XVI. This mischance ruined Greece, which even now might have recovered herself, and avoided falling into the hands of the insolent and rapacious Macedonians. For Aratus, either because he distrusted and feared Kleomenes, or else because he grudged him his success, and thought that after he had for thirty-three years been chief of the Achæans, it was not to be endured that a young man should overthrow him, and enter into the fruit of his labours, at first tried to oppose the Achæans when they offered to come to terms with the Lacedæmonians; but as they would not listen to him, because they were cowed by the boldness of Kleomenes, and also admitted the justice of the Lacedæmonian claim to be the leading state in Peloponnesus, as their ancestral right, he adopted a course which was a disgraceful one for any Greek, but especially so for him, and one which was most unworthy of his former political life. He determined to invite Antigonus into Greece, and to fill the Pelopennesus with those very Macedonians whom he himself when a lad had chased out of the country by his capture of the Acro-Corinthus, although he was regarded with suspicion by all the kings, and was at variance with them all, and though he had already accused this very Antigonus himself of every conceivable crime in his "Memoirs," which are still extant. Yet he himself has stated that he suffered much, and risked much to free Athens from a Macedonian garrison; though now he led these very men with arms in their hands into his own native country, and up to his own paternal hearth. He thought that Kleomenes, a descendant of Herakles, a king of Sparta, who had restored the simple ancient Dorian constitution of Lykurgus, as one tightens the relaxed strings of a lyre, to bring it into tune, was unworthy to be accounted the ruler of Sikyon and Tritæa; and in his eagerness to avoid the rough Spartan cloak, and the Spartan barley bread, and that with which he especially charged Kleomenes, the destruction of wealth and the encouragement of poverty, threw himself and all Achæa with him, into the arms of the Macedonians, with all their diadems and their purple robes and their habits of oriental despotism. That he might avoid acting under the orders of Kleomenes, he was content to offer sacrifice at festivals in honour of Antigonus, and himself to place a garland upon his head, and to lead the pæan in praise of a man wasted and emaciated by consumption. And this I write, not from any desire to depreciate Aratus, for in many respects he proved himself a truly great and patriotic man, but rather out of pity for the weakness of human nature, which will not allow even the most eminent persons to present us with the spectacle of an entirely unblemished virtue.