But the administration of the provinces in the last century of the Roman Republic often pressed very heavily upon the unfortunate provincials. Even after making due deduction for professional exaggeration from the charges brought by Cicero against extortionate governors, there remains ample evidence of their exactions. The notorious Verres, the scourge of Sicily, though he only passed through Greece, levied blackmail upon Sikyon and plundered the treasury of the Parthenon, and bad governors of Macedonia, like Caius Antonius and Piso, had greater opportunities for making money at the expense of the Greeks. As Juvenal complained at a later period, even when these scoundrels were brought to justice on their return home, their late province gained nothing by their punishment, and Caius Antonius, in exile on Cephalonia, treated that island as if it were his private property. The Roman money-lenders had begun, too, to exploit the financial necessities of the Greeks, and even so ardent a Philhellene as Cicero’s correspondent, Atticus, who owed his name to his long sojourn at Athens and to his interest in everything Attic, lent money to the people of Sikyon on such ruinous terms that they had to sell their pictures to pay off the debt. Athens, deprived of her commercial resources since the siege by Sulla, resorted to the sale of her coveted citizenship, much as some modern States sell titles, and subsisted mainly on the reputation of her schools of philosophy. It became the fashion for young Romans of promise to study there; thus Cicero spent six months there and revisited the city on his way to and from his Cilician governorship, and Horace tells us that he tried “to seek the truth among the groves of Academe[5].” Others resorted to Greece for purposes of travel or health, and the hellebore of Antikyra (now Aspra Spitia) on the Corinthian Gulf and the still popular baths of Ædepsos in Eubœa were fashionable cures in good Roman society. Moreover, a tincture of Greek letters was considered to be part of the education of a Roman gentleman. Cicero constantly uses Greek phrases in his correspondence, and Latin poets borrowed most of their plumes from Greek literature.