in many cases a powerful impression on the subjects, more especially on the frivolous and unstable Greeks, by their old-fashioned piety, by the reverential stillness prevailing at their repasts, by their comparatively upright administration of office and of justice, especially by their proper severity towards the worst bloodsuckers of the provincials—­the Roman revenue-farmers and bankers—­and in general by the gravity and dignity of their deportment.  The provincials found their government comparatively tolerable.  They had not been pampered by their Carthaginian stewards and Syracusan masters, and they were soon to find occasion for recalling with gratitude the present rods as compared with the coming scorpions:  it is easy to understand how, in later times, the sixth century of the city appeared as the golden era of provincial rule.  But it was not practicable for any length of time to be at once republican and king.  Playing the part of governors demoralized the Roman ruling class \vith fearful rapidity.  Haughtiness and arrogance towards the provincials were so natural in the circumstances, as scarcely to form matter of reproach against the individual magistrate.  But already it was a rare thing—­and the rarer, because the government adhered rigidly to the old principle of not paying public officials —­that a governor returned with quite clean hands from his province; it was already remarked upon as something singular that Paullus, the conqueror of Pydna, did not take money.  The bad custom of delivering to the governor “honorary wine” and other “voluntary” gifts seems as old as the provincial constitution itself, and may perhaps have been a legacy from the Carthaginians; even Cato in his administration of Sardinia in 556 had to content himself with regulating and moderating such contributions.  The right of the magistrates, and of those travelling on the business of the state generally, to free quarters and free conveyance was already employed as a pretext for exactions.  The more important right of the magistrate to make requisitions of grain in his province—­partly for the maintenance of himself and his retinue (-in cellam-) partly for the provisioning of the army in case of war, or on other special occasions at a fair valuation—­was already so scandalously abused, that on the complaint of the Spaniards the senate in 583 found it necessary to withdraw from the governors the right of fixing the price of the supplies for either purpose.(32) Requisitions had begun to be made on the subjects even for the popular festivals in Rome; the unmeasured vexatious demands made on the Italian as well as extra-Italian communities by the aedile Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, for the festival which he had to provide, induced the senate officially to interfere against them (572).  The liberties which Roman magistrates at the close of this period allowed themselves to take not only with the unhappy subjects, but even with the dependent free-states and kingdoms, are illustrated by the raids of Gaius Volso in Asia Minor,(33) and above all by the scandalous proceedings in Greece during the war with Perseus.(34)