of making immunity from taxation a principle of Roman citizenship divided the Greeks into two classes, the rich and the poor. The former led luxurious