This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
[146]
But as for his other benefits, it is impossible to reckon them up,
those which he bestowed on cities, both in Syria and in Greece, and in
all the places he came to in his voyages; for he seems to have conferred,
and that after a most plentiful manner, what would minister to many necessities,
and the building of public works, and gave them the money that was necessary
to such works as wanted it, to support them upon the failure of their other
revenues: but what was the greatest and most illustrious of all his works,
he erected Apollo's temple at Rhodes, at his own expenses, and gave them
a great number of talents of silver for the repair of their fleet. He also
built the greatest part of the public edifices for the inhabitants of Nicopolis,
at Actium; 1
and for the Antiochinus, the inhabitants of the principal city of Syria,
where a broad street cuts through the place lengthways, he built cloisters
along it on both sides, and laid the open road with polished stone, and
was of very great advantage to the inhabitants. And as to the olympic games,
which were in a very low condition, by reason of the failure of their revenues,
he recovered their reputation, and appointed revenues for heir maintenance,
and made that solemn meeting more venerable, as to the sacrifices and other
ornaments; and by reason of this vast liberality, he was generally declared
in their inscriptions to be one of the perpetual managers of those games.
1 Dr. Hudson here gives us the words of Suetonius concerning this Nicopolis, when Augustus rebuilt it: "And that the memory of the victory at Actium might be celebrated the more afterward, he built Nicopolis at Actium, and appointed public shows to be there exhibited every fifth year." In August, sect. 18.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.