3
Mummius's Settlement of Greece
If the views presented in chapters 1-2 are sound, in order to assess properly the significance of the years 148-145 in the history of Roman power in the East we must focus our attention not on the dubious idea of "annexation" through the "creation" of provinces but on the specific, concrete realities of the settlement of the affairs of Macedonia and Greece. We have already surveyed what little there is to be known about the activities of Q. Caecilius Metellus in Macedonia; now we may turn to L. Mummius's settlement of Greece after the Achaean War, undistracted by the red herring of provincialization.[1] To what extent does the Mummian settlement represent a fundamental reorganization and restructuring of Greece's political forms? How far, on the other hand, does it follow in a now mature tradition of Roman settlements in the East, marked by the confiscation of booty, indemnifies, some territorial rearrangements, and a subsequent Roman withdrawal? As before, in pursuing these questions it is paramount to guard against straying beyond what our evidence actually tells us, or beyond the limits of its reliability, merely in order to hold on to cherished preconceptions or deeply ingrained interpretations.
Pausanias 7.16.9-10
The chief evidence for the arrangements of Mummius and the senatorial commission of ten is a passage from the survey of Achaean history in Pausanias's description of Greek antiquities, which dates to the second
century A.D. Since so much of what follows begins from this text, it must be quoted in full:
Mummius destroyed the walls of the cities that had taken the opposing side in the war, disarming the inhabitants, even before the Romans sent out commissioners. When the men who were to advise him arrived, he thereupon set about putting down democracies and appointing the magistrates according to a criterion of wealth. Tribute was assessed upon Greece, and the wealthy were prevented from holding property outside their states. The leagues of each ethnic group—the Achaean, the Phocian, Boeotian, and those of other parts of Greece—had all equally been dissolved. But not many years thereafter the Romans took pity upon Greece: they restored the traditional ethnic leagues and the right to hold property abroad, and they remitted the fine that Mummius had imposed on some. (He had ordered the Boeotians to pay 100 talents to the Heracleans and Euboeans, and the Achaeans 200 to the Lacedaemonians.) The Greeks received these indulgences from the Romans, but a Roman commander has been sent out to them from that time down to the present. The Romans refer to him as the commander of Achaea rather than of Greece because they took hold of Greece by overcoming the Achaeans, who were at that time the leaders of the Hellenic world.[2]
When giving historical background, Pausanias is more likely to be transmitting his own broad but unspecialized knowledge than reporting original research or faithfully paraphrasing a written source. The controversy as to whether his source for Achaean history was Polybius or some other historian will not, therefore, settle the question of the authority of the passage as a whole, since on any particular point Pausanias may be
introducing other material from memory—perhaps faultily.[3] We have already noted that Pausanias is blatantly wrong about one thing: that Roman commanders were sent out regularly to Greece henceforth.[4] This error compromises the entire passage, or rather warns us that each item must be judged on its own merits, by reference to what corroborating evidence may be available. Nor is it enough that the account Pausanias gives is broadly "credible"[5] —what would be more "credible," did we not possess contrary evidence, than that Roman commanders were sent regularly to Greece after 146? In particular, since the misstep regarding the presence of Roman commanders shows that Pausanias supposed that Greece became a province at this time, we must be especially wary of any item that may be derived from the same line of thought.
Tribute
The most likely example of a hasty judgment by Pausanias is his assertion that "tribute was levied upon Greece," since this would be a natural assumption for a writer of the Principate who believed that Greece was now placed under Roman governors.[6] On the methodological principle just stated, without corroboration of this statement we should have to reserve judgment on the matter. It would be a very slender reed indeed if made to stand on its own. But, in fact, closer consideration in light of other evidence only weakens it.[7]
There is relatively copious evidence of the payment of tribute by various Greek states after the First Mithridatic War. The view, therefore, that no Greeks paid tribute before Achaea was assigned as a separate province from 27 B.C. is untenable.[8] The core issue is, however, whether tribute can be
traced before the Mithridatic War, for otherwise it would be most plausible to associate its appearance with Sulla's punitive actions against those who had supported or succored the Pontic forces against Rome. But for the period before 86 B.C. the evidence held to attest to the levying of tribute is—in remarkable contrast to the following period—in very short supply. Indeed, in my view, there is none. Let us review it briefly.
In an inscription of 73 from Oropus concerning a dispute between that city and the Roman publicani over tributary status, two relevant passages from the current lex locationis (the statute regulating state contracts for the collection of revenue) are quoted. The first mentions grants of immunity given by the Senate or Roman commanders (note the plural number of these); the second, grants given by Sulla that were duly ratified by the Senate.[9] The assumption of one scholar that the first passage refers necessarily to pre-Sullan grants is quite unfounded; the plural number was presumably intended to cover all past and future cases at the time of the lex locationis , itself of indeterminate date, but not necessarily going back to Sulla.[10] These quotations from the lex locationis applicable to Boeotia in 73 B.C. therefore provide no evidence for tributary status before Sulla.
Nor can we draw important conclusions from the grant by a Roman magistrate of freedom from taxation and special contributions (
and ) to the Isthmian-Nemean guild of Dionysiac artists from some date in the latter half of the second century.[11] Exemption from local taxes and liturgies was at least as pressing a concern to the artists as any putative Roman levies, and their exemption from these by Rome stands in a long Hellenic tradition. It no more implies Roman assumption of effective sovereignty than do like grants of the past conferred by Hellenistic kings or indeed the Amphictyonic Council.[12]
Some have tried to get around the problem of the lack of actual evidence for tribute by deduction from legal forms: so, it is argued, the title civitas libera or immunis allegedly held by some cities from 146 implies of itself a provincial tributary status in Greece with which it is implicitly contrasted.[13] I remain skeptical of such abstract deductions, particularly since
the premises are quite uncertain.[14] That various communities held such titles in the middle of the first century B.C. and later—for that is the evidence on which the argument relies—tells us nothing about what was done in 146-145. On the other hand, what explicit evidence we have speaks quite unambiguously of the
or libertas of Achaea, even of Greece as a whole.[15] The straightforward interpretation of the evidence is then modified to fit the hypothesis: this is a different kind of freedom, merely an informal concept, fully compatible with "provincial status" and the payment of tribute.[16] This is arbitrary use of extremely weak evidence. Certainly, the notion that formal guarantees of "freedom" or exemption from tribute draws an implicit contrast with an otherwise prevailing tributary status can hardly be reduced to a formal rule. In the first century B.C. , when Roman tribute had become rather pervasive, such a contrast is indeed clearly implied; but at an earlier stage it cannot be presumed to exist. Roman guarantees of "freedom," "autonomy," and "exemption from tribute" (, and ) are known long before there was any question of Roman taxation in the East;[17] while, on the other hand, the Macedonians, subject to tribute from 167, notoriously enjoyed official libertas and .[18] Without any direct evidence of the payment of tribute we cannot conclude that anywhere in the second century B.C. "freedom" was by definition a release from an otherwise general obligation to pay tribute. Therefore, even if guarantees of libertas and immunitas could be traced to 146, this would no more prove the existence of a tributary status than the positively attested "freedom" of the Greeks demonstrates its contrary. Tribute cannot be conjured up in this way.
