I too take pleasure, as though I myself had borne a share of the toil and the danger, in having come to the end of the Punic War. For although it would little become one who has presumed to declare that he would write out the whole history of Rome to grow weary at the several parts of so vast a work, yet, when it comes into my mind that the sixty-three years—for so many there are from the First Punic War to the close of the Second—have filled as many volumes for me as the four hundred and eighty-seven years from the founding of the city to the consulship of Appius Claudius, who first made war upon the Carthaginians, had filled, I already foresee in my mind that, like men who, drawn on by the shallows next the shore, walk out into the sea on foot, the further I advance, the more I am carried into a vaster depth and, as it were, an abyss, and that the work almost grows, which seemed to be made less by the finishing of each first part.

The Punic peace was followed by the Macedonian war—in danger by no means to be compared with it, whether in the valor of the commander or the strength of the soldiery, but well-nigh more renowned for the fame of its ancient kings, the long-standing repute of the nation, and the greatness of an empire by which they had once held in arms much of Europe and the greater part of Asia. But the war begun against Philip some ten years before had been laid down three years after its beginning, the Aetolians having been the occasion both of the war and of the peace. Thereafter the Romans, now set free by the Punic peace and embittered against Philip—at once for the faith he had broken toward the Aetolians and the other allies of that same region, and for the auxiliaries lately sent with money into Africa to Hannibal and the Carthaginians—were roused to renew the war by the entreaties of the Athenians, whom he had driven within their city when he had laid waste their fields. About the same time envoys came both from King Attalus and from the Rhodians, with the news that the states of Asia too were being stirred up. To these embassies the answer was given that the matter would be the Senate’s care; the deliberation upon the Macedonian war was referred entire to the consuls, who were then in their provinces. Meanwhile three envoys were sent to Ptolemy, king of Egypt—Gaius Claudius Nero, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, and Publius Sempronius Tuditanus—to announce that Hannibal and the Carthaginians had been defeated, and to give the king thanks because in their doubtful days, when even their neighboring allies were deserting the Romans, he had stood by his faith, and to beg that, if driven by wrongs they should undertake the war against Philip, he would keep his old goodwill toward the Roman people.

About the same time the consul Publius Aelius, in Gaul, having heard that before his coming the Boii had made inroads into the lands of the allies, enrolled two emergency legions on account of that rising, added to them four cohorts from his own army, and ordered Gaius Ampius, prefect of the allies, to invade the territory of the Boii with this hasty force through Umbria, by the way they call the Sapinian tribe; he himself led by the same open route through the mountains. Ampius, entering the enemy’s borders, at first carried out his ravaging prosperously enough and in safety; then, having chosen a spot near the fort of Mutilum suitable enough for reaping the grain—for the crops were now ripe—he set out, without scouting the country round or posting outposts strong enough to protect the armed, the unarmed, and those intent on the work; and by a sudden onset of the Gauls he was surrounded along with his foragers. Thereupon panic and flight seized even the armed. About seven thousand men, scattered among the crops, were cut down, among them the prefect Gaius Ampius himself; the rest were driven by fear into the camp. From there, with no settled leader, by the soldiers’ common consent, on the next night, leaving the greater part of their belongings, they made their way to the consul through passes well-nigh impassable. He, having done nothing else worth recording in the province save that he ravaged the territory of the Boii and struck a treaty with the Ingaunian Ligurians, returned to Rome. When he first held a session of the Senate, all demanding that he take up no matter before that of Philip and the allies’ complaints, it was at once laid before them; and a full Senate decreed that the consul Publius Aelius should send, with command, whomsoever he saw fit, who, having taken over the fleet which Gnaeus Octavius was bringing back from Sicily, should cross into Macedonia. Marcus Valerius Laevinus, sent as propraetor, took over thirty-eight ships from Gnaeus Octavius near Vibo and crossed into Macedonia. When the legate Marcus Aurelius had come to him and had shown him how great armies and how great a number of ships the king had got ready, and how, going about all the cities not of the mainland only but of the islands too, partly in person, partly through his agents, he was rousing men to arms—that this war must be taken up by the Romans with a greater effort, lest, while they delayed, Philip should dare what Pyrrhus before him had dared from a kingdom considerably smaller—Aurelius judged it good to write these same things to the consuls and the Senate.

At the close of this year, when the matter of lands for the veteran soldiers who under the leadership and auspices of Publius Scipio had brought the war in Africa to its end had been laid before the Senate, the Fathers decreed that Marcus Junius, the city praetor, should, if he saw fit, appoint a board of ten to measure out and divide the Samnite and Apulian land, so much of it as was public property of the Roman people. There were appointed Publius Servilius, Quintus Caecilius Metellus, Gaius and Marcus Servilius—both bore the surname Geminus—, Lucius and Aulus Hostilius Cato, Publius Villius Tappulus, Marcus Fulvius Flaccus, Publius Aelius Paetus, and Titus Quinctius Flamininus.

In those days, while the consul Publius Aelius held the elections, the consuls chosen were Publius Sulpicius Galba and Gaius Aurelius Cotta. The praetors then made were Quintus Minucius Rufus, Lucius Furius Purpurio, Quintus Fulvius Gillo, and Gaius Sergius Plautus. The Roman dramatic games were that year given with magnificence and lavish display by the curule aediles Lucius Valerius Flaccus and Lucius Quinctius Flamininus; two days were repeated; and a vast quantity of grain, which Publius Scipio had sent from Africa, they distributed to the people at four asses the measure, with the utmost good faith and to general goodwill. And the plebeian games were thrice wholly repeated by the plebeian aediles Lucius Apustius Fullo and Quintus Minucius Rufus, who from his aedileship had been chosen praetor. And there was a banquet of Jupiter on occasion of the games.

In the five hundred and fifty-first year from the founding of the city, in the consulship of Publius Sulpicius Galba and Gaius Aurelius, the war with King Philip was begun, a few months after the peace granted to the Carthaginians. First of all, on the Ides of March—the day on which the consulship was then entered upon—the consul Publius Sulpicius brought the matter forward, and the Senate decreed that the consuls should perform a sacrifice with full-grown victims to whatever gods seemed good to them, with this prayer: "that whatsoever the Senate and people of Rome had in mind concerning the commonwealth and the entering upon a new war, that thing might fall out well and happily for the Roman people and the allies and the Latin name"; and that after the sacrifice and the prayer they should consult the Senate about the commonwealth and the provinces. In those days, opportunely for the kindling of men’s minds to war, there came both letters from the legate Marcus Aurelius and the propraetor Marcus Valerius Laevinus, and a fresh embassy of the Athenians, to announce that the king was drawing near their borders, and that shortly not their fields only but their city too would be under his sway, unless there were some help in the Romans. When the consuls had reported that the sacrifice had been duly performed, and that the soothsayers answered that the gods had assented to the prayer, that the entrails had been favorable and portended an enlargement of the borders, a victory, and a triumph, then the letters of Valerius and Aurelius were read and the Athenian envoys heard. A decree of the Senate was then passed, that thanks should be given to the allies, in that, though long pressed, they had not departed from their faith even for fear of a siege; that about sending help the answer should be given when the consuls had drawn lots for the provinces, and when that consul to whom Macedonia had fallen had laid before the people the proposal that war be declared upon Philip, king of the Macedonians. To Publius Sulpicius the province of Macedonia fell by lot, and he published a bill: did they will and order that war be declared on Philip the king and on the Macedonians who were under his rule, for the wrongs and the arms brought against the allies of the Roman people? To the other consul, Aurelius, Italy fell as his province. The praetors then drew lots: Gaius Sergius Plautus the city jurisdiction, Quintus Fulvius Gillo Sicily, Quintus Minucius Rufus Bruttium, Lucius Furius Purpurio Gaul. The bill concerning the Macedonian war was rejected at the first assembly by nearly all the centuries. This men had done of their own accord, wearied by the length and the weight of the war, out of a loathing for dangers and toils; and besides, Quintus Baebius, tribune of the plebs, entering upon the old road of accusing the Fathers, had charged that wars were being sown out of wars, that the plebs might never enjoy peace. The Fathers took this ill, and the tribune of the plebs was torn with reproaches in the Senate; and each for himself urged the consul to proclaim the assembly anew for carrying the bill, to chide the people’s sloth, and to teach them how great a loss and disgrace that postponement of the war would prove. The consul, at the assembly on the Campus Martius, before he sent the centuries to the vote, summoned a meeting and spoke: "You seem to me, Quirites, not to understand that the question put to you is not whether you shall have war or peace—for Philip will allow you no free choice in that, since he is setting on foot a mighty war by land and sea—but whether you shall carry your legions across into Macedonia, or receive the enemy into Italy. How great the difference is, you learned, if never else, at least in the late Punic war. For who doubts that, if to the Saguntines under siege and imploring our faith we had briskly brought help, as our fathers had brought it to the Mamertines, we should have turned the whole war away into Spain—the war which, by hanging back, we received into Italy to our utter ruin? Nor is even this in doubt, that this very Philip—who had already covenanted by envoys and letters with Hannibal to cross over into Italy—we held fast in Macedonia by sending Laevinus with a fleet to carry the war to him unprovoked. And what we did then, when we had Hannibal as an enemy in Italy, do we now hesitate to do, with Hannibal driven from Italy and the Carthaginians utterly conquered? Suppose we let the king make trial of our sloth in the storming of Athens, as we let Hannibal make trial of it in the storming of Saguntum: not in the fifth month thereafter, as Hannibal came from Saguntum, but on the fifth day after he has loosed his ships from Corinth, he will reach Italy. Do not, I grant, match Philip with Hannibal, nor the Macedonians with the Carthaginians; but with Pyrrhus you will surely match him. Match him, do I say? By how much does the one man surpass the other man, the one nation the other nation! Epirus has always been the smallest appendage to the kingdom of Macedonia, and is so to this day. The whole Peloponnese Philip holds in his sway, and Argos itself, made famous no more by ancient renown than by the death of Pyrrhus. Now compare our own case. A far more flourishing Italy, our resources far more entire, our commanders safe, safe all those armies which the Punic war afterward consumed—yet Pyrrhus, attacking, shook it, and came as victor almost to the very city of Rome! And not the Tarentines only, and that coast of Italy which they call Greater Greece—so that you would think they had followed their tongue and their name—but the Lucanian and the Bruttian and the Samnite revolted from us. Do you believe that these, if Philip crosses into Italy, will keep quiet or abide in their faith? They abided, no doubt, in the later Punic war! Never will those peoples fail to revolt from us, except when there is no one to whom they may revolt. If it had irked you to cross into Africa, you would have Hannibal and the Carthaginians for your enemies in Italy today. Let Macedonia have the war rather than Italy; let the enemy’s cities and fields be laid waste with fire and sword; we have learned by now that our arms are more prosperous and more powerful abroad than at home. Go to the vote, with the gods graciously aiding, and confirm what the Fathers have resolved. Of this counsel not the consul only is the author, but the immortal gods also, who, as I sacrificed and prayed that this war might fall out well and happily for me, for the Senate and for you, for the allies and the Latin name, and for our fleets and armies, portended all things glad and prosperous." Sent to the vote after this speech, they ordered the war, as he proposed. Thereupon a supplication of three days was proclaimed by the consuls in accordance with a decree of the Senate, and the gods were besought at all the sacred couches that the war which the people had ordered against Philip might fall out well and happily. And the fetials were consulted by the consul Sulpicius, whether they bade that the war which was being declared on King Philip be announced to himself in person without fail, or whether it was enough that it be announced at whatever garrison should be nearest within the borders of the kingdom. The fetials decreed that whichever of the two he did, he would do rightly. The Fathers gave the consul leave to send, as the envoy to declare war on the king, whomsoever he saw fit of those who were outside the Senate. Then the matter of the armies of the consuls and praetors was dealt with. The consuls were ordered to enroll two legions each, and to disband the old armies. To Sulpicius, to whom a new war of great name had been decreed, leave was given to take what volunteers he could from the army which Publius Scipio had brought back from Africa; but he was to have no right to take any veteran soldier against his will. To the praetors Lucius Furius Purpurio and Quintus Minucius Rufus the consuls were to give five thousand each of the allies of the Latin name, with which garrisons the one should hold the province of Gaul, the other of Bruttium. Quintus Fulvius Gillo was himself ordered to choose, out of the army which the consul Publius Aelius had had, those who had served fewest campaigns, until he too had made up five thousand of the allies of the Latin name: that was to be the garrison of the province of Sicily. To Marcus Valerius Falto, who as praetor the year before had held the province of Campania, the command was prorogued for a year, that he might cross as propraetor into Sardinia: he too was to choose, from the army that was there, five thousand of the allies of the Latin name, those of them who had served fewest campaigns. And the consuls were ordered to enroll two city legions, to be sent wherever the situation should require, since many peoples in Italy had been tainted by partnership in the Punic war and were still swelling with the anger bred of it. Six Roman legions the state was to employ that year.

