Plutarch's life of the Sicyonian statesman Aratus, who freed his city by night-scaling a tyrant's wall as a young exile and spent the rest of his career stitching Greek cities into the Achaean League, only to die slowly poisoned by the Macedonian king he had helped install.
Plutarch opens not with Aratus's birth but with a dedication to Aratus's sons Polycrates and Pythocles, urging them to be nourished on the record of their own house. The narrative proper begins with the boy Aratus, seven years old, swept up in the chaos when the tyrant Abantidas murders his father Clinias and seizes Sicyon; the child is smuggled to safety in the house of his father's sister and grows up in exile at Argos nursing, as Plutarch puts it, a fierce and burning hatred against tyrants. As a young man he engineers his own return: with a handful of exiles, borrowed ladders, and a plan built around a garden wall's blind spot, he scales the walls of Sicyon by night and overthrows the tyrant Nicocles without a single killing, then immediately merges his liberated city into the Achaean League rather than ruling it alone.
From there the Life becomes the story of the League itself, told through Aratus's recurring generalships (he holds the office seventeen times) and his signature move: seizing Acrocorinth, the fortress citadel that Philip the younger called "the fetters of Greece," from its Macedonian garrison in a second night operation even more perilous than the first, financed in part by pawning his own household silver and his wife's gold ornaments to pay Corinthian conspirators. Plutarch tracks Aratus's long, uneven contest against a shifting cast of tyrants (Aristippus of Argos, Lydiades of Megalopolis) and against the formidable reforming king Cleomenes of Sparta, whose successes eventually force Aratus into the fateful step of inviting Macedonian power back into the Peloponnese under Antigonus Doson in exchange for surrendering Acrocorinth itself. The Life closes with Aratus as elder statesman and tutor-by-example to the young king Philip V, whose character curdles from promise into cruelty; Philip's agent Taurion administers Aratus a slow poison, and Aratus dies at Aegium in his seventeenth generalship, telling a friend who saw him cough blood, "These, Cephalon, are the wages of royal friendship."
Historically this Life is a primary window onto the Achaean League and the last century of independent Greek federal politics before Roman domination, and Plutarch tells us outright that he is working from Aratus's own memoirs alongside the historians Polybius and Phylarchus, flagging where they disagree. It is also one of Plutarch's most morally ambivalent portraits: he openly weighs Aratus's genuine hatred of tyranny and personal daring against the compromises of his statecraft, including the killing of Aristomachus and the readmission of Macedonian garrisons he had once risked his life to expel, making it a case study in the costs of pragmatic leadership rather than a simple celebration of a liberator.
“Aratus, thus stolen away and having escaped the danger, immediately conceived and nursed a fierce and burning hatred against tyrants”
— Aratus
“and so Aratus, hurrying, climbed up too, forty men in all having gone up before him; and after waiting to take on a few more from below, he advanced to the house of the tyrant and to the headquarters”
— Aratus
“so that it was no jest, but true, that the younger Philip habitually called the city of the Corinthians "the fetters of Greece."”
— Aratus
“he took most of his drinking-cups and his wife's gold ornaments and pledged them to Aegias for the money”
— Aratus
“he said, "These, Cephalon, are the wages of royal friendship."”
— Aratus
Aratus was a third-century BCE Greek statesman who, as an exiled boy, saw his father Clinias murdered by the tyrant Abantidas. As a young man he retook his home city of Sicyon by scaling its walls at night, then spent the rest of his career as the dominant general and diplomat of the Achaean League, a federation of Greek city-states in the Peloponnese.
He organized a small band of exiles and hired men, scouted the wall with servants disguised as ordinary travelers, and used ladders built openly by an engineer under cover of his trade. Timing the climb to moonlight and dog patrols, his forty lead men scaled the wall, seized the tyrant Nicocles's mercenary barracks without killing anyone, and drove Nicocles from the city.
Acrocorinth was the citadel fortress controlling the Isthmus, and Plutarch calls it what let its holder control 'the single man who holds it master' of both mainland regions. Aratus took it from its Macedonian garrison in a second dangerous night operation, financed partly by his own pawned silver and his wife's gold, and it became the strategic prize the whole rest of the Life pivots around, including Aratus's later, controversial decision to hand it back to a different Macedonian king.
Plutarch is explicit that Aratus was bolder and more effective in secret conspiracies than in open warfare, and that his caution let real opportunities slip. The Life's most debated episode is Aratus inviting Antigonus Doson's Macedonian army back into the Peloponnese to counter King Cleomenes of Sparta, a move critics (which Plutarch weighs using Polybius and Phylarchus as sources) saw as betraying the very anti-Macedonian, anti-garrison politics that had made his name.
According to Plutarch, King Philip V of Macedon, whose character had curdled from promising youth into cruelty, had his agent Taurion administer Aratus a slow-acting poison that produced a low fever and cough before eventually killing him. Aratus recognized what was happening but bore it in silence, dying at Aegium during his seventeenth term as general.
The Achaean League was a federation of Peloponnesian Greek cities that pooled military and political power rather than existing as separate rival states. Aratus was elected its general seventeen times and repeatedly folded newly liberated or allied cities (including his own Sicyon and later Corinth) into the League instead of ruling them personally, which Plutarch presents as the source of the League's unusual strength.
Plutarch draws heavily on Aratus's own memoirs, and cross-checks contested episodes against the historians Polybius and Phylarchus, noting explicitly where Phylarchus is 'not altogether to be trusted' unless Polybius corroborates him.
After Aratus's poisoning death at Aegium, the Achaeans and especially the Sicyonians insist on honoring him with a hero's burial despite an ancient law against burial within their walls; an oracle from Delphi clears the way, and Sicyon institutes annual sacrifices to him at a shrine called the Arateion. Plutarch closes by noting that Aratus's son Philip turned out cruel and dissolute by contrast.
Aemilius Paulus · Agesilaus · Agis · Alcibiades · Alexander · Antony · Aristides · Artaxerxes · Caesar · Caius Gracchus · Caius Marius · Camillus