The process by which the disputes between Megalopolis, Sparta, and the Achaian koinon were resolved demonstrates that the Achaians were not only fully autonomous in the aftermath of the Romans’ war against Perseus but also that they continued to refine their institutions in the interests of achieving internal peace and civic order.
The Romans’ settlement of Greece after Pydna instigated a series of local conflicts, in which we nevertheless find the Romans continuing to recognize and uphold Achaian autonomy. Two episodes illustrate the point. The first is a dispute between the Athenians and Achaians that was taken to Rome in 159/8 over the right of the Delians, who had been expelled when the Romans handed their island over to the Athenians in 166 and given citizenship in Achaia, to sue Athenians for loss of property in accordance with an existing symbolon between Athens and Achaia. The Romans found that “all arrangements made about the Delians by the Achaians according to their laws were valid,” which amounts to an affirmation of the Delians’ right as Achaian citizens to be covered by the existing Achaian-Athenian symbolon.295 The Romans continued to uphold Achaian autonomy, but the episode must have soured Achaian-Athenian relations. They deteriorated further still when the Achaians responded to a call for help from the city of Oropos sometime shortly after 160. Oropos had been made independent when the Boiotian koinon was dismantled in 171, but for reasons that are unclear the Athenians invaded and sacked the city.296 Outraged by this treatment, the Oropians sought redress from the Romans, who merely asked Sikyon, a member of the Achaian koinon, to arbitrate. When the Athenians balked at the fine imposed by the arbitrators and perpetrated further violence, it appears from an honorific decree of Oropos (T46) that the Achaians swung into action to restore the hapless Oropians to their city.297 Again we see the Achaian koinon acting with full autonomy in relation to other states, with evident awareness of the Romans. In short, although our evidence for the period after 167 is scant, it all points to a fully autonomous Achaian koinon. Nothing, then, seems to have prepared the Achaians for the overwhelmingly violent Roman response to a flare-up of the old quarrel between them and the Spartans.
Despite those long-standing tensions, Spartan commitment to the koinon must have appeared serious in 151/0, for in that year a Spartan, Menalkidas, was elected to the office of stratēgos for the first—and last—time in Achaian history.298 With historical hindsight it is clear that the appointment exacerbated those tensions rather than soothing them. When Menalkidas laid down his office, he was accused by Kallikrates of having sought permission from the Romans for Sparta to secede from the koinon.299 When precisely this happened is unclear, but it must have predated 150.300 It is described by Pausanias as a capital charge, but Menalkidas was acquitted despite the hostility of most Achaians to his case. In order to deflect the Achaian suspicions that were incited by this acquittal, Diaios encouraged them to prosecute Spartan dissidents, those implicated in seeking Roman support for their cause in the still-simmering boundary dispute with Megalopolis. Diaios levied the Achaian army to make war “not on Sparta itself, but on those who were disturbing it.”301 He declared twenty-four leading Spartan citizens guilty of what he claimed was a capital crime, and the Spartans chose to exile them in an effort to prevent a war with Achaia. Both sides sent ambassadors to Rome, the Achaians represented by Diaios and Kallikrates (who died en route), the Spartans by Menalkidas, the erstwhile Achaian stratēgos. According to Pausanias, the Romans promised to send an arbitrator, but he was slow to arrive, so the ambassadors returned, and each told his home audience what it wanted to hear: the Achaians that they had been given permission to bring the Spartans under complete subjection; the Spartans that they had been separated from the koinon.302
