These things were done through the winter; but at the beginning of spring Quinctius, having summoned Attalus to Elatia and wishing to bring under his sway the nation of the Boeotians—wavering down to that day with uncertain minds—set out through Phocis and pitched his camp five miles from Thebes, the capital of Boeotia. Thence on the next day, with the soldiers of a single maniple and with Attalus and the embassies which had gathered thronging from every side, he proceeded toward the city, having ordered the hastati of the legion—they were two thousand men—to follow him at an interval of a mile’s distance. About midway on the road the praetor of the Boeotians, Antiphilus, met him; the rest of the multitude watched from the walls for the coming of the Roman commander and the king. Few arms and few soldiers were to be seen about them; the hastati who followed were hidden, far off, by the windings of the roads and the valleys lying between. When he was now drawing near the city, he went the more slowly, as though greeting the crowd that came out to meet him; the cause of the delay was that the hastati might come up. The townsfolk, the throng driven on before the lictor, did not catch sight of the column of armed men that closely followed until they had reached the commander’s quarters. Then, as if the city had been betrayed by the trick of the praetor Antiphilus and taken, all were struck dumb; and it was plain that no free deliberation had been left to the council which had been proclaimed for the Boeotians on the next day. They hid their grief, which they would have shown both in vain and not without danger.

In the council Attalus spoke first. Beginning from the services of his ancestors and his own—both their common services to all Greece and their particular services to the nation of the Boeotians—being now too old and too weak to bear the strain of speaking, he fell silent and collapsed; and while they carried the king away, stricken with palsy in part of his limbs, the assembly was for a little while broken off. Then Aristaenus, the praetor of the Achaeans, was heard with the greater authority because he counseled the Boeotians nothing other than what he had counseled the Achaeans. A few words were added by Quinctius himself, who in his speech extolled Roman good faith rather than Roman arms or wealth. Then a motion concerning the joining of an alliance with the Romans, brought forward and read out by Dicaearchus of Plataea, no one daring to speak against it, was accepted and ordained by the votes of all the states of Boeotia. The council dismissed, Quinctius—having tarried at Thebes only so long as Attalus’s sudden seizure compelled—after it appeared that the force of the disease had brought no present danger to his life but a palsy of the limbs, left him there for the necessary tending of his body and returned to Elatia, whence he had set out; the Boeotians too, like the Achaeans before them, having been won to the alliance, and—since these were left safe and at peace behind him—all his thoughts now turned upon Philip and what remained of the war.

Philip too, at the beginning of spring, after his envoys had brought back nothing of peace from Rome, set about holding a levy through all the towns of his kingdom, amid a great dearth of young men. For continual wars through many generations now had used up the Macedonians; and in his own reign too a great number had fallen, both in the naval wars against the Rhodians and Attalus and in the land wars against the Romans. So he both enrolled recruits as soldiers from sixteen years of age, and certain men who had served out their campaigns, in whom there was but any remnant of strength left, were recalled to the standards. His army thus filled up, after the spring equinox he drew all his forces together to Dium, and there, his standing camp pitched, exercising his soldiery daily, he awaited the enemy. And Quinctius, having set out from Elatia about the same days, came past Thronium and Scarphea to Thermopylae. There a council of the Aetolians, proclaimed at Heraclea, detained him, as they deliberated with how great a force they should follow the Roman to the war. The decrees of the allies being learned, on the third day, having advanced from Heraclea past Xyniae, he pitched his camp on the border of the Aenianes and the Thessalians and awaited the Aetolian auxiliaries. The Aetolians made no delay; under the lead of Phaeneas six hundred foot came with four hundred horse. That there might be no doubt what he had waited for, Quinctius at once moved his camp. When he had crossed into Phthiotic territory, five hundred Gortynians of the Cretans, under the lead of Cydas, and three hundred Apolloniates of no unlike equipment joined him, and not long after Amynander with twelve hundred Athamanian foot.

