Nevertheless they were
mistaken. How little the Romans with all their Philhellenism had
been successful in heartily conciliating Hellenic patriotism, was
nowhere more clearly apparent than in the attitude of the Greeks
towards the Attalids. King Eumenes II had been, as a friend of
the Romans, extremely hated in Greece;(19) but scarcely had a
coldness arisen between him and the Romans, when he became suddenly
popular in Greece, and the Hellenic hopefuls expected the deliverer
from a foreign yoke to come now from Pergamus as formerly from
Macedonia. Social disorganization more especially was visibly
on the increase among the petty states of Hellas now left to
themselves. The country became desolate not through war and
pestilence, but through the daily increasing disinclination of
the higher classes to trouble themselves with wife and children;
on the other hand the criminal or the thoughtless flocked as
hitherto chiefly to Greece, there to await the recruiting officer.
The communities sank into daily deeper debt, and into financial
dishonour and a corresponding want of credit: some cities, more
especially Athens and Thebes, resorted in their financial distress
to direct robbery, and plundered the neighbouring communities.
The internal dissensions in the leagues also--e. g. between the
voluntary and the compulsory members of the Achaean confederacy--
were by no means composed. If the Romans, as seems to have been
the case, believed what they wished and confided in the calm which
for the moment prevailed, they were soon to learn that the younger
generation in Hellas was in no respect better or wiser than the older.
The Greeks directly sought an opportunity of picking a quarrel
with the Romans.

Achaean War

In order to screen a foul transaction, Diaeus, the president of the
Achaean league for the time being, about 605 threw out in the diet
the assertion that the special privileges conceded by the Achaean
league to the Lacedaemonians as members--viz. their exemption from
the Achaean criminal jurisdiction, and the right to send separate
embassies to Rome--were not at all guaranteed to them by the Romans.
It was an audacious falsehood; but the diet naturally believed what
it wished, and, when the Achaeans showed themselves ready to make
good their assertions with arms in hand, the weaker Spartans yielded
for the time, or, to speak more correctly, those whose surrender was
demanded by the Achaeans left the city to ap