Pyrrhos, for a moment, expelled Antigonos from the Macedonian throne, which Antigonos recovered while' Pyrrhos was warring in Peloponnesos. By the time that Pyrrhos was dead, and Antigonos again firmly fixed in Macedonia, the League had grown up to maturity as far as regarded the cities of the old Achaia. … Thus far, then, circumstances had favoured the quiet and peaceful growth of the League." It had had the opportunity to grow firm enough and strong enough, on the small scale, to offer some lessons to its disunited and tyrannized neighbors and to exercise an attractive influence upon them. One of the nearest of these neighbors was Sikyon, which groaned under a tyranny that had been fastened upon it by Macedonian influence. Among the exiles from Sikyon was a remarkable young man named Aratos, or Aratus, to whom the successful working of the small Achaian League suggested some broader extension of the same political organism. In B. C. 251, Aratos succeeded in delivering his native city from its tyrant and in bringing about the annexation of Sikyon to the Achaian League. Eight years later, having meantime been elected to the chief office of the League, Aratos accomplished the expulsion of the Macedonians and their agents from Corinth, Megara, Troizen and Epidauros, and persuaded those four cities to unite themselves with the Achaians. During the next ten years he made similar progress in Arkadia, winning town after town to the federation, until the Arkadian federal capital, Megalopolis, was enrolled in the list of members, and gave to the League its greatest acquisition of energy and brain. In 229 B. C. the skill of Aratos and the prestige of the League, taking advantage of disturbances in Macedonia, effected the withdrawal of the Macedonian garrisons from Athens and the liberation of that city, which did not become confederated with its liberators, but entered into alliance with them. Argos was emancipated and annexed, B. C. 228, and "the League was now the greatest power of Greece. {1603} A Federation of equal cities, democratically governed, embraced the whole of old Achaia, the whole of the Argolic peninsula, the greater part of Arkadia, together with Phlious, Sikyon, Corinth, Megara, and the island of Aigina." The one rival of the Achaian League in Peloponnesus was Sparta, which looked with jealousy upon its growing power, and would not be confederated with it. The consequences of that jealous rivalry were fatal to the hopes for Greece which the Achaian union had seemed to revive. Unfortunately, rather than otherwise, the Lacedæmonian throne came to be occupied at this time by the last of the hero-kings of the Herakleid race—Kleomenes. When the inevitable collision of war between Sparta and the League occurred (B. C. 227-221), the personal figure of Kleomenes