Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.5, 1865).djvu/411

 ARATUS. 403 This aflfront he resented so far as to resolve to give up the seal and lay down the office of general ; but upon second thoughts he found it best to have patience, and presently marched with the Acha3ans to Orchomenus and fought a battle with Megistonus, the step-father of Cleo- meneSj where he got the victory, killing three hundred men and taking Megistonus prisoner. But whereas he used to be chosen general every other year, when his turn came and he was called to take upon him that charge, he declined it, and Timoxenus was chosen in his stead. The true cause of which was not the pique he was alleged to have taken at the people, but the ill circum- stances of the Achaean aflfau's. For Cleomenes did not now invade them gently and tenderly as hitherto, as one controlled by the civil authorities, but having killed the Ephors, divided the lands, and made many of the stran- ger residents free of the city, he was responsible to no one in his government ; and therefore fell in good earnest upon the Achseans, and put forward his claim to the supreme military command. Wherefore Aratiis is much blamed, that in a stormy and tempestuous time, like a cowardly pilot, he should forsake the helm, when it was even perhaps his duty to have insisted, whether they would or no, on saving them ; or if he thought the Achaean affairs desperate, to have yielded all up to Cleo- menes, and not to have let Peloponnesus fell once again into barbarism with Macedonian garrisons, and Acro- Corinthus be occupied with lUyric and Gaulish soldiers, and, under the specious name of Confederates, to have made those masters of the cities whom he had held it his business by arms and by policy to bafiie and defeat, and, in the memoirs he left behind him, loaded with reproaches and insvdts. And say that Cleomenes was arbitrary and tyrannical, yet was he descended from the Heraclidae, and Sparta was his country, the obscurest