In the very midst of the preparation for war envoys came from King Ptolemy, to announce that the Athenians had asked the king for help against Philip; but that, although the Romans and he were allies in common, the king would yet send neither fleet nor army into Greece to defend or attack anyone save by the authority of the Roman people; that he would either rest quiet in his kingdom, if it pleased the Roman people to defend their allies, or would suffer the Romans to rest, if they preferred, and would himself send help such as could readily protect Athens against Philip. Thanks were given to the king by the Senate, and the answer made that it was the Roman people’s purpose to protect their allies; that if there were need of anything for that war, they would inform the king, knowing the resources of his kingdom to be a firm and faithful support of their commonwealth. Then gifts were sent to the envoys, by decree of the Senate, of five thousand asses to each.

While the consuls were holding the levy and getting ready what was needed for the war, the state—scrupulous in religion, above all at the outset of new wars—when the supplications had now been held and the entreaty made at all the sacred couches, ordered, that nothing might be left undone which had ever been done, that the consul to whom the province of Macedonia had fallen should vow games and a gift to Jupiter. A delay to the public vow was raised by Licinius, the pontifex maximus, who said it was not lawful to make a vow out of an uncertain sum; that it ought to be vowed out of a fixed sum, because that money could not be put to use in the war and ought to be set apart at once and not mingled with other money; and that, if this were done, the vow could not be duly discharged. Although both the matter and its author carried weight, yet the consul was bidden to refer to the college of pontiffs whether a vow of an uncertain sum could rightly be undertaken. They decreed that it could, and even more rightly so. The consul made the vow in the same words in which vows for the fifth year had been wont before to be undertaken, with the chief pontiff dictating before him—save that he vowed to make the games and gifts at such a sum as the Senate should determine at the time when the vow was discharged. Eight times before had the Great Games been vowed at a fixed sum; these were the first at an uncertain one.

When the minds of all were turned to the Macedonian war, suddenly—when nothing was less feared at that time—the rumor of a Gallic rising arose. The Insubres and Cenomani and Boii, having stirred up the Celines and the Ilvates and the rest of the Ligurian peoples, under the leadership of Hamilcar the Carthaginian—who had stayed behind in those parts from Hasdrubal’s army—had fallen upon Placentia; and when they had sacked the city and in their wrath burned the greater part of it, leaving scarce two thousand men amid the fires and the ruins, they crossed the Po and pressed on to plunder Cremona. The news of the neighboring city’s disaster gave the colonists time to shut their gates and dispose garrisons along the walls, so that they might at least be besieged before they were stormed, and might send messengers to the Roman praetor. Lucius Furius Purpurio was then in charge of the province; the rest of his army having been disbanded by decree of the Senate save five thousand of the allies of the Latin name, he had halted with these forces in the nearest region of the province, about Ariminum. He then wrote to the Senate in what an upheaval the province was: that of the two colonies which had slipped past that mighty storm of the Punic war, one had been taken and sacked by the enemy, the other was under siege; and that there would not be protection enough in his army for the hard-pressed colonists, unless he chose to throw five thousand allies to be butchered by forty thousand of the enemy—for so many were in arms—and, by so great a disaster of his own, to swell the spirits of an enemy already puffed up by the destruction of a Roman colony. When these letters had been read out, they decreed that the consul Gaius Aurelius should order the army, to which he had appointed a day to assemble in Etruria, to be present at Ariminum on the same day, and either go himself, if he could do so without harm to the commonwealth, to crush the Gallic rising, or write to the praetor Quintus Minucius that, when the legions had come to him from Etruria, he should send in their stead five thousand of the allies to be meanwhile a garrison for Etruria, and go himself to free the colony from siege. They voted, too, that envoys be sent to Africa—the same to Carthage and the same to Numidia, to Masinissa: to Carthage, to announce that their countryman Hamilcar—they did not well know whether out of Hasdrubal’s earlier army or out of Mago’s later—was making war against the treaty, and had stirred up armies of Gauls and Ligurians to arms against the Roman people; and that, if peace pleased them, he must be recalled by them and surrendered to the Roman people. At the same time they were bidden to announce that not all the deserters had been given back, and that a great part of them were said to walk openly about Carthage; these ought to be arrested and hunted out, that they might be restored under the treaty. These were the instructions to the Carthaginians. They were bidden to congratulate Masinissa, that he had not only recovered his ancestral kingdom but had even enlarged it by the addition of the most flourishing part of Syphax’s borders. They were bidden also to announce that the war with King Philip had been undertaken, because he had aided the Carthaginians with auxiliaries and, by inflicting wrongs on the allies of the Roman people while Italy was ablaze with war, had compelled fleets and armies to be sent into Greece, and by drawing off their forces had been a chief cause of the later crossing into Africa; and to ask that he send to that war some auxiliary Numidian cavalry. Ample gifts were given to be carried to the king: vessels of gold and silver, a purple toga and a palm-embroidered tunic with an ivory scepter, and a bordered toga with a curule chair; and the envoys were bidden to promise that, if he should signify a need of anything to strengthen and enlarge his kingdom, the Roman people would zealously furnish it, as his deserts merited. The envoys of Vermina too, son of Syphax, came before the Senate in those days, pleading his error and his youth and turning all the blame upon the treachery of the Carthaginians: that Masinissa had been made from an enemy a friend of the Romans, and that Vermina too would strive not to be outdone in services toward the Roman people by Masinissa or by any other; and asking that he be styled king and ally and friend by the Senate. The answer given to the envoys was that his father Syphax too had without cause been suddenly made an enemy of the Roman people from an ally and friend, and that he himself had served the apprenticeship of his youth in provoking the Romans to war. Therefore peace must first be sought by him from the Roman people, before he be styled king and ally and friend; the Roman people was wont to give that honor of a title in return for great services of kings toward itself. Roman envoys would be in Africa, to whom the Senate would give charge to grant Vermina terms of peace, he leaving the free decision to the Roman people; if he should wish anything added to them, taken away, or altered, he must again make his request to the Senate. The envoys sent to Africa with these instructions were Gaius Terentius Varro, Spurius Lucretius, and Gnaeus Octavius. Quinqueremes were given them, one apiece.

Then a letter of the praetor Quintus Minucius, whose province was Bruttium, was read out in the Senate: that money had been secretly taken by night at Locri from the treasures of Proserpina, and that no trace was to be found of those to whom the crime belonged. The Senate took it ill that there was no ceasing from sacrileges, and that not even Pleminius—so notable and so recent an instance of crime together with its punishment—deterred men. The consul Gaius Aurelius was charged to write to the praetor in Bruttium that it was the Senate’s pleasure that an inquiry into the plundered treasures be held on the same model as Marcus Pomponius the praetor had held three years before; that what money was found be replaced; that what was not found be made good, and that expiatory rites, if it seemed good, be performed, as the pontiffs had before determined. The care of expiating the violation of that temple was kindled the more by prodigies reported about the same time in several places. In Lucania, they reported, the sky had blazed; at Privernum the sun had been red all day long under a clear sky; at Lanuvium, in the temple of Juno Sospita, a great din had arisen in the night. Moreover, monstrous births of animals were reported in several places: among the Sabines a child was born of doubtful sex, whether male or female; another was found, already sixteen years old, likewise of ambiguous sex; at Frusino a lamb with a swine’s head; at Sinuessa a pig was born with a human head; in Lucania, on the public land, a colt with five feet. All were thought foul and misshapen, the work of nature straying into alien shapes; before all, the half-male creatures were held accursed and ordered to be carried out to sea at once, as recently, in the consulship of Gaius Claudius and Marcus Livius, a like portentous birth had been carried out. None the less they ordered the board of ten to consult the books concerning that portent. The decemvirs from the books prescribed the same rites which had lately been performed in consequence of that prodigy. They ordered besides that a hymn be sung through the city by thrice-nine maidens, and a gift be borne to Queen Juno. These things the consul Gaius Aurelius saw to, in accordance with the answer of the decemvirs. The hymn, as in our fathers’ memory Livius had done, so then Publius Licinius Tegula composed.

When all the religious scruples had been expiated—for at Locri too the sacrilege had been traced out by Quintus Minucius, and the money replaced in the treasures out of the goods of the guilty—and the consuls wished to set out for their provinces, private citizens came in throng to the Senate, men to whom, out of the money they had lent in the consulship of Marcus Valerius and Marcus Claudius, the third installment was due that year, because the consuls had said there was nothing from which it could be paid them at present, since the treasury scarcely sufficed for a new war that must be waged with a great fleet and great armies. The Senate could not bear their complaints: if the money given for the Punic war the state wished to use for the Macedonian war too, then, with one war rising out of another, what else would it be than that their own money, given as a benefaction, should be confiscated as though it were a crime? Since the private citizens asked what was fair, and yet the state was not able to pay its debt, the Senate decreed what lay midway between the fair and the expedient: that, since a great part of them said that lands were everywhere for sale and that they themselves had need to buy, a supply of public land within the fiftieth milestone be made available to them; that the consuls assess the land and impose upon it a rent of one as the iugerum, as a token that it was public land, so that, if any, when the people was able to pay, should prefer to have his money rather than the land, he might restore the land to the people. The private citizens gladly accepted that condition; and that land was called the trientabulum, because it had been given in lieu of the third part of the money.

