LITMIR.BIZ

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stratēgos.²⁴⁹ The Spartans decided to involve the Romans in the winter of 191/0, establishing a pattern that persisted for nearly fifty years. They sought the restoration of hostages sent to Rome after Flamininus’s war against Nabis in 195, the restoration of Spartans exiled by the Achaians, and the restoration of their traditional control over the coastal towns of Lakonia.²⁵⁰ The hostages were returned by the Romans, but the other matters had more to do with Achaia than with Rome. Philopoimen, under some duress, agreed to allow the return of those Spartans who had been exiled by the Achaians.²⁵¹

      With the Spartans somewhat mollified, it remained only for the Achaians to persuade the Elians and Messenians to join the koinon in order to achieve the goal of a politically united Peloponnese. While the Elians expressed openness to the possibility, the Messenians refused, and the stratēgos of 191/0, Diophanes of Megalopolis, led the Achaian army against the city. Before hostilities had progressed very far the Messenians surrendered themselves to Flamininus, who was at Chalkis again in an unofficial diplomatic role. In a bizarre sequence of decisions that highlights both the ambiguity of the Romans’ authority in Greece in this period and the distrust that prevailed among Greek states, Flamininus ordered the Achaians to withdraw and then ordered the Messenians to join the Achaian koinon.²⁵²

      The pattern repeated itself in 189/8, when the Spartans again revolted from Achaia and handed their city over to Fulvius Nobilior. At his suggestion, both parties sent ambassadors to Rome, where it was resolved that “nothing should be changed with regard to the Lacedaemonians.”²⁵³ The Achaians took this to mean that they could deal with the Spartans as they would deal with any other member of their own polity, namely with complete autonomy. So Philopoimen, as stratēgos, led the Achaian army, its ranks swelled by pro-Achaian Lakedaimonian exiles, against Sparta in the spring of 188. As the force reached the city, the exiles attacked their compatriots, and some seventeen Spartans, held responsible for the revolt, were killed in a riotous encounter; on the following day an additional sixty-three were killed after a brief trial before some sort of Achaian tribunal. The Achaians demanded that the Spartans tear down their city wall and expel their mercenaries and those helots who had been liberated by the tyrants. Finally, they revoked the ancestral Lykourgan constitution and replaced the Spartan with Achaian laws.²⁵⁴ If this seemed to Philopoimen and his supporters like a final settlement of the Spartan issue, they were mistaken. The Achaians had been unable to eradicate all opposition within Sparta, and those who still sought independence attempted to accomplish it by Roman intervention. In a series of embassies and letters, complaints were lodged with the Romans about the cruelty of the Achaians’ behavior, requests were made by exiled Spartans for restoration, rebukes were sent from Rome to the Achaians, and the Achaians themselves became divided over the question of how they should respond to ostensible Roman requests. The emergence of this internal rift was perhaps more damaging to the Achaian koinon than anything else in this period, for it created political opportunities by which Achaian independence was eventually undermined.²⁵⁵ The full cost of Philopoimen’s decision to align the Achaians with Rome in order to secure their independence from Macedon was now being revealed. The Romans expected that their resolutions would be followed, but doing so sometimes required the Achaians to violate their own laws and reverse their own ratified decisions. They had indeed achieved independence from Macedon but were quickly becoming subordinated to the Romans.²⁵⁶

      Although the Achaians had finally succeeded in creating a single state from the complex political mosaic of the Peloponnese, they did not succeed at quelling all disaffection among their newest members. Messene revolted in 183 in circumstances that are largely lost to us but was brought back into the koinon in the following year, in the course of which the great Achaian leader Philopoimen died.²⁵⁷ Just as the Messenian War was being resolved, internal unrest at Sparta led to another temporary secession from the Achaian koinon. When Sparta’s leaders sought to restore it, the major stumbling block in negotiations was the problem of how to handle a group of pro-Achaian Spartans who had been exiled when the city first revolted from the Achaian koinon in 189/8 and had been restored by the Achaians after the massacre of Spartan rebels at Kompasion in 188, but who subsequently sent embassies to Rome complaining of Achaian behavior and were therefore viewed by the Achaians as ungrateful.²⁵⁸ Sparta was readmitted when its citizens agreed to bring back from exile those Spartans who “had not been guilty of any ingratitude to the ethnos of the Achaians.” The decision was inscribed on a stele and had the binding force of law.²⁵⁹

