The Historians' History of the World 05

In the same year in which Lucullus and Galba took command in Spain, the senate was induced to perform an act of tardy justice in the release of the Achæan captives. The abduction of the best men in every state of Greece gave free scope, as has been said, to the oppressions of the tyrants favoured by Rome. In the Achæan assembly alone there was still spirit enough to check Callicrates, who never ventured to assail the persons and property of his fellow-citizens. Meantime years rolled on; the captives still languished in Etruscan prisons; hope deferred and sickness were fast thinning their numbers; the assembly asked only that Polybius and Stratius might return, but the request was met by a peremptory negative. At last, when Scipio returned from Spain, he induced Cato to intercede for these unhappy men. The manner of the old censor’s intercession is characteristic.

The debate had lasted long and the issue was somewhat doubtful, when Cato rose, and, without a word about justice or humanity, simply said: “Have we really nothing to do but to sit here all day, debating whether a parcel of old Greeks are to have their coffins made here or at home?” The question was decided by this unfeeling argument, and the prisoners, who in sixteen years had dwindled from one thousand to three hundred, were set free. But when Polybius prayed that his comrades might be restored to their former rank and honours, the old senator smiled, and told him “he was acting like Ulysses, when he ventured back into the cave of the Cyclops to recover his cap and belt.”

The men released in this ungracious way had passed the best part of their lives in captivity. The elder and more experienced among them were dead. The survivors returned with feelings embittered against Rome; they were rash and ignorant, and, what was worse, they had lost all sense of honour and all principle, and were ready to expose their country to any danger in order to gratify their own passions. The chief name that has reached us is that of Diæus. Polybius did not return at first, and when he reached Greece he found his countrymen acting with such reckless violence that he gladly accepted Scipio’s invitation to accompany him to the siege of Carthage. Callicrates, by a strange reverse, was now the leader of the moderate party. Diæus advocated every violent and unprincipled measure. On an embassy to Rome the former died, and Diæus returned as chief of the Achæan League.

Not long after (in 148 B.C.) a pretender to the throne of Macedon appeared. He was a young man named Andriscus, a native of Adramyttium, who gave himself out as Philip, a younger son of that luckless monarch. The state of Macedonia, divided into four republics, each in a state of compulsory excommunication, was so distracted, that, in the year 151, the people sent an embassy to Rome, praying that Scipio might be sent to settle their affairs, and he had only been prevented from undertaking the task by the self-imposed duty of accompanying the army of Lucullus into Spain. The pretender, however, met with so little success in his first attempt that he fled to the court of Demetrius at Antioch, and this prince sent him to Rome. The war with Carthage was then at its height. The senate treated the matter lightly, and the adventurer was allowed to escape. Some Thracian chiefs received him, and with troops furnished by them he penetrated into Thessaly. The Roman prætor, Juventius Thalna, was defeated and slain by the pretender.

The temporary success of Pseudo-Philippus (as the Romans called him) encouraged Diæus to drive the Achæans into a rupture with Rome. The haughty republic, he said, was at war with Carthage and with Macedon; now was the time to break their bonds. Q. Metellus, who had just landed in Greece with a considerable army, gave the Achæans a friendly warning, but in vain.

Metellus soon finished the Macedonian War. At his approach the pretender hastily retired from Thessaly, and was given up to the Roman prætor by a Thracian chief whose protection he had sought.

Meanwhile, a commission had already arrived at Corinth, headed by M. Aurelius Orestes, who summoned the chiefs of the League to hear the sentence of the senate upon their recent conduct. He informed them that they must relinquish all claims of sovereignty over Corinth, Argos, and Lacedæmon—a doom which reduced the Achæan League nearly to the condition from which Aratus first raised it. The chiefs reported what they had heard to the assembly. A furious burst of passion rose, which Diæus did not attempt to restrain. Orestes and the Romans hardly escaped personal violence.

[147-146 B.C.]