Then Publius Sulpicius, after the vows pronounced on the Capitol, set out from the city with his lictors in their war-cloaks, came to Brundisium, distributed among the legions the veteran volunteers from the African army, chose ships out of the fleet of Gnaeus Cornelius, and on the day after he loosed from Brundisium crossed into Macedonia. There the envoys of the Athenians met him, begging that he free them from the siege. Gaius Claudius Cento was sent to Athens at once with twenty warships and a thousand soldiers. For the king himself was not besieging Athens; at that very time he was attacking Abydus, having already tried his strength in naval engagements with the Rhodians and Attalus, in neither battle with success; but he was emboldened, beyond his inborn fierceness, by the treaty struck with Antiochus, king of Syria, and by the resources of Egypt now divided with him—on which, the death of King Ptolemy being heard of, both were threateningly bent.

Now the Athenians had drawn upon themselves the war with Philip on no worthy cause, while out of their old fortune they kept nothing but their spirit. Two Acarnanian youths, during the days of the mysteries, being uninitiated and ignorant of the religious law, entered the temple of Ceres with the rest of the crowd. Their talk readily betrayed them, as they asked certain things absurdly; and being brought before the wardens of the temple, though it was plain they had entered through a mistake, they were put to death as for an unspeakable crime. That deed, so foul and so hostile, the Acarnanian nation reported to Philip, and obtained from him that, Macedonian auxiliaries being given them, he should suffer them to make war upon the Athenians. This army first laid waste the land of Attica with fire and sword, then returned into Acarnania with booty of every kind. And that, indeed, was the first provocation of feeling; afterward a regular war was made of it, by the decrees of the state declaring it formally. For King Attalus and the Rhodians, pursuing Philip as he withdrew into Macedonia, when they had come to Aegina, the king crossed over to the Piraeus to renew and confirm the alliance with the Athenians. The whole state poured out to meet him, with their wives and children; the priests with their insignia received him as he entered the city, and the gods themselves, well-nigh summoned from their seats, received him. The people was at once called to an assembly, that the king might treat in person of what he wished; then it seemed more in keeping with his dignity that he should write of the matters that seemed good, rather than in their presence blush at the recounting of his benefactions to the state, or burden his modesty by the immoderate flattery of the multitude’s demonstrations and acclamations. In the letter, however, which was sent to the assembly and read out, there was first a rehearsal of his benefactions toward the state, then of the things he had done against Philip, and last an exhortation to take up the war while they had him, while they had the Rhodians, and at that time even the Romans, to help them: in vain afterward, if they had then held back, would they seek the opportunity they had let slip. The Rhodian envoys were then heard, whose service was recent: that they had sent back four Athenian warships, lately taken by the Macedonians and recovered. And so, by an immense consensus, war was decreed against Philip. Honors immoderate were paid first to King Attalus, then to the Rhodians as well. Then first was mention brought in of a tribe, to be called the Attalid, to be added to the ten old tribes; and the people of the Rhodians was presented with a golden crown for valor’s sake, and citizenship was given to the Rhodians, even as the Rhodians had before given it to the Athenians. After this King Attalus betook himself back to his fleet at Aegina; the Rhodians from Aegina sailed to Cia, and thence through the islands to Rhodes, taking all into alliance save Andros, Paros, and Cythnus, which were held by Macedonian garrisons. Attalus, having sent messengers from Aegina into Aetolia and awaited the envoys thence, was for some while kept idle. But neither could he rouse them to arms—they being glad of the peace, however composed, with Philip—and he himself and the Rhodians, when, had they pressed Philip, they might have had the glorious title of Greece set free by their doing, by suffering him to cross again into the Hellespont and to seize the strong places of Thrace and gather his strength, nourished the war and yielded to the Romans the glory of waging and finishing it.

Philip showed the more kingly spirit; for though he had not held his ground against Attalus and the Rhodians as enemies, yet, not frightened even by the Roman war that threatened, he sent one Philocles, of his prefects, with two thousand foot and two hundred horse to ravage the lands of the Athenians, handed over the fleet to Heraclides to make for Maronea, and himself pressed on by land to the same place with two thousand light-armed foot and two hundred horse. And Maronea indeed he stormed at the first onset; thence with great labor he besieged Aenus, and at last took it by the treachery of Callimedes, a prefect of Ptolemy. He next seized other forts—Cypsela and Doriscus and Serrheum. Advancing thence to the Chersonese, he received Elaeus and Alopeconnesus, the people themselves surrendering them; Callipolis too and Madytus were given up, and certain forts of no name; the Abydenes shut their gates against the king, not even admitting his envoys. That siege long detained Philip, and they might have been delivered from it, had Attalus and the Rhodians not held back. Attalus sent only three hundred soldiers as a garrison, the Rhodians a single quadrireme from their fleet, when it lay at Tenedos. Afterward, when they could now scarcely sustain the siege, Attalus himself crossed over thither too, but showed only the hope of help from near at hand, succoring his allies neither by land nor by sea. The Abydenes at first, with engines disposed along the walls, not only kept off those who approached by land, but made the anchorage dangerous to the enemy’s ships too; afterward, when part of the wall had been thrown down in ruins, and the mines had now reached the inner wall hastily thrown up against them, they sent envoys to the king about the terms of surrendering the city. They bargained that the Rhodian quadrireme with its crew and Attalus’s garrison be let go, and that they themselves leave the city each with a single garment. But when Philip answered that there was no peace for them unless they yielded all, the report of this embassy so kindled their wrath, from indignation and despair together, that, turning to the Saguntine frenzy, they ordered all the matrons to be shut up in the temple of Diana, the freeborn boys and maidens, and the infants too with their nurses, in the gymnasium; the gold and silver to be brought to the forum, the precious raiment to be cast into the Rhodian and Cyzicene ships that were in the harbor; the priests and the victims to be brought, and altars to be set in the midst. There men were first chosen who, when they should see their own line cut down fighting before the breached wall, should at once slay the wives and children, cast the gold, the silver, and the raiment that was in the ships into the sea, and set fire to the public and private buildings in as many places as they could; and to commit this deed they were bound by oath, the priests dictating the abominable formula before them; then the men of military age swore that none would leave the line alive save as victor. These, mindful of the gods, fought so stubbornly that, when night was about to part the battle, the king first, dismayed by their frenzy, broke off the fight. The chief men, to whom the more dreadful part of the deed had been assigned, when they saw but few left of the battle, and those worn out with wounds and weariness, at first light sent the priests with fillets to surrender the city to Philip.

Before the surrender, of those envoys who had been sent to Alexandria, Marcus Aemilius—by the consent of the three the youngest—having heard of the siege of the Abydenes, came to Philip. When he complained that arms had been borne against Attalus and the Rhodians, and that at that very moment he was attacking Abydus, and when the king said that he had been provoked to war unprovoked by Attalus and the Rhodians, "Did the Abydenes too," he said, "attack you unprovoked?" To one unused to hearing the truth, the speech seemed fiercer than was fitting to be held before a king. "Your age," he said, "and your beauty, and above all the Roman name, make you over-bold. For my part, I would first that you, mindful of the treaties, keep the peace with me; but if you provoke war, you too shall feel that the kingdom and the name of the Macedonians is no less noble than the Roman." So the envoy was dismissed. Philip, having received the gold, the silver, and what had been heaped together, lost all the human booty. For so great a frenzy seized the multitude that, suddenly deeming those betrayed who had met death in the fighting, reproaching one another with perjury, and most of all the priests, who had handed over alive to the enemy those whom they had devoted to death, of a sudden all ran off to the slaughter of their wives and children, and killed themselves by every path of death. The king, dumbfounded at that madness, checked the assault of his soldiers and said he gave the Abydenes three days for dying. In that space the conquered wrought more atrocities upon themselves than the angry victors would have wrought; nor did any come alive into his power, save those whom chains or some other necessity kept from death. Philip, having set a garrison in Abydus, returned to his kingdom. And as the destruction of Saguntum had given Hannibal spirit for the Roman war, so the disaster of the Abydenes gave it to Philip; when messengers met him that the consul was already in Epirus, and had led his land forces into winter quarters at Apollonia, his naval forces at Corcyra.

Meanwhile, to the envoys who had been sent into Africa, the Carthaginians made answer concerning Hamilcar, leader of the Gallic army, that they could do no more than punish him with exile and confiscate his goods; that the deserters and runaways whom they had been able to track down by search they had given back, and that about that matter they would send envoys to Rome to satisfy the Senate. Two hundred thousand pecks of wheat they sent to Rome, two hundred thousand to the army in Macedonia. Thence the envoys went on into Numidia to the kings. The gifts were given to Masinissa and the instructions delivered. A thousand Numidian horsemen were accepted, though he offered two thousand. He himself saw to their being put aboard ship, and sent them, with two hundred thousand pecks of wheat and two hundred thousand of barley, into Macedonia. The third embassy was to Vermina. He, coming to meet the envoys at the first borders of his kingdom, gave them leave to write themselves what terms of peace they would: that any peace would be good and just for him with the Roman people. Terms of peace were given him, and he was bidden to send envoys to Rome to confirm it.

About the same time Lucius Cornelius Lentulus returned as proconsul from Spain. When he had set forth in the Senate the deeds done by him over many years bravely and prosperously, and had asked that it be permitted him to ride into the city in triumph, the Senate judged that his deeds were worthy of a triumph, but that it had not received from its forefathers the precedent that one who had waged his campaign neither as dictator nor as consul nor as praetor should triumph: as proconsul he had held Spain as a province, not as consul or praetor. It was come to, however, that he should enter the city in ovation; though Tiberius Sempronius Longus, tribune of the plebs, interposed his veto, saying that this, no more than the other, would be after the manner of the forefathers or by any precedent. At last the tribune, overcome by the consensus of the Fathers, gave way, and by decree of the Senate Lucius Lentulus entered the city in ovation. He carried, of silver from the spoils, forty-three thousand pounds; of gold, two thousand four hundred and fifty. To the soldiers he distributed from the booty a hundred and twenty asses apiece.