Acting on this notion, the Achaians proceeded to levy their army against Sparta, now under the leadership of the stratēgos Damokritos, who ignored the stay of attack ordered by Roman envoys.303 Damokritos won a victory in pitched battle against the Spartans but refused to attempt a siege of the city. For that failure he was fined by the Achaians, and his successor, Diaios of Megalopolis, appears to have persecuted those in Achaia whom he believed to have pro-Spartan sympathies.304 In the spring or summer of 147 the Roman legate L. Aurelius Orestes, who had been promised in 149 to arbitrate in the dispute between Achaia and Sparta, finally arrived in Corinth and summoned “those who held office in each city.”305 Orestes reported the decision of the Roman senate that Sparta, Corinth, Argos, Herakleia Trachinia, and Arkadian Orchomenos were to be immediately released from the synedrion of the Achaians on the grounds that they were not ethnically Achaian and had joined the koinon relatively recently.306 This announcement was clearly a tremendous shock, for Sparta had been the only member polis in open dissent. After a hastily summoned assembly meeting, the Achaians arrested and imprisoned all the Spartans they could seize in Corinth. According to some sources, which Polybios regarded as exaggerated, Orestes and his colleagues themselves faced considerable personal danger, and their complaints to the senate on this score only further entrenched Roman hostility to the Achaians.307
In the autumn of 147, Diaios was succeeded as stratēgos by the resolutely anti-Roman Kritolaos. The Romans sent another embassy to the Achaians, with orders, according to Polybios, to deliver a mild reproof and to ask the Achaians to hold those directly responsible for mistreatment of the Roman ambassadors accountable for their crimes. Whether in fact they did not “wish to tear the [Achaian] ethnos asunder” at this point is unclear; Polybios finds himself in the awkward position of being an Achaian apologist for Rome, blaming his countrymen for allowing themselves to be misled by “the worst men, hated by the gods, bringing ruin upon the ethnos.”308 The Roman ambassadors sought to negotiate an end to the war between Achaia and Sparta, which was derailed by Kritolaos’s refusal to cooperate.309 That small war had been fully subsumed by a much larger one. Kritolaos spent the winter of 147/6 drumming up support for war against Rome and proposing financial measures that would enable the Achaians to fund the war that now appeared inevitable.310
By the spring of 146, Achaian opposition to Rome was widespread. Despite an apparently mollifying embassy from the Romans, war was declared by the Achaians, “in word against the Spartans, but in reality against the Romans.”311 At the behest of Kritolaos, who stood to gain all as the current stratēgos, the Achaians voted extraordinary and complete authority to those who were elected as stratēgoi.312 As the conflict shifted away from Sparta and toward Rome, the Achaians were joined by numerous other Greek cities.313 Direct hostilities ensued so quickly, however, that if there was a formal alliance, it never had time to organize an effective defense. A Roman army was already present in Macedonia under the consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus, having finally quelled the revolt of Andriskos, a claimant to the Macedonian throne. Metellus, motivated by a desire to end the war before his successor, Mummius, should arrive, encouraged the Achaians to release Sparta and the other cities named by Orestes, and went himself to Herakleia Trachinia, which was under siege by Kritolaos and the Achaian army for its willingness to abandon the koinon after Orestes’ embassy declared that it should be independent. As the Roman army descended across the Spercheios Valley, Kritolaos led the Achaians in flight to Skarpheia in Lokris, where he himself died and the Achaians suffered a massive defeat.314 A full military levy was raised throughout Achaia, with orders to muster at Corinth. The peace overtures offered by Metellus were refused.315 So the war with Achaia became the prize of Mummius, who mustered his massive force at Corinth and overwhelmed the Achaian defenders. The city was abandoned by its inhabitants and burned to the ground. The men who remained were killed; the women and children, sold into slavery. Ancient works of art, many of them sacred, were plundered and pillaged.316 The walls of all those cities that had defied the Roman decrees were destroyed. Democracies were replaced by oligarchies. And just as they did when they sundered the Macedonian kingdom into four distinct republics, the Romans undermined the material foundations of political cooperation by making property ownership outside one’s own polis illegal. Finally, not only the Achaian koinon but all ethnic confederacies throughout Greece were henceforth strictly prohibited.317
1. Diod. Sic. 18.8.2–7; Plut. Alex. 49.14. Mendels 1984: 130 discusses the strategic importance of Oiniadai. Foundation of Athenian cleruchy on Samos: Isoc. 15.11; Dem. 15.9–10; Diod. Sic. 18.18.9; Nep. Timoth.