In sum, no evidence corroborates Pausanias's bland assertion of the levying of tribute upon Greece in 146. There are, on the contrary, good reasons to believe that Roman tribute was imposed as a punishment upon parts of Greece immediately following the Mithridatic War. The argument must necessarily be one ex silentio , for it is not in the nature of things for
a nonevent to be documented by positive evidence. And yet there are stronger and weaker arguments from silence, and the fundamental criterion for distinguishing between them is whether our evidence would look substantially different if the proposition in question were indeed true. That is precisely my contention with regard to Mummius's alleged imposition of tribute.
The first solid evidence for Greek tribute comes as soon after the Mithridatic War as 78 and 73 respectively, at Carystus on Euboea and the area of Oropus in Boeotia.[19] Can this chronological coincidence be mere accident? Euboea was the major Pontic base during the war in Greece, and we know of at least one other punitive measure associated with its behavior in the war: Sulla's gift to Archelaus of 10,000 plethra of Euboean land, evidently confiscated after the battle of Orchomenus (Plut. Sull . 23.2). Boeotia, on the other hand, served mainly as a battlefield but still was too ready to favor whichever side was stronger in the immediate neighborhood. For this Sulla plundered the land and punished Thebes by assigning half of its territory to the Panhellenic sanctuaries as recompense for his appropriation of their treasures.[20] Of particular interest for the case of the environs of Oropus, the Boeotian towns along the Euripus, under the eye of the Pontic commander at Chalcis, seem to have remained on the wrong side to the end: Sulla ruthlessly destroyed Anthedon, Larymna, and Halae (Plut. Sull . 26.4), and Oropus probably escaped the same fate only by its association with Amphiaraus.[21] Given what we know of the campaigns in Greece in 87-86 the sudden appearance of evidence for the collection of tribute from Euboea and Boeotia so soon after the Mithridatic War hardly looks like a coincidence.
On the other hand, Carystus especially, and perhaps northeast Boeotia too, are not likely candidates for subjection to tribute in 146-145. Our evidence shows that among Euboeans, only Chalcis can be shown to have taken the side of Achaea and Thebes, while, on the other hand, most of the rest of the island, which had been plundered by the Thebans just before
the war, took no part in the hostilities against Rome.[22] Thebes alone among Boeotian cities is conspicuous in our evidence on the Achaean side, and there is precious little evidence to support the view that the Boeotian towns along the Euripus rallied against Rome in 146.[23]
The payment of tribute by Euboeans outside of Chalcis and by northeast Boeotians makes best sense, then, as a result of the campaigns of the Mithridatic War. Now if any communities were assessed tribute for their behavior in the Achaean War, they should have been the member states of the Achaean League. Yet no literary or epigraphic evidence attests unambiguously to the payment of tribute by any community of the Peloponnese before the end of the Republic.[24] It is hard to believe that this too
is only coincidence, just as it strains credulity to assume it is only chance as well that almost immediately after the Mithridatic War significant evidence for the payment of tribute in Greece suddenly appears. The silence of our evidence is itself significant, for in no respect is our epigraphic and literary evidence for Roman provincial administration in general fuller than it is regarding the complaints and disputes to which tributary obligations gave rise: we need only compare Asia, where such complaints become quite prominent in our evidence within the first generation after the imposition of Roman tribute by M'. Aquillius.[25] And yet the dispute of 73 over whether Oropus was subject to Roman tribute or was exempt because its revenues belonged to a god (Amphiaraus) is the first such case known from Greece[26] —over seventy years after tribute was established in Greece on the usual hypothesis.
The exemption from tribute given Elatea in Phocis for its demonstration of loyalty in 86 against Taxilles's Pontic army is no hindrance to the view presented here that tribute was assessed upon Sulla's enemies in the Mithridatic War and not before.[27] It is indeed likely at this date that this right implies the levying of tribute elsewhere—but it does not tell us that Elatea had paid tribute previously. Equally plausibly, Elatea was rewarded for its recent loyalty by being explicitly exempted from the first assessment of tribute upon parts of Greece by Sulla after the defeat of the Mithridatic forces.[28] We might compare the exemptions given to communities in Illyricum at the same time as the imposition of Roman tribute there in 167 (Livy 45.26.13-14). Sulla's treatment of the cities of Asia certainly shows that he was in a rather vindictive—not to say avaricious—mood.[29]
Certainly, to judge from the perfectly regular pattern of the past, we should expect Rome to extract some sort of financial indemnity at the end of the Achaean War. (The "fines" levied by Mummius were paid not to
Rome but to Greek victims of the Achaeans and Thebans.)[30] This consideration raises the possibility that Pausanias's statement rests on a misinterpretation of his source. In Polybius,
regularly denotes a fixed, regular, but temporary payment (indemnity) as well as a permanent one (tribute).[31] Whether or not Polybius was Pausanias's source, immediately or at one or more removes, this ambiguity in second-century usage could well have caused someone in the chain of transmission, unfamiliar with past Roman practice of demanding fixed-term indemnities and perhaps misled, like Pausanias, by the assumption of the provincial status of Greece, to misunderstand a reference to a temporary series of payments as one to permanent tribute, so familiar later. This can of course only be speculation, but it shows how easily one could account for an error by Pausanias.
To sum up, the view that Greece was tributary from 146 hangs from one slender thread: Pausanias's assertion in a passage with one blatant error (the assignment of Achaia provincia to a commander from 146) that demonstrates a serious misapprehension of the status of Greece. Given this misunderstanding, and the ease with which a writer of the Principate might associate the presence of provincial governors and tributary obligations, Pausanias's statement about tribute is virtually devoid of authority. It is certainly not corroborated by documentary or other specific evidence. On the contrary, that evidence appears in places where the penalty of tribute would be no surprise as a result of the Mithridatic War but would be a rather awkward consequence of the Achaean; while the part of Greece most obviously culpable in Roman eyes after the Achaean War (the member states of the Achaean League itself) shows no sign of the payment of tribute until a century later. This argument from silence against the assessment of Roman tribute in 146-145 is, to my mind, stronger than Pausanias's bland statement.
Mummius and Greek Democracy
After the assessment of tribute, here rejected, the most weighty of the measures Pausanias attributes to Mummius is that of "putting down" (
) democracies and the selection of magistrates according to a
standard of wealth.[32] Pausanias's statement is both sweeping and vague—what precise actions comprise "putting down" democracies?—and there is no consensus among modern scholars on the extent to which the constitutions of Greece were rearranged by Mummius and the commission of ten.[33] Again, in view of the diminished authority of this passage of Pausanias, this stark claim cannot be privileged in any way and must be corroborated, if we are to accept it, by other evidence.
It is clear enough that Mummius did make certain constitutional arrangements, although their scope and character is unclear from the scattered references we have that are of any specificity. Mummius gave the Achaeans laws, indeed a politeia , in 146-145.[34] Before the commission of ten departed, Polybius was instructed to take a judicial tour of the cities, settling disputes and helping people to gain familiarity with the new politeia and laws (39.5.2-3); we may conclude that these new regulations had a noticeable impact on citizens. "Laws" (
) apparently laid down by Mummius and the commission are mentioned in an inscription from Nemea; they seem to have regulated interstate justice.[35] Pausanias himself mentions two Mummian regulations of the internal affairs of the Greek cities: according to him, the right of landownership outside one's home city was also abolished, though only temporarily,[36] also—at least on the usual interpretation of 7.16.9—a property qualification was imposed for the holding of magistracies.