Now the consular army had been led across from Arretium to Ariminum, and five thousand of the allies of the Latin name had passed from Gaul into Etruria. And so Lucius Furius, setting out by forced marches from Ariminum against the Gauls who were even then besieging Cremona, pitched his camp at an interval of a mile and a half from the enemy. There had been a splendid chance of doing the work, if he had led straight from the march to assault their camp; for they were wandering scattered everywhere through the fields, with no garrison left strong enough. He feared the weariness of his soldiers, because the column had been led at speed. The Gauls, recalled from the fields by the shouting of their fellows, abandoned the booty that was in their hands and sought their camp again; and on the next day they went out into line of battle. Nor did the Roman make any delay of fighting; but there was scarce room to draw up, so swiftly did the enemy come on to battle. The right wing—for he had the allied army divided into wings—was placed in the front line, the two Roman legions in reserve. Marcus Furius was set over the right wing, Marcus Caecilius over the legions, Lucius Valerius Flaccus over the cavalry—all of them legates. The praetor kept with him two legates, Gaius Laetorius and Publius Titinius, with whom he could look about and meet all the sudden attempts of the enemy. The Gauls at first, straining with all their multitude upon one spot, hoped to be able to overwhelm and crush the right wing, which was foremost. When this made little headway, they tried to go round by the horns and enfold the enemy’s line—which, in a multitude against few, seemed easy. When the praetor saw this, that he too might widen his line, he drew the two legions from the reserve round the right and left of the wing that was fighting in the front line, and vowed a temple to Jupiter Diiovis if on that day he should rout the enemy. He ordered Lucius Valerius to send the cavalry of the two legions on the one part, the allied cavalry on the other, against the enemy’s horns, and not to suffer them to go round the line; and at the same time he himself, when he saw the middle of the Gauls’ line thinned by the drawing-off of the horns, ordered the standards to be carried forward and the close-packed soldiers to break through their ranks. The horns were driven in by the cavalry and the center by the foot. And suddenly, when on every side they were being laid low in vast slaughter, the Gauls turned their backs and in headlong flight made again for their camp. The cavalry pursued the fleeing; soon the legions too, following, made an assault upon the camp. Fewer than six thousand men escaped thence; above thirty-five thousand were slain or taken, with seventy military standards, and more than two hundred Gallic wagons laden with much booty. Hamilcar the Carthaginian leader fell in that battle, and three noble captains of the Gauls. Some two thousand free persons of Placentia, prisoners, were restored to the colonists. It was a great victory and a joyful one at Rome. When the dispatch was brought, a supplication of three days was decreed. Of Romans and allies about two thousand fell in that battle, most of them of the right wing, against which the enemy’s vast force was hurled at the first onset. And although the war had been wellnigh fought out by the praetor, the consul Gaius Aurelius too, when he had finished what had to be done at Rome, set out into Gaul and took over the victorious army from the praetor.

The other consul, when he had come into his province with the autumn well-nigh spent, was wintering about Apollonia. From the fleet, which had been beached at Corcyra, Gaius Claudius and the Roman triremes, as was said before, sent to Athens, when they had reached the Piraeus, had brought great hope to allies who were now letting their spirits sink. For both the land-raids that from Corinth through Megara used to be made into the fields ceased, and the pirate ships from Chalcis, which had made not the sea only dangerous but all the coastlands too for the Athenians, no longer dared even to round Sunium, much less to venture beyond the strait of the Euripus into the open sea. There came up besides three Rhodian quadriremes, and there were three Attic open ships, fitted out to guard the coastlands. With this fleet, while Claudius judged it enough for the present that the city and the lands of the Athenians be defended, the fortune of a yet greater thing was offered him. Exiles from Chalcis, driven out by the wrongs of the king’s men, brought word that Chalcis could be seized without any contest; for the Macedonians, because there was no fear of an enemy near at hand, were roaming everywhere, and the townsfolk, trusting in the Macedonian garrison, neglected the watch of the city. On these informants he set out, and although he had reached Sunium so betimes that he could have sailed thence to the first narrows of Euboea, yet, lest by rounding the headland he should be seen, he held the fleet at its station until nightfall; and at the first darkness he moved, and in a calm reached Chalcis a little before light, where the city is most thinly peopled, and with a few soldiers took the nearest tower and the wall about it by ladders, the guards in one place being asleep, in another none keeping watch. Advancing thence to the parts thick with buildings, they slew the guards, broke open a gate, and let in the rest of the throng of armed men. Thence they spread through the whole city, and the tumult swelled the more because fire had been thrown upon the buildings about the forum. The royal granaries blazed up, and the arsenal too with its vast store of engines and artillery. Then began a slaughter everywhere, alike of those who fled and of those who fought back. And now, when no one of military age was left unslain or unrouted, and Sopater the Acarnanian too, prefect of the garrison, had been killed, all the booty was first gathered into the forum, then put aboard the ships. The prison too was broken open by the Rhodians, and the captives let out, whom Philip had laid up as in the safest of keeping. Then, the statues of the king being thrown down and mutilated, the signal for retreat was given, and they went aboard the ships and returned to the Piraeus, whence they had set out. But if there had been soldiers of Rome enough both to hold Chalcis and not to abandon the garrison of Athens, it would have been a great thing at the very beginning of the war—Chalcis and the Euripus taken from the king; for as by land the pass of Thermopylae shuts off Greece, so by sea the strait of the Euripus shuts it.

Philip was then at Demetrias. When the disaster of the allied city was reported to him there, although help was too late for what was lost, yet, seeking the thing nearest to help—vengeance—he set out at once with five thousand light-armed and three hundred horse, and made for Chalcis well-nigh at a run, in no doubt that the Romans could be crushed. Disappointed of that hope, and having come to nothing else than the unsightly spectacle of the half-ruined and smoking city of his allies, leaving scarce a few to bury those whom the war had consumed, he crossed the Euripus by the bridge as hastily as he had come, and led through Boeotia to Athens, thinking that a like attempt would meet with a not unlike result. And it would have answered, had not a scout—the Greeks call them hemerodromoi, men who measure a vast space in a single day’s running—, having watched the king’s column from some lookout, gone ahead and reached Athens at midnight. There was the same sleep and the same carelessness which a few days before had betrayed Chalcis. Roused by the alarming message, both the praetor of the Athenians and Dioxippus, prefect of a cohort of mercenary auxiliaries, having called the soldiers into the forum, bade the signal be given from the citadel by trumpet, that all might know the enemy was at hand. So from every side they ran to the gates and the walls. A few hours later Philip, yet a good while before light, drawing near the city, when he caught sight of the many lights and heard the din of men in alarm, as in such an uproar, halted his standards and ordered the column to sit down and rest, meaning to use open force in the daylight, since the stratagem had availed too little. He approached by the Dipylon. That gate, set as it were in the mouth of the city, is somewhat larger and wider than the rest, and within it and without are broad ways, so that the townsmen could draw up a line from the forum to the gate, and without, a road about a mile long, leading to the gymnasium of the Academy, offered free space to the enemy’s foot and horse. By that road the Athenians, with Attalus’s garrison and the cohort of Dioxippus, their line drawn up within the gate, carried out their standards. When Philip saw this, thinking he had the enemy in his power and the slaughter long desired—for against no city of the Greeks was he more bitterly hostile—he urged on his horse, lifted up not by anger only but by glory too, since he counted it a fine thing to be seen fighting, the walls being thronged with a great crowd come even to watch. Carried out a good way before the line with a few horsemen into the midst of the enemy, he put a vast ardor into his own men and dismay into the foe. Having with his own hand wounded very many at close quarters and from afar, and driven them into the gate, he followed even there; and when he had wrought greater slaughter in the press of those crowding in panic, he yet had a safe retreat from his rash venture, because those who were in the towers of the gate held their weapons, lest they hurl them upon their own men mingled with the foe. Then, while the Athenian soldiers held within the walls, Philip, the signal for retreat being given, pitched camp at Cynosarges—there was a temple of Hercules and a gymnasium and a grove set about it. But Cynosarges and the Lyceum and whatever was sacred or pleasant about the city was burned, and not buildings only but tombs too were thrown down, and nothing of divine or human right was spared before his ungovernable wrath. On the next day, when at first the gates had been shut, then suddenly opened, because Attalus’s garrison from Aegina and the Romans from the Piraeus had entered the city, the king moved his camp some three miles from the city. Thence he set out for Eleusis, hoping to seize unawares the temple and the fort which both overlooks and is set around the temple; but when he perceived that the watches were by no means neglected, and that a fleet was coming from the Piraeus to its aid, he gave up the attempt and led to Megara and straight on to Corinth; and when he heard that a council of the Achaeans was at Argos, he came upon the assembly itself, the Achaeans not expecting him. They were deliberating about war against Nabis, tyrant of the Lacedaemonians, who, the command having been transferred from Philopoemen to Cycliadas, a leader by no means his equal, seeing the Achaean auxiliaries melting away, had renewed the war and was laying waste the lands of his neighbors and was now formidable to the cities too. Against this enemy, while they were debating how many soldiers should be enrolled from each state, Philip promised that he would take from them the care that touched Nabis and the Lacedaemonians, and would not only keep their allies’ fields from ravaging, but would carry all the terror of the war into Laconia itself by leading his army thither at once. When this speech was received with vast applause, "It is fair, however," he said, "that I protect your possessions with my arms, only that mine be not meanwhile stripped of their defenses. So, if it seem good to you, prepare just so many soldiers as may suffice to guard Oreus and Chalcis and Corinth, that, with my own safe at my back, I may carry on the war against Nabis and the Lacedaemonians free of care." It did not escape the Achaeans whither that so kindly promise and the help offered against the Lacedaemonians tended: it was sought that he might lead the youth of the Achaeans out of the Peloponnese as hostages, to bind the nation to the Roman war. And though Cycliadas, praetor of the Achaeans, thought it of no use to convict him of this, when he had only said that it was not lawful by the laws of the Achaeans to bring forward other matters than those for which they had been convened, the decree about the army to be prepared against Nabis being passed, he dismissed a council held bravely and freely, he who till that day had been counted among the king’s flatterers. Philip, foiled of his great hope, with a few volunteer soldiers enrolled, returned to Corinth and into the land of Attica.

In those very days in which Philip was in Achaia, Philocles, the king’s prefect, setting out from Euboea with two thousand Thracians and Macedonians to ravage the borders of the Athenians, crossed the pass of Cithaeron in the region of Eleusis; thence, having sent half his soldiers to plunder up and down through the fields, he himself with the other part lay hidden in a place fit for an ambush, that, if from the fort at Eleusis a sally should be made upon his plundering men, he might fall suddenly and unforeseen upon the scattered enemy. The ambush was not undetected. And so, his soldiers being recalled who had dispersed to plunder, and drawn up, he set out to assault the fort of Eleusis, and withdrew thence with many wounds, and joined himself to Philip as he came from Achaia. By the king himself too the assault of the same fort was attempted; but the Roman ships coming from the Piraeus, and a garrison let in, forced him to desist from the attempt. The king then, dividing his army, sent Philocles with part to Athens, and went himself with part to the Piraeus, so that, while Philocles by approaching the walls and threatening assault should keep the Athenians shut within their city, he himself might have the means of storming the Piraeus, left with a slight garrison. But the assault of the Piraeus was no easier for him than that of Eleusis, the same men well-nigh defending both. From the Piraeus he led suddenly to Athens. Thence, repulsed by a sudden sally of foot and horse amid the narrows of the half-ruined wall which joins the Piraeus to Athens by two arms, he gave up the assault of the city, and, the army being again divided with Philocles, set out to lay waste the fields; and whereas in his former ravaging he had busied himself with throwing down the tombs about the city, now, that he might leave nothing inviolate, he ordered the temples of the gods, which they held consecrated in the several country districts, to be thrown down and burned; and the land of Attica, eminently adorned with works of that kind, both by abundance of native marble and by the genius of its artists, furnished matter to this frenzy. For he was not content to throw down the temples themselves and to overturn the images, but ordered the very stones to be broken, lest whole they should heap up the ruins. And after his wrath was sated—or rather after matter for the exercise of his wrath ran short—he withdrew from the enemy’s land into Boeotia, and did nothing else worth remembering in Greece.

