Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/324

294 and pay a large war indemnity. At the following Nemaean Games, Argos was proclaimed free and rejoined the Achaean League. Finally, Flamininus, on his return to Italy, in B.C. 194, put a finishing touch upon his work of liberation by withdrawing the Roman garrisons from Demetrias, Chalcis, and Acrocorinthus.

The settlement seemed an equitable one and likely to be lasting, because it was founded on natural divisions and a respect for established facts, and involved no interference with local institutions. But from the very first there were two points of danger and discontent—Sparta and Aetolia. The tyrant of Sparta naturally resented the loss of all access to the sea; and the Aetolians were annoyed by not being allowed to reunite distant league states, especially Leucadia and Pharsalus, and at not having been commissioned to put down Nabis, and thus re-possess themselves of their larger towns in Arcadia. A disturbance in Boeotia, which had Macedonian sympathies, issuing in the murder of Roman soldiers and consequent severities by Flamininus, and the presence of Roman commissioners in Thessaly, where the details of settlement occupied some years, gave them a pretext for saying that Greece had only gained a change of masters. They were, in fact, determined upon the usual policy of discontented states in Greece—to call in the help of a foreign power. They selected Antiochus of Syria, whom we heard of last as having occupied Palestine as his share of the dominions of Egypt which he and Philip had agreed to partition. Since then he had