It is this last measure that Pausanias dearly associates most closely, by means of a
parataxis, with the alleged "abolition" of democracy. It
therefore demands our special attention. Certainly, in classical Greek political thought, the selection of magistrates in accordance with a property qualification was something associated with "oligarchy" or "timocracy" and was not consistent with "democracy",[37] Pausanias (or his source) was simply following an old tenet of classical political philosophy in interpreting this as an oligarchic change. But we are entitled to question whether in the actual circumstances of the middle of the second century B.C. a standard of wealth for the holding of political office amounted in fact to the suppression of democracy as it was then understood.
First, we should note that we have no second-century comment on the motivation behind such a measure, for which Flamininus's arrangements in Thessaly in 194 provided an important precedent. Livy, to be sure, has an explanation for Flamininus's selection of wealthy councillors and judges on that occasion: "He made stronger that portion of the population of the cities that benefited more from security and stability."[38] However, we cannot assume that this comment appeared in Polybius,[39] and it cannot safely be treated as anything other than Livy's own interpretation, nearly two centuries after the event. For all that, it is not in my view entirely wrong; I hope to show that it has been misinterpreted precisely because it has fit so well with the preconceptions of many modern scholars.
What practical effect would a census requirement for office have had in Greece in the middle of the second century? It must be emphasized that Pausanias speaks of a criterion of wealth only for selection of magistrates (
), not for the possession of the basic rights of citizenship, nor is anything said of participation in the council.[40] But political office had in Hellenistic Greece long been the preserve of a class that no qualification of wealth is likely to have excluded.[41] The officials of the Achaean League, to take one example for which we have relatively good information, had
belonged to a relatively narrow, wealthy elite.[42] Even in Boeotia, in Polybius's view a land characterized by gross demagogy in his day (20.6.1-3), we do not hear of "the masses" holding public office but of the political leaders' pandering to their wishes.
On the other hand, any specific innovation ought to have had some real objective. It is possible that our preoccupation with class as a tool of analysis has obscured for us something that was quite clear to the contemporary observer. Polybius suggests that an endemic ailment of contemporary politics was the prevalence of bribery. When Flamininus chose to treat Philip V better than the Aetolians in particular had anticipated, Polybius comments: "Since by this time bribery and the notion that no one should do anything gratis were so prevalent in Greece—and quite current coin among the Aetolians—they could not believe that Flamininus's complete change of attitude toward Philip could have been brought about without a bribe."[43] Polybius was quite interested in the attitude of other societies toward graft and peculation and sees it as a revealing sign of a society's state of health;[44] it seems likely that it was precisely its flourishing state in Greece that made him particularly sensitive to this matter. It is of particular interest in this light to note that bribery, or at least allegations of it, played a prominent role on the Achaean side in the diplomatic prelude to the war with Rome. Menalcidas, the Achaean strategos , was said to have been offered a bribe of ten talents to assist the Oropians against the Athenians ca. 151/150;[45] Menalcidas supposedly promised to split the bribe with Callicrates in order to win his influential support, but then, after winning in this way the adherence of Callicrates, "a man who could never resist a bribe," he refused to pay him off. Menalcidas, now brought to trial by Callicrates for his conduct in office, gave Diaeus, the new strategos , three of the ten talents to save him. Diaeus (later to lead the Achaeans against Mummius, after Critolaus's death) was rivaled in greed only by Menalcidas, it was said.[46] Whether or not the scandalous stories told about the Achaean leadership were true, it seems clear that some thought it had been compromised by a weakness for "gifts." Diodorus, for what it is worth, adds that the Achaean strategoi during the crisis with Rome were themselves indebted (32.26.3). The selection of magistrates (and it is mag-
istrates alone who are mentioned by Pausanias) according to their wealth may well have been intended to exclude men who, though not precisely "poor" and surely not of the lower social class, were under some pressure of personal circumstances, not least because of debt, and might otherwise be thought to be ready to take advantage of their official position to compensate for the expenses of public life.[47] Polybius, at least, thought that political leaders' financial embarrassment could induce them to make damaging revisions to the laws (13.1.3). The possible danger from this source was especially great immediately after the recent war, which must have ruined not a few fortunes: aside from the devastations of defeat itself, the war effort in Achaea had included a moratorium on actions against debtors for the duration of the war and enforced contributions from the wealthy, and the ban on landholding abroad already noted will have been a further blow for some members of the social and political elite.[48] The inscription from Dyme discussed below gives a good indication of the volatility of the Achaean cities at this time. Men otherwise entitled by their former social and economic standing, but ruined in the recent war, might have caused considerable trouble if they had been permitted to hold public office before conditions had settled.[49]
A closer analysis of the circumstances of 146-145, therefore, strongly suggests that the selection of magistrates on the basis of wealth was intended above all to assure a smooth transition to the postwar order. Is there any reason to suppose that, as universally supposed, Mummius imposed a permanent property qualification for Greek (or Achaean) magistracies? Not if we take Pausanias precisely at his word. His Greek, strictly read, means not "he established property qualifications for magistracies" but "he appointed magistrates [
] in accordance with property qualifications";[50] that is, there is no dear implication that a permanent
property qualification was laid down rather than that such qualifications were used by Mummius in appointing new magistrates. The well-known parallel to Mummius's action, Flamininus's enrollment of councillors and judges "for the most part according to their wealth" in Thessaly in 194,[51] tends toward the contrary conclusion. Here unambiguously we hear only of a single instance of the appointment of officials according to a standard of wealth, not the imposition of a lasting property qualification.[52] Certainly, property valuations (
) fail to make an appearance in our sources for the political makeup of the states of Greece after 146;[53] this could be due to the nature of our evidence, but equally they may simply not have been employed after reconstruction. The point of Mummius's appointment of magistrates according to a criterion of wealth was therefore, as it must have been for Flamininus, most likely to ensure that the new dispensation got off to a smooth start, under the leadership of those whose personal circumstances were not such as to induce them to radical measures to recoup losses in the recent war, rather than to effect a lasting political change.[54]
We have no direct evidence of any further constitutional tinkering by Mummius.[55] Some scholars have supposed that a tilt in the constitutional balance toward the power of the councils can be discerned from 146, and that this can be attributed to Mummius. The change in nomenclature of the councils of many central Greek cities from
to , largely in the course of the second century B.C. , cannot be attributed to
Mummius, since it demonstrably predates 146 in certain instances and seems to have spread over the whole of the second century in various parts of Greece; and the common assumption that the Romans had something to do with it is based on nothing more than a rough chronological coincidence.[56] In any case such a change in nomenclature has no clear relevance for the relative power of the institutions of government.[57] Study of the constitutional bodies mentioned in the epigraphic prescripts of local decrees is another indirect approach. J. Touloumakos noted the declining frequency with which after 146 the people (
) is mentioned, while the magistrates () and councillors () continue to appear. From this material one might conclude that the council became more powerful relative to the assembly in many Greek cities after about the middle of the second century, but it would rash to assume that Mummius's arrangements of 246 had any direct connection with this trend, which is part of a larger development spreading over the whole Hellenistic period, receiving at most indirect encouragement from the Romans.[58] Indeed, when we examine the epigraphic evidence in more detail, taking care to distinguish between kinds of decrees, and considering the sometimes tendentious dates of certain documents with appropriate caution, the picture becomes less simple. The demos as a rule continued to decree major honors,[59] and those
decrees in which the people are not mentioned tend to be rather mundane and administrative in nature, therefore perhaps not requiring approval by the assembly. The early first-century publication of an oracle at Argos or the arrangements for a trip to Patrae by the Thurian
and for the settlement of a land dispute, both without mention of the demos as a sanctioning body, are hardly clear symptoms of the decline of democracy, much less Roman influence; nor is the second- or first-century inscription from Thuria that reveals the supervision by of the activities of a grain commission.[60] The evidence of epigraphic prescripts is a very blunt instrument with which to isolate a development that would presumably have taken place above all in the spirit of the thing rather than its outward form, but it nevertheless deserves some notice that no clear changes in constitutional form are discernible in the evidence.
