Between Heathenism and Christianity - College of Stoic Philosophers

Plutarch and the Greece of His Age
built under imperial auspices, affords striking evi
dence of what Roman influence meant on the
morals
of a Greek polity.
It is a matter of common knowledge what Roman
internecine war brought upon Italy. To a certain
extent the same evils were shared by Greece.
Three
of the fiercest battles between the contestants for the
principate were fought in or near Greece. The
Greeks were always on the losing side, though her
soldiers were not numerously represented
in the
Roman armies. These battles did but accelerate a
retrograde movement that had been quite marked
least since the Mithridatic war, though it did not
begin then. The population was rapidly decreasing.
Plutarch says that, in his time all Greece could not
furnish three thousand heavy^armed soldiers. This
statement must not be taken too literally; it can
hardly mean that there were not this number of ablebodied
men in the whole of Greece; it must mean
that it did not contain three thousand citizens suffi
ciently well-to=do to enable them to support them
selves in the field. In the days of their glory some
of the smallest Greek states were better off
at
than this
would indicate. It is certainly proof positive of
poverty, if not of a very sparse population. But
this, too, had greatly decreased in some places. In
the time of Augustus, Thebes had ceased to be any
thing more than a large village the same Thebes
that had played so prominent a part in legend and
history. With a few exceptions, the larger Boeotian
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