The affair of the Achaeans being in this unfortunate condition, Aratus, who was wont to take the office every other year, refused the command, though they entreated and urged him to accept it. And this was ill-done, when the storm was high, to put the power out of his own hands, and set another to the helm. Cleomenes at first proposed fair and easy conditions by his ambassadors to the Achaeans, but afterwards he sent others, and required the chief command to be settled upon him; in other matters offering to agree to reasonable terms, and to restore their captives and their country. The Achaeans were willing to come to an agreement upon those terms, and invited Cleomenes to Lerna, where an assembly was to be held; but it happened that Cleomenes, hastily marching on, and drinking water at a wrong time, brought up a quantity of blood and lost his voice; therefore being unable to continue his journey, he sent the chiefest of the captives to the Achaeans, and, putting off the meeting for some time, retired to Lacedaemon.
This ruined the affairs of Greece, which was just beginning in some sort to recover from its disasters, and to show some capability of delivering itself from the insolence and rapacity of the Macedonians. For Aratus (whether fearing or distrusting Cleomenes, or envying his unlooked-for success, or thinking it a disgrace for him who had commanded thirty-three years to have a young man succeed to all his glory and his power, and be head of that government which he had been raising and settling so many years), first endeavoured to keep the Achaeans from closing with Cleomenes; but when they would not hearken to him, for Cleomenes' daring spirit, and thinking the Lacedaemonians' proposals to be very reasonable, who designed only to reduce Peloponnesus to its own model, upon this he took his last refuge in an action which was unbecoming any of the Greeks, most dishonourable to him, and most unworthy his former bravery and exploits. For he called Antigonus into Greece and filled Peloponnesus with Macedonians, whom he himself, when a youth, having beaten their garrison out of the castle of Corinth, had driven from the same country. And there had been constant suspicion and variance between him and all the kings, and of Antigonus, in particular, he has said a thousand dishonourable things in the commentaries he has left behind him. And though he declares himself how he suffered considerable losses, and underwent great dangers, that he might free Athens from the garrison of the Macedonians, yet, afterwards, he brought the very same men armed into his own country, and his own house, even to the women's apartment. He would not endure that one of the family of Hercules, and king of Sparta, and one that reformed the polity of his country, as it were, from a disordered harmony, and returned it to the plain Doric measure and rule of life of Lycurgus, should be styled head of the Tritaeans and Sicyonians; and whilst he fled the barley-cake and coarse coat, and, which were his chief accusations against Cleomenes, the extirpation of wealth and reformation of poverty, he basely subjected himself, together with Achaea, to the diadem and purple, to the imperious commands of the Macedonians and their satraps. That he might not seem to be under Cleomenes, he offered sacrifices, called Antigonea, in honour of Antigonus, and sang paeans himself, with a garland on his head, to the praise of a wasted, consumptive Macedonian. I write this not out of any design to disgrace Aratus, for in many things he showed himself a true lover of Greece, and a great man, but out of pity to the weakness of human nature, which, in characters like this, so worthy and in so many ways disposed to virtue, cannot maintain its honours unblemished by some envious fault.
The Achaeans meeting again in assembly at Argas, and Cleomenes having come from Tegea, there were great hopes that all differences would be composed. But Aratus, Antigonus and he having already agreed upon the chief articles of their league, fearing that Cleomenes would carry all before him, and either win or force the multitude to comply with his commands, proposed that, having three hundred hostages put into his hands, he should come alone into the town, or bring his army to the place of exercise, called the Cyllarabium, outside the city, and treat there.
