Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/372

342 shown to Livia when she fled there with her former husband, it was still debarred from the harbour town of Gytheium, and remained quite insignificant. Athens was, on the other hand, deliberately depressed as far as political interests were concerned, for it was deprived of Aegina and Eretria and of one of the few sources of revenue still left it—the sale of its citizenship. The next year was spent by Augustus in regulating the Asiatic provinces, especially Bithynia.

From henceforth these countries shared in the advantages which the imperial régime created—by the increased check upon the tyranny and rapacity of provincial governors, the facility of appeal to the Emperor, and the greater security that their complaints would be fairly considered. To the provincials the Emperor was not the despot which he appeared to certain classes at Rome, but their protector and support. Honours are therefore everywhere paid to him, or his family, or his responsible ministers. To this inscriptions give witness in every direction, as at Ilium to Agrippa, at Delos to Caesar's daughter Julia, at Hypata in Thessaly to his adopted son, Gaius. The one condition of favour, however, was order and loyalty. Samos was granted libertas in honour of his long residence in the island, but Cyzicus was deprived of the same privilege for having beaten and executed certain Roman citizens, as Tyre and Sidon incurred the same penalty by political disorders. The alarm of the magistrates at Philippi when told that St. Paul was a Roman citizen, and of the town clerk of Ephesus when there was an uproar in the theatre, vividly illustrate this cardinal