Philip, having learned of the Romans’ setting out from Elatia, and reckoning—as one for whom the contest for the sum of things was at hand—that the soldiers must be exhorted, when he had discoursed at length on much already often recalled, the valor of their ancestors and the military renown of the Macedonians, came to those things which then most of all terrified their minds, and by which they could be raised to some hope. Against the disaster suffered in the narrows at the river Aous he set the three times the Romans had been driven back by force from the Macedonian phalanx at Atrax. And even there, where they had failed to hold the beset jaws of Epirus, the first fault had been that of those who had kept the watches negligently, the second, in the battle itself, that of the light-armed and the mercenary soldiers; but the phalanx of the Macedonians had even then stood firm, and on level ground and in a fair fight would always remain unconquered. These were sixteen thousand soldiers, all the strength and sinew of his kingdom. Besides this there were two thousand targeteers, whom they call peltasts, and an equal number of Thracians and Illyrians—the nation’s name is Tralles—two thousand of each; and auxiliaries hired for pay, mixed from several nations, about one thousand five hundred, and two thousand horse. With these forces the king awaited the enemy. The Romans had about an equal number; only in the strength of cavalry, because the Aetolians had been added, were they superior.

When Quinctius had moved his camp to Phthiotic Thebes, having got a hope, through Timon, a leading man of the state, that the city would be betrayed, he came up to the walls with a few of the horse and of the light-armed. There his hope was so far disappointed that he would have undergone not only a struggle with those who sallied out but a dire peril too, had not foot and horse, suddenly called out from the camp, come to his aid in time. And after nothing of the hope rashly conceived was succeeding, he desisted for the present from any further attempt upon the city; but, well knowing that the king was now in Thessaly, though it was not yet ascertained into what region he had come, he ordered the soldiers, sent out through the fields, to cut and prepare palisade-stakes. Both the Macedonians and the Greeks use a palisade, but they have fitted its use neither to convenience of carrying nor to the strength of the fortification itself; for they cut trees both larger and more branching than a soldier could carry along with his arms, and when they had fenced their camp with these set out before it, the dislodging of that palisade was easy. For, because the trunks of the great trees stood out far apart and their many strong branches offered what could be well gripped by hand, two, or at most three, young men, straining together, would pull out a single tree; and when it was pulled out, an opening like a gateway lay at once exposed, nor was there anything at hand to block it with. The Roman cuts palisade-stakes light and for the most part two-pronged, of three or at the very most four branches, so that the soldier, his arms slung at his back, may conveniently carry several at once; and they fix them so close and interweave them by their branches that it cannot be made out either which stake belongs to which prong, or which prong to which stake; and the branches, sharpened and thrust one through another, so leave no room for inserting a hand that nothing can be grasped to be pulled, nor, since the interlaced branches give one another a mutual binding, can anything be pulled at all; and if by chance one is torn out, it both opens little space and is very easily replaced.

On the next day Quinctius, his soldiers carrying the palisade with them so that he might be ready to pitch camp in any place, advanced a moderate march, and when he had encamped about six miles from Pherae, sent men to spy out in what part of Thessaly the enemy was and what he was preparing. The king was in the neighborhood of Larisa. Already made aware that the Roman had moved from Thebes to Pherae, and himself too eager to have done with the contest as soon as possible, he set out to lead his men against the enemy and pitched his camp about four miles from Pherae. Thence, on the next day, when the light-armed of both sides had gone forward to seize the hills above the city, and at about an equal distance from the ridge that was to be taken had come within sight of one another, they halted, and—sending messengers back to camp to ask what they should do, since beyond expectation the enemy had met them—waited quietly. On that day, indeed, they were recalled to camp with no engagement begun; on the next there was a cavalry battle about the same hills, in which, not least by the work of the Aetolians, the king’s men were routed and driven into camp. A great hindrance to both sides in carrying on the action was ground planted thick with trees, and gardens, as in suburban places, and roads narrowed by stone walls and in certain places shut off altogether. And so both commanders alike resolved to withdraw from that region, and, as if by prearrangement, both made for Scotussa, Philip in the hope of foraging from there, the Roman to forestall him and spoil the enemy’s grain. Through the whole day, because hills with an unbroken ridge lay between, the two columns went without catching sight of one another at any point. The Romans pitched camp at Eretria in Phthiotic territory, Philip above the river Onchestus. Not even on the next day, when Philip had pitched camp at the place they call Melambium in the territory of Scotussa, and Quinctius about Thetideum in the land of Pharsalus, did either side have it well ascertained where the enemy was. On the third day, first a downpour burst, then a darkness most like night kept the Romans back in fear of an ambush. Philip, for the sake of hastening his march, in no way deterred though after the rain the clouds had sunk down to the very earth, ordered the standards borne forward; but so dense a fog had blinded the day that neither could the standard-bearers see the way nor the soldiers the standards, and the column, straggling toward uncertain shouts, was thrown into confusion as though by a nighttime wandering. Having crossed over the hills which are called Cynoscephalae, they left there a strong post of foot and horse and pitched camp. The Roman, though he had kept himself in the same camp at Thetideum, nevertheless sent out ten squadrons of horse and a thousand foot to reconnoiter where the enemy was, warning them to beware of the ambushes which the dark day would screen even in open places. When they had come to the occupied hills, mutual terror being thrown upon them, they kept still as if numbed; then, messengers having been sent back to camp to the commanders, when the first alarm at the unexpected sight had settled, they no longer held off from fighting. At the start the battle was provoked by a few running forward, then it grew as the routed were protected by reinforcements; and in it, since the Romans, by no means a match, sent one messenger after another to the commander that they were being hard pressed, five hundred horse and two thousand foot, chiefly Aetolians, sent up in haste with two military tribunes, restored the wavering fortune, and the tide being turned, the Macedonians, now in difficulty, kept imploring the king’s aid by messengers. But he—as one who that day, on account of the spreading fog, had looked for anything rather than a battle—having sent a great part of his men of every kind out to forage, for some while was helpless of counsel and in alarm; then, after the messengers pressed upon him, and the mist had now uncovered the mountain ridges, and the Macedonians were in view, driven together onto a hill especially lofty among the rest, defending themselves by their position rather than their arms, judging that the sum of things must somehow be committed to the hazard, lest the loss of an undefended part be incurred, he sent Athenagoras, commander of the mercenaries, with all the auxiliaries except the Thracians and with the cavalry of the Macedonians and the Thessalians. At their coming the Romans, driven from the ridge, did not halt before they had reached more level valley ground. That they were not pushed off in headlong flight, the greatest protection lay in the Aetolian horse. These were then by far the best cavalry in Greece; in infantry they were beaten among their neighbors.

