e of
securing what they had won by building military roads and establishing
strong posts of control, as at Colchester, Chester, and
Caerleon-on-Usk. Some amount of iron-working was being done in
Britain, but its chief exports were, as they had long been, tin, salt,
and hides. The British themselves had no towns. The places so called
were nothing more than collections of huts, surrounded by rampart and
ditch, in some easily defensible spot amid wood or marsh.

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 G