In Dyme in northwest Achaea a disturbance broke out ca. 144 which went as far as the destruction of the town's archives; in my view, the local authorities quickly brought the situation under control but appealed to the proconsul Q. Fabius Maximus Servilianus, then in Patrae, to judge and punish those they presented to him as the culprits.[61] This affair has often been held to illustrate Pausanias's comment on the suppression of democracies, but in fact this incident is too obscure for us to tell even whether "democracy" was at issue here. We must beware of arguing in a circle here, for the fragmentary and tendentious evidence—Fabius's own letter describing his decision and punishment of the alleged conspirators—is short on specifics, and there is great danger of imposing prior assumptions to make the evidence say what we want it to. Whatever the true nature of the trouble, it does seem clear that Fabius accepted the appeal to his judicial authority with alacrity and decisively favored those he regarded as Rome's friends, just as had L. Aemilius Paulus after the war with Perseus in 167.[62] Further it must be stressed that this was an extraordinary situation, fully explained by the internal instability in Achaea and political demoralization
in the immediate aftermath of the war while the Mummian settlement was still at a critical stage. As we have seen, after Fabius's appearance ca. 144 in the Peloponnese Roman commanders will have been a very rare sight indeed; it would be a mistake to conclude from this apparently exceptional event that the proconsul of Macedonia after 146 kept a sharp eye on internal affairs in the cities of Greece and was prepared to intervene decisively to eliminate any democratic stirrings.[63] Similarly the harsh actions taken by Paulus and the Roman commission in 167 did not set the conditions for continual meddling; indeed, the contrary seems most likely: these measures were intended to make such dose attention unnecessary.
A summary is in order. Mummius and the commission of ten gave the Achaeans certain laws and a politeia . Pausanias interprets the political effect of these arrangements as the suppression of democracy, citing specifically a qualification of wealth. It remains unclear whether a lasting property requirement was imposed for magistrates or whether this was the criterion Mummius used in 146 to appoint new magistrates; nor can we be sure what the intention behind it was, although I have suggested that, contrary to the usual view, the measure most probably is to be seen as one with no more than a temporary effect, and its purpose was to reinforce the settlement at its most critical time. No other evidence corroborates Pausanias's view of a decisive shift in the Greek states (or at least those defeated in 146) away from democracy as the concept had come to be known by the middle of the second century.
Indeed, much is to be said for the view recently presented that Pausanias's statement about democracy is in fact a contentious rejoinder from an anti-Roman source to the contemporary presentation of the war and its settlement in Roman official policy and by Polybius himself. Polybius's portrayal of Critolaus and his fellows as tyrants, and the references in the inscription from Dyme to the politeia and "freedom" "restored" by the Romans all suggest that, in the official interpretation, the Mummian settlement was a restoration of the traditional democracy after a highly disruptive wave of tyranny.[64] It is noteworthy in Polybius's account of the war that he is eager to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of a few irresponsible leaders; the reason is dear: the mass of people can thus be exculpated before the Romans.[65] There can be little doubt that this is pre-
cisely the view that Polybius presented to Mummius and the commission of ten, who otherwise showed that they were willing to accept Polybius's interpretations of Achaean history.[66] If so, they ought not to have seen the demos as a threat to stability, but its irresponsible leaders. And it is certainly hard to accept the idea that Polybius, who was personally closely associated with the Roman settlement of 146-145, and whose thought even after 146 is dearly committed to the traditional Hellenic ideology of autonomy and independence,[67] had a hand in the suppression of his beloved native democracies. It seems likely that Pausanias's source seized upon Mummius's appointment of magistrates on the basis of wealth in 146-145 as a means to refute current official claims that the traditional democratic system was being restored.
The widespread notion that Rome actively sponsored timocracy and was hostile toward Greek democracy in the second century dies hard and will no doubt encourage resistance to the line of argument presented here. This is not the place for a full rebuttal and we must restrict ourselves to what may cast light on the situation in 146. First we must note that while there are dear precedents in 194 and 167 for the establishment by Roman conquerors of political structures where the defeat of an enemy had left a vacuum of public authority, there is no parallel whatever for Roman intervention against democracy as such; nor can any clear instance be cited of Roman activism in establishing the wealthy in power on a permanent basis as opposed to a onetime measure intended to provide a quiet transition to a new political order.[68] One does not find in Polybius or indeed in Livy (the author's editorial comments excluded) any evidence of Roman contempt or hostility toward the moderate form of democracy that was virtually universal in Greece at this time. It would be quite unjustifiable to retroject to 146, when Greek cultural superiority was still daunting, the anti-Greek and antidemocratic sentiments voiced in the middle of the next
century, when Hellenic political weakness, after over a century of Roman domination, might indeed be an object of contempt to the rulers of the world.
Nor, on the other hand, does the old notion of Rome's "natural preference" for rule by the wealthy offer the key to understanding.[69] This is not the place to respond in detail to this hypothesis, which depends more on a priori assumptions about class solidarity than upon evidence of Roman actions and behavior. We might note at the outset that Mummius's ban on property holding abroad will have harmed only wealthy Greeks, as Pausanias himself explicitly notes;[70] so whatever preferences may have existed were readily subordinated in 146-145 to other concerns. In any case we have no evidence from the whole of the preceding period of Roman intervention in the East of any direct action taken in favor of wealthy Greeks against their poorer compatriots. The unsubtle but nevertheless in broad terms surely valid distinction that appears in our sources between the attitude of the general Greek populace toward Rome (unenthusiastic to hostile) and that of political leaders (often sharply divided between those who put a premium on cultivating Rome's friendship and those who resisted all infringement of local independence)[71] is based on differences not of class interest or ideology but of assessments of what was to be gained, publicly and privately, by a stand for or against Rome. The fundamental contrast is between a few leaders whose policy of appeasement of Rome was given credibility by the reality of Roman power, and everyone else—leaders such as Philopoemen, Archon, and Lycortas in Achaea as well as in most cases the majority of the populace—united in their devotion to independence and full national sovereignty. The question is not therefore why the poor did not love Rome but why a few political leaders did;[72] and the simple answer is that alliance with Rome's interests could translate into power for certain individuals among the political elite—provided only that the Romans made very dear that they were making a point of de-
manding adherence.[73] The Romans, for their part, tended to favor those Greeks who supported them, and showed no ideological consistency in doing so.[74] In the absence of any indication that Romans of the middle of the second century saw Greek democracy as a threat, or of any precedent for Roman intervention with the object of establishing the wealthy in a permanent position of power, skepticism about Pausanias's claim of the suppression of democracy tout court is warranted.
Mummius and the Greek Leagues
Nothing in Pausanias's description of the results of the Achaean War has generated so much controversy as his statement regarding the dissolution and the subsequent restoration of the Greek leagues.[75] Since this assertion immediately follows a list of actions taken by Mummius and the commissioners, scholars have always assumed that this sentence forms part of that list. It then becomes necessary to explain why Rome would have formally disbanded the leagues in 146-145 only to reform them "not many years later" (Paus. 7.16.10). Those who sense an a priori difficulty with a formal abolition of the leagues or interpret other evidence in such a way as to contradict Pausanias's assertion dismiss it as another example of Pausanian historical confusion.[76]
It is possible, however, that Pausanias has here been misread. The crucial verb is in the pluperfect tense and passive voice (
): Pausanias has mentioned the major features of Mummius's arrangements in the aorist or imperfect tenses, then adds in the pluperfect that the leagues
had been dissolved.[77] Strictly speaking, Pausanias simply does not say that Mummius dissolved the leagues. It seems that Pausanias here has stepped back in time and is referring to an event that occurred not as part of, but before, the settlement.