The consul Sulpicius at that time had his camp between Apollonia and Dyrrachium at the river Apsus, whither he summoned the legate Lucius Apustius and sent him with part of the forces to lay waste the enemy’s borders. Apustius, having ravaged the edge of Macedonia and taken at the first onset the forts of Corrhagum, Gerrunium, and Orgessus, came to Antipatrea, a city set in a narrow gorge. And at first he tried to entice the chief men, called out to a parley, to commit themselves to the faith of the Romans; then, when, trusting in the size and walls and site of the city, they spurned his words, he attacked them with force of arms and took the place, and, the grown men being killed and all the booty granted to the soldiers, he tore down the walls and burned the city. This terror brought it about that Codrio, a town strong enough and fortified, was surrendered to the Romans without a contest. Leaving a garrison there, he took Cnidus by storm—a name better known for another city in Asia than for this town. As the legate was returning to the consul with booty large enough, one Athenagoras, a royal prefect, attacked the rear at the crossing of a river and threw the hindmost into disorder. At their shouting and confusion the legate, riding swiftly back, wheeled his standards about, and, the baggage being cast into the midst, drew up a line; nor did the king’s men bear the onset of the Roman soldiers. Many of them were killed, more taken. The legate, having brought back his army unharmed to the consul, was thence at once sent on to the fleet.

This expedition, prosperous enough, having opened the war, the petty kings and chiefs who dwell along the borders of Macedonia came into the Roman camp: Pleuratus son of Scerdilaedus, and Amynander king of the Athamanians, and, of the Dardanians, Bato son of Longarus. Longarus had waged a war on his own account with Demetrius, Philip’s father. To them, as they promised auxiliaries, the consul answered that he would use the service of the Dardanians and of Pleuratus when he led his army into Macedonia; to Amynander he assigned the task of stirring up the Aetolians to war. To the envoys of Attalus—for they too had come at that time—he gave charge that the king should await the Roman fleet at Aegina, where he was wintering, and, that fleet joined to him, should press Philip in the sea-war as before. To the Rhodians too envoys were sent, that they should take up their share of the war. Nor was Philip less busily—for he had now reached Macedonia—preparing for war. His son Perseus, quite a boy, he sent with part of the forces, giving him from among his friends men to govern his age, to hold the passes that are at Pelagonia. Sciathus and Peparethus, cities of no small name, he destroyed, that they might not be a prey and a prize to the enemy’s fleet. To the Aetolians he sent envoys, lest that restless nation should change its faith at the coming of the Romans.

The council of the Aetolians was to be held on a fixed day, which they call the Panaetolium. To attend it, both the king’s envoys hastened their journey, and there came, sent by the consul, the legate Lucius Furius Purpurio; the envoys of the Athenians too came to that council. First the Macedonians were heard, with whom their treaty was most recent. They said that, in no new matter, they had nothing new to bring; for by the same reasons by which, having found the Roman alliance unprofitable, they had made peace with Philip, they ought, the peace once composed, to keep it. "Or do you prefer," said one of the Macedonian envoys, "to imitate—shall I call it the license, or the levity—of these men? who, when they had bidden answer be made to your envoys at Rome, ’Why do you come to us, Aetolians, without whose authority you made peace with Philip?’, these same men now demand that you wage war along with them against Philip; and before they pretended that arms had been taken up against him on your account and for you, now they forbid you to be at peace with Philip. To bring help to Messana they first crossed into Sicily; a second time, to deliver Syracuse, oppressed by the Carthaginians, into freedom; and Messana and Syracuse and all Sicily they hold themselves, and have made the province tributary, subject to the axes and the rods. Forsooth, just as you at Naupactus hold your council by your own laws, through magistrates created by yourselves, free to choose ally and enemy as you will, to have peace and war at your own discretion—so to the states of the Sicilians a council is appointed at Syracuse, or Messana, or Lilybaeum: a Roman praetor holds the assize; at his bidding they are summoned and assemble; they see him on a lofty platform rendering haughty judgments, hemmed about with lictors; the rods threaten their backs, the axes their necks; and every year they draw by lot one master after another. Nor ought they, nor can they, wonder at this, when they see the cities of Italy—Regium, Tarentum, Capua, not to name the neighbors from whose ruins the city of Rome has grown—subject to the same rule. Capua indeed survives, the tomb and monument of the Campanian people, the people itself carried off and cast into exile, a city maimed, without senate, without commons, without magistrates, a portent, left, more cruelly than if it had been destroyed, to be inhabited. It is madness, if men of alien race—parted from us more by tongue and ways and laws than by the space of seas and lands—should hold these regions, to hope that anything will remain in the same estate. Philip’s kingdom seems to stand somewhat in the way of your liberty; yet he, when with justice he was incensed against you, asked nothing of you beyond peace, and today desires the keeping of the peace once made. Accustom these lands to foreign legions and accept the yoke: too late and in vain, when you have a Roman master, will you seek Philip for an ally. Aetolians, Acarnanians, Macedonians, men of one tongue, light causes arising for the moment part and join again; with aliens, with barbarians, all Greeks have, and ever will have, an eternal war; for by nature, which is everlasting and not by causes that change from day to day, they are enemies. But where my speech began, there it shall end: in this same place, the same men, three years ago decreed the peace of this same Philip, with the same Romans disapproving that peace who now wish to disturb it made and composed. In which deliberation, since fortune has changed nothing, I do not see why you should change." After the Macedonians, the Romans themselves so conceding and bidding, the Athenians were brought in, who, having suffered foul things, could the more justly inveigh against the cruelty and savagery of the king. They bewailed the wretched wasting and ravaging of their fields: nor did they complain that they had suffered from an enemy the things of an enemy; for there are certain laws of war which it is right both to do and to suffer: that crops be burned, houses thrown down, plunder of men and cattle driven off, is wretched rather for him who suffers than unjust. But this, in very truth, was their complaint: that he who calls the Romans aliens and barbarians had so polluted all rights divine and human together that in his former ravaging he had waged an unholy war upon the gods below, in the second upon the gods above. All the tombs and monuments within their borders had been thrown down, the shades of all laid bare, the bones of none covered with earth. They had had shrines which once, while they dwelt scattered in those little forts and villages, they had consecrated, and which, even when gathered into one city, their forefathers had not left deserted. About all these temples Philip had carried hostile fires; the images of the gods, half-burned and mutilated, lay among the prostrate door-posts of the temples. Such as he had made the land of Attica, once adorned and wealthy, such, if he were allowed, would he make Aetolia and all Greece. The like deformity would have befallen their own city too, had not the Romans come to their aid. For with the same wickedness the gods who keep the city, and Minerva who guards the citadel, had been assailed, with the same the temple of Ceres at Eleusis, with the same Jupiter and Minerva at the Piraeus; but, repulsed by force of arms from their temples and even their walls, he had vented his rage upon those shrines which were safe by their sanctity alone. Therefore they prayed and besought the Aetolians that, pitying the Athenians, with the immortal gods for their leaders, and after the gods the Romans, who next to the gods had the greatest power, they would take up the war. Then the Roman legate spoke: "The whole shape of my speech the Macedonians first, then the Athenians, have changed. For the Macedonians, when I had come to complain of Philip’s wrongs against so many cities allied to us, by themselves accusing the Romans have made me hold my defense as better than my accusation; and the Athenians, by recounting his unspeakable and inhuman crimes against the gods below and above, have left to me, or to any man, what more I could cast in his teeth? Think that these same things the Cianians, the Abydenes, the Aenians, the Maronites, the Thasians, the Parians, the Samians, the Larissaeans, the Messenians here from Achaia complain of—heavier and bitterer things those of whom he had the greater power to do harm. As to what he has cast at us, unless they are deeds worthy of glory, I confess they cannot be defended. He cast at us Regium and Capua and Syracuse. At Regium, in the war with Pyrrhus, a legion sent by us at the very prayer of the Regini themselves for their protection possessed by crime the city it had been sent to defend. Did we then approve that deed? Or rather, having pursued the criminal legion in war, brought it into our power, and made it pay the penalty to our allies with its back and its neck, did we restore to the Regini their city, their fields, and all their goods, with freedom and their laws? When the Syracusans were oppressed by foreign tyrants, that it might be the more shameful, we brought them help, and worn out, harassed, well-nigh for three years besieging by land and sea a most strongly fortified city—when now the Syracusans themselves preferred to be slaves to the tyrants rather than be taken by us—we took the city by those same arms, and, having freed it, gave it back. Nor do we deny that Sicily is our province, and that the states which were on the Carthaginian side and waged war against us with one mind with them are tributary to us and pay us tax; nay rather, we wish you and all nations to know this, that each man’s fortune is according to his desert toward us. Should we then repent of the punishment of the Campanians, of which not even they themselves can complain? These men, when for their sake we had waged war against the Samnites for nigh seventy years with great disasters of our own, when we had joined them to us first by treaty, then by intermarriage and kinship, and at last by citizenship, in our time of adversity, first of all the peoples of Italy, having foully murdered our garrison, revolted to Hannibal; then, indignant at being besieged by us, they sent Hannibal to assault Rome. If neither the city itself nor any single man of these survived, who could be indignant that anything had been ordained against them harsher than their desert? More of them, from consciousness of their crimes, took death upon themselves than were punished by us. From the rest we took away their town and their fields in such wise that we gave them land and a place to dwell in, and suffered the harmless city to stand uninjured, so that whoever sees it today finds there no trace of a city stormed or taken. But why do I speak of Capua, when to Carthage, conquered, we have given peace and freedom? There is rather this danger, lest by pardoning the conquered too easily we incite the more, for that very reason, to make trial of the fortune of war against us. Let these things be said for us, and these against Philip, whose murders within his own house, the slaughter of his kinsmen and friends, and his lust well-nigh more inhuman than his cruelty, you, who are nearer to Macedonia, know better. As for you, Aetolians, we took up war for your sake against Philip; you without us made peace with him. And perhaps you will say that, while we were busied with the Punic war, you were compelled by fear to accept terms of peace from him who then had the greater power; and we, while greater matters pressed, gave up on our part too the war that had been laid down by you. Now both we, by the kindness of the gods, the Punic war finished, have thrown all our strength upon Macedonia, and to you the fortune is offered of restoring yourselves into our friendship and alliance—unless you prefer to perish with Philip rather than to conquer with the Romans." When these things had been said by the Roman, and the minds of all inclined toward the Romans, Damocritus, praetor of the Aetolians—having, as report goes, received money from the king—assented to neither part, and said that to counsels of great moment nothing was so hostile as haste; for swift repentance follows, but that same repentance late and useless, when counsels hurried headlong can neither be recalled nor restored to their first estate. The time for that deliberation, whose ripeness he thought must be awaited, could even now be fixed thus: since it was provided by the laws that nothing concerning peace and war should be transacted save in the Panaetolic and Pylaic council, let them decree at once that the praetor, when he wished to treat of war and peace, might without penalty summon a council, and that what should then be brought forward and decreed should be as valid and ratified as if it had been transacted in the Panaetolic or Pylaic council. The envoys being thus dismissed with the matter in suspense, he said it had been excellently provided for the nation: for to whichever side the better fortune of war should fall, to its alliance would they incline. These things were done in the council of the Aetolians.

