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The Romans had resolved to cancel the unnatural and forced inclusion of Sparta among the Achaean states, and generally to act with vigour against the Achaeans. Some years before these had been obliged to release from their league the Aetolian town of Pleuron; now they were directed to renounce all the acquisitions which they had made since the second Macedonian war viz.
It is true that, as was implied in the very introduction of the provincial constitution, the special confederacies, and the Achaean in particular, were as such dissolved; the communities were isolated; and intercourse between them was hampered by the rule that no one might acquire landed property simultaneously in two communities.
Entering into the town himself, he, a private man as he was, refused admission to both the consul of Rome, and the General of the Achaeans, quieted the disorders in the city, and reunited it on the same terms as before to the Achaean confederacy.
At this epoch, when Tarentum was still contending with Sybaris for the first place among the Greek cities of Lower Italy, its extensive commercial connections must have been already forming; but the Tarentines seem never to have steadily and successfully directed their efforts to a substantial extension of their territory after the manner of the Achaean cities. Greek Cities Near Vesuvius
At the beginning of 608 the Achaeans advanced into Thessaly to reduce to obedience Heraclea near to Oeta, which, in accordance with the decree of the senate, had detached itself from the Achaean league. The consul Lucius Mummius, whom the senate had resolved to send to Greece, had not yet arrived; accordingly Metellus undertook to protect Heraclea with the Macedonian legions.
But frantic party feuds, insurrections en masse of the slaves, social abuses of all sorts, attempts to supply in practice an impracticable state-philosophy, in short, all the evils of demoralized civilization never ceased to rage in the Achaean communities, till under the accumulated pressure their political power utterly broke down.
Wherefore Aratus is much blamed, that in a stormy and tempestuous time, like a cowardly pilot, he should forsake the helm, when it was even perhaps his duty to have insisted, whether they would or no, on saving them; or if he thought the Achaean affairs desperate, to have yielded all up to Cleomenes, and not to have let Peloponnesus fall once again into barbarism with Macedonian garrisons, and Acro-Corinthus be occupied with Illyric and Gaulish soldiers, and, under the specious name of Confederates, to have made those masters of the cities whom he had held it his business by arms and by policy to baffle and defeat, and, in the memoirs he left behind him, loaded with reproaches and insults.
The consul therefore judged it prudent, that, before they entered on that affair, ambassadors should be sent to the Achaean state, with assurances, that if they came over from the king to the side of the Romans, the latter would consign Corinth to them, and annex it to the old confederacy of their nation.
The unfortunate variances with Sparta, and the still more lamentable invocation of Macedonian interference in the Peloponnesus, had so completely subjected the Achaean league to Macedonian supremacy, that the chief fortresses of the country thenceforward received Macedonian garrisons, and the oath of fidelity to Philip was annually taken there. Sparta, Elis, Messene
The Greeks of Lower Italy tried to resist the pressure of the barbarians; the league of the Achaean cities was reconstructed in 361; and it was determined that, if any of the allied towns should be assailed by the Lucanians, all should furnish contingents, and that the leaders of contingents which failed to appear should suffer the punishment of death.
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