If we are to seek some time before the formal settlement of the war in which to place the dissolution of these leagues, there can be none better than the concluding stage of the war itself. As far as one can reconstruct the story from Pausanias and Zonaras, our fullest sources, after the disastrous battle at the Isthmus the Achaean League simply collapsed: soldiers and commanders fled to their home cities, and the federal strategos Diaeus committed suicide.[78] Under such circumstances it is very difficult to imagine that the League was able to cohere sufficiently to surrender en bloc,[79] assuming Mummius was even inclined to accept anything but individual deditiones ; and it will have been in the interest of many member cities to attempt to distance themselves from the actions of the League. The Boeotian League, assuming that it existed in 146,[80] and the Phocian League, if at least part of it had joined the Boeotians, will have suffered the same fate as Metellus marched through the country.[81] It was by military action, and by accepting the surrender of individual cities, not by a formal ban, that Metellus and Mummius caused the collapse of the leagues.
A close historical and linguistic parallel without actual fighting, is provided by the "dissolution" of the Boeotian League in 172/271 as a direct result of the individual deditiones of the Boeotian cities to Q. Marcius
Philippus (Polyb. 27.2.6-7) rather than a formal ban. Using precisely the word Pausanias applies to the Greek leagues in 146, Polybius writes that "The league of the Boeotians was dissolved [
] and scattered into its individual cities."[82] Pausanias need not be speaking of a formal enactment abolishing the leagues any more than is Polybius.[83] He inserted the reference to the collapse of the leagues here presumably to supply the necessary background to what immediately follows—their restoration with Roman sanction "a few years later"; mention of the leagues was perhaps also suggested by the reference to the abolition of enktesis (foreign landownership) immediately preceding because, in fact, enktesis in member states was a characteristic feature of the federal states (and indeed Pausanias does link the two here twice in immediate succession). Whether or not enktesis was specifically forbidden or merely followed from the collapse of the leagues, the effect certainly will have been to fragment the former constituent cities of the leagues into quite separate economic and political units where previously a very high degree of integration had been achieved, some idea of which can be gained from the large proportion of non-Epidaurian Achaeans in the Epidaurian list of the dead of the battle of the Isthmus.[84]
The significant point in all of this for us is that Pausanias 7.16.9 is not good evidence for the formal abolition of the leagues by Mummius. If my interpretation is correct, he and the senatorial commission did not ban the leagues but did nothing to reconstitute them. The Achaean, Boeotian, and Phocian leagues were casualties of the war, not of the settlement; they were not the marked victims of a new senatorial hostility.
T. Schwertfeger has gone farther, rejecting Pausanias altogether and arguing not only that Mummius and the senatorial commission did not dissolve the leagues, but that they reconstituted at least the Achaean League already in 146-145. In his view, the future of the leagues was the crucial question of 146-145, so Mummius and the commission must have done something about it; and their solution can only have been to recon-
stitute the Achaean League, in view of the fact that its existence is attested later.[85]
Obviously, I hold no brief for Pausanias, but it must be said that the evidence for this view is disappointingly weak: both the inscription from Dyme and Polybius refer to a politeia "given" or "restored" by the Romans to the Achaeans, dearly already in 146-145 rather than a few years later; and an honorary inscription for Damon of Patrae, if dated to 122, used
as an ethnic designation for a number of men from various Achaean communities.[86] But the inscription for Damon cannot bear any weight. Its date is in fact quite uncertain: the years 162 and 96 cannot safely be excluded from consideration;[87] nor in any case need evidence for the existence of the Achaean League in 122 clash with Pausanias, who says that the leagues were restored "not many years later" than 146. But regardless of the matter of date, the inscription does not necessarily attest to the existence of a league. There is no mention of a : the dedicants are merely "Achaeans who went on the expedition" under Damon.[88] They had a (line 9)—Damon—but auxiliary troops will often have had their own commanders, which certainly does not imply the existence of a league.[89] What then of the politeia in Polybius and in the inscription from Dyme, which is dearly part of the Mummian settlement? The issue here is whether politeia refers to a pattern for a league or to the constitutional form of the cities of the former Achaean League.[90] The law that Polybius himself drafted on interstate jurisdiction (39-5.5) may imply the absence of a federal citizenship, while Pausanias explicitly, in a passage separate from his description of the Achaean War and its settlement, gives Polybius
credit for establishing politeiai (in the plural).[91] Q. Fabius Maximus in the Dymaean inscription had good reason to exaggerate the subversiveness of the troublemakers who, he alleges, had tried to overthrow the politeia restored to the Achaeans (not just Dyme). The earliest certain testimony to the existence of the Achaean League after Mummius appears not before early in the first century B.C .[92] The evidence is therefore very unclear, but none of it conflicts with Pausanias's view that the leagues did not function for a few years after 146.
