Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/330

300 brought to Rome from Pergamus, such as the dying Gaul (called “the Dying Gladiator),” and the Belvidere Apollo. Eumenes also began the great library which contained 200,000 volumes, and was eventually transferred by Antony to Alexandria as a gift to Cleopatra after a great part of the Alexandrian library had been destroyed by fire. The sovereigns of Pergamus were enlightened men and apparently excellent rulers, and Asiatic Greece now enjoyed a brief period of peace and increasing wealth.

European Greece was not so fortunate. The Aetolians were still in arms, nor did they give in until their capital, Ambracia, had stood a long and memorable siege. They then had to submit to be deprived of all annexations, to surrender all right to make additions to their League either by war or negotiation, and, in fact, to be a dependency of Rome without the right of having a foreign policy, though for internal purposes they retained their constitution (B.C. 187). Aetolia ceases to count in Greek history from this time. Its population decreased, and its narrow territory—now bounded on the west by the River Achelous—seemed to lapse into barbarism. In Western Greece Ambracia and Acarnania were declared free states, but Corcyra was governed by a Roman praefectus, and the freedom of these states, as of the commonwealth of Epirus, was really on sufferance and at the mercy of Rome.

Nor was the freedom of Southern Greece in much better case. The great achievement of Philopoemen, the last great soldier of the Achaean League, had been to compel Sparta to join the League, and so to make