At this time Greece was reduced to extreme weakness, being partially ruined, and altogether reduced to great straits, by the deity. For Argos, which had been a town of the greatest importance in the days of the so-called heroes, lost its good fortune with the overthrow of the Dorians. And the Athenians, who had survived the Peloponnesian War and the plague, and had even lift up their heads again, were not many years later destined to be subdued by the Macedonian power at its height. From Macedonia also came down on Thebes in Bœotia the wrath of Alexander. And the Lacedæmonians were first reduced by Epaminondas the Theban, and afterwards by the war with the Achæans. And when Achaia with great difficulty, like a tree that had received some early injury, grew to great eminence in Greece, then the folly of its rulers stopped its growth. And some time after the Empire of Rome came to Nero, and he made Greece entirely free, and gave to the Roman people instead of Greece the most fertile island of Sardinia. When I consider this action of Nero I cannot but think the words of Plato the son of Aristo most true, that crimes remarkable for their greatness and audacity are not committed by everyday kind of people, but emanate from a noble soul corrupted by a bad bringing up.[9] Not that this gift long benefited Greece. For in the reign of Vespasian, who succeeded Nero, it suffered from intestine discord, and Vespasian made the Greeks a second time subject to taxes and bade them obey the prætor, saying that Greece had unlearnt how to use liberty. Such are the particulars which I ascertained. The boundaries between Achaia and Elis are the river Larisus (near which river there is a temple of Larissæan Athene), and Dyme, a town of the Achæans, about 30 stades from the Larisus. Dyme was the only town in Achaia that Philip the son of Demetrius reduced in war. And for this reason Sulpicius, the Roman Prætor, allowed his army to plunder Dyme. And Augustus afterwards assigned it to Patræ. In ancient days it was called Palea, but when the Ionians were in possession of it they changed its name to Dyme, I am not quite certain whether from some woman of the district called Dyme, or from Dymas the son of Ægimius. One is reduced to a little uncertainty about the name of the place also by the Elegiac couplet at Olympia on the statue of Œbotas, a native of Dyme, who in the 6th Olympiad was victor in the course, and in the 80th Olympiad was declared by the oracle at Delphi worthy of a statue at Olympia. The couplet runs as follows: “Œbotas here the son of Œnias was victor in the course, and so immortalized his native place Palea in Achaia.” But there is no need for any real confusion from the town being called in the inscription Palea and not Dyme, for the older names of places are apt to be introduced by the Greeks into poetry, as they call Amphiaraus and Adrastus the sons of Phoroneus, and Theseus the son of Erechtheus.