The evidence for the Boeotian League after the settlement of the Achaean War is equally unhelpful for assessing Pausanias. Indeed, it is controversial whether the Boeotian League as such was reconstituted after the Third Macedonian War and thus even existed in 146 as Pausanias appears to believe, but let us suppose that it did.[93] The first dear attestation of its existence after 146 comes in an inscription dated before 120 by one epigraphist but more usually toward the turn of the second century.[94] Only the evidence for the Phocian League provides some support for Pausanias's notion of a lapse for a short period after 146. The disappearance of the name of the Phocian federal strategos from Phocian manumissions at Delphi between ca. 146 and 128, where previously this official had been cited in the dating formula without exception, is suggestive.[95] Although this falls short of proof for the nonexistence of the Phocian League between those years (for even after 128 the strategos is no longer regularly cited in the dating formulae), it does suggest an interruption of some kind.[96]
Other documents mentioning the Phocian League or its officials are too loosely dated to offer any help.[97]
In sum, Pausanias's statement about the Greek leagues after the Achaean War cannot be decisively confirmed. On the other hand, it receives some small corroboration from the Phocian manumission lists at Delphi, and it is (in contrast to other points discussed above) not likely to be the result of some misapprehension of the status of Greece in 146 or polemical distortion by his source. It may therefore be provisionally accepted. The "restoration" of the leagues will probably have taken the form of a favorable senatorial response to an embassy sent to Rome for the purpose. At the same time, the right to own land abroad was restored—a fundamental element of league structure—and the fines imposed by Mummius were remitted (Paus. 7.16.10). The date of this act is irrecoverable, although it should precede 128 if the Phocian evidence has been read correctly.[98] It is tempting to associate the restoration of the leagues and the other signs of Roman "pity" mentioned by Pausanias with Polybius's visit to the Senate sometime after the Mummian settlement had taken root (Polyb. 39.8.1-2). The leagues, when reconstituted, may have been smaller or weaker or both, but this need not be attributed to Roman dictation.[99]
The central point, for our purposes, is that Pausanias, if accepted on the fate of the Greek leagues, does not imply that Mummius and the senatorial
commission formally abolished them. The prevalent view that the future of Greek leagues was a burning problem which Mummius and the Senate could not avoid confronting in 146,[100] and that consequently he set about abolishing some or reconstituting others because they were allegedly a useful means of controlling Greece,[101] blows the issue out of all proportion. The Greek federal states were hardly a source of worry to the Romans, given their proven inability to challenge Roman power—least of all now, when the strongest among them, the Achaean League, had been crushed, and the Boeotian and Phocian leagues had pathetically folded. Their fate could safely be left to the chastened Greeks themselves. Indeed, after "not many years" in abeyance, they reappeared: "Hellenic institutions, once the Romans retired, had a way of slipping back into place."[102]
Further Arrangements
To round out our discussion of political restructuring and formal arrangements of Mummius and the commission of ten, we may note that Mummius heard at least one interstate dispute, the old struggle over ownership of the Denthaliatis region contested by Messene and Sparta.[103] The land had been granted to Messene by Philip II and his decision confirmed by Antigonus Doson, but the Lacedaemonians, encouraged no doubt by Rome's recent support against the Achaean League, took advantage of Mummius's presence to resurrect their claim; they were, however, disappointed, for Mummius decided for the Messenians. It is true that Messene had not played an active role in the war, but this remains a noteworthy example of resistance to the temptation of unscrupulously rewarding Rome's loyal friends. The hearing of such disputes as part of a general settlement was a normal task of Roman victors, and we can prob-
ably assume that there were others in 146-145.[104] A fragmentary inscription from Nemea has been thought to imply that in 145 Mummius judged the dispute between Cleonae and Argos over the direction of the Nemean games, but the references in the text to laws and Mummius and the commission of ten may rather suggest that the dispute was negotiated not by Mummius himself but in accordance with regulations for such disputes established by him in consultation with the ten commissioners.[105]
After only six months in Greece, in the spring of 145 the commission of ten returned to Rome; Mummius presumably followed closely, bringing most if not all of his army home for a triumph in 145.[106] Greece was declared "free."[107] But this did not conclude the work to be done. We have always known that the commissioners instructed Polybius to travel through the cities, settling disputes and helping the transition to the new laws and politeia (39.5.2-3); we now know, however, that a Roman proconsul, Q. Fabius Maximus Servilianus, had taken Mummius's place and was supervising the process of adjustment.[108] But soon after ca. 144 (when Servilianus is known to have been at Patrae) Roman troops, we must assume, withdrew from Greece yet again, as they had in 194, 187, and 167.
A very different picture of Mummius's settlement of the Achaean War begins to emerge from a painstaking analysis of the evidence for his acts of reorganization and restructuring. In chapter 2 we saw that there is no reason to posit the reduction of any part of Greece to a province; now we see also that it is most improbable that tribute was levied in Greece in 146-145, and that whatever constitutional modifications Mummius introduced are unlikely to have brought radical change in local governance in the long run. The settlement of Greece of 146-145 no longer appears to signal a break with past Roman behavior; indeed, the continuities are striking. As in the past, the Roman victor "gave laws" (leges dedit ) to the defeated peoples to govern their reconstruction, and then withdrew; some of the measures—the enrollment of officials according to a property valuation,
and provisions for interstate jurisdiction—recall precedents set by Flamininus.[109] Financial exploitation of victory in perpetuum was evidently a consideration secondary to others: Rome declined to extend its administrative and military responsibilities, even though they might have been made to pay for themselves through the levying of tribute.[110] None of this, of course, implied the abdication of imperium : quite the contrary, as I believe the most notorious Roman action—the destruction of Corinth—shows.
The Destruction of Corinth and Other Punitive Measures
Most of the Corinthians had already abandoned the dry when Mummius captured Corinth on the third day after the battle at the Isthmus.[111] After Mummius had performed the solemn ritual of devotio , designating the enemy dry and its population as a sacrifice to the gods of the underworld, Corinth was taken by storm and burned. Those who were unfortunate enough to have remained in the city were slaughtered or enslaved, and the dry was thoroughly plundered.[112] This treatment was fully in accordance with traditional Roman terroristic practice toward communities that refused surrender and thereby "forced" their capture by assault.[113] Such savage treatment of stiff-necked enemies encouraged surrender in the future and kept the troops happy, for in the middle of the second century, at a time when elsewhere, particularly in Spain, warfare was bitter and unprofitable, the need to satisfy the soldiers' hunger for booty was particularly strong.[114] When to these strong motives is added Mummius's own ambition (for the booty from Corinth was a splendid haul that contributed in no small degree to its conqueror's fame throughout the Roman
world),[115] Corinth's damning role in the events that led to the war (it was there that Roman envoys had been mobbed and insulted in 147),[116] and the accident that it was the first place in the Romans' path to offer real resistance, we have a more than complete explanation for its treatment at the hands of Mummius and his troops.[117]
After Corinth was thus burned and looted, and its population enslaved or in flight, it is difficult to imagine what more was needed to destroy it physically. The question that remained after the smoke had cleared was above all whether it would be formally extinguished as well, or whether it would be permitted to be reconstituted. Similarly, in the Third Macedonian War, Haliartus in Boeotia had been thoroughly destroyed upon its capture by the Roman troops in 171, after which the Senate refused to allow its restoration as a community and handed over its territory to Athens.[118] Most Corinthians had fled,[119] apparently to the other towns of the Peloponnese; this was the stock out of which Corinth might again have been resettled.
A distinction should therefore probably be drawn, and some lapse of time be assumed, between the assault on the city, with the attendant sack and fire that must have inflicted enormous damage, and its formal extinction by subsequent senatorial decree, almost certainly brought to Greece by the ten commissioners after news had come of the conclusion of the war.[120] Although the ancient sources are not usually careful to draw such a distinction, with an interval of time between the two events, there is some support for it in our texts. The sequence in Zonaras (9.31.6) places the destruction of buildings and walls after the arrival of the ten commis-
sioners, although they will presumably not have left Rome until news came that the war was over, hence not before the capture of Corinth; while Florus dearly distinguishes the sack of the city from its demolition (1.32.6). Roman precedent in the East was dearly to have decem legati bring with them senatorial regulations concerning the major issues of the settlement,[121] and we have already noted the parallel of Haliartus for a senatorial decision, subsequent to a city's capture and physical destruction at the hands of the troops, forbidding the reconstitution of a community.
But while the senatus consultum that decreed Corinth's fate is to be seen above all as a negative injunction forbidding the reconstitution of the city and thus extinguishing the state,[122] it is dear that it also put the final touches upon its physical destruction. Corinth's buildings—perhaps above all public buildings, an important expression of civic identity—and walls were to be demolished.'[123] Archaeological exploration does not appear to reveal methodical demolition so much as massive destruction, much of it perhaps the result of the capture of the city rather than of the subsequent decree; but the walls were certainly breached and thrown down in places.[124] In addition, the captive Corinthians (but not those of other states) were to be sold, and Corinth's territory confiscated as ager publicus (Zonar. 9.31). It was not an exaggeration to say that by this decision [Corinthum ] funditus sustulerunt .[125] Still, the land was not to go to waste. Confiscated by Rome, it was let out to possessores for a vectigal , and Sicyonians held the greater part of it.[126] The vectigal , though perhaps not a great source of revenue, will have been welcome. The idea that the land was cursed in
addition is a misunderstanding of the ceremony of devotio and has perhaps been influenced by the romantic embellishments that have corrupted the modem tradition on the fate of Carthage.[127]
Already in ancient times there was speculation about why Rome annihilated Corinth in 146. The official justification seems to have been founded on the treatment of the Roman envoys in 147,[128] but explanations given distill into two complementary traditions: to deprive Greeks of a useful stronghold in war for the future, and to act as a deterrent by striking terror into other cities and subsequent generations.[129] We should note that no ancient source gives substance to the notion favored by an earlier generation of scholars that Corinth's fate was due to the jealousy of Roman capitalists established at Delos.[130] That view presumes too much about the amount of leverage exerted by Roman traders on the Senate in foreign affairs;[131] furthermore it ignores the copious epigraphic testimony of Delos that Romans were established in force in Delos only after the destruction of Corinth.[132] Indeed, it seems that Roman traders were well established in Corinth itself at this time.[133] Moreover, if, as argued above, Corinth suffered extensive physical destruction already at the time of its capture and sack, and the subsequent senatorial decree only added the finishing touches, there was no need of its formal extermination as a community in
order to insure that the once-great emporium would be no threat to Delos for a very long time to come.