The matter being reported as more cheerful than the success of the fight warranted, when one man after another running back from the battle kept shouting that the Romans were fleeing in panic, drove the king—reluctant and hesitating and saying that it was being done rashly, that neither the place nor the time pleased him—to lead out all his forces into line. The Roman did the same, drawn on more by necessity than by the opportunity of battle. He left the right wing, with the elephants drawn up before the standards, in reserve; with the left, and with all the light-armed, he advanced against the enemy, reminding them at the same time that they were about to fight with the same Macedonians whom, hedged about by mountains and rivers at the jaws of Epirus, they had, the natural difficulty of the ground once overcome, driven out and stormed in open field; with the same whom, formerly under the leadership of Publius Sulpicius, they had conquered as they blocked the entrance into Eordaea; that the kingdom of Macedonia had stood by reputation, not by strength, and that this reputation too had at last vanished. By now he had reached his own men standing in the bottom of the valley, who, at the coming of the army and the commander, renewed the fight, and, charging, again turned the enemy. Philip, with the targeteers and the right wing of foot—the strength of the Macedonian army, which they called the phalanx—advanced against the enemy almost at a run; he ordered Nicanor, one of the courtiers, to follow at once with the rest of the forces. At first, as he escaped onto the ridge, and saw from the few arms and bodies of the enemy lying there that there had been a fight in that place, and that the Romans had been driven from it, and that the fighting was now near the enemy’s camp, he was lifted up with enormous joy; soon, as his men fled back and the terror was reversed, for a little while uncertain whether to draw his forces back into camp, he was in alarm; then, as the enemy drew near—and, besides that his men were being cut down from behind, and that, unless they were defended, not even he himself had any longer a retreat in safety—forced to hazard the sum of things with part of his men not yet come up, he placed the horse and the light-armed who had been in the battle on the right wing, and ordered the targeteers and the Macedonian phalanx to lay aside their pikes, whose length was a hindrance, and to do the work with their swords. At the same time, that the line might not easily be broken through, he doubled it by taking half from the front and extending the ranks inward, so that the line should be long rather than broad; and at the same time he ordered the ranks packed close, so that man should be joined to man, arms to arms.

