by Plutarch
During his term as hipparch, Philopoemen laboured to improve the Achaean League’s military proficiency, a slow development that gradually enhanced its capacity for asserting a degree of independence in its international relationships at a time when the league was increasingly dependent on, and subordinate to, its hegemon Philip V.6 Nonetheless, true to its obligations, the Achaeans fought alongside Philip against Rome in the First Macedonian War (214–205 BC), during which Philopoemen held the office of general (strategos) three times. For the most part, however, the Achaeans concentrated their hostilities against Sparta, at that time a Roman ally. Sparta was in the hands of Machanidas, yet another in a sequence of absolute rulers in a city suffering from continual social unrest and faction.7 Philopoemen defeated him at the battle of Mantinea in 207 BC, a success that for ever secured his reputation for valour and generalship in Greece (chs. 10–11).
The battle of Mantinea also occasioned the beginning of the Achaean League’s drift away from Macedon. At the same time, Machanidas’ successor in Sparta, Nabis, began to work miracles there.8 Soon, in combination with Cnossus on Crete, Sparta was once more an international power and a threat to the Achaean League. By 204 BC Achaea and Sparta were intermittently at war, until, sometime in 202/1 BC, Nabis seized control of Messene. At this provocation, Philopoemen, though a private citizen, raised a force sufficient to drive Nabis out (ch. 12), a bold achievement that won him acclaim and a fresh term as general. Achaea soon declared war on Nabis, while Philopoemen once more departed for Crete.
But before he removed himself to Crete, Philopoemen presided over the first of Rome’s overtures to the Achaean League.9 It was obvious that Rome and Macedon would again come to blows, only this time the stakes were to be much higher than in the First Macedonian War and the Romans hoped to persuade the Greeks to side with them against Philip.10 Naturally, the Achaean League preferred to find a middle path between such powerful belligerents. As for Philopoemen, because he did not remain on the scene but departed in 200 or 199 BC, he was not an obvious influence in subsequent Achaean deliberations, which went Rome’s way. It has been suggested that Philopoemen’s second visit to Crete, as mysterious to modern scholars as his first, was at least in part intended to blunt Nabis’ influence there.11
In his absence, there were drastic transformations in the political situation of Greece and of the Achaean League. War broke out between Philip and Rome, the Second Macedonian War (200–197 BC), and in 199/8 BC, the league, dissolving its connection with Philip, sided with the Romans (Livy 32.19–23). In the following year, Nabis followed his Achaean enemies into the Roman fold, although he was not above double-dealing with Philip when it suited his interests. In the year after that, Philip was defeated – a victory followed up by the Romans’ decreeing the freedom of the Greeks. Philopoemen missed it all, however, and did not return from Crete until sometime in 194/3 BC.12
His time in Crete had done little to diminish his standing in the league. He was again general in 193/2 BC, when he continued to oppose Nabis, despite the Romans’ unwillingness to tolerate further warfare between their two allies. For his part, Philopoemen insisted that the Achaeans’ alliance with the Romans did not deprive them of an independent foreign policy, and this position led to serious conflicts between the Achaean general and the Roman Flamininus, who, after his victory over Philip, was the main representative of Roman policy in Greece. In 192 BC Nabis was assassinated, and Philopoemen forcibly united Sparta with the Achaean League.13
From 191 to 188 BC, Rome was at war with Antiochus the Great and his Aetolian allies. During this contest the Achaeans remained loyal to Rome.14 Meanwhile, the condition of Sparta remained a source of controversy within and without the Achaean League. The effects of social upheaval over so long a time had left the city in a shattered state, and internal political rivalries had dispersed a multitude of Spartan exiles throughout Greece. It was Philopoemen’s desire to resolve Sparta’s difficulties – but only in ways that helped to ensure Achaean domination, interference that provoked Spartan resistance and led to a prolonged cycle of conflicts. In the end, Philopoemen imposed order through mass execution, the destruction of the city’s defences and the eradication of the traditional Lycurgan constitution (ch. 16).15
Spartan appeals to Rome were answered by further Roman efforts to persuade the Achaean League to moderate its treatment of the city. Rome sent a series of distinguished embassies, including, in 183 BC, a commission of three former consuls headed by Flamininus, in an attempt to improve Sparta’s situation. All were rebuffed by Philopoemen and his supporters, including Lycortas. These diplomatic exchanges about Sparta took place within a larger Achaean debate over how far the league should go in accommodating Roman demands. In every case, Philopoemen insisted on the Romans’ observing the letter of their alliance, a position that led to personal friction between himself and Flamininus and made the Greek leader unpopular with the Roman senate.16 Before the matter could be satisfactorily resolved, Messene rebelled against the Achaean League in 182 BC. Philopoemen, who was then general for the eighth time, responded militarily, was captured by the Messenians and put to death by them (chs. 18–20).17 The Achaeans, led by Lycortas, quickly reasserted control in Messene and honoured Philopoemen with a public funeral (ch. 21: Polybius 23.16).
