Plutarch wrote Parallel Lives in the first and second centuries: paired biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, drawn for character more than for battle lists. This volume is Aratus of Sicyon, a Greek without a Roman pair. Sicyon sat in the northern Peloponnese of Greece, near Corinth, in the 200s BC.

As a young man he took his city back from a tyrant by night, climbing with scaling ladders. He then spent a lifetime stitching the Achaean League together city by city — a union of Greek towns in the Peloponnese. He captured the Acrocorinth, the fortress over Corinth that people called Greece's fetter, from a Macedonian garrison. When Cleomenes of Sparta grew too strong, Aratus called Macedon in to stop him, and the League paid with its independence. He died, they say, of a slow poison Philip V preferred to an argument: a liberator who ended as a king's client.