Quinctius, having taken in among his standards and ranks those who had been in the battle, gave the signal with the trumpet. Rarely otherwise, it is said, did so great a shout arise at the opening of a fight; for by chance both lines raised the war-cry together, and not only those who were fighting but the reserves too and those who were that very moment coming into the battle. On the right wing the king, fighting from the higher ridges, with the great help of the ground, was winning; on the left, just as the part of the phalanx which had been the rearmost of the column was now drawing near, there was confusion without any order; the center, which was nearer the right wing, stood intent on the spectacle as on a fight that in no way concerned it. The phalanx, which had come as a column rather than a battle-line, and was fitter for the march than for the fight, had scarcely got up onto the ridge. Against these men in their disorder Quinctius—though he saw his own giving ground on the right wing—drove the elephants first against the enemy and made his charge, reckoning that the part overthrown would draw the rest with it. The matter was not in doubt; at once the Macedonians turned their backs, routed by their first terror at the beasts. And the rest indeed kept pursuing these routed men; but one of the military tribunes, taking his plan on the spur of the moment, with the soldiers of twenty maniples, leaving that part of his own men which was beyond doubt winning, by a short circuit fell upon the enemy’s right wing from the rear. No battle-line attacked from behind but he would have thrown into confusion; but to the common dismay of all in such a case there was added this, that the phalanx of the Macedonians, heavy and immovable, could neither wheel itself about, nor did those who a little before had been giving ground in front, but now were pressing upon the terrified men, allow it. To this they were also pressed by the ground, because the ridge from which they had fought, while they pursued the routed down the slope, they had given over to the enemy now led around to their rear. For a little while cut down in the midst, then most of them, their arms thrown away, took to flight. Philip, with a few foot and horse, at first seized a hill higher than the rest, to spy out what fortune there was on the left part of his men; then, after he marked the headlong flight and all the ridges round about gleaming with standards and arms, he too withdrew from the field. Quinctius, when he had pressed upon the retreating men, suddenly—because he had seen the Macedonians raising their pikes—uncertain what they were preparing, for a little while halted his standards at the strangeness of the thing; then, when he learned that this was the custom of the Macedonians surrendering themselves, he had it in mind to spare the conquered. But by the soldiers, ignorant that the fight had been given up by the enemy and of what the commander wished, a charge was made upon them, and the foremost being cut down, the rest were scattered in flight. The king made for Tempe at full speed. There he halted one day at Gonni, to take up any who might survive the battle. Eight thousand of the enemy were slain that day, five thousand taken. Of the victors about seven hundred fell. If anyone is to believe Valerius, who immoderately swells the number of everything, forty thousand of the enemy were slain that day; taken—there the lie is more modest—five thousand seven hundred, and military standards two hundred and forty-nine. Claudius too writes that thirty-two thousand of the enemy were slain, four thousand three hundred taken. We have not given credence to the smallest number by preference, but have followed Polybius, no uncertain authority both for all Roman affairs and especially for those done in Greece.

Philip, having gathered from the rout those who, scattered by the various chances of the battle, had followed his tracks, and having sent men to Larisa to burn the royal records, that they might not come into the enemy’s power, withdrew into Macedonia. Quinctius, the captives and booty sold—part of it granted to the soldiers—set out for Larisa, not yet sufficiently aware what region the king had made for or what he was preparing. Thither came a royal herald, on the face of it that there might be a truce until those who had fallen in the line should be taken up for burial, but in truth to seek leave for the sending of envoys. Both were obtained from the Roman. There was added too that word: that the king bade him be of good cheer—which especially offended the Aetolians, already swelling with resentment and complaining that the commander had been changed by victory: before the battle he had been wont to share all things great and small with the allies; now they had no part in any of his counsels, he managed everything by his own judgment alone, and was now seeking a place for private favor with Philip, so that, while the Aetolians had drained off the hard and bitter portions of the war, the Roman should turn to himself the favor and the fruit of peace. And without doubt somewhat of honor had been withdrawn from them; but why they were slighted they did not know. They believed that a man unconquered by such desire was gaping after the king’s gifts; but he was both incensed, and not undeservedly, at the Aetolians on account of their insatiable greed for plunder and their arrogance in snatching to themselves the glory of the victory—which by its vanity offended the ears of all—and he saw that, with Philip removed and the power of the Macedonian kingdom broken, the Aetolians would have to be reckoned the masters of Greece. For these reasons he diligently did many things, so that they should be and seem cheaper and slighter in the eyes of all.

