Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/308

278 ascendency in Greece, and whose policy was the direct cause of the advent of the Romans. The districts of Greece which had, during the Cleomenic war, formed some kind of alliance, were Achaia, Epirus, Phocis, Boeotia, Acarnania, Thessaly—under the hegemony, that is, of Macedonia. It was, indeed, not a measure of Greek unity, but of Macedonian influence. They, with the addition of the King of Bithynia, are still found to form the Macedonian alliance, when in B.C. 205 Philip was compelled to sign the armistice with Rome at Phoenice. All these states now had grievances against the Ætolians, which culminated in a joint declaration of war at Corinth, after Aratus, who was an able statesman but a poor military commander, had sustained a severe reverse at Caphyae. The professed object of the war was to restore to the several allies what had been violently taken from them by the Ætolians; to free those states which had been forcibly united to the Ætolian League, and to restore their free constitutions; and lastly, to emancipate the temple of Delphi and the Amphictyonic Council from Ætolian monopoly.

This "social war" lasted till B.C. 217, and its beginning synchronised with disturbances at many points in the Hellenic world. A revolution at Sparta gave Lycurgus the opportunity of getting rid of his king-colleague and securing the sole power for himself, in which he and his successors maintained the policy of bitter hostility to the Achaeans. A war for the possession of Palestine was on the point of breaking out between Antiochus III. (of Syria) and