hey did. The
Macedonians were expelled, and Aratus put an Achaian garrison into the
Acro-Corinthus.

His whole care was to get Greece free from the Macedonians, and he drove
them out from city after city, persuading each to join the Achaian League
as it was delivered. Argos was still under a tyrant named Aristippus,
and Aratus made many attempts to turn him out, by his usual fashion of
night attacks. Once he got into the city, and fought there all day,
though he was wounded with a lance in the thigh; but he was obliged to
retreat at night. However, he attacked the tyrant when out on an
expedition, and slew him, but still could not set Argos free, as the
tyrant's son Aristomenes still held it.

However, Lysiades, the tyrant of Megalopolis, was so moved by admiration
for the patriot that he resigned, and the city joined the League. In
fact, Aratus was at this time quite the greatest man in Greece. He beat
the AEtolians, when they were on a foray into the Achaian territories,
and forced them to make peace; and he tried also to win Athens and Sparta
to the common cause against Macedon, but there were jealousies in the way
that hindered his success, and all his enterprises were rendered more
difficult by his weakly health, which always made him suffer greatly from
the fatigue and excitement of a battle.

[Picture: Ruins of a Temple at Corinth]

CHAP. XXXV. AGIS AND THE REVIVAL OF SPARTA. B.C. 244-236.

[Picture: Decorative chapter heading]

Sparta had never been so overcome by Macedon as the states north of the
Isthmus, but all the discipline of Lycurgus had been forgotten, and the
Ephors and Kings had become greedy, idle, and corrupt. One of the kings,
named Leonidas, had gone to Antioch, married an Eastern wife, and learned
all the Syrian and Persian vanities in which King Seleucus delighted, and
he brought these home to Sparta. The other king, Eudamidas, was such a
miser, that on his death, in 244, his widow and his mother were said to
possess more gold than all the rest of the people in the state put
together; but he left a son of nineteen, named Agis, most unlike himself.

As soon as, in his childhood, Agis had heard the story of his great
forefathers, he set himself to live like an ancient Spartan, giving up
whatever Lycurgus had forbidden, dressing and eating as plainly as he
could, and always saying that he would not be king if he did not hope to
make Sparta