Pompeius was no less intent on regulating and elevating the existing communities than on founding new townships.  The abuses and usurpations which prevailed were done away with as far as lay in his power; detailed ordinances drawn up carefully for the different provinces regulated the particulars of the municipal system.  A number of the most considerable cities had fresh privileges conferred on them.  Autonomy was bestowed on Antioch on the Orontes, the most important city of Roman Asia and but little inferior to the Egyptian Alexandria and to the Bagdad of antiquity, the city of Seleucia in the Parthian empire; as also on the neighbour of Antioch, the Pierian Seleucia, which was thus rewarded for its courageous resistance to Tigranes; on Gaza and generally on all the towns liberated from the Jewish rule; on Mytilene in the west of Asia Minor; and on Phanagoria on the Black Sea.

Aggregate Results

Thus was completed the structure of the Roman state in Asia, which with its feudatory kings and vassals, its priests made into princes, and its series of free and half-free cities puts us vividly in mind of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation.  It was no miraculous work, either as respects the difficulties overcome or as respects the consummation attained; nor was it made so by all the high-sounding words, which the Roman world of quality lavished in favour of Lucullus and the artless multitude in praise of Pompeius.  Pompeius in particular consented to be praised, and praised himself, in such a fashion that people might almost have reckoned him still more weak-minded than he really was.  If the Mytilenaeans erected a statue to him as their deliverer and founder, as the man who had as well by land as by sea terminated the wars with which the world was filled, such a homage might not seem too extravagant for the vanquisher of the pirates and of the empires of the east.  But the Romans this time surpassed the Greeks.  The triumphal inscriptions of Pompeius himself enumerated 12 millions of people as subjugated and 1538 cities and strongholds as conquered—­it seemed as if quantity was to make up for quality—­ and made the circle of his victories extend from the Maeotic Sea to the Caspian and from the latter to the Red Sea, when his eyes had never seen any one of the three; nay farther, if he did not exactly say so, he at any late induced the public to suppose that the annexation of Syria, which in truth was no heroic deed, had added the whole east as far as Bactria and India to the Roman empire—­ so dim was the mist of distance, amidst which according to his statements the boundary-line of his eastern conquests was lost.  The democratic servility, which has at all times rivalled that of courts, readily entered into these insipid extravagances.  It was not satisfied by the pompous triumphal procession, which moved through the streets of Rome on the 28th and 29th Sept. 693—­ the forty-sixth birthday of Pompeius the Great—­adorned,