The League of course had its internal feuds and discordances of policy; and the ilEtolian League north of the Gulf (only half Greek, and wholly barbarian in instability and lack of pro Greek feeling), which alternately allied itself with it and ravaged its territory, was a mis chievous rival and enemy. But the League would probably have fully held its own till the Romans came, but for Sparta. Cleomenes JI had revolutionized that state, which had shrunk into the narrowest of oligarchies and could not maintain its position ; he had turned it into a socialistic one, and wished to force the League to join him in a great Peloponnesian union, of which Sparta would be master, imposing both its foreign policy and perhaps its internal or ganization on the rest, and which would destroy the internal independence of the League and menace the possessions of every property-holder in it. The League was badly defeated by Cleo menes in the field, and was between hammer and anvil; for the only power which could save it was Macedonia, its natural foe and old master, and Antigonus Doson refused to give aid unless the citadel of Corinth, the key of Peloponnesus, held by the League, were given up to him. Aratus felt, however, that the suzerainty of Macedonia, now that the League was strong enough to pre vent active •tyranny, was a less evil than the mastery of Cleomenes; and by cunning manage ment he induced the League to pay the price asked for Antigonus' help. Cleomenes was crushed at Sellasia, and his Spartan constitution came to an end, and the League became a de pendency of Macedonia. Yet Aratus' policy was justified by events so far as the League was concerned; it did not suffer from Macedonian tyranny, though the chance of forming a united Greece was at an end. But that was probably
as little possible under Cleomenes as under Macedonia.
In point of fact the destroying enemy was not Macedonia but Rome. Under the noble and able Philopczmen of Megalopolis, soldier and statesman of high rank, the League was pros pering and giving the citizens an enviallle gov ernment. But a pro-Roman policy prevailed, and Philopcemen left the country. In 198 it allied itself with Rome against Macedonia, and this was always the beginning of the end with the other party to a Roman alliance. There were wars against Sparta, and a struggle between Roman and anti-Roman partisans in the assem bly, with Roman envoys and intriguers to fan the flames. Finally, in 167, the Romans de ported the flower of the Achaian citizens to Italy, many of them being imprisoned, others as the future historian Polybius (q.v.), then a youth of 18— kept as hostages but given Roman advantages. The last struggle took place in 146, when Mummius defeated the League at Corinth, and the independence of Greece or any fraction of it was at an end. All southern and central Greece was made a Roman province called Achaia.
The first-hand authority for the League is Polybius, unfortunately extant only in frag ments; in some parts he is pieced out by Livy, passages of whose work are often obvious translations from Polybius. In English the one great work is E. A. Freeman's