Plutarch’s Philopoemen
Plutarch’s treatment of Philopoemen, although favourable, is more textured and qualified than Polybius’. In this Life, as well as in Titus Flamininus, Plutarch emphasizes the themes of Greek freedom, of Roman influence, of Greek independence in the presence of Roman power – and of Greek contentiousness. These were all matters of contemporary relevance for Plutarch’s readers. Elsewhere, Plutarch is at pains to remind Greek leaders how their powers are exercised in a universe dominated by Rome: ‘As you enter into office … you must say to yourself, “You rule as a subject: the city is subject to proconsuls, the procurators of Caesar” ’ (Moralia 813e). Greek politicians had an absolute duty, in Plutarch’s view, to deal with Roman government in a dignified yet sensibly subordinate manner – and especially to avoid domestic faction. These were the keys to their enjoying in the best way the freedom that the Romans permitted them to have (Moralia 814b–816a, 824c). And it was, to return to Plutarch’s representation of things in this pairing, the Greeks’ historic failure to rid themselves of contentiousness that ultimately frustrated their desire for independence. In Titus Flamininus (ch. 11), after the proclamation of Greek freedom in 196 BC, Plutarch provides an account of Greek reflections on the significance of the event:
At this moment of celebration, it was all the more natural that they should talk and reflect on the fate of Greece. They thought of all the wars she had fought for freedom; but freedom had never come more firmly or delightfully than now, and it had come almost without blood and without grief, championed by another people … If one discounted [the wars against Persia], all Greece’s wars had been fought internally for slavery, every one of her trophies had been also a disaster and reproach for Greece, which had generally been overthrown by its leaders’ evil ways and contentiousness.
Contentiousness, which by Plutarch’s day appears to have conjoined the ideas of ‘love of victory’ (philonikia) with ‘love of strife’ (philoneikia), is here depicted as something like a congenital failure on the part of the Greeks’ heroes, valiant though they were.18 The last of the Greeks, Plutarch insists, shared this debilitating quality.19
Plutarch’s Philopoemen is a man possessed of a great nature, the kind of character Plutarch later analysed in strongly Platonic terms when he turned to Coriolanus and Alcibiades.20 Here Plutarch underscores Philopoemen’s phronēma, his pride or spirit, which, especially when activated by anger, induces him to perform bold but sometimes inappropriate deeds.21 For example (ch. 16), when Flamininus and the Achaean general Diophanes, marched on Sparta:
That stirred Philopoemen’s anger, and he did something which was not precedented nor strictly justifiable, but was certainly the great deed
of a great-hearted man [i.e. a man with ‘a great spirit’, a megalon phronēma]. He went to Sparta himself, and barred the entry of the Achaean general and the Roman consul, private citizen though he was.
Or, again (ch. 17), when Philopoemen opposes Flamininus’ attempt to restore the Spartan exiles, only to secure their restoration in the following year so that the credit could be his, Plutarch observes: ‘That was the sort of combative and contentious approach to authority that his proud spirit [phronēma] inspired.’ In each passage we see Philopoemen so roused that he cannot resist a startling confrontation. Still, it is so-far-so-good at this stage of his Life, inasmuch as in each of these instances Philopoemen scored a success, with no real harm done.