A truce of fifteen days had been given to the enemy, and a conference appointed with the king himself; and before its time came, he summoned the allies into council and laid before them what terms of peace it pleased them should be proposed. Amynander, king of the Athamanians, settled his opinion in few words: that peace must be so composed that Greece, even with the Romans absent, should be powerful enough at once to guard both its peace and its liberty. The Aetolians’ speech was harsher: who, after a brief preface that the Roman commander did rightly and in order in sharing the counsels of peace with those whom he had had as allies of the war, said that he was deceived in the whole matter if he believed he would leave either peace to the Romans or liberty to Greece firm enough, unless Philip were either killed or driven from his kingdom; and that both of these were easy, if he were willing to use his fortune. To this Quinctius said that the Aetolians had spoken an opinion neither mindful of the custom of the Romans nor consistent with themselves. For they themselves, in all the earlier councils and conferences, had always discoursed about terms of peace, not that the war should be waged to extermination; and the Romans, besides their most ancient custom of sparing the conquered, had given a particular proof of clemency in the peace granted to Hannibal and the Carthaginians. He passed over the Carthaginians: with Philip himself, how often had it come to a conference? and never had it been moved that he should give up his kingdom. Was it, because he had been beaten in battle, that the war had been made inexpiable? Against an armed enemy one ought to clash with hostile spirits; toward the conquered every gentlest soul holds the greatest sway. The kings of Macedonia seemed burdensome to the liberty of Greece; yet if the kingdom and the people were taken away, the Thracians, Illyrians, and then the Gauls—wild and untamed peoples—would pour into Macedonia and into Greece. Let them not, by clearing away each nearest thing, make for greater and graver ones an approach to themselves. Then, when Phaeneas, the praetor of the Aetolians, broke in and protested that, if Philip slipped away at that moment, he would soon rebel the more grievously, "Stop your uproar," he said, "where there must be deliberation. The king will not be bound by such terms that he can stir up war." This council dismissed, on the next day the king came to the pass which leads into Tempe—that place had been given for the conference; on the third day a full council of the Romans and the allies was granted him. There Philip, very prudently letting go of his own free will, rather than have them wrung from him by wrangling, those things without which peace could not be obtained, said that he conceded everything which at the former conference had either been commanded by the Romans or demanded by the allies, and that for the rest he would leave the matter to the Senate. Although he seemed to have shut the mouth even of all his bitterest enemies, yet the Aetolian Phaeneas, while all the rest were silent, said, "What then? To us, Philip, do you at last give back Pharsalus and Larisa Cremaste and Echinus and Phthiotic Thebes?" When Philip said that he made no objection to their recovering them, a dispute arose between the Roman commander and the Aetolians about Thebes; for Quinctius said that these had been made the property of the Roman people by the right of war, because, while matters were still entire, his army being brought up to them, they had been called into friendship, and, when there was free power of revolting from the king, had preferred the king’s alliance to the Roman; Phaeneas held it just that, in return for the alliance of war, what they had held before the war should be restored to the Aetolians, and that it had been so provided in the first treaty that the booty of war in things that could be carried and driven off should follow the Romans, the land and the captured cities the Aetolians. "You yourselves," said Quinctius, "broke the terms of that alliance of yours, at the time when, deserting us, you made peace with Philip. And if it did remain, that law would still hold only for cities taken by storm; the states of Thessaly came of their own will into our power." These things, said with the assent of all the allies, were to the Aetolians not only grievous to hear at the present but soon also a cause of war and of great disasters arising from it. With Philip it was agreed thus: that he should give his son Demetrius and certain of the number of his friends as hostages, and two hundred talents, and for the rest should send envoys to Rome; for that purpose there should be a truce of four months. If peace were not obtained from the Senate, it was undertaken that the hostages and the money should be returned to Philip. No greater cause, it is said, had the Roman commander for hastening the peace than that it was established that Antiochus was setting in motion a war and a crossing into Europe.

