grew up, in which the old recollections and the old antagonisms had faded.  The Roman senate thought that the time for general forgiveness and oblivion had come, and in 604 released the survivors of those Achaean patriots who had been confined for seventeen years in Italy, and whose liberation the Achaean diet had never ceased to demand.  Nevertheless they were mistaken.  How little the Romans with all their Philhellenism had been successful in heartily conciliating Hellenic patriotism, was nowhere more clearly apparent than in the attitude of the Greeks towards the Attalids.  King Eumenes ii had been, as a friend of the Romans, extremely hated in Greece;(19) but scarcely had a coldness arisen between him and the Romans, when he became suddenly popular in Greece, and the Hellenic hopefuls expected the deliverer from a foreign yoke to come now from Pergamus as formerly from Macedonia.  Social disorganization more especially was visibly on the increase among the petty states of Hellas now left to themselves.  The country became desolate not through war and pestilence, but through the daily increasing disinclination of the higher classes to trouble themselves with wife and children; on the other hand the criminal or the thoughtless flocked as hitherto chiefly to Greece, there to await the recruiting officer.  The communities sank into daily deeper debt, and into financial dishonour and a corresponding want of credit:  some cities, more 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