B.C. 167.]

THE ACHEAN LEAGUE.

513

father of the historian Polybius. He is first mentioned in B.C. 189, as one of the envoys to Rome on the collision between Sparta and the Achæan League; and, after supporting and continuing the policy of Philopomen, he finally succeeded in bringing back Sparta and Messene into the confederacy. In B.C. 179 he distinguished himself by his firm opposition to the demand of the Romans for the restoration of all the Spartan exiles; and, during the war with Perseus, he prevailed on the Achæans to preserve neutrality. The last mention of his name is in the year of the defeat of Perseus; and this seems to have been the last year of his life. His leading opponent was Callicrates, one of those characters who, branded as traitors by the patriots of their own country, have gained the dubious eulogies of philosophical historians for their discernment in deserting the cause of freedom. He first showed his colours when, sent to Rome to support the views which Lycortas had carried in the diet against the restoration of the Spartan exiles, he did not scruple to urge upon the Senate the policy of giving active support to the Roman party in all the Hellenic states* (B.C. 179). He returned, the bearer of such letters of approval from the Senate, that the league could not refuse to elect him general. In B.C. 174, we find him again in opposition, resisting the motion of the general Xenarchus for an alliance with Perseus; and, in B.C. 168, he thwarted the proposal of Lycortas for sending aid to Egypt against Antiochus Epiphanes, by producing a letter from the proconsul Q. Marcius, commanding the League to confine itself to friendly mediation. And now, when Paulus Æmilius was settling the affairs of Greece, Callicrates seized the opportunity to denounce 1000 of the Achæan patriots for complicity with Perseus, and they were carried to Rome for trial (B.c. 167). Their removal was doubtless meant by the Romans as an act of precaution rather than of vengeance: they were distributed in honourable captivity among the Italian towns; but any attempt to escape was punished with death. They were permitted to return after seventeen years (B.c. 151). Callicrates reaped the reward of their betrayal in the hatred of his

* Mommsen says of this conduct :-" Callicrates the Achæan, who went to the senate to enlighten it as to the state of matters in Peloponnesus, and to demand a consistent and sustained intervention "-(he did this, but went to do the very opposite)" may as a man have had somewhat less ability than his countryman Philopomen, who was the main founder of the patriotic policy; but he was in the right.' There is all the difference in the world between confessing, in the light of history, that the Greeks had lost the capacity for freedom, and lauding the traitor who used the melancholy fact as a pretext for foreign intervention.

VOL. II.

LL

countrymen, who deemed it a pollution to bathe with him, while the very boys threw the name of traitor in his teeth: but yet later ages have reaped unspeakable benefit from his crime. Among the exiles was the historian Polybius, whose long residence at Rome, and friendship with the younger Africanus and other leading Roman statesmen, gave him that accurate information, and that knowledge of Roman policy which combined with the love of freedom in which he had been trained, and the endowments bestowed upon him by nature, to make him the greatest of ancient historians, except Thucydides. But for the long didactic essays, into which he was led by over-anxiety to make his work instructive, he might have shared the honours of the first rank among historians.

This deportation, of course, rendered the Achæans helpless for the present, and secured the ascendancy of Callicrates, in spite of their hatred. The Athenians were rewarded for their neutrality by the gift of the ruined city of Haliartus, in Boeotia, and of Lemnos and Delos, the latter being made a free port, as a rival to Rhodes. Amphipolis and Leucas were taken from the Ætolians and the Acarnanians, who had betrayed some sympathy with Perseus, while the Epirots, who had openly espoused his cause, felt the utmost resentment of the victors. By the command of the Senate,

