plenty of citizens within the Achaian koinon. But they had not solved a more immediate problem: by 196 the Achaian koinon incorporated virtually all the Peloponnese, with the notable exceptions of Elis, Sparta, Messene, and Argos, which were all aligned with one another in their hostility to Achaia. So when Flamininus, with authorization from the Roman senate as well as from the Hellenic Alliance, declared war against Nabis in 195, it was natural for the Achaians to be keen to help.225 The war, which left Nabis in power in Sparta but in a significantly weakened state, returned Argos to the Achaian koinon and placed the coastal towns of Lakonia under Achaian control.226 The Achaians were not, however, the only ones to feel discontented by the settlement of the Roman war against Nabis; for the Aitolians it was yet another piece of evidence to support their case that the Romans were trying to enslave the Greeks, not to liberate them. In response to the displeasure expressed by members of the Hellenic Alliance in the spring of 194, Flamininus announced his intention to evacuate the garrisons at Demetrias, Chalkis, and Acrocorinth, to hand the latter over to the Achaians, and to withdraw the entire Roman army from Greece.227
Not even this, however, was enough for the Aitolians, who began almost immediately to agitate for a war against the Romans. In the spring of 193 they sent ambassadors to those rulers whom they suspected would be most amenable to their plan: Nabis, Philip, and Antiochos III. The Spartan tyrant responded eagerly to their provocation and moved to regain the Lakonian coastal towns that had been stripped from him by Flamininus in 195. Philip had learned a harder lesson and was noncommittal. Antiochos, who had his own grievances against the Romans, was eventually won over to the Aitolian position and made an alliance with them for war against Rome.228 The Achaians, incensed by Nabis’s attacks on the Lakonian coastal towns and on their own land, voted once again to go to war. In a single campaign Nabis was defeated and driven back within the walls of the city, but it remained beyond their authority to strip him of his formal powers.229 While Flamininus was making the diplomatic rounds in Greece, trying to prevent widespread disaffection, the Aitolians heard reports at the Panaitolika of 192 from their own ambassador to Antiochos, one Thoas, who had recently returned and brought with him an ambassador of Antiochos, and they voted “to invite Antiochos to liberate Greece and to arbitrate between the Aitolians and Romans.”230 As they awaited the king’s arrival, according to Livy, in closed deliberations the apoklētoi of the Aitolian koinon resolved simultaneously to invade Demetrias and Chalkis, two of the old Macedonian fetters that had recently been evacuated by the Roman army, and Sparta itself.231 They managed to capture Demetrias, but at Chalkis they had no success.232 Nabis himself was of course no friend of the Romans, but the Aitolians plotted to assassinate him on the assumption that doing so would endear them to the Spartan populace and create in the city a certain ally for their war against Rome. After running the tyrant through with spears on an occasion when none expected hostility from this quarter, the small Aitolian force that had been sent to commit the murder turned to plundering Nabis’s palace and the city of Sparta itself. It quickly became apparent that their promise of liberating the city was sham, and those Aitolians who were not killed in Sparta took flight into Achaia, where they were captured and sold into slavery by the Achaian magistrates.233 Despite their coordinated opposition to the Aitolian assassins, the Spartans were in complete disarray following the sudden death of Nabis, and Philopoimen seized the opportunity to attach Sparta to the Achaian koinon.234 Although the Achaians had for decades sought the incorporation of Sparta into the koinon, the circumstances by which it was accomplished almost guaranteed that Philopoimen’s would be a pyrrhic victory.
