especially Athens and Thebes, resorted in their financial distress
to direct robbery, and plundered the neighbouring communities.
The internal dissensions in the leagues also--e. g. between the
voluntary and the compulsory members of the Achaean confederacy--
were by no means composed. If the Romans, as seems to have been
the case, believed what they wished and confided in the calm which
for the moment prevailed, they were soon to learn that the younger
generation in Hellas was in no respect better or wiser than the older.
The Greeks directly sought an opportunity of picking a quarrel
with the Romans.

Achaean War

In order to screen a foul transaction, Diaeus, the president of the
Achaean league for the time being, about 605 threw out in the diet
the assertion that the special privileges conceded by the Achaean
league to the Lacedaemonians as members--viz. their exemption from
the Achaean criminal jurisdiction, and the right to send separate
embassies to Rome--were not at all guaranteed to them by the Romans.
It was an audacious falsehood; but the diet naturally believed what
it wished, and, when the Achaeans showed themselves ready to make
good their assertions with arms in hand, the weaker Spartans yielded
for the time, or, to speak more correctly, those whose surrender was
demanded by the Achaeans left the city to appear as complainants
before the Roman senate. The senate answered as usual that it would
send a commission to investigate the matter; but instead of reporting
this reply the envoys stated in Achaia as well as in Sparta, and in
both cases falsely, that the senate had decided in their favour.
The Achaeans, who felt more than ever their equality with Rome as
allies and their political importance on account of the aid which