Aratus seeing that Philip was avowedly entering of hostilities with <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Rome&groupId=935&placeId=1669">Rome</a> and had entirely changed his sentiment towards the allies, with difficulty persuaded him by urging on him a number of difficulties and pleas.
Now that actual facts have confirmed a statement I made in my fifth Book, which was there a mere unsupported pronouncement, I wish to recall it to the memory of those who have followed this history, so as to leave none of my statements without proof or disputable.
When in describing the Aetolian war I reached that part of my narrative in which that Philip was too savage in his destruction of the porticoes and other votive offerings at Thermus, we should not owing to his youth at the time lay the blame so much on the king himself as on the friends he associated with, I then stated that Aratus\' conduct throughout his life vindicated him from the suspicion of having acted so wickedly, but that such conduct savoured of Demetrius of <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Pharos&groupId=879&placeId=1586">Pharos</a>.
I then promised to make this clear from what I would afterwards relate, and I reserved the proof of the above assertion for this occasion, when, as I just stated in my account of his treatment of the Messenians, all owing to a difference of one day — Demetrius having arrived and Aratus being too late — Philip committed the first of his great crimes.
Henceforth, as if he had had a taste of human blood and of the slaughter and betrayal of his allies, he did not change from a man into a wolf, as in the Arcadian tale cited by Plato, but he changed from a king into a cruel tyrant.
And a still more striking proof of the sentiment of each is this advice that they respectively gave about the citadel of Messene; so that there is not a shadow of doubt left about the Aetolian matter.
Walbank Commentary