Despite the limited success of their initial moves, the Aitolians pressed ahead with their war against the Romans and their Greek allies, placing most of their hope in the forces of Antiochos III, whom they persuaded to cross to Greece in the autumn of 192.235 He arrived with a disturbingly small force and the promise of a much larger one in the following spring; the Aitolians welcomed Antiochos into their general assembly and voted to prosecute hostilities with Antiochos as their leader.236 But few Greeks were persuaded by the claim that Antiochos had come to liberate them: the Chalkidians were resolutely unimpressed; the Boiotians remained neutral; the Achaians, instead of accepting the Aitolians’ overtures, declared war on them; and their erstwhile enemy Philip V offered to assist the Romans.237 The resistance effort ended in defeat at Thermopylai in April 191.238
The Aitolians had perhaps gone too far in their attempt to drive the Romans out of Greece to surrender the cause easily, enduring several sieges before realizing that they would have to resort to diplomacy with Rome in 190.239 A terrifying round of negotiations ended when L. Cornelius Scipio arrived in Greece and, with his sights set on the incomparably richer target of Asia, granted the Aitolians a truce of six months.240 Yet despite—or perhaps because of—the fear the Aitolians had experienced in their attempts to negotiate with the Romans, they were unable to remain at peace during the armistice. While Scipio and the Roman army were in Asia fighting Antiochos III in 189, the Aitolians intervened in a quarrel between Philip V and his former ally Amynander, who had taken refuge in Aitolian- controlled Ambrakia when his kingdom of Athamania was handed over to Philip.241 Aitolian support for Amynander was regarded by the Romans as a rebellion not just against their ally Philip but against themselves as well.242 Amynander sought to placate the Romans through diplomacy, but the Aitolians, having expelled some Macedonian garrisons for him, now regained some of the territories that they had incorporated into their koinon in the past—Amphilochia, Aperantia, and Dolopia.243 The areas were strategic, creating a buffer zone between the Aitolian heartland, Macedonia, and the newly independent Thessaly. If the Aitolians derived some sense of security from these victories, it must have vanished with the news that the Romans had defeated Antiochos at Magnesia and were now sending an army under Marcus Fulvius Nobilior to attack them for their violation of the armistice.244 Fulvius laid siege to Aitolian-controlled Ambrakia while the Achaians and Illyrians harried coastal Aitolia and the Macedonians plundered Amphilochia and Dolopia.245 The Aitolians, unable to defend themselves on so many fronts at once, sought to make peace. The terms that they finally accepted mandated a dramatic reduction of the territory of the koinon and a permanent prohibition on expansion: they were neither to retain nor to accept into their state in the future any of the communities that had been taken by the Romans or entered into alliance with them since 190, when Scipio had first crossed to Greece.246 When this condition was presented to the Aitolian council, there was some dispute, for “they endured with difficulty the proposal that cities that had been under their jurisdiction should be torn off as if from their own body.”247 They had, however, no choice but to agree, consenting also to pay a war indemnity of five hundred Euboian talents, to restore all Roman prisoners and deserters, to surrender their control over the island of Kephallenia, and to have the same friends and enemies as the Romans.248 In addition to major territorial losses, the Aitolians’ ability to conduct interstate relations on an independent basis was entirely hobbled, and the war indemnity imposed a major economic hardship. Although the Aitolian koinon was not formally dismantled by the Romans, it was almost entirely subordinated to them and can from this historical moment no longer be analyzed as an independent state.
Most other Greeks, and above all the Achaians, had had nothing but scorn for the Aitolians, and it was perhaps this attitude that prevented them from seeing the fate of the Aitolian koinon as a warning sign. While the Aitolians had been rushing headlong to their ruin, the Achaians continued their struggle to incorporate the entire Peloponnese within their koinon. The main stumbling block was Sparta. Despite having been integrated into the Achaian koinon in 192 by Philopoimen after the assassination of Nabis, opposition remained in Sparta and sparked a brief rebellion in 191 when news came that Philopoimen had not been elected stratēgos.249 The Spartans decided to involve the Romans in the winter of 191/0, establishing a pattern that persisted for nearly fifty years. They sought the restoration of hostages sent to Rome after Flamininus’s war against Nabis in 195, the restoration of Spartans exiled by the Achaians, and the restoration of their traditional control over the coastal towns of Lakonia.250 The hostages were returned by the Romans, but the other matters had more to do with Achaia than with Rome. Philopoimen, under some duress, agreed to allow the return of those Spartans who had been
