The Roman senate thought that the time for general forgiveness and oblivion had come, and in 604 released the survivors of those Achaean patriots who had been confined for seventeen years in Italy, and whose liberation the Achaean diet had never ceased to demand.

Nevertheless they were mistaken.

How little the Romans with all their Philhellenism had been successful in heartily conciliating Hellenic patriotism, was nowhere more clearly apparent than in the attitude of the Greeks towards the Attalids.

King Eumenes II had been, as a friend of the Romans, extremely hated in Greece;( 19) but scarcely had a coldness arisen between him and the Romans, when he became suddenly popular in Greece, and the Hellenic hopefuls expected the deliverer from a foreign yoke to come now from Pergamus as formerly from Macedonia.

Social disorganization more especially was visibly on the increase among the petty states of Hellas now left to themselves.