Kitap 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.
