Kitap 34
32
To this the Roman commander replied: "It is not with you that we entered into friendship and alliance, but with Philip, the rightful and legitimate king of Lacedaemon. His right to the crown has been usurped by the tyrants who ruled there while we were preoccupied by, first, the Punic War, then with wars in Gaul and elsewhere, just as you have usurped it during this war with Macedon. What greater inconsistency could there be than for those who waged war against Philip for the liberation of Greece to form a league of unity with a tyrant, and a tyrant, too, who has always treated his subjects with the utmost oppression and cruelty? In fact, even if you had not seized and were not now holding Argos by dishonest practices, it would still have been incumbent on us, whilst liberating the rest of Greece, to restore Lacedaemon also to her old free constitution and to those laws which you spoke about just now as though you put yourself on a par with Lycurgus. Are we to make it our care that your garrisons shall be withdrawn from Iasos and Bargyliae and at the same time leave Argos and Lacedaemon, two of the most famous cities and at one time the lights of Greece, prostrate beneath your feet, and so let their servitude sully our title as the liberators of Greece? You say the sympathies of the Argives were with Philip. Well, we release you from any obligation to be angry with them so far as we are concerned. We have sufficient evidence that the blame for that rests upon some two or at the most three persons, not upon the citizens as a body, just, in fact, as the invitation given to you and your troops and your admission into the citadel was in no way whatever the act of their government. We know that the Thessalians and Phocians and Locrians were unanimous in their support of Philip, and yet we have given them their freedom in common with the rest of Greece; what, pray, do you suppose we shall do in the case of the Argives, who as a State were innocent of any complicity with him?