Philip was busily preparing for war by land and sea. He was concentrating his naval forces at Demetrias in Thessaly; and, thinking that Attalus and the Roman fleet would move from Aegina at the beginning of spring, he set over the ships and the seacoast Heraclides, whom he had set over them before; he himself was getting ready his land forces, believing that he had stripped the Romans of two great helps—on the one side the Aetolians, on the other the Dardanians, the passes at Pelagonia having been closed by his son Perseus. By the consul the war was not being prepared but already waged. He was leading his army through the borders of the Dassaretii, carrying untouched the grain which he had brought out of winter quarters, since the fields furnished what was enough for the soldiers’ use. The towns and villages surrendered themselves partly of their own will, partly through fear; some were taken by storm, some were found deserted, the barbarians fleeing to the nearby mountains. At Lyncus he made a standing camp near the river Bevus; thence he sent men to forage about the granaries of the Dassaretii. Philip saw indeed that all around was thrown into confusion and that the men were in great panic, but, little knowing what quarter the consul had made for, he sent a squadron of horse to scout out whither the enemy had bent their march. The same error was on the consul’s side; he knew the king had moved from his winter quarters, but knew not what region he had made for. He too had sent horsemen to reconnoiter. These two squadrons, having long wandered from opposite directions by uncertain ways through the Dassaretii, at last met upon one road. Neither was deceived—as soon as the noise of men and horses was heard from afar—that the enemy was approaching. And so, before they came into sight, they had made ready their horses and arms; nor was there any delay, as soon as they first saw the enemy, in joining battle. Being, as it chanced, in number and in valor—picked men as they were on both sides—not unequal, they fought with even strength for some hours. The weariness of themselves and their horses parted the battle with the victory uncertain. Of the Macedonians forty horsemen fell, of the Romans thirty-five. Yet neither did these bring back to the king, nor those to the consul, any surer knowledge in what region the enemy’s camp was; it was learned through deserters, whom the lightness of their dispositions furnishes, in all wars, for the discovery of the enemy’s affairs. Philip, thinking it would profit him both for the affection of his men and that they should the more readily face danger for him, if he took care for the burial of the horsemen who had fallen in the skirmish, ordered them to be brought into the camp, that the honor of their funeral might be seen by all. Nothing is so uncertain or so beyond reckoning as the minds of a multitude. What seemed likely to make them readier to undergo every contest, that struck fear and sloth into them; for men who had seen wounds dealt by spears and arrows, and rarely by lances, being used to fight with Greeks and Illyrians, when they saw bodies mangled by the Spanish sword, arms cut off with the shoulder, or whole necks severed and heads parted from the body, and the entrails laid open, and the other foulness of wounds, perceived in panic, and the common sort with them, against what weapons and what men they must fight. The king himself too was seized with terror, who had not yet met the Romans in a set battle. And so, recalling his son and the garrison that was in the passes of Pelagonia, that he might increase his own forces with these, he opened the way into Macedonia to Pleuratus and the Dardanians. He himself, with twenty thousand foot and two thousand horse, setting out against the enemy with deserters for guides, fortified with ditch and rampart a hill near Athacus, a little more than a mile from the Roman camp; and looking down upon the Roman camp below, he is said to have marveled both at the whole aspect of the camp and at its parts marked off each to their own quarters, with the order of the tents and the spacing of the streets, and to have said that those could not seem to anyone the camp of barbarians. For two days the consul and the king, each awaiting the other’s attempts, kept their men within the rampart; on the third the Roman led out all his forces into line. The king, fearing so swift a cast of a general engagement, sent four hundred Trallians—that is a kind of the Illyrians, as I have said in another place—and three hundred Cretans, with an equal number of horse added to these foot, under the command of Athenagoras, one of his courtiers, to provoke the enemy’s horse. By the Romans—their line was a little more than five hundred paces off—the velites and about two squadrons of horse were sent out, that they might match the enemy in number alike of horse and foot. The king’s men believed it would be the kind of fight they were used to, that the horsemen, pursuing and fleeing by turns, should now use their weapons, now turn their backs, that the swiftness of the Illyrians should serve for sallies and sudden rushes, and that the Cretans should hurl their arrows upon the enemy charging in disorder. This order of fighting was thrown into confusion by the onset of the Romans, fiercer and more dogged; for, just as if they fought with the whole line, the velites, their spears thrown, did the work hand to hand with their swords, and the horsemen, once they had charged the enemy, with their horses standing fought partly from the horses themselves, partly leaping down and mingling with the foot. So neither was the king’s horseman a match for the horseman, being unused to a standing fight, nor the foot-skirmisher, roving and well-nigh half-naked in his kind of arms, a match for the Roman veles, armed with shield and sword and equally fitted both to defend himself and to attack the enemy. They did not therefore endure the contest, but, saving themselves by nothing else than speed, fled back into the camp.

Then, after one day had been let pass, when the king was about to fight with all his forces of cavalry and light-armed, he had by night hidden the targeteers, whom they call peltasts, in ambush in a convenient place between the two camps, and had charged Athenagoras and the horsemen that, if the matter went forward in open battle, they should use their fortune, but if not, by yielding little by little they should draw the enemy to the place of ambush. And the cavalry indeed gave way; but the leaders of the targeteer cohort, not waiting well enough for the signal, by rousing their men before the time lost the chance of doing the thing well. The Roman, both victor in the open battle and safe from the snare of the ambush, withdrew into his camp.

On the next day the consul came down into line with all his forces, the elephants being placed before the first standards—an aid which the Romans then first used, because they had several taken in the Punic war. When he saw the enemy lurking within the rampart, he advanced even up to the hills and right beneath the rampart, reproaching them with cowardice. When not even then was the chance of fighting given—because, from standing camps so near, foraging was little safe, the soldiers being scattered through the fields and the cavalry ready to fall on them at once—he moved his camp some eight miles thence to Ottolobus (that is the name of the place), to have safer foraging by the distance. When the Romans were foraging in the near fields, at first the king held his men within the rampart, that the enemy’s carelessness might grow together with their boldness. When he saw them scattered, he set out at a quick pace with all his cavalry and the Cretan auxiliaries—as many of the swiftest foot as could keep pace with the horse at a run—and posted his standards between the Roman camp and the foragers. Then, dividing his forces, he sent part to hunt down the straggling foragers, with the order given that they leave none alive, and with the other part he himself halted and beset the roads by which the enemy seemed likely to run back to camp. Already there was slaughter and flight everywhere, and not yet had any messenger of the disaster reached the Roman camp, because those who fled fell in with the royal post, and more were killed by those who beset the roads than by those sent to do the slaughter. At last some, slipping through the midst of the enemy’s posts in panic, brought into the camp confusion rather than any sure news. The consul, having ordered the cavalry to bring help to the struggling wherever each could, himself led the legions out of camp and led them against the enemy in a hollow square. Some of the horsemen, scattered through the fields, went astray, deceived by shouts arising now from one place, now from another; part met the enemy face to face. In several places at once the fight began. The royal post was waging the fiercest battle; for, by the very multitude of horse and foot, it was well-nigh a regular line, and of the Romans, because it had beset the middle road, the most were borne against it. In this too the Macedonians had the advantage, because the king himself was present to urge them on, and the Cretan auxiliaries, drawn up close and ready, wounded many unawares as they fought scattered and in disorder. And if they had kept measure in pursuit, they would have made profit not for the glory of the present fight only but for the sum of the war; but now, following too intemperately in their greed for slaughter, they fell in with the Roman cohorts coming up with their military tribunes, and the fleeing horseman, when he saw the first standards of his own men, wheeled his horses upon the scattered enemy, and in a moment the fortune of the battle was turned, those now turning their backs who but lately had pursued. Many were killed in close encounter, many in flight; nor did they perish by the sword only, but some, flung into the marshes, were swallowed up with their very horses in the deep mud. The king too was in danger; for his horse, wounded, falling headlong, threw him to the ground, and he came near to being crushed as he lay. His safety was a horseman who quickly leaped down himself and set the panic-stricken king upon his horse; he himself, since he could not on foot keep pace with the fleeing horse, was run through by the enemy, roused at the king’s downfall, and perished. The king, riding round the marshes, by roads and pathless ground, in a wild flight at last reached his camp—when most had now despaired of his escaping unhurt. Two hundred Macedonian horsemen perished in that battle, about a hundred were taken; eighty richly caparisoned horses were led off, the spoils of their arms being brought back too.

