39.36
A few
days later the Roman commissioners arrived. The council was convened to
meet them at Clitoris in Arcadia. Before the business began, the Achaeans
saw Areus and Alcibiades, who had been condemned to death at the last
meeting, sitting with the commissioners. They were thoroughly alarmed and
did not consider that the coming discussion would be very favourable to
them; no one, however, dared to open his mouth. Appius pointed out how
the various things that the Lacedaemonians complained of were viewed with
displeasure by the senate -the assassination at Campasium of the delegates
who on the invitation of Philopoemen had gone to make their defence, and
then after this cruelty towards men, their filling up the measure of savagery
by razing the walls of a great and famous city and annulling the immemorial
laws and world-famed discipline of Lycurgus. After this speech, Lycortas in
his capacity of captain-general, and also as a supporter of Philopoemen, the
prime mover in all that had happened in Lacedaemon, rose to reply. "It is
more difficult," he began, "for us to speak before you, Appius Claudius, than
it was the other day before the Roman senate. Then we had to answer the
accusations of the Lacedaemonians; now it is you who are our accusers, you
before whom the issue is to be tried. Whilst labouring under this
disadvantage, we still hope that you will lay aside the heated temper in which
you spoke just now, and listen to us in a judicial frame of mind. At all events,
as regards the complaints which the Lacedaemonians laid before Q. Caecilius
and afterwards at Rome, and which you yourself have now repeated, it is to
them, and not to you, that I shall suppose myself to be replying.
"You bring up against us the assassination of the delegates who had
gone on the invitation of Philopoemen to make their defence. I hold this
charge ought never to have been made by you, Romans, or even by others in
your presence. Why so? Because it was laid down in your treaty with the
Lacedaemonians that they should not interfere with the cities on the coast.
Had T. Quinctius been in the Peloponnese; had there been a Roman there at
the time when the Lacedaemonians made an armed attack upon the cities
which they were pledged to leave alone, the inhabitants would, of course,
have taken refuge with the Romans. As you were far away, with whom else
could they have found shelter but with us, your allies? They had previously
seen us carrying succour to Gytheum and attacking Lacedaemon on similar
grounds in conjunction with you. On your behalf, then, we undertook the
war as a just one, prompted by our sense of duty. Since others commend our
conduct, and not even the Lacedaemonians can find fault with it, since the
gods themselves, who have given us the victory, showed their approval of it,
how can what we did by right of war admit of question? And yet the thing
they lay most stress upon in no way concerns us. We are responsible for
having called to trial the men who had excited the population to take up
arms, who had stormed and plundered the maritime towns and massacred
their leading men; but the putting them to death as they were coming into the
camp was your doing, Areus and Alcibiades; and now, good heavens! you
are actually accusing us of it! The Lacedaemonian refugees, these two men
amongst them, were with us at the time, and because they had selected the
maritime towns for their residence, they believed that their lives were in
danger, and in retaliation made an attack upon those who had been the
instruments of their banishment and would not suffer them to pass their lives
in security, even though it were in exile. It was not, therefore, the Achaeans
but the Lacedaemonians who slew Lacedaemonians, whether justly or
unjustly, we are not concerned to discuss.