      The issue is highlighted by Polybios, for in his analysis it led to a deepening of the internal political rift in Achaia, which had disastrous results: his own father, Lykortas, as stratēgos of the koinon in 182, advocated and achieved the reintroduction of Sparta and the restoration only of those exiles who had not shown ingratitude to the Achaians, but in early 180 the Achaian council and assembly were called to a meeting to discuss a letter from the Roman senate requesting the restoration of all the exiles. Lykortas, according to Polybios, exhorted the Achaians to explain to the Romans that accommodating their request was impossible, for doing so would “violate our oaths, our laws, our stelai, which hold together our common polity.”²⁶⁰ His political opponents Kallikrates and Hyperbatos, however, argued that “neither law nor stele nor anything else is more compelling” than the Romans’ request. The resolution of the debate is unclear, but Kallikrates went to Rome, exposed the political fault lines in Achaia, and urged the senate to express their disapproval of those Achaian leaders who valued their own laws and treaties as more binding than the will of the Romans. The Roman response was to ask the Achaians, once again, to restore the exiles; but this time the request was accompanied by letters to Aitolians, Epeirotes, Athenians, Boiotians, and Akarnanians, apparently requesting their assistance in putting pressure on the Achaians to comply with their demand.²⁶¹ The Romans’ communication with the Achaians apparently also praised Kallikrates, according to Polybios increasing the esteem in which the Achaians held him; in 180/79 Kallikrates served as stratēgos of the Achaians and effected the return not only of the Spartan but also of the Achaian exiles.²⁶² Polybios charges Kallikrates with being the “instigator of great evils for all the Greeks, but especially for the Achaians” and with ushering in a “turn for the worse” in Achaia at the very moment when it had, at least in territorial terms, reached its greatest strength.²⁶³ That assessment is clearly colored by a strong bias, and there is no doubt that Achaian internal affairs, as well as Achaian relations with Rome, had been flirting with disaster for at least a decade.²⁶⁴ Assessing the immediate impact is, however, extremely difficult, for the texts of both Polybios and Livy are lacunose at this crucial juncture, and we can discern little of what happened in Achaia again until 174.

      

      We know, however, that in the intervening years Philip V died and was succeeded by his son Perseus, whose energetic attempts to regain the power and resources of the Macedonian kingdom before his father’s defeat at Kynoskephalai had attracted the hostility and suspicion of the Romans. Among other strategies, Perseus courted the favor of the Greeks of the mainland, but in this he had mixed success: by 174 the Achaians and Athenians were staunchly opposed to him, but it was perhaps in the following year that the Boiotian koinon concluded an alliance with Perseus, a move that brought about the complete destruction of the oldest koinon in the Greek world.²⁶⁵ The Romans, having declared war on Perseus in 172, sent legates to Greece in advance of their forces to muster support for their cause. While in Thessaly, they received a number of envoys from the Boiotians, anxious about the Roman response to their alliance with Perseus. According to Polybios, ambassadors came from Thespiai, Chaironeia, Lebadeia, and several other cities seeking to hand their individual cities over to the Romans, while one Ismenias, a leader in the pro-Macedonian politics of Boiotia, sought “in accordance with the koinon to place all the poleis in Boiotia together at the discretion of the legates.”²⁶⁶ The Roman legates, in Polybios’s words, thought it “most suitable to break up the Boiotians into their constituent poleis,” so they neglected Ismenias and received the other ambassadors warmly.²⁶⁷

      The Romans had certainly learned from the endless internal disputes of the Achaians, their dodges and feints over the issue of the Spartan exiles, that in a large and complex state like one of the Hellenistic koina, unanimity of opinion, and therefore loyal allegiance to Rome, was exceedingly difficult to secure. Fragmentation would

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