Along the Rhine it is enough to note that the Germans were being kept in hand.  South of the Danube the region now known as Styria and Carinthia was rich in iron, and both here and all along the mountainous tract of the Tyrol and neighbourhood Rome was steadily pushing her language and habits by means of settlement, trading, and military occupation.  It may be remarked by the way that at this date there were in use practically all the Alpine passes now familiar to us—­the Mont Genevre, the Little and Great St. Bernard, the Simplon, the St. Gothard, and the Brenner.

The Upper Balkans were necessarily under military occupation, but Macedonia was a flourishing graecized province with Thessalonica—­the modern Salonika—­for its capital.  Greece proper, known officially as Achaia, had declined in every respect since the classical age of Athens.  The monuments of that city were, indeed, as sumptuous as ever; a number had been added in Roman times, though generally in inferior taste.  Athens was still a sort of university, but its professors were for the most part sophists or rhetoricians, beating over again the old straws of philosophies which had once possessed a living meaning and exercised a living force.  Athens herself had never properly recovered from the migration of learning to Alexandria.  Delphi, the great oracular seat of the Greek world, had also declined in importance, although it could still boast of an imposing array of buildings and memorials.  The centre of commerce and of official life, a Roman colony in the midst of Greece, a cosmopolitan and a dissolute place, was Corinth on the Isthmus.  Here Nero had intended to cut a canal through from sea to sea—­he had turned the first sod with his own hand—­but his personal extravagance caused an insufficiency of funds, and the project met with the fate of the first enterprise at Panama.  It was, therefore, still necessary for a traveller proceeding to the East to cross the Isthmus and reship at Cenchreae.  The rest of Greece was almost all poor and sparsely populated, and many ancient sites and monuments were already suffering from neglect and dropping into ruin.

[Illustration:  Fig. 6—­THE ACROPOLIS AT ATHENS (From D’Ooge.)]

Across the Aegean, Asia Minor was in a condition of unprecedented prosperity.  It contained no less than five hundred towns of considerable repute, chief among them being Smyrna and Ephesus, with their handsome public buildings, open squares, theatres, gardens, and promenades.  Smyrna in particular boasted of its wide marble-paved streets crossing each other at right angles, and provided with arcades running along their sides.  Its one defect was the want of proper sewers.  Among the sights of the world was the huge temple at Ephesus, dedicated to Artemis, the “Great Diana” of the Acts of the Apostles.  This temple, the largest in the ancient world, was 425 feet long, 220 wide, and its columns were 60 feet in height and numbered 127.