I said the proudest day of his life, save one. For he had one prouder.
Two years longer he tarried among the Greeks, as commissioner to see the treaties carried out; and for a short time he fell into odium with the people he had liberated, for that, when he was warring against Nabis, the cruel tyrant and usurper of Lacedæmon, and might have dethroned him, he made peace, and suffered him to retain his blood-bought dominion. Some were so base as to attribute this to jealousy of Philipœmen. His own statement, and our knowledge of his character bears out that statement, asserts that he could not destroy Nabis, without destroying Sparta, and that in preference to destroying Sparta, he suffered Nabis to go free.
But when he left the shores of Hellas, after interceding twenty times, and mediating successfully between the Greeks and his successors, the Ætolians much desired to make him some great gift, that should prove their great love and veneration. But the known integrity of the man deterred them; for it was notorious that he would receive naught that savored of a bribe.
At last they bethought them. There were in Greece twelve hundred Roman citizens, who had been captives to Hannibal, and by him sold as slaves. Their sad case had of late been sadly aggravated, as slaves themselves and bondmen, they all saw their countrymen, many their kinsmen, some their brethren or their sons, free, conquerors, and hailed as saviors of the land, to which they were enslaved.
Titus had grieved for them deeply; but he was too poor to ransom them, too just to take them by the strong hand from their lawful owners. So the Ætolians ransomed them at five minæ[[19]] the head; and, as he was on the point of setting sail, brought them down to the wharf in a body, and presented them to him, the gift of liberated Greece. “A gift worthy,” says Plutarch, “of a great man, and a lover of his country.”
A gift, say I, which none would have offered but to—what is far greater than a great—a good man. A gift which proves alike the character of the givers, and the receiver. An honor, as few gifts are, to both.
I care not that in Flamininus’ triumph those twelve hundred ransomed Romans, of their own free will, walked with shaven heads and white caps, as manumitted slaves, and that the people of Rome had no eyes for the hostage prince, or the barbaric gold, or the strange Macedonian armor—had no eyes for Flamininus himself, but only for the twelve hundred manumitted Romans.
But I do care that the Ætolians knew, from their knowledge of the man, that there was one invaluable gift which it would gladden the heart of the incorruptible of men to receive at their hands, richer than untold gold, inestimable jewels, the priceless liberty of freeborn Romans.
It does not belong to the military career of Flamininus, but it does to the history of his life, that in after days he was sent by the Senate ambassador to Prusias, king of Bithynia, for the purpose of compelling the surrender into their hands of the aged, exiled, down fallen Hannibal; and that, rather than fall into those pitiless hands, which never refrained the scourge and axe from the noblest foeman, the old man had recourse to the
“Cannarum vindex et tanti sanguinis ultor,