charged St Luke with an incorrect use of terms; and the origin of their
mistake is a significant comment on the perplexities in which a later
forger would find himself entangled in dealing with these official
designations. They fell upon a passage in Strabo [292:1] where this
writer, after mentioning the division of the provinces between the
Emperor and the Senate, states that the Senate sent consuls to the two
provinces of Asia and Africa but praetors to the rest on their
list,--among which he mentions Cyprus; and they jumped at the
conclusion--very natural in itself--that the governor of Cyprus would be
called a propraetor. Accordingly Baronio [293:1] suggested that Cyprus,
though a praetorian province, was often handed over _honoris causa_ to
be administered by the proconsul of Cilicia, and he assumed therefore
that Sergius Paulus held this latter office; while Grotius found a
solution in the hypothesis that proconsul was a title bestowed by
flatterers on an official whose proper designation was propraetor. The
error illustrates the danger of a little learning, not the less
dangerous when it is in the hands of really learned men. Asia and
Africa, the two great prizes of the profession, exhausted the normal two
consuls of the preceding year; and the Senate therefore were obliged to
send ex-praetors and other magistrates to govern the remaining provinces
under their jurisdiction. But it is now an unquestioned and
unquestionable fact that all the provincial governors who represented
the Senate in imperial times, whatever magistracy they might have held
previously, were styled officially proconsuls [293:2].

The circumstances indeed, so far as regards Cyprus, are distinctly
stated by Dion Cassius. At the original distribution of the provinces
(B.C. 27) this island had fallen to the Emperor's share; but the
historian, while describing the assignment of the several countries in
the first instance, adds that the Emperor subsequently gave back Cyprus
and Gallia Narbonensis to the Senate, himself taking Dalmatia in
exchange [293:3]; and at a later point, when he arrives at the time in
question (B.C. 22), he repeats the information respecting the transfer.
'And so,' he adds, 'proconsuls began to be sent to those nations also'
[294:1]. Of the continuance of Cyprus under the jurisdiction of the
Senate, about the time to which St Luke's narrative refers we have ample
evidence. Contemporary records bear testimony to the existence o