Aratus

Chares the Athenian, having been successful in a battle with the king’s generals, wrote to the people of Athens that he had won a battle which was sister to that at Marathon; and this enterprise of Aratus may be rightly called a sister of those of Pelopidas the Theban and Thrasybulus the Athenian, in which they slew tyrants, except that it surpassed them in being undertaken, not against Greeks, but against a foreign and alien power.

For the Isthmus of Corinth, forming a barrier between the seas, brings together the two regions, and thus unites our continent; and when Acrocorinthus, which is a lofty hill springing up at this centre of Greece, is held by a garrison, it hinders and cuts off all the country south of the Isthmus from intercourse, transits, and the carrying on of military expeditions by land and sea,

and makes him who controls the place with a garrison sole lord of Greece. Therefore it is thought that the younger Philip of Macedon[*](Philip V., 237-179 B.C.) uttered no jest, but the truth, whenever he called the city of Corinth the fetters of Greece.

Accordingly, the place was always an object of great contention among kings and dynasts, but the eagerness of Antigonus to secure it fell nothing short of the most frenzied passion, and he was wholly absorbed in schemes to take it by stratagem from its possessors, since an open attempt upon it was hopeless.