*

The peculiar character of the work of Polybius is indicated by its very title, which is not a History, but Pragmateia (рayuareía), that is, an investigation or essay of the subject treated, in contrast to the Apodeixis Historias (iotopíns àwódeĝis), or statement of information of Herodotus. Intermediate between the two is the method of Thucydides, in which principles are connected with the facts that illustrate or suggest them, instead of being drawn out into didactic digressions. The work of Polybius, which was a continuation of the History of Aratus (see p. 115), consisted of forty books, and embraced the important period from the accession of Philip V. to the extinction of Hellenic independence (B. C. 220-146). As the author lived from about B. C. 204 to B.C. 122, and had the opportunity of learning the earlier events he records from eye-witnesses, both in Greece and at Rome, the work is strictly one of contemporaneous history. But his impartiality in dealing with his own times is not more remarkable than the conscientious diligence of his researches into the earlier periods which he notices by way of introduction and digression; and we have special means of judging his merits, by comparing him with the careless and one-sided rhetoric of Livy. His work has, moreover, the artistic character of unity. Its subject was the real establishment of the Roman empire, in the space of fifty-three years from the accession of Philip V. to the conquest of Perseus. This occupied the first part of his work, to which the second, relating the final subjection of Greece, may be regarded as a supplement. Unhappily we possess only the Remembering that Polybius

first five books entire, with fragments of the rest. would of course write in the language of his own age, and not in that of two or three centuries earlier, it is scarcely necessary to notice the amusing objection made to his style by the Cambridge scholar, who said he never read Polybius because it was bad Greek.

B.C. 156.]

THE PHILOSOPHERS AT ROME.

515

Æmilius destroyed seventy of their towns, and sold 150,000 of the people into slavery. Paulus, who had remained in Greece to regulate these affairs with ten commissioners, returned to Rome in the autumn of B.C. 167. He brought an enormous spoil into the treasury, and celebrated a three days' triumph, the most magnificent that had ever ascended to the Capitol. A king, loaded with chains, for the first time walked before a proconsul's triumphal car, and behind it rode on horseback the two sons of Paulus, Q. Fabius Maximus and P. Cornelius Scipio. But the man, whose family had been his chief care, must have felt all this but little consolation for the loss of his two younger sons, boys of twelve and fourteen, who died, one a few days before and the other a few days later. For once, the office of the slave was superfluous, who was wont to ride behind the victor's car, to remind its occupant that he was mortal (B.c. 167). The proud name of Emilius Paulus Macedonicus died with him in B.C. 160, owing to the adoption of his two sons into other families. His funeral games are memorable for the first exhibition of the Adelphi of Terence.

The final catastrophe was still prolonged for twenty years but little remains to be told of the interval. Athens and Sparta appear as petty states, contributing indirectly to the destruction of that Hellas, for the supremacy of which they once contended. The city of Solon, Themistocles, and Pericles, was reduced to dependence for the supply of her expenses on the bounty of the Ptolemies; and when that failed her, she returned to piracy, like the Greeks before the age of civilization. An expedition against Oropus in Euboea provoked an appeal to the Roman Senate, who referred the question to the Sicyonians, and Athens was condemned to pay the enormous fine of 500 talents, the measure, not of the injuries inflicted on Oropus, but of her presumption in taking up arms (B.C. 156). An embassy was sent to Rome to deprecate the severity of the sentence; and just five years after the passing of a law banishing all philosophers and rhetoricians, the Senate received as envoys the three chief masters of the philosophic schools of Athens, Diogenes the Stoic, Critolaüs the Peripatetic, and Carneades the founder of the third Academy. The last, in particular, charmed the leading men of Rome by his declamations, the most celebrated of which were those on Justice, which he delivered on successive days. His magnificent eulogium of Justice, on the first day, won even the sternest Romans of the old school-and among them Cato-to doubt whether they themselves had exercised. the virtue towards the Greek philosophers. But when, on the

second day, the orator proceeded to answer all his former arguments, and to prove that justice was a mere conventional device for the maintenance of civil order, Cato indignantly moved the Senate to send the sophist back again to his school, and not to suffer the Roman youth to be corrupted.