According to Plutarch, a nature like Philopoemen’s demands a philosophical education to moderate it,22 and although Philopoemen had the benefit of excellent teachers (ch. 1), his approach to the higher forms of Greek culture was narrow and selective (ch. 4). He was more interested in warfare, the enterprise which consumed his attention, something marked from the beginning by Plutarch’s initial likening of the young Philopoemen to Achilles under the tutelage of Phoenix (ch. 1). Consequently, his great nature fell prey to contentiousness, the result of which, in this Life, is his indecently harsh treatment of Sparta and his abolition of its ancient constitution, by which action he mistreated his fellow-Greeks ‘in the most savage and unprecedented way imaginable’ (ch. 16). It is also Philopoemen’s contentiousness that, in the end, brings about his own humiliation and death. The point is made explicitly in the final Comparison, which insists that Philopoemen ‘was also thought to have thrown away his life in his anger and contentiousness, for his hastening to Messene was not timely, but quicker than it should have been’ (Comparison Philopoemen–Flamininus 1).
For Plutarch, however, none of this diminishes Philopoemen’s undisputed virtue. Contentious he may have been, but Philopoemen was also a champion of Greek freedom. Victor at Mantinea, where he struck down the tyrant Machanidas, Philopoemen was celebrated at the Nemean festival, and rightly so according to Plutarch. Philopoemen also liberated Messene from the tyrant Nabis and defeated him in battle, deeds that inspired Greek adulation even as they stimulated Flamininus’ jealousy (chs. 14–15). And it was Philopoemen who brought Sparta into the Achaean League, thereby unifying the Peloponnese under a single government free from autocracy. Even Philopoemen’s resistance to Roman interference in Greece, Plutarch makes clear, was in pursuit of freedom (Comparison Philopoemen–Flamininus 3). He struggled to preserve Greece’s dignity as well as its liberty, which is why, although Plutarch esteems Flamininus’ benefactions towards Greece as ‘noble’, Philopoemen’s dignified independence in the face of Roman power was ‘nobler still’ (Comparison Philopoemen–Flamininus 3).
In a sense, Philopoemen, like the Plutarchan heroes of the late republic such as the Younger Cato or Brutus, was a man who found himself pitted against the inevitable: the rise of Rome, like the end of the republic in favour of imperial rule, was divinely propelled.23 Plutarch openly concedes the Greeks’ – and Philopoemen’s – failure to overcome their principal deficiency, but he quite naturally mourns Greece’s loss of independence, even if it was unavoidable. All of this is inscribed in the conclusion of this Life, when Plutarch observes how Philopoemen’s excellence was recognized by the Romans, when, after the Achaean War of 146 BC, they refused to remove Philopoemen’s statues. In this, Plutarch observes, the Romans did the correct thing: ‘Rewards and gratitude are owed to benefactors from those they benefit, but good men deserve honour from all those like themselves’ (ch. 21). But this gesture, he hardly need elaborate, came only after the destruction of Corinth, the very city in which Flamininus had proclaimed the freedom of the Greeks fifty years before. Now, however, although Greece was not formally annexed, the days of its independence were truly at an end.24 Philopoemen’s fight, however futile, had been for something worth fighting for.
Sources
Plutarch’s most important source for this Life was Polybius, both his Histories, which cover the period of Philopoemen’s life in Books 10–24 (not all of which are preserved for us in their entirety) and his (now lost) encomium of Philopoemen. Livy narrates this same period in Books 24–39 (Philopoemen’s death is recorded at Livy 39.50), but it is unlikely that Plutarch felt any need to consult him when he had Polybius at his disposal. For the early chapters of this Life, Plutarch also turned to Phylarchus, as he did for his Aratus and his Agis & Cleomenes.25 Finally, at chapter 16 Plutarch cites Aristocrates (FGrH 591), a Spartan historian of the early imperial period who composed a history of Sparta from the time of Lycurgus down at least to the time of Nabis.