There were those who on this day accused the king of rashness and the consul of slackness: for Philip ought to have kept quiet, since he knew that within a few days the enemy, all the country round being exhausted, would come to the last extremity of want; and the consul, when he had routed the enemy’s cavalry and light-armed and well-nigh taken the king himself, ought to have led straight on to the enemy’s camp; for the enemy, so stricken, would not have stood, and the war could have been finished in a moment of time. That, as is the way with most things, was easier to say than to do. For if the king had met him with all his foot-forces too, perhaps amid the uproar, when all, conquered and stricken with fear, fled from the battle within the rampart and thence the victorious enemy pressed straight over the works, the king might have been driven from his camp; but seeing that his foot-forces had remained whole in the camp, that posts were set before the gates and garrisons disposed, what would the consul have accomplished, save to imitate the rashness of the king, who a little before had followed the stricken horsemen in disorder? Nor indeed would even the king’s first plan, by which he made his attack on the foragers scattered through the fields, be blameworthy, if he had set a measure to his successful fight. It is the less to be wondered at that he tried his fortune, because there was a rumor that Pleuratus and the Dardanians, having set out from home with vast forces, had now crossed into Macedonia; by which forces, if he were surrounded on all sides, it could be believed the Roman would finish the war by sitting still. And so, after two unsuccessful cavalry battles, Philip, thinking the stay in the same camp much less safe, when he wished to depart thence and to deceive the enemy as he went, sent a herald at sunset to the consul to ask a truce for burying the horsemen, and, having tricked the enemy, in the second watch, leaving many fires through the whole camp, he departed with his column in silence. The consul was even then caring for the bodies, when it was announced that the herald had come and on what errand. The answer being given only that there would be opportunity to meet on the morrow, the night and part of the following day were granted to Philip to gain a start on his march. He made for the mountains, a road by which he knew the Roman would not enter with a heavy column. The consul at first light, having dismissed the herald with the truce granted, when not long after he perceived that the enemy had gone, ignorant by what way to follow, spent several days in the same standing camp foraging. Then he made for Stuberra, and brought in from Pelagonia the grain that was in the fields. Thence he advanced to Pluinna, not yet having learned what region the enemy had made for. Philip, when at first he had made a standing camp at Bruanium, setting out thence by cross-paths gave the enemy a sudden fright. And so the Romans moved from Pluinna and pitched camp at the river Osphagus. The king too, not far thence, settled himself, a rampart being drawn along the bank of a stream which the inhabitants call the Erigonus. Thence, having learned well enough that the Romans would make for Eordaea, he went ahead to seize the passes, that the enemy might not be able to cross the narrow gorge where the approach was shut in. There, with rampart in one place, ditch in another, in another a heap of stones to serve for a wall, in another trees thrown across, as either the place demanded or the material supplied, he made all haste to fortify, and, as he thought, made a road difficult by its own nature impassable by works set across all the passages. The country round was mostly wooded, most inconvenient for the Macedonian phalanx, which, except where it sets its very long spears like a rampart before its shields—a thing for which open ground is needed—is of scarcely any use. The Thracians too, with their pikes likewise of vast length, were hindered among the branches set everywhere across. A single Cretan cohort alone was not useless; but even that, while it could shoot its arrows at a horse and rider exposed to a wound if anyone charged, against the Roman shields had neither force enough to pierce them nor any open mark to aim at. So, when they perceived that kind of weapon was vain, they pelted the enemy with stones lying everywhere through the whole valley. The rattling of these upon the shields, with more noise than any wound, held the Romans coming up for a little while. Then, despising these too, partly forming a testudo they went straight through the enemy in front, partly by a short circuit, when they had got upon the ridge of the hill, dislodged the panic-stricken Macedonians from their forts and posts, and, in such broken ground, flight being hard, cut down most of them. So the pass was won with less of a struggle than they had set before their minds, and they came into Eordaea, where, the fields being ravaged far and wide, the consul withdrew into Elimea. Thence he made an attack on Orestis and assaulted the town of Celetrum, set in a peninsula; a lake girds the walls; the one approach from the mainland is by a narrow neck. At first, trusting in the site itself, they refused his command, the gates being shut; then, after they saw the standards advancing and a testudo coming up to the gate and the neck beset by a column of the enemy, before they should try the contest they came in fear into surrender. From Celetrum he advanced into the Dassaretii and took the city of Pelium by storm. Thence he carried off the slaves with the rest of the booty; the freeborn persons he let go without ransom, and gave them back their town, a strong garrison being set there; for the city was conveniently placed for making raids into Macedonia. Thus, the enemy’s lands having been traversed, the consul led his forces back into pacified country to Apollonia, whence he had begun the war.

The Aetolians and the Athamanians and the Dardanians, and so many wars suddenly arising one after another from different quarters, had turned Philip aside. Against the Dardanians, who were now withdrawing from Macedonia, he sent Athenagoras with the light-armed foot and the greater part of the cavalry, with orders to press on the rear as they departed and, by harassing the hindmost column, to make them slower to bring their armies from home. As for the Aetolians, Damocritus the praetor—he who at Naupactus had been the author of delay in deciding for war—had in the next council, after the report of the cavalry battle at Ottolobus, and the crossing of the Dardanians and Pleuratus with the Illyrians into Macedonia, and besides the arrival of the Roman fleet at Oreus and, over and above so many nations poured about Macedonia, the threat of a sea-siege too—these causes had restored Damocritus and the Aetolians to the Romans; and, Amynander king of the Athamanians being joined to them, they set out and besieged Cercinium. The townsfolk had shut their gates, whether by force or by will is uncertain, because they had a royal garrison. But within a few days Cercinium was taken and burned; those who survived out of the great disaster, free and slave, were carried off among the rest of the booty. This fear drove all who dwell about the marsh of Boebe to leave their cities and seek the mountains. The Aetolians, turned aside thence for lack of booty, went on to make for Perrhaebia. There they took Cyretiae by storm and foully plundered it; the people who inhabit Maloea were received into surrender and alliance of their own will. From Perrhaebia Amynander advised making for Gomphi; for Athamania overhangs this city, and it seemed it could be taken without a great struggle. The Aetolians made for the rich plains of Thessaly for plunder, Amynander following, though he approved neither the unbridled ravaging of the Aetolians nor the camp pitched without any discrimination or care of fortifying in whatever place chance had brought them. And so, lest their rashness and carelessness should be the cause of some disaster to him and his men too, when he saw them pitching camp in the low ground beneath the city of Pharcadon, he himself took a hill a little more than a mile thence, safe with even a slight fortification. The Aetolians, who, save that they plundered, scarcely seemed to remember that they were in an enemy’s country, some straying half-armed through the fields, others in the camp without posts spending day and night alike in sleep and wine—upon these Philip came unawares. When some, fleeing in panic from the fields, announced that he was at hand, Damocritus and the other leaders were thrown into confusion—and it chanced to be the noontide hour, at which most lay heavy with food and asleep; they roused one another, bade take up arms, sent others to recall those who were straying scattered through the fields to plunder; and so great was the panic that some of the horsemen went out without their swords, and most put not on their breastplates. Thus hastily led out—when all together they scarce made up the number of six hundred horse and foot—they fell in with the royal cavalry, superior in number, in arms, and in spirit. And so, routed at the first onset, scarce trying the contest, in shameful flight they sought their camp again; those whom the cavalry cut off from the column of the fleeing were slain and taken. Philip, when his men were now drawing near the rampart, ordered the recall to be sounded; for he had his horses and men wearied not so much by the battle as by the length of the march and the over-hasty speed together. And so he ordered the horsemen squadron by squadron, and the maniples of light-armed by turns, to go to water and to take food, and kept others under arms on guard, awaiting the column of foot, led more slowly because of the weight of their arms. When it came up, the foot too were bidden, their standards set up and their arms laid before them, to take food hastily, two or three at most from each maniple being sent to fetch water; meanwhile the cavalry with the light-armed stood ready and drawn up, if the enemy should make any move. The Aetolians—for by now the throng too that had been scattered through the fields had betaken itself into the camp—, as if to defend the works, disposed armed men about the gates and the rampart, while in safety they fiercely watched the quiet enemy. But after the standards of the Macedonians were moved, and ready and drawn up they began to come up to the rampart, suddenly all, abandoning their posts, fled through the rear part of the camp to the hill, to the camp of the Athamanians. Many of the Aetolians too in this so panic-stricken flight were taken and slain. Philip, if enough of the day had been left, in no doubt that the Athamanians too could have been driven from their camp, the day being spent first in the battle, then in the plundering of the camp, sat down beneath the hill in the nearest plain, meaning at first light of the following day to attack the enemy. But the Aetolians, in the same panic in which they had left their own camp, the next night scattered and fled. Of the greatest use was Amynander, by whose leadership the Athamanians, knowing the ways, by paths unknown over the highest mountains, while the enemy followed, brought them through into Aetolia. A few in their scattered flight error carried among the Macedonian horse, whom at first light Philip, when he saw the hill deserted, sent to harass the enemy’s column.

In those same days too Athenagoras, the king’s prefect, having come up with the Dardanians as they were withdrawing into their borders, threw their rearmost column into confusion; then, after the Dardanians wheeled their standards and drew up a line, the battle was even, a regular engagement. When the Dardanians began again to advance, the king’s men with their cavalry and light-armed harassed the Dardanians—who had no such kind of help—burdened as they were with their unwieldy arms; and the ground itself aided. Very few were killed, more wounded, none taken, because they do not rashly leave their ranks, but in close order both fight and give way.

Thus the losses received in the Roman war Philip had made good by two well-timed expeditions, having curbed two nations, in an enterprise bold, and not in success only fortunate. Then a chance occurrence lessened for him the number of the Aetolian enemy. Scopas, a chief of the nation, sent by King Ptolemy from Alexandria with a great weight of gold, carried off into Egypt six thousand foot and five hundred horse hired for pay; nor would he have left any of the youth of the Aetolians, had not Damocritus—now warning them of the war that pressed, now of the coming desolation, whether from care for the nation or to thwart Scopas, being too little courted with gifts—by chiding kept part of the younger men at home. These things were done that summer by the Romans and Philip on land. At the beginning of that same summer the fleet, having set out from Corcyra with the legate Lucius Apustius, rounded Malea and joined King Attalus about Scyllaeum in the territory of Hermione. Then indeed the state of the Athenians, whose hatred against Philip had long been kept within bounds through fear, poured it all forth in the hope of present help. Nor are there ever wanting there tongues ready to stir up the commons; a kind of men which, as in all free states, so especially at Athens, where eloquence has the greatest power, is nourished by the favor of the multitude. They at once carried a bill, and the commons voted, that the statues of Philip, all his portraits, and the names inscribed on them, likewise those of all his ancestors, male and female, should be taken down and effaced; that the festal days, the sacred rites, the priesthoods which had been instituted in honor of him and of his ancestors should all be stripped of their sanctity; that the places too in which anything had been set up or inscribed in his honor should be accursed, and that nothing thereafter should be set up or dedicated in them of the things which it was lawful to set up or dedicate in a clean place; that the public priests, as often as they prayed for the people of Athens and their allies, their armies and fleets, so often should curse and execrate Philip, his children and his kingdom, his land and sea forces, and the whole race and name of the Macedonians. It was added to the decree that, if anyone thereafter should bring forward anything that tended to the mark and disgrace of Philip, the Athenian people would order it all; if anyone, on the contrary, should say or do aught toward his disgrace or his honor, whoever killed him should kill him by right. Lastly it was included that all things which had once been decreed against the Pisistratids should be observed alike against Philip. The Athenians thus waged war against Philip with letters and words, wherein alone their strength lies; Attalus and the Romans, when they had gone first from Hermione to the Piraeus, having tarried there a few days, loaded—with honors to their allies as immoderate as their wrath had been against the enemy—by the decrees of the Athenians, sailed from the Piraeus to Andros. And when they had halted in the harbor which they call Gaurion, having sent men to try the minds of the townsmen, whether they preferred to surrender the city of their own will rather than to make trial of force, after they answered that the citadel was held by a royal garrison and that they were not in their own power, the forces being landed and all the apparatus of besieging cities, the king and the Roman legate came up to the city from different quarters. The Roman arms and standards, never seen before, and the spirit of the soldiers coming up so readily to the walls, terrified the Greeks somewhat the more; and so flight was at once made into the citadel, and the enemy took the city. And in the citadel, when for two days they had held out, trusting in the place rather than in their arms, on the third day, having bargained for themselves and the garrison to be carried over to Delium in Boeotia each with a single garment, they surrendered the city and the citadel. These were granted by the Romans to King Attalus; the booty and the ornaments of the city they carried off themselves. Attalus, that he might not have an empty island, persuaded almost all the Macedonians and certain of the Andrians to remain. Afterward those too who under the agreement had been carried over to Delium were recalled by the king’s promises, since the longing for their country also inclined their minds the more readily to belief.