The mitigation of the fine to 100 talents still left it beyond the resources of the Athenians, who seem to have taken the first opportunity of revenging themselves on Oropus (B.c. 150). This time the Oropians appealed to the Achæan League, relying less on the justice of their cause than on the corruption of the leading statesmen. So far as the transaction is intelligible, a bribe of ten talents was given to Menalcidas, the general of the league, who promised the half of it to Callicrates, for the use of his all-powerful influence. This promise he failed to keep, and Callicrates revenged himself by accusing Menalcidas, who was a Spartan, of advising the Romans to sever Sparta from the league. Menalcidas only escaped condemnation by a present to Diæus, his successor in the office of general; but Diæus-and this says something for the remnant of public virtue left among the Achæans-Diæus fell into such disgrace by the transaction that he was fain to occupy the attention of the confederacy by urging a new attack on the Spartans, on the ground that they had violated the laws of the league by a private appeal to Rome respecting a disputed boundary.

Other events had occurred to inflame and encourage the war party. In B.c. 151 the Achæan exiles had returned from Rome, having been dismissed with a sort of contemptuous mercy. After the repeated rejection of their petition for liberty, their cause was espoused by P. Scipio, as the friend of Polybius. Cato, gained over by Scipio, decided the question by a characteristic speech, thrown in when the debate was almost exhausted. "Have we nothing better to do," said he, "than to sit here all day long, debating whether a parcel of worn-out Greeks shall be carried to their graves here or in Achaia?" But when the exiles proceeded to petition the Senate for restoration to their honours, Cato told Polybius, with a smile, that he resembled Ulysses returning to the cave of the Cyclops for the hat and sash he had left behind. Of the 300 exiles who landed in Greece-for to this had their number been reduced-almost the only one who had learned the necessity of moderation was Polybius himself. They were mad enough to look with hope towards Andriscus, a low-born adventurer, who called himself Philip, and claimed the Macedonian throne as

B.C. 140.]

SACK OF CORINTH BY MUMMIUS.

517

the son of Perseus, but was defeated and taken prisoner by the prætor, Q. Metellus, after some brief success. In the same year

Polybius retired from a scene where he found no good to be done, to join his friend Scipio in the Third Punic War; and Callicrates died at Rhodes, on an embassy to Rome respecting the affairs of Sparta, leaving his epitaph to be written by the traveller Pausanias, "his death being, for aught I know, a clear gain to the country" (B.C. 149).

Thus every check on the war-party was removed; and the Spartans were left no resource but an appeal to Rome. The Senate sent two commissioners, who decided that the Achæan League should give up, not only Sparta, but Corinth; that is, that they should surrender the key of Peloponnesus, together with all other cities not Achæan (B.c. 147). The sentence was received with the greatest dissatisfaction at Corinth itself: the indignation of the citizens vented itself in an attack on the Spartan residents; and the Roman commissioners themselves were endangered in the riot. After a second fruitless embassy, to demand satisfaction for this new outrage, the Senate declared war against the Achæan League; and the prætor Metellus was ordered to march into Peloponnesus. The Achæan general Critolaüs proved as incompetent in the field as he had been headstrong in council. Abandoning the defence of Thermopylæ, he was overtaken and defeated at Scarphea in Locris, he himself never again being heard of. The other leader of the war party, Diæus, succeeded him as general, and checked the progress of Metellus; but meanwhile a second Roman army landed at the Isthmus under the consul Lucius Mummius. Diæus, marching to the defence of Corinth, was utterly defeated; and the city was evacuated, not only by the Achæan troops, but by the mass of the inhabitants. Their retirement failed to save Corinth from being made one of the chief examples of that vengeance by which the Romans were wont to put a decisive end to a long conflict. Mummius gave up the undefended city to the flames, the few men in it to slaughter, and the women and children to slavery. The precious treasures of art, which had been accumulated for centuries at Corinth-one of the chief schools of sculpture and painting-became partly the playthings of the Roman soldiers, a band of whom were seen by Polybius at a game of dice or draughts on a masterpiece of Aristides, and were partly exposed for sale. Taught their value by the enormous prices at which Attalus III. eagerly bought some of them,* the consul sent

The "Attalici Conditiones" of Horace, Carm. I. 1.