Aetolian League in 218 B.C.

Aetolian League — Spring 218 BC · The Social War.

The most feared and most hated of the Greek federations — a league of hardy central-Greek highlanders whose way of life was raiding, expanded by sword and by treaty into a sprawling power that controls Delphi and its Amphictyony, much of central Greece, the Ionian islands, and distant cities bound by shared citizenship. In 218 the Aetolians are at war with the whole Hellenic Symmachy — Macedon, the Achaean League and their allies — and Philip V has just stormed and burned their sacred heart at Thermon.

It was the Aetolians who lit the Social War, their captains Dorimachus and Scopas leading raids deep into the Peloponnese — the sack of Cynaetha in 220 horrified Greece. The Symmachy answered: in 218 the young Philip V swept into Aetolia itself and sacked Thermon, the federal sanctuary, avenging the plundered shrines of the Peloponnese with sacrilege of his own. Yet the league fights on — and at the peace of Naupactus in 217 an Aetolian, Agelaus, will warn all Greece of a "cloud rising in the west."