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“What was the use, then, of torches and scaling-ladders?” asked Cleomenes. Aratus laughed, and asked a Spartan who was in exile what kind of youth this young king was; and the Spartan made reply, “If you have any designs against Sparta, you had better begin them before the game chicken’s spurs are grown.”
For it is related that, as Aratus was not long before offering sacrifice, there were found in the liver two gall-bags enclosed in the same caul of fat; whereupon the soothsayer told him that there should very soon be the strictest friendship imaginable between him and his greatest and most mortal enemies; which prediction he at that time slighted, having in general no great faith in soothsayings and prognostications, but depending most upon rational deliberation.
But now Aratus and the Achæan League refused to obey him, so he marched down from Macedon to restore order. To prevent his advance, and to hinder his getting even as much as a foothold in the peninsula, Aratus wanted to capture the fortress of Ac-ro-co-rin´thus, which barred the Isthmus of Corinth.
It contains the Phænomena of Aratus in Greek with Cicero's Latin interpretation, the places where Cicero's Translation is wanting being supplied; a Translation of the same Phænomena, ascribed to Germanicus; the fragment of Aratus's Prognostics, and the forms of the constellations as found in a Manuscript; with Remarks upon the whole, the Paraphrase of Festus Avienus, and marginal notes.
And so, being overthrown in battle near Phylacia by Bithys, Demetrius's general, and there being a very strong report that he was either taken or slain, Diogenes, the governor of the Piraeus, sent letters to Corinth, commanding the Achaeans to quit that city, seeing Aratus was dead.
To prevent such a misfortune, he decided to attack the Spartan king while he was too young to excel in the art of war. He therefore advanced with a good army; but, to his surprise and dismay, he was completely defeated by the young king. Several of the smaller towns now showed a desire to leave the Achæan League and join Sparta, so Aratus became more eager than ever to suppress her rising power.
That astronomy more especially, which ministered, in the nomenclature of the stars, to the thoughtless erudite dilettantism of the age and, in its relations to astrology, to the prevailing religious delusions, was regularly and zealously studied by the youth in Italy, can be proved also otherwise; the astronomical didactic poems of Aratus, among all the works of Alexandrian literature, found earliest admittance into the instruction of Roman youth.
In the meantime, Aratus was hard at work struggling to get up the rocks, at first slowly and with much difficulty, straying continually from the path, which lay deep, and was overshadowed with the crags, leading to the wall with many windings and turnings; but the moon immediately and as if by miracle, it is said, dispersing the clouds, shone out and gave light to the most difficult part of the way, until he got to that part of the wall he desired, and there she overshadowed and hid him, the clouds coming together again.
But Aratus, in his jealousy, forgot that the great work of his youth had been to get free of Macedon, and in order to put down Sparta and Cleomenes, actually asked the help of Antigonus, king of Macedon, and brought his hated troops back into the Peloponnesus, promising to welcome them, if only Cleomenes might be put down.
I have little in this order to observe and prove but that the strategus is the same honor both in name and thing that was borne, among others, by Philopemen and Aratus in the Commonwealth of the Achaeans; the like having been in use also with the AEtolians. The orator, called otherwise the speaker, is, with small alteration, the same that had been of former use in this nation.
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