The Hellenistic World and Rome
pater’s victory in the Lamian War of ..He then comes to the vari-
ous Successors who ruled in Greece from the late fourth century onwards:
‘‘And who is ignorant of the actions of Cassander, Demetrius and Antigonus
Gonatas, all so recent that the memory of them is quite vivid? Some of them
by introducing garrisons to cities and others by introducing tyrannies left no
city with the right to call itself unenslaved.’’ Finally he comes to the acts of
violence which Philip V himself had committed in Greece. In the speech as
preserved, apparently almost complete, there is no reference to the Romans,
except to say that with their aid Philip was likely to be defeated (, –).
Whatever the original speaker in ..really said, Polybius could have
used this point in his narrative to say something positive about the potential
Roman role in Greece. He does not. The real issue, as always, lay elsewhere:
the preservation of the freedom of the Greek cities in the face of the threats
posed by successive kings and dynasties.
Then the Acarnanian ambassador gives a speech which reviews the same
historical period, but from the opposite point of view. Philip II, he says, by
defeating the Phocians in the Sacred War, that is, in .., had saved the
liberty of Greece. In the Peloponnese Philip had come in response to appeals
and had used his power to arbitrate between Sparta and its enemies. His son
Alexander had punished the Persians for their offenses against Greece and ‘‘in
a word he made Asia subject to Greece.’’ As for later crimes in Greece, it was
the Aetolians who were most guilty. It was the Macedonian monarchy of the
Antigonids, which ruled from ..onwards, which had protected Greece
against the northern barbarians. Even Antigonus Doson, king of Macedon,
in defeating Sparta it in .., had done so in order to liberate it from a
tyrant,namelyKingCleomenes.
But now, the Acarnanian ambassador goes on, it is no longer a matter of
alliances between Greeks: ‘‘But now Greece is threatened with a war against
men of a foreign race [the Romans] who intend to enslave her, men whom
you [the Aetolians] fancy you are calling in against Philip, but whom you
are really calling in against yourselves and the whole of Greece.’’ All Greeks
should beware, especially the Spartans who had once thrown into a well the
ambassador sent by Xerxes to demand submission and had sent Leonidas to
defend the liberty of Greece at Thermopylae. The Romans had already com-
mitted atrocities in Greece: ‘‘A fine alliance this for anyone to determine to
join, and especially for you Lacedaimonians, who, when you conquered the
barbarians [i.e., the Persians at Plataea in ..], decreed that the Thebans
were to pay a tithe to the gods for having decided under compulsion, but
alone among the Greeks, to remain neutral during the Persian invasion’’ (,
–).