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 at 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 able-bodied men in the whole of Greece; it must mean that it did not contain three thousand citizens sufficiently well-to-do to enable them to support themselves in the field. In the days of their glory some of the smallest Greek states were better off 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 anything 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 towns were in the same sad plight. Cities without inhabitants, or only a few; cattle grazing in the deserted streets, and even in the market-place, seem to have been a common sight. What had become of the inhabitants? We only know that they were gone, most of them, doubtless, to their graves.
In Greece, Sparta excepted, slavery was of a rather mild type, and it was unusual for a Greek to sell a slave to a foreigner. Neither did gladiatorial combats flourish among the Greeks. Even Corinth, that in later times contained a large admixture of Romans, could not acclimate them. While it is true that the Greeks made light of human life and took it upon the slightest pretext, it was rarely done by the cruel methods of the Romans. With all their faults and frailties they belonged to a distinctly higher type of men, and their civilization at a very early period began to move along lines afterward followed by the progressive nations of the world. How infinitely better were their peaceful contests than the bloody spectacles that were the delight of Rome!