From Andros they crossed to Cythnus. There some days were spent in vain assaulting the city, and, because it was scarce worth the labor, they withdrew. At Prasiae—that is a place on the Attic mainland—twenty barks of the Issaeans were joined to the Roman fleet. These were sent to ravage the lands of the Carystians; the rest of the fleet held Geraestus, a famous harbor of Euboea, while the Issaeans returned from Carystus. Thence all, sails given to the deep, by mid-sea, past the island of Scyros, came to Icus. There, kept a few days by a raging north wind, when the first calm was granted, they crossed to Sciathus, a city laid waste and lately plundered by Philip. The soldiers, straying through the fields, brought back to the ships grain and whatever else could be of use for food; of booty there was nothing, nor had the Greeks deserved to be plundered. Thence making for Cassandrea, they held first at Mendaeum, a maritime village of that state. Thence, when, the headland rounded, they wished to bring the fleet round to the very walls of the city, a fierce storm arising, well-nigh overwhelmed by the waves, scattered, with the loss for the most part of their tackle, they escaped to land. And that storm at sea was an omen too for the thing to be done on land. For, the ships being gathered into one and the forces landed, when they had assaulted the city, repulsed with many wounds—for there was a strong royal garrison there—the attempt being vain, they withdrew to Canastraeum in Pallene. Thence, rounding the headland of Torone, they made for Acanthus. There first the land was ravaged, then the city itself taken by storm and plundered. Advancing no further—for now their ships too were heavy with booty—they sought again, back whence they had come, Sciathus, and from Sciathus Euboea. There, leaving the fleet, with ten light ships they entered the Malian gulf to confer with the Aetolians on the manner of waging the war. Pyrrhias the Aetolian was chief of that embassy which came to Heraclea, to share counsels with the king and with the Roman legate. They asked of Attalus, under the treaty, that he furnish a thousand soldiers; for so many he owed to men waging war against Philip. This was refused to the Aetolians, because they too had before grudged to go out to ravage Macedonia, at the time when, Philip burning things sacred and profane about Pergamum, they could have drawn him off thence by regard for their own affairs. So the Aetolians were dismissed with hope rather than with help, the Romans promising everything; Apustius with Attalus returned to the fleet.

Then they began to deliberate about the assault of Oreus. That city was strong both in its walls and, because it had been attempted before, in a firm garrison. There had joined them, after the storming of Andros, twenty Rhodian ships, all decked, with the prefect Agesimbrotus. This fleet they sent to a station off Zelasium—it is a headland of Phthiotis above Demetrias, very conveniently placed—that, if the Macedonian ships should move from there, it might be on guard. Heraclides, the king’s prefect, kept his fleet there, more by way of seizing an occasion, if the enemy’s carelessness should give any, than of daring anything by open force. Oreus the Romans and King Attalus assaulted from opposite sides, the Romans from the citadel toward the sea, the king’s men over against the valley that lies between the two citadels, where the city is also cut off by a wall. And as the places were different, so they assaulted in different fashion too: the Roman by bringing up sheds and mantlets and a ram to the walls, the king’s men by hurling missiles with ballistas and catapults and every other kind of engine, and stones of vast weight; they made mines too, and whatever else had proved of profit in the former assault. But the Macedonians not only were defending the city and the citadels in greater numbers than before, but also with more present spirit, mindful of the king’s chiding for the fault they had committed, and at once of his threats and of his promises for the future. And so, when, beyond expectation, the time was being drawn out there, and there was more hope in the siege and the works than in a swift assault, the legate, thinking that meanwhile something else too could be done, leaving as many as seemed enough to finish the works, crossed over to the nearest part of the mainland and by a sudden arrival took Larisa—not that famous city in Thessaly, but the other, which they call Cremaste—save the citadel. Attalus too surprised Pteleon, while men feared nothing less than any such thing during the assault of another city. And now, when the works about Oreus were near completion, the garrison that was within was worn out by unbroken toil, by watches day and night alike, and by wounds—a part of the wall too, battered by the ram, had now fallen in many places—; and the Romans by night broke through the open way of the ruin into the citadel which is above the harbor. At first light, the signal being given from the citadel by the Romans, Attalus too himself entered the city, the walls being for the most part thrown down; the garrison and the townsfolk fled into the other citadel, whence two days later surrender was made. The city fell to the king, the captive persons to the Romans.

Now the autumnal equinox was at hand; and there is a Euboean gulf, which they call Coela, suspect to sailors. So, desiring to get away thence before the winter storms, they sought again the Piraeus, whence they had set out for the war. Apustius, leaving thirty ships there, sailed past Malea to Corcyra. The king was detained by the fixed time of the rites of Ceres, that he might be present at the sacred ceremonies; after the rites he too withdrew into Asia, sending Agesimbrotus and the Rhodians home. These were the things done that summer by land and sea against Philip and his allies by the consul and the legate, the Romans being aided by King Attalus and the Rhodians.

The other consul, Gaius Aurelius, when he had come into his province to a war already finished, did not hide his anger against the praetor, because he had managed the matter in his absence. And so, sending him off into Etruria, he himself led the legions into the enemy’s land, and by ravaging waged a war with more booty than glory. Lucius Furius, both because in Etruria there was nothing he could do, and at the same time eager for a Gallic triumph, which he thought could be more easily obtained while the consul was absent, angry and envious, having come to Rome unexpectedly, held the Senate in the temple of Bellona, and, his deeds set forth, asked that it be permitted him to ride into the city in triumph. With a great part of the Senate he prevailed both by the greatness of his deeds and by favor. The elders refused the triumph, both because he had managed the matter with another’s army and because he had left his province out of a desire to snatch a triumph as the occasion offered; that indeed he had done by no precedent. The men of consular rank in particular held that he ought to have awaited the consul; for he could, by pitching his camp near the city and so protecting the colony as not to decide it by battle, have drawn out the matter until the consul’s coming; and what the praetor had not done, the Senate ought to do, namely await the consul; when they had heard the consul and praetor disputing face to face, they would judge the more truly of the case. A great part of the Senate held that the Senate ought to look at nothing but the deeds done, and whether he had done them in his magistracy and under his own auspices. Of the two colonies which had been set as barriers, as it were, to check the Gallic risings, when one had been plundered and burned, and that fire was likely to pass, as from buildings joined together, into the other colony so near, what, pray, ought the praetor to have done? For if nothing ought to be managed without the consul, either the Senate had erred in giving an army to the praetor—since, just as it had willed the matter to be managed not by the praetor’s but by the consul’s army, so it could have provided by decree of the Senate that it be managed not by the praetor but by the consul—or the consul had erred, who, when he had ordered the army to cross from Etruria into Gaul, did not himself come to Ariminum to be present at the war, which it was not lawful to wage without him. The seasons of war do not await the delays and postponements of commanders, and one must sometimes fight, not because you will it, but because the enemy compels. The battle itself and the issue of the battle ought to be regarded. The enemy routed and cut down, their camp taken and plundered, a colony freed from siege, the captives of the other colony recovered and restored to their own, the war finished in a single battle. Not men only had rejoiced at that victory, but to the immortal gods too supplications had been held for three days, because the commonwealth had been managed well and happily, not ill and rashly, by Lucius Furius the praetor. And by a certain fate, too, the Gallic wars had been given to the Furian house. By speeches of this kind, his own and his friends’, the present favor of the praetor overcame the absent consul’s majesty, and a full Senate decreed the triumph to Lucius Furius. Lucius Furius the praetor triumphed over the Gauls while in his magistracy, and carried into the treasury three hundred and twenty thousand asses, of silver a hundred thousand five hundred; nor were any captives led before his chariot, nor spoils carried in front, nor soldiers in his train. All but the victory was plainly the consul’s.

Then the games which Publius Cornelius Scipio as consul had vowed in Africa were given with great display. And concerning the lands of his soldiers it was decreed that each of them should receive, for every year he had served in Spain or in Africa, two iugera of land; that land the decemvirs should assign. Three commissioners likewise were appointed to fill up the number of colonists at Venusia, because the strength of that colony had been thinned by the war with Hannibal—Gaius Terentius Varro, Titus Quinctius Flamininus, and Publius Cornelius Scipio son of Gnaeus. These enrolled colonists for Venusia.

In the same year Gaius Cornelius Cethegus, who as proconsul held Spain, routed a great army of the enemy in the Sedetanian country. Fifteen thousand Spaniards are said to have been slain in that battle, and seventy-eight military standards taken.

The consul Gaius Aurelius, when he had come from his province to Rome for the elections, complained not of what men had anticipated in their minds—that he had not been awaited by the Senate, nor any chance given to a consul of disputing with a praetor—but that the Senate had so decreed the triumph as to hear the words of no one save him who was to triumph, and not of those who had taken part in the war. The forefathers, he said, had ordained that legates, tribunes, centurions, soldiers in fine should be present at a triumph, that the Roman people might see witnesses of the deeds of him to whom so great an honor was paid. Had there been anyone of that army which had fought with the Gauls—if not a soldier, at least a sutler—whom the Senate might have questioned what truth or what falsehood the praetor reported? He then proclaimed a day for the elections, at which were created consuls Lucius Cornelius Lentulus and Publius Villius Tappulus. The praetors then made were Lucius Quinctius Flamininus, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, Lucius Villius Tappulus, and Gnaeus Baebius Tamphilus.

The grain-supply too that year was very cheap; a great quantity of grain brought from Africa the curule aediles Marcus Claudius Marcellus and Sextus Aelius Paetus distributed to the people at two asses the peck. And they gave the Roman games with great display; one day they repeated; and they set five bronze statues, from the fines, in the treasury. The plebeian games were thrice wholly repeated by the aediles Lucius Terentius Massiliota and Gnaeus Baebius Tamphilus, who had been chosen praetor. And funeral games were given that year over four days in the forum, on occasion of the death of Marcus Valerius Laevinus, by Publius and Marcus his sons, and a gladiatorial show was given by them; twenty-five pairs fought. Marcus Aurelius Cotta, decemvir of sacred rites, died; in his place Manius Acilius Glabrio was substituted.

At the elections, the curule aediles created were, as it chanced, both such as could not at once enter upon their magistracy. For Gaius Cornelius Cethegus had been created in his absence, while he held the province of Spain; Gaius Valerius Flaccus, whom they had created being present, because he was flamen of Jupiter, could not swear to the laws; and it was not lawful to hold a magistracy more than five days unless one had sworn to the laws. When Flaccus asked to be released from the laws, the Senate decreed that, if the aedile should provide, at the discretion of the consuls, one to swear in his stead, the consuls, if it seemed good to them, should treat with the tribunes of the plebs to bring the matter before the plebs. There was given, to swear for his brother, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, praetor designate. The tribunes brought it before the plebs, and the plebs voted that it should be just as if the aedile himself had sworn. And concerning the other aedile too a vote of the plebs was made; the tribunes asking which two they should bid go into Spain with command to the armies, that Gaius Cornelius the curule aedile might come to administer his magistracy, and that Lucius Manlius Acidinus might leave the province after many years, the plebs ordered that Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus and Lucius Stertinius should have command as proconsuls in Spain.