A number of parallels from past and contemporary practice give greatest credence to the "terroristic" or, if one prefers, the "deterrent" intention behind the destruction of Corinth. Polybius believed that the Romans used ruthlessness strategically. He notes, for example, that it was their habit, upon first capturing a city, to cut to pieces every living thing they met: "They do this, it seems to me, to inspire terror" (10.15.4-5). In Greece the Romans seem on the whole to have avoided such tactics until the war against Perseus, when they were rather liberally indulged. Haliartus was annihilated for its stubborn resistance, and Paulus brutally laid waste to Epirus, plundering some seventy towns and hauling away as slaves some quarter of a million Epirotes, to punish it for favoring the Macedonian king; both punishments were decreed by the Senate.[134]
On the other hand, the Senate renounced and did what it could to correct the savage treatment meted out by commanders in the field in the same war to Coronea and Abdera, ravaged despite (it seems) their surrender;[135] this reminds us that such actions were a matter of policy, not to be indulged in lightly or out of mere passion, and were regarded as harsh but just retribution for hostility to Rome. Outside of Greece, the Roman order in 149 to the Carthaginians to abandon their city, and its eradication when captured in the very year of the destruction of Corinth, 146, gave further examples. In the case of Carthage the punishment seemed so far out of proportion to the crime that some Greeks, Polybius indicates, resorted to the explanation that Rome was turning to a policy of destruction for its own sake (36.9.5-8); yet here too it seems a distinct lesson was being taught concerning the dire results of paying insufficient heed to Rome's demands. Corinth, too, surely was eliminated as a community above all for symbolic effect. The ruins of the ancient, prestigious, and hitherto rich city will have served as a lasting memento, standing beside the most-traveled routes in Greece, of what wrath disobedience to Roman commands could provoke. That the ruins of Corinth did attract considerable attention over the following century, before its Augustan refoundation, is dear from a host of references, including epigrams from the Palatine Anthology.[136]
The ravages inflicted by Mummius and the Roman army were not entirely limited to Corinth. A considerable amount of booty certainly came from other towns in Achaea and Boeotia.[137] Some was given to Attalus's general Philopoemen.[138] The lion's share was doubtless sent back to Rome, thence to many towns of Italy and even the provinces.[139] Mummius's triumph was renowned for its bronzes and paintings—and actors.[140] But some of the booty at least stayed in Greece as dedications at the great Hellenic sanctuaries, especially Olympia, but also Delphi, Epidaurus, Isthmia, and even the smaller sanctuaries at Oropus, Thebes, Thespiae, Aulis, and Tegea.[141] The number of noteworthy locations where Mummius's dedications are found probably testifies to a grand tour not unlike Aemilius Paulus's triumphant procession through the major sites of Greece in 168/167, which had a dear propagandistic function.[142] But the integration of Rome into the Hellenistic community was not the only message being sent.[143] At the most public places in Greece, and at many of the minor centers as
well, could be seen spoils from the cities that had opposed Rome in the Achaean War. The ruins of Corinth were not the only extant symbol of the defeat of 146.
In addition to the haul of booty some alleged ringleaders of the war were executed.[144] If Metellus had not already done so, Mummius now punished the Theban boiotarch Pytheas.[145] Otherwise we hear only of the execution of certain
(knights) of Chalcis (Polyb. 39.6.4-5), in Polybius's view Mummius's most notorious excess, which he was inclined to blame on his advisers ("friends"). According to Livy's epitomator alone both Thebes and Chalcis were destroyed (Per . 52), but this is improbable: Metellus, to whom the Thebans had surrendered, had thought them worthy of mild treatment, and Thebes continued to be a major Boeotian city in the subsequent years.[146] If the worst excess of Mummius was the execution of some Chalcidian , he could hardly have annihilated their city. Perhaps the walls of Thebes and Chalcis were broken up.[147] Chalcis was, after all, another of the old "fetters of Greece."
For all that, it is a significant point that devastating reprisals were reserved by Mummius and the commission of ten for Corinth alone. Greeks had closely watched the development of the recent crisis with Carthage in 149, and Rome's harsh demand for the elimination of the city had been much discussed, with some passion.[148] Polybius movingly describes how after the initial Achaean defeat at Scarphea, people were nearly driven mad with terror; some fled aimlessly through the countryside; others even threw themselves off cliffs and down wells in utter desperation.[149] As their dash with Rome developed, the Achaean leadership had held back from
negotiations with Metellus because of their expectation that they would receive no pity from the Romans (Polyb. 38.17.7). But, luckily, in Polybius's retrospection, Greek resistance had collapsed so quickly that Rome's wrath was not allowed to peak: the phrase "had we not been destroyed quickly, we should never have been saved" was on everyone's lips.[150] Our survey of Mummius's punitive measures gives point to that assessment and shows it to be no mere apologia. Mummius had imposed indemnities on the defeated, helped himself to much booty, and punished some individuals for their alleged part in inciting the war; but Corinth had borne the brunt of Rome's rage, and the rest of Greece was spared the dire fate that it had feared. Most of those defeated in 146, not to speak of those Greeks uninvolved in the struggle, will have been much relieved by the moderation of their treatment at Mummius's hands.
Therefore when Polybius tells us that Mummius "was honored in every city and received appropriate thanks,"[151] he is not speaking as a Roman quisling.[152] We have epigraphic evidence of some of these honors, and it seems that something more than cringing flattery lies behind them. The city of Elis, which may have seceded from the Achaean League in the course of the war, honored Mummius in the most conspicuous way possible by setting up an inscribed statue group at Olympia.[153] The Argives raised an equestrian statue in Mummius's honor in their agora (SEG XXX. 365). We should recall that the Eleans and Argives were among the prizes won by the Achaean League in the wars of the first part of the century that it had fought as an ally of Rome, and had never played a distinguished role within the confederation since their more or less forced incorporation. The Romans had, indeed, demanded their separation from Achaea in 147, and those who wished to put the best construction on events may have regarded the collapse of the League as the recovery of Elean or Argive independence from Achaean domination. Unfortunately, we do not know the dedicator of the great statue group at Olympia of Mummius and the
decem legati .[154] Sparta or Heraclea may be good candidates, for Rome had won them their independence from the Achaean League, and they were now being paid fines by the Achaeans and Boeotians respectively.[155] Eretria on Euboea, which instituted a footrace in honor of Mummius, apparently also had good reason to be pleased with him.[156] Euboeans had been freed of Theban (and Chalcidian?) harassment and were to be paid a fine by their former tormentors (Paus. 7.16.10). Not a few Greeks, then, positively benefited from Rome's defeat of the Achaeans and their allies, and some of them, as we have just seen, made highly conspicuous public statements of their loyalty to Rome—if not in the war itself, at least in its aftermath. The visitor to the greatest Panhellenic gathering place, Olympia, will have observed in this one sanctuary at least two impressive monuments in honor of Mummius and the senatorial commission erected by Greeks and a number of smaller dedications by Mummius himself of the booty from Rome's enemies in 146. The juxtaposition of extravagant thanks from Rome's friends and the spoils of Rome's enemies virtually cried out Vergil's expression of the moral principle underlying Roman power: parcere subiectis et debellare superbos .
