Description of Greece

​Cleomenes, the son of Leonidas, the son of Cleonymus, having succeeded to the kingship in Sparta, imitated Pausanias, both desiring a tyranny and being displeased with the established laws. Since he was more hot-headed than Pausanias and not cautious of his life, everything was quickly accomplished by his pride and daring; having slain by poison, through the agency of the ephors, Eurydamidas, the king of the other house, who was still a child, he transferred the authority to Epicleidas his brother, and having dissolved the power of the gerousia, he established in their stead nominal patronomoi. Desiring greater things and the rule over the Greeks, he attacked the Achaeans first, hoping to have them as allies if he conquered, and above all not wishing them to be an obstacle to his deeds.

​Having joined battle near Dyme, which is above Patrae, when Aratus was also then leading the Achaeans, he was victorious in the battle. This forced Aratus, fearing for the Achaeans and for Sicyon itself, to call in Antigonus. When Cleomenes violated the peace which he had concluded with Antigonus and openly committed other treaty-breaking deeds, and made the Megalopolitans refugees, Antigonus having thus crossed into the Peloponnese, the Achaeans engaged Cleomenes near Sellasia. When the Achaeans conquered, Sellasia was enslaved and Lacedaemon itself was captured. Now Antigonus and the Achaeans restored to the Lacedaemonians their ancestral constitution;

​and of the children of Leonidas, Epicleidas died in the battle, while Cleomenes, fleeing to Egypt and at first holding high honor with Ptolemy, happened to be imprisoned, having been convicted of rallying Egyptian men against the king. And he escaped from the prison and gave the Alexandrians a start of a riot; but in the end, as he was about to be captured, he slew himself. The Lacedaemonians, gladly rid of Cleomenes, no longer thought fit to be ruled by kings, but the other parts of that constitution remain for them even to this day. To Aratus, Antigonus remained well-disposed as to a benefactor and a companion in such brilliant achievements.

​But Philip, when he succeeded to the government—for Aratus did not praise him when he frequently used anger toward his subjects, and sometimes even checked him when he was eager to act—for these reasons killed Aratus, giving him a poison when he suspected nothing. And having carried him from Aegium—for there his fate overtook him—to Sicyon, they buried him, and the hero-shrine is still called the Arateum. Similar things were done by Philip also to Eurycleides and Micon, the Athenians; for indeed these, being orators and not unpersuasive to the people, he killed by poisons.

​But indeed, the murderous poison was destined to be a calamity to Philip himself also; for Perseus, the younger of the children of Philip, destroyed his brother Demetrius with poison, and by this very deed also provided their father, who was disheartened, with a cause to die. I have indicated these things looking to the verse of Hesiod made with the help of a god, that he who devises evil for another turns it first against himself.

​After the hero-shrine of Aratus, there is an altar to Isthmian Poseidon, and there is Zeus Meilichius and Artemis called Patroa, made with no art; Meilichius is fashioned like a pyramid, and she like a column. Here also their council-house is built, and a portico called Cleisthenean after the builder; and Cleisthenes built it from spoils, having fought together with the Amphictyons in the war against Cirrha. In the open air of the market-place is a bronze Zeus, the work of Lysippus, and near him a gilded Artemis.

​Nearby is a temple of Apollo Lycius, already fallen into decay and least of all worth seeing. For when wolves came upon their flocks so that there was no longer any profit from them, the god, having named a certain place where a dry log lay, gave an oracle to set the bark of this log and meat together before the beasts; and the bark destroyed them immediately when they tasted it, but that log lay in the temple of Apollo Lycius, and what kind of tree it was not even the Sicyonian guides understood.

​Next to this are bronze statues in a row; they say that they are the daughters of Proetus, but the inscription referred to other women. Here is a bronze Heracles; Lysippus the Sicyonian made it, and nearby stands Hermes Agoraeus.