The Historians' History of the World 04

The Grecian states submitted to various and multiplied acts of oppression, without a struggle. The government which retained the longest a portion of the spirit of ancient times, was the Achæan. In their treatment of Achaia, the Romans, although they had gained over to their interests several of the Achæan chiefs, were obliged to proceed with great circumspection, lest the destruction of their own creatures should defeat their designs. They endeavoured to trace some vestiges of a correspondence between the Achæan body and the late king of Macedon; and when no such vestiges could be found, they determined that fiction should supply the place of evidence. Caius Claudius, and Cneius Domitius Ahenobarbus, were sent as commissioners from Rome, to complain that some of the first men of Achaia had acted in concert with Macedon. At the same time they required, that all who were in such a predicament should be sentenced to death: promising that, after a decree for that purpose should be enacted, they would produce the names of the guilty. “Where,” exclaimed the assembly, “would be the justice of such a proceeding? First name the persons you accuse, and make good your charge.” “I name, then,” said the commissioner, “all those who have borne the office of chief magistrate of Achaia, or been the leaders of your armies.” “In that case,” answered Xenon, an Achæan nobleman, “I too shall be accounted guilty, for I have commanded the armies of Achaia; and yet I am ready to prove my innocence, either here, or before the senate of Rome.” “You say well,” replied one of the Roman commissioners, laying hold on his last words, “let the senate of Rome then be the tribunal before which you shall answer.”

A decree was framed for this end, and above a thousand Achæan chiefs were transported into Italy, a hundred and sixty-seven years before Christ.f Among these was Polybius,b who afterwards became famous as the historian of the Roman Conquest, and whose work, though preserved only in fragments beyond the fifth book of the original forty, is the chief reliable source of information regarding some of the events of the period we have just considered. Had fortune spared us the later books of Polybius, our knowledge of the history of the Leagues would have been far different from what it is; for this Greek of the “degenerate” Hellenistic age is universally admitted to be the most philosophical and reliable of all historical writers among his countrymen of any age, Thucydides alone excepted. We shall see more of his work when we come to the history of the Punic wars, where he is again the chief authority.a

FOOTNOTES

[48] [Freemani comparing the two great Leagues says: “The political conduct of the Achæan League with some mistakes and some faults, is, on the whole, highly honourable. The political conduct of the Ætolian League is, throughout the century in which we know it best, simply infamous.”]

[49] [Freemani praises Marcus of Cerynea, as the probable founder or “Washington of the original League,” though obscured later by Aratus.]

[50] [Freemani calls Aratus “the Creator, the Preserver, and the Destroyer” of the League and bitterly compares his surrender of Corinth with Cavour’s delivery of Savoy and Nice to Napoleon III.]

[51] [“This infamous action,” says Polybius,b “was not for some time discovered to the world; for the poison was not of that kind which procures immediate death; but was one of those which weaken the habit of the body, and destroy life by slow degrees. Aratus himself was very sensible of the injury that he had received. ‘Such, Cephalo,’ he said to a favourite servant, ‘is the reward of the friendship which I have had for Philip.’ So great and excellent a thing is moderation, which disposed the sufferer, and not the author of the injury, to feel the greatest shame when he found that all the glorious actions which he had shared with Philip, in order to promote the service of that prince, had been at last so basely recompensed.

“Such was the end of this magistrate, who received after his death, not from his own country alone, but from the whole republic of the Achæans, all the honours that were due a man who had so often held the administration of their government, and performed such signal services for the State. For they decreed sacrifices to him, with the other honours that belong to heroes, and, in a word, omitting nothing that could serve to render his name immortal.”]

The Plain of Argos

CHAPTER LXIV. THE FINAL DISASTERS