After the crisis occasioned by that war in Hellas he was carried off along with the other Achaean hostages to Italy,( 26) where he lived in exile for seventeen years (587-604) and was introduced by the sons of Paullus to the genteel circles of the capital.

By the sending back of the Achaean hostages( 27) he was restored to his home, where he thenceforth acted as permanent mediator between his confederacy and the Romans.

He was present at the destruction of Carthage and of Corinth (608).

He seemed educated, as it were, by destiny to comprehend the historical position of Rome more clearly than the Romans of that day could themselves.

From the place which he occupied, a Greek statesman and a Roman prisoner, esteemed and occasionally envied for his Hellenic culture by Scipio Aemilianus and the first men of Rome generally, he saw the streams, which had so long flowed separately, meet together in the same channel and the history of the states of the Mediterranean resolve itself into the hegemony of Roman power and Greek culture.