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 appear as complainants
before the Roman senate. The senate answered as usual that it would
send a commission to investigate the matter; but instead of reporting
this reply the envoys stated in Achaia as well as in Sparta, and in
both cases falsely, that the senate had decided in their favour.
The Achaeans, who felt more than ever their equality with Rome as
allies and their political importance on account of the aid which
the league had just rendered in Thessaly against the pseudo-Philip,
advanced in 606 under their -strategus- Damocritus into Laconia: in
vain a Roman embassy on its way to Asia, at the suggestion of Metellus,
admonished them to keep the peace and to await the commissioners of
the senate. A battle took place, in which nearly 1000 Spartans
fell, and Sparta might have been taken if Damocritus had not been
equally incapable as an officer and as a statesman. He was superseded,
and his successor Diaeus, the instigator of all this mischief,
zealously continued the war, while at the same time he gave to the
dreaded commandant of Macedonia assurances of the full loyalty of the
Achaean league. Thereupon the long-expected Roman commission made its
appearance, with Aurelius Orestes at its head; hostilities were now
suspended, and the Achaean diet assembled at Corinth to receive its
communications. They were of an unexpected and far from agreeable
character. The Romans had resolved to cancel the unnatural and
forced(20) inclusion of Sparta among the Achaean states, and generally
to act with vigour against the Achaeans. Some years before (591)
these had been obliged to release from their league the Aetolian
town of Pleuron;(21) now they were directed to renounce all the
acquisitions which they had made since the second Macedonian war--viz.
Corinth, Orchomenus, Argos, Sparta in the Peloponnesus, and Heraclea
near to Oeta--and to reduce their league to the condition in which it
stood at the end of the Hannibalic war. When the Achaean deputies
le