The distribution by Mummius of punishments—especially the exemplary punishment meted out to Corinth—and rewards needs to be set into a broader context for its full significance to be understood. I have argued above that what was essential in the Roman concept of the imperium was the power of the Roman people to command obedience. Our survey of the results of the Fourth Macedonian and Achaean wars has largely substantiated Gruen's thesis of Roman hesitancy (not from altruism, indeed) to take on abiding administrative and governmental commitments in the East, or to exploit the economic consequences of its power to fullest effect. That a small army remained behind in Macedonia after 148 was a military decision to shore up a now obvious weakness in Paulus's settlement, but not a radical about-face in Roman policy toward direct rule. In Greece, the
settlement of 146-145 closely resembled its precedents; particularly worth stressing are the Roman military withdrawal and refusal to extract tribute. Yet we ought not to draw the conclusion from this behavior, which followed a now-traditional pattern, that Rome was indifferent toward the East. Rather, Rome's interest was to restore and maintain its hegemonial position—its imperium —in the East.
As we have seen, Polybius repeatedly stresses that the essence of this power was recognition of the necessity to obey Rome's orders: in his view, from 168 it was "agreed" (
) that this necessity obtained for all 0.4.3). As Gruen has shown, examples are not lacking of occasions after 168 (there are, indeed, occasions after 146) when Roman requests or orders were flouted with impunity.[157] Greeks hardly had to reckon with the threat of military force to back up most such demands, often of marginal interest to Rome, and could often weigh the chances of a reaction and go about their business. But since the imperium populi Romani was itself defined by obedience to Roman commands, rejection of an order of some importance might be interpreted as a direct challenge to the Roman imperium that had apparently safely been established since the war with Perseus. The violent response to the senatorial demand in 147 to allow Lacedaemon, Corinth, Argos, Heraclea, and Orchomenus to be detached was one such challenge to the imperium populi Romani ,[158] and the vote for war against Sparta in the spring of 146, despite repeated Roman warnings, was a second; both took place at Corinth. The full significance of the destruction of Corinth now becomes clearer: it asserted, with dreadful finality, the imperium of the Roman people in the very heart of Greece, and the fearful consequences of defiance. But Rome was ill prepared, especially under current manpower constraints, to maintain a direct presence in Greece—hence the resort to exemplary punishment at Corinth in 146.
The point, of course, about Rome's imperium had been made before: in Polybius's view the subordination of Greece to Roman power had already been accomplished in 168. His contemporary assessment of the significance of the Achaean War, insofar as it can be reconstructed from the patchy fragments that survive from this portion of the History , bears little resemblance to modern judgments that give it such prominence as a terminus in the story of Roman expansion in the Balkan peninsula.[159] In Polybius's
view the Achaean and Andriscan wars together comprised a "common misfortune for all Greece,"[160] but it was temporally bounded on both sides: that is, the "misfortune" (
) began and ended with the wars themselves.[161] The settlement of the Achaean war, on the other hand, was a relative blessing, if any weight is to be given to the idea that the Greeks were saved by the very speed of their defeat.[162] As we have seen, Mummius's settlement, with the dramatic exception of Corinth, was marked by lenience; Greece might have had a proconsul and a legion as permanent residents and have paid tribute as well. From the broader perspective of the history of the expansion of Roman power, it is clear enough that Polybius saw the Achaean and Andriscan wars as red-letter dates: they represent for him the final stage of the period of "disturbance and disruption,"[163] and they therefore served (along with the Third Punic War) as a suitable conclusion for his work. But there was no guarantee, despite Corinth, that there would not again be "disturbance and disruption." It is not obvious that for Polybius, our only contemporary source, the Achaean and Andriscan wars mark a genuine turning point in the development of Rome's imperium in the East. We have seen that the so-called Achaean Era is of dubious significance and may, indeed, be associated with the "freeing" of the Greeks in 146.[164] It is doubtful therefore whether we should impute to contemporaries the view of later sources, distorted by long hindsight, that Mummius's victory represents the final subjugation of Greece to Rome.[165]
The threads of the argument of these first three chapters may now be drawn together. The settlement of the wars in Macedonia and Greece marks no sharp break in Roman "policy" or practice in its Eastern imperium . The assignment of Macedonia provincia after Metellus's departure in 146 is not to be taken as a change of "status"; it was an ad hoc solution to the emasculation of Macedonia's defenses against the Balkan tribes in 168-167. On the other hand, no part of Greece was made formally subject to Rome and its commander in 146-145, and the presence henceforth of a Roman commander in Macedonia did not in itself affect Greece's legal status. The continuities with past Roman behavior are striking. In Macedonia, tribute had already been imposed in 168-167. In Greece, it appears in the current state of the evidence that tribute was not levied on the defeated states in 146-145; Hellas was once again "freed" and—so it appears—Roman troops withdrawn. While details of Mummius's constitutional arrangements remain obscure, it is improbable that they were particularly invasive and they surely did not extend outside the part of Greece defeated in 146; they do not deserve unique emphasis in the story of the evolution of Greek democracy, whose floruit had long passed anyway. Even the Achaean, Boeotian, and Phocian leagues, which had been crushed by the war, reconstituted themselves not very much later. Contemporaries are unlikely to have thought, as have modern scholars, that in 148—145 Rome had acquired territory for its "empire." Macedonia and Greece had for more than a generation been subject to the imperium of the Roman people in the only sense for which we have contemporary evidence: that they were obliged by the realities of power to obey Roman commands. And yet, in yielding the principle of obedience to Rome the Greeks only acknowledged its hegemonial position; they did not concede formal sovereignty, or effective sovereignty except in special cases. For the mere fact that Rome's orders had to be obeyed did not imply that such orders would be frequent or necessarily onerous. In the absence of major diplomatic or military crises, Roman commands might be as few and sporadic after 146 as they had been previously.
This is not to say that the presence of a Roman commander in Macedonia was not of great historical importance in the long run. Although he appears to have been an extremely rare sight in Greece itself, preoccupied as he was with the ancient problem of the defense of Macedonia's northern
frontier, Greeks would, by a sort of natural magnetism, find him a convenient recourse for the settlement of their various internal disputes—if they were prepared to make the trek to Macedonia, for he could not be expected to come south. Local legal and administrative structures must have been gradually but noticeably eroded over the generations by the tendency to resort to this useful source of power.[166] It is, furthermore, possible that the presence of a Roman legion in Macedonia, however burdened by frontier defense, had some deterrent effect on any stirrings of independence south of the Peneus. But it is noteworthy that it seems to have done little to prevent Achaea's break with Rome in 146, and there is no sign that it had much effect on the Athenians in 88-87. The greatest deterrents in Greece must have been a consciousness of Roman invincibility and memory of the exemplary punishment meted out to Corinth. But circumstances could change and memories could fade—and evidently did within sixty years.