ession, the best regulated public
or private economy could not but succumb to them, and the most
unspeakable misery could not but extend over all the nations
from the Tagus to the Euphrates. "All the communities," it is said
in a treatise published as early as 684, "are ruined"; the same truth
is specially attested as regards Spain and Narbonese Gaul,
the very provinces which, comparatively speaking, were still
in the most tolerable economic position. In Asia Minor even towns
like Samos and Halicarnassus stood almost empty; legal slavery
seemed here a haven of rest compared with the torments to which
the free provincial succumbed, and even the patient Asiatic had become,
according to the descriptions of Roman statesmen themselves,
weary of life. Any one who desires to fathom the depths to which man
can sink in the criminal infliction, and in the no less criminal
endurance, of all conceivable injustice, may gather together
from the criminal records of this period the wrongs which Roman grandees
could perpetrate and Greeks, Syrians, and Phoenicians could suffer.
Even the statesmen of Rome herself publicly and frankly conceded
that the Roman name was unutterably odious through all Greece
and Asia; and, when the burgesses of the Pontic Heraclea on one occasion
put to death the whole of the Roman tax-collectors, the only matter
for regret was that such things did not occur oftener.

Caesar and the Provinces

The Optimates scoffed at the new master who went in person
to inspect his "farms" one after the other; in reality the condition
of the several provinces demanded all the earnestness and all the wisdom
of one of those rare men, who redeem the name of king from being regarded
by the nations as merely a conspicuous example of human insufficiency.
The wounds inflicted had to be healed by time; Caesar took care
that they might be so healed, and that there should be
no fresh inflictions.

The Caesarian Magistrates

The system of administration was thoroughly remodelled.
The Sullan proconsuls and propraetors had been in their provinces
essentially sovereign and practically subject to no control;
those of Caesar were the well-disciplined servants of a stern master,
who from the very unity and life-tenure of his power sustained
a more natural and more tolerable relation to the subjects
than those numerous, annually changing, petty tyrants. The governorships
were no doubt still distributed among the annually-retiring two