I'll tell you what's wrong with this....

[mlp071]

What year you are in ?Do you have governors in each city?Do you have any of your spies and assassins in cities? Where you keeping population growth in high rates?

In my Maks campaign(around 150BC right now), i am holding around 60-ish provinces.Territory goes from Kyrene and Pselkis , bordering Seleukeia and going to Armavir on East. On west i have Italy , Sicily and Balkans in my hands.My capital is still in Pella (RP reasons).

None of my cities has less then 115% public order and all Taxes are set on High(Roma is 130% with high) and no garrisons with more then 3 units(except some border ones).

Without knowing more about the your game , there could be several reasons that can possibly cause instabilities in your cities:

- Expanding to fast.
- Keeping population growth too high, so cities grow too fast, and you didn't have time to rebuild PO buildings.I found it that 0.5% with High Taxes is optimal setting (at least for me).Exception would be nomads and their starting provinces and some smaller, poor factions.
- Having no governor or having governor with bad traits(or ethnicity for that matter) for governing could cause unrest and will cause huge corruption.Governors could be educated before they takeover.
- Unless buildings in newly conquered city are of my culture, i destroy and rebuild every single building , unless they can be upgraded. First buildings that have to(must) go are public growth ones(even my culture ones) and temples, and first that have to be built are governmental and PO ones.
- There is always possibility that there are spies in your city, leftover from previous owner or new ones that are causing unrest.
- You didn't place any of your spies in cities .I always keep at least one spy(or more) and 1 assassin in each town.
-45% distance penalty is not that much, when you get to 70-80% that's when problems should start.

...and more

Hellenistic factions have best PO, educational and growth control variety of buildings in EB,imho, so use them wisely if you didn't already.

cheers