Life of Philopoemen
[c. 253–182 BC]
1. There was once a Mantinean called Cleander,1 an aristocrat and one of the most powerful men in the city. He fell upon hard times, was driven into exile, and came to Megalopolis.2 It was mainly because of Philopoemen’s father, Craugis,3 a man distinguished in every respect and Cleander’s personal friend, that he chose the city; and as long as Craugis was alive he did everything he could for Cleander, and when he died Cleander repaid his generosity by acting as guardian to his orphaned son. It was like Homer’s tale of Phoenix bringing up Achilles.4 In just the same way, Philopoemen’s character from the very beginning was moulded and grew in a noble and kingly way.
When Philopoemen reached adolescence, the Megalopolitans Ecdelus and Demophanes5 took over his guardianship. Both men had been disciples of Arcesilaus6 in the Academy, and stood out among their contemporaries for their application of philosophy to the realities of politics. They liberated their own city from tyranny by secretly organizing the group which was to kill Aristodemus;7 they helped Aratus in expelling Nicocles, tyrant of Sicyon;8 and when the men of Cyrene9 asked them for help when their city had collapsed into political chaos, they sailed out and imposed a most splendid settlement which restored order and legality. They themselves counted Philopoemen’s education among their achievements, claiming that through their philosophy they had moulded the boy into a blessing for all Greece. Indeed, it was as if Greece had borne him in her old age as a late-born brother to those great leaders of old, and Greece consequently loved him greatly, bestowing power on him which grew along with his glory. A Roman once praised him as ‘the last of the Greeks’:10 never again (that was the implication) did Greece bear a man who was truly great, and worthy of her past.
2. Some people think he was ugly, but that is not true, as we can see from a surviving statue at Delphi.11 There is a story of a woman of Megara12 who failed to recognize him when he was her guest, but that was because of a certain easy-going unpretentiousness in his manner. She had heard that the general of the Achaeans was coming, and, very flustered, was preparing dinner: it happened that her husband was away. Then Philopoemen arrived, wearing a cheap soldier’s cloak. She thought he was one of the servants who had been sent on ahead, and told him to help with the preparations. He immediately threw off his cloak and began to cut the wood. Then the husband came in, Philopoemen’s old guest-friend,13 and saw what was happening. ‘What’s this, Philopoemen?’ he asked. ‘It can only be one thing,’ replied Philopoemen in broad Doric:14 ‘I’m paying the punishment for my wretched appearance.’ As for the rest of his body, Titus Flamininus once said jokingly that ‘you have fine hands and legs, Philopoemen, but no belly’, for he was rather slender in the middle. But the joke was really aimed at his military power, for he had fine infantry and cavalry but was often short of money. These, then, are the stories they tell about Philopoemen in the schools.15
3. As for his character, his ambition was not altogether free of contentiousness nor devoid of irascibility. He particularly wanted to model himself on Epaminondas,16 and he certainly reproduced a powerful version of Epaminondas’ energy, his insight and his incorruptibility. But he could not retain his mildness or gravity or humanity towards political opponents, for his anger and contentiousness were simply too strong. He consequently seemed
more attuned to military than to political excellence: even in childhood he was already fond of soldierly things, and threw himself enthusiastically into the lessons which were helpful for this – practice in armed fighting, for instance, or riding.
He was naturally good at wrestling, too, but when some of his friends and tutors encouraged him to train systematically, he first asked them whether athletics would compromise his military training. They replied by telling him the truth: that an athlete’s body and lifestyle are totally different from a soldier’s, and in particular their training and diet diverge widely17–athletes need lots of sleep, they have regular meals and eat until they are full, and they follow a carefully ordered regimen with prescribed periods of activity and rest; that is what develops and keeps them in peak condition, and the slightest disturbance or change in their routine quickly changes them for the worse. But a soldier needs to be experienced in every sort of irregularity and fluctuation, and in particular he must be able to bear privation and sleeplessness with ease. When Philopoemen was told this, he not only kept well away from athletics himself and ridiculed the activity: later, when he was general, he also did everything he could to discourage the practice by penalizing and humiliating anyone who took part in any kind of athletic competition. They were making the most useful bodies quite useless, he said, for the contests for which they were really needed.
