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