e courts in the hands of
the more wealthy and bringing the anti-Macedonian party to the helm;
and with attaching as much as possible the civic commonwealths to the
Roman interest, by adding everything, which in each community should
have fallen by martial law to the Romans, to the common property of
the city concerned. The work was finished in the spring of 560;
Flamininus once more assembled the deputies of all the Greek
communities at Corinth, exhorted them to a rational and moderate use
of the freedom conferred on them, and requested as the only return for
the kindness of the Romans, that they would within thirty days send to
him the Italian captives who had been sold into Greece during the
Hannibalic war. Then he evacuated the last fortresses in which Roman
garrisons were still stationed, Demetrias, Chalcis along with the
smaller forts dependent upon it in Euboea, and Acrocorinthus--thus
practically giving the lie to the assertion of the Aetolians that
Rome had inherited from Philip the "fetters" of Greece--and departed
homeward with all the Roman troops and the liberated captives.

Results

It is only contemptible disingenuousness or weakly sentimentality,
which can fail to perceive that the Romans were entirely in earnest
with the liberation of Greece; and the reason why the plan so nobly
projected resulted in so sorry a structure, is to be sought only in
the complete moral and political disorganization of the Hellenic
nation. It was no small matter, that a mighty nation should have
suddenly with its powerful arm brought the land, which it had been
accustomed to regard as its primitive home and as the shrine of
its intellectual and higher interests, into the possession of
full freedom, and should have conferred on every community in it
deliverance from foreign taxation and foreign garrisons and the
unlimited right of self-government; it is mere paltriness that sees
in this nothing save political calculation. Political calculation
made the liberation of Greece a possibility for the Romans; it was
converted into a reality by the Hellenic sympathies that were at that
time indescribably powerful in Rome, and above all in Flamininus
himself. If the Romans are liable to any reproach, it is that all
of them, and in particular Flamininus who overcame the well-founded
scruples of the senate, were hindered by the magic charm of the
Hellenic name from perceiving in all its extent the wretched character
of the Greek s