D. 60.

[Picture: Decorative chapter heading]

After a time Macedon and Achaia were made by the Romans into provinces,
each of which had a governor who had been one year in a magistrate's
office at Rome, and then was sent out to rule in a province for three or
for five years.

In 146, nearly a hundred years after the ruin of Corinth, Julius Caesar
built it up again in great strength and beauty, and made it the capital
of Achaia. As it stood where the Isthmus was only six miles across, and
had a beautiful harbour on each side, travellers who did not wish to go
round the dangerous headlands of the Peloponnesus used to land on one
side and embark on the other. Thus Corinth become one of the great
stations for troops, and also a mart for all kinds of merchandise, and
was always full of strangers, both Greeks and Jews.

The Romans, as conquerors, had rights to be tried only by their own
magistrates and laws, and these laws were generally just. They were,
however, very hard on subject nations; and, therefore, the best thing
that could happen to a man was to be made a Roman citizen, and this was
always done to persons of rank, by way of compliment--sometimes to whole
cities.

[Picture: View from Corinth]

Athens had never had a great statesman or soldier in her since the time
of Phocion, but her philosophers and orators still went on discoursing in
the schools, and for four hundred years at least Athens was a sort of
university town, where the rich young men from Rome, Carthage,
Alexandria, Asia Minor, and Syria came to see the grand old buildings and
works of art, and to finish their education. For though the great men of
Greece were all dead, their works, both in stone and in writing, still
remained, and were the models of all the world, and their language was
spoken all over the East. The Romans' own tongue, Latin, was used at
home, of course, but every gentleman knew Greek equally well, and all the
Syrians, Jews, and Egyptians who had much intercourse with them used
Greek as the language sure to be known--much as French is now used all
over Europe.

But there was an answer coming to all those strainings and yearnings
after God and His truth which had made those old Greek writings
beautiful. There is a story that one night a ship's crew, passing near a
lonely island in the AEgean Sea, sacred to the gods, heard a great
wailing and crying aloud of spirit voices, exclaim