coursing to a junior in the service. Another extract from the same letter will show generally both the evils in the province and the sort of benefits that the Roman rule might confer if honestly administered. He is enumerating the good points in his brother's rule:—
“No new debt is being contracted by the states, while many have been relieved by you from a heavy and longstanding one. Several cities that had become dilapidated and almost deserted, of which one was the most famous state in Ionia, the other in Caria—Samos and Halicarnassus—have been given a new life by you. There is no party fighting, no civil strife in the towns: you take care that the government of the states is administered by the best class of citizens; brigandage is abolished in Mysia; murder sup- pressed in many districts; peace is established throughout the province; and not only the robberies usual on highways and in country places, but those more numerous and more serious ones in towns and temples, have been completely stopped; the fame, fortunes, and repose of the rich have been relieved of that most oppressive instrument of praetorial rapacity—vexatious prosecution: the expenses and tribute of the states are made to fall with equal weight on all who live in the territories of those states: access to you is as easy as possible: your ears are open to the complaints of all: no man's want of means or want of friends excludes him, I don't say from access to you in public or on the tribunal, but even from your house and chamber: in a word, through- out your government there is no harshness or cruelty—everywhere clemency, mildness, and kindness reign supreme.”
This ideal picture of the pax Romana is probably very unlike the real state of things under Ouintus Cicero or any one else. It rather serves to show us clearly what the evils of the system were. A lurid
