Aratus

Aratus is identified with the renovation of the Achaean League, a confederacy invoked to show how common laws and authority could temper faction within individual republics. His role is not narrated as a personal life story: he enters as part of a comparative political history, where the league’s relative moderation is set against its vulnerability to division and Macedonian power.

Aratus and the Achaean League

The account associates the league’s renewal with Aratus and uses it to support a specific institutional claim. The popular government of the Achaean members, it argues, produced fewer disorders than popular governments in cities exercising sovereignty individually, because the confederacy’s general authority and laws restrained local turbulence. The comparison makes Aratus’s significance political rather than biographical: the league’s renovated form serves as an example of union moderating conflict among its constituent communities.

That favorable judgment is qualified. The account does not claim that faction disappeared from the cities or that harmony prevailed throughout the confederacy. It points instead to the league’s reversals and eventual fate as evidence that internal discord persisted. The example therefore supports a limited proposition about the moderating effects of federal authority, not an idealized picture of a conflict-free union.

Revival amid Division and External Pressure

The league’s history places its revival against an earlier dissolution. After Macedonian influence broke the union apart, cities were drawn into separate interests; some fell under Macedonian garrisons, while others came under local rulers who had emerged from political disorder. Oppression eventually renewed the cities’ desire for liberty. A few reunited, their example attracted others able to remove their rulers, and the league grew to include almost the whole Peloponnese.

This expansion did not secure lasting unity. Sparta and Athens, jealous of the Achaeans’ rising influence, weakened the wider prospect of Greek confederation. The Achaeans then sought support from the kings of Egypt and Syria against Macedon, but Cleomenes of Sparta attacked them and helped break those allies’ commitments. Faced with submission to Cleomenes or recourse to their former oppressor, the Achaeans chose Macedonian assistance. Their victory over Cleomenes brought a new reversal: the powerful ally became master, and the league obtained little more than permission to retain its laws.

Historical and Political Significance

Aratus’s association with the league’s renovation anchors an argument about the advantages and limits of confederation. The Achaean example suggests that common authority can restrain disorder within member states, while its recurring fractures show that such arrangements remain exposed to ambition, rivalry, and external manipulation. The essays set this history beside the weaker Amphictyonic confederacy and the American political problem, using Greek precedents to argue that union requires more than nominal association: it must be capable of sustaining common action without erasing the political life of its members.