At the same time, and, as some have handed down, on the same day, at Corinth the Achaeans routed the king’s commander Androsthenes in a pitched battle. Philip, intending to hold that city as a citadel against the states of Greece, and having summoned thence the chief men under the pretense of conferring how many horse the Corinthians could furnish for the war, had detained them as hostages, and besides the five hundred Macedonians and eight hundred auxiliaries mixed from every kind who had already been there before, had sent thither a thousand Macedonians and twelve hundred Illyrians and Thracians, and eight hundred Cretans, who served on either side. To these were added a thousand Boeotians, Thessalians, and Acarnanians, all shield-bearers, and seven hundred from the youth of the Corinthians themselves, so that there should be six thousand armed men—and they gave Androsthenes confidence to decide the matter in the field. Nicostratus, the praetor of the Achaeans, was at Sicyon with two thousand foot and a hundred horse, but, seeing himself unequal both in number and in kind of soldiers, did not go out from the walls. The royal forces of foot and horse, ranging at large, were laying waste the territory of Pellene and Phlius and Cleonae; at last, reproaching the enemy with cowardice, they crossed over into the borders of the Sicyonians; carried round too by ship, they ravaged the whole coast of Achaia. When the enemy did this more diffusely and—as happens from over-great confidence—even more carelessly, Nicostratus, having got hope of attacking them off their guard, sent a secret message round to the neighboring states, on what day and how many armed men from each state should assemble at Apelaurus—that place is in the land of Stymphalus. Everything being made ready by the appointed day, setting out thence at once through the borders of the Phliasians, he reached Cleonae by night, all being ignorant of what he was preparing. There were with him five thousand foot, of whom some were light-armed, and three hundred horse. With these forces, having sent off men to spy out into what quarter the enemy were pouring themselves, he waited. Androsthenes, ignorant of all this, having set out from Corinth, pitched camp at Nemea—a river that flows between the Corinthian and the Sicyonian territory. There he ordered half the army, divided into three parts, and all the horse, to scatter to lay waste at once the territory of Pellene and of Sicyon and of Phlius. These three separate columns departed. When this was brought to Nicostratus at Cleonae, at once, having sent forward a strong band of mercenaries to seize the pass through which is the crossing into the Corinthian territory, and the horse being placed before the standards to go in front, he himself followed at once with a double column. On the one side went the mercenary soldiers with the light-armed, on the other the shield-bearers; that was the strength in the armies of those nations. Now the foot and horse were not far from the camp, and certain of the Thracians had made a charge upon the enemy as they strayed scattered through the fields, when sudden terror was carried into the camp. The commander was in alarm, as one who had seen the enemy nowhere except in scattered groups on the hills before Sicyon, not daring to bring their column down into the plains, and would never have believed they would approach from Cleonae. He ordered the stragglers slipped away from the camp to be recalled by trumpet; he himself, having ordered the soldiers hastily to take up arms, went out of the gate with a thin column and drew up his line above the river. The rest of the forces, since they could scarcely be gathered and drawn up, did not bear the first charge of the enemy; the Macedonians had been both most numerous of all at the standards and for long made the hope of victory doubtful; at last, stripped bare by the flight of the rest, when now two lines of the enemy from different sides—the light-armed on the flank, the shield-bearers and targeteers in front—pressed upon them, they too, the matter inclining, first gave ground, then, driven on, turned their backs, and most of them, their arms thrown away, no hope left of holding the camp, made for Corinth. Nicostratus, the mercenary soldiers having been sent to pursue these, the horse and the Thracian auxiliaries against the ravagers of the Sicyonian land, there too made a great slaughter, almost greater than in the battle itself. Of those too who had laid waste Pellene and Phlius, part in disorder and ignorant of all, returning to camp, were borne into the enemy’s posts as into their own; part, suspecting from the running about what the truth was, so scattered themselves in flight everywhere that they were surrounded as they wandered by the very country folk. There fell that day fifteen hundred, and three hundred were taken. All Achaia was freed from great fear.

Before the fight at Cynoscephalae, Lucius Quinctius, at Corcyra, the chief men of the Acarnanians having been summoned—the only one of the peoples of Greece that had remained in the alliance of the Macedonians—made there a certain beginning of a movement. Now two causes especially had held them in friendship with the king: one, the loyalty inborn in the people; the other, fear and hatred of the Aetolians. A council was proclaimed at Leucas. Thither neither did all the peoples of the Acarnanians assemble, nor did the same thing please those who had assembled; but two chief men and the magistrates carried it that a decree of alliance with Rome should be made, though only a partial one. All who had been absent took this ill; and in this murmuring of the people, two chief men of the Acarnanians sent by Philip, Androcles and Echedemus, availed not only to abolish the decree of the Roman alliance, but also that Archelaus and Bianor, both chief men of the people, because they had been the authors of that opinion, should be condemned of treason in the council, and that the imperium should be annulled for the praetor Zeuxidas, because he had laid the matter before them. A rash thing, but prosperous in its outcome, the condemned did. For when their friends advised that they yield to the time and go off to the Romans at Corcyra, they resolved instead to offer themselves to the multitude and either by that very act to soften their angers or to bear what chance had brought. When they had brought themselves into the crowded council, at first there was a murmur and uproar of men wondering, then a silence arose, from respect at once for their former dignity and pity for their present fortune. The power of speaking too being granted, they discoursed at the beginning suppliantly, but, as the speech advanced, when it came to clearing away the charges, with as much confidence as innocence gave; at last, daring even of their own accord to complain somewhat and to chide both the unfairness against themselves and the cruelty, they so worked upon men’s spirits that all in full assembly annulled everything that had been decreed against them; and none the less they voted that they must return into the alliance of Philip and refuse the friendship of the Romans.

These things were decreed at Leucas. This was the capital of Acarnania, and thither all the peoples came together into council. And so, when this sudden change was reported to the legate Flamininus at Corcyra, he set out at once with the fleet and brought his ships to land at Leucas, near what they call the Heraeum. Thence, with every kind of engines and machines by which cities are stormed, he advanced to the walls, thinking that at the first terror their spirits could be made to waver. After nothing of peace was shown, he then began to raise sheds and towers and to bring up the ram to the walls.

Acarnania as a whole, set between Aetolia and Epirus, looks toward the setting sun and the Sicilian sea. Leucadia is now an island, divided from Acarnania by a shoaly strait that has been dug through by hand; then it was a peninsula, cohering with Acarnania on its western side by a narrow neck. That neck was about five hundred paces long, and not more than a hundred and twenty wide. In those narrows Leucas is set, laid against a hill that turns toward the east and Acarnania; the lower parts of the city are level, lying toward the sea by which Leucadia is divided from Acarnania. From there it is assailable by land and sea; for both the shoals are more like a standing pool than a sea, and the whole plain is of earth and easy for siegeworks. And so the walls, in many places at once, either undermined or shaken down by the ram, were falling. But as exposed as the city itself was to the besiegers, so impregnable were the spirits of the enemy. Day and night intent, they repaired the battered parts of the wall, blocked up what had been laid open by the ruins, entered the fighting tirelessly, and defended the walls by their arms rather than themselves by the walls; and they would have drawn out that siege longer than the Romans hoped, had not certain exiles of Italian stock dwelling at Leucas admitted soldiers from the citadel. These, however, as they ran down from the higher ground with great uproar, the Leucadians, their line drawn up in the forum, withstood for some while in a fair fight. Meanwhile the walls were both taken by ladders in many places, and a way was made over the heaps of stones and the ruins into the city; and now the legate himself with a great column had surrounded the fighters. Then part were cut down in the midst, part, their arms thrown away, surrendered themselves to the victor. And a few days after, when the battle that had been fought at Cynoscephalae was heard of, all the peoples of Acarnania came into the power of the legate.

In the same days, with fortune inclining everywhere at once, the Rhodians too, to reclaim from Philip the region of the mainland—they call it the Peraea—possessed by their ancestors, sent the praetor Pausistratus with eight hundred Achaean foot and about eighteen hundred armed men collected from various kinds of auxiliaries; they were Gauls and Pisyetae and Nisyetae and Tamiani, and Areans from Africa and Laodiceans from Asia. With these forces Pausistratus seized Tendeba in the Stratonicean territory, a most opportune place, the king’s men who were at Thera being unaware. In good time too, and summoned for this very purpose, an auxiliary force of a thousand Achaean foot with a hundred horse came up; Theoxenus was over them. Dinocrates, the king’s prefect, for the sake of recovering the fort, first moved his camp to Tendeba itself, then to another fort, likewise of the Stratonicean territory—they call it Astragon—and, all the garrisons which were scattered in many places being called down, and the Thessalian auxiliaries from Stratonicea itself, set out to lead them to Alabanda, where the enemy were. Nor did the Rhodians decline the battle. So, their camps placed near at hand, they went down at once into the line. Dinocrates places five hundred Macedonians on the right wing, on the left the Agrianians, and receives into the center the men drawn together from the garrisons of the forts—they were chiefly Carians—and surrounds the wings with the cavalry and the auxiliaries of the Cretans and Thracians. The Rhodians had the Achaeans on the right wing, on the left the mercenary soldiers, a picked band of foot, in the center auxiliaries mixed from several nations, and what there was of horse and light-armed was thrown round the wings. On that day the two lines only stood on either side above the bank of a torrent, which then flowed between with a thin stream, and, a few weapons being hurled, withdrew into camp. On the next day, drawn up in the same order, they put on a battle somewhat greater than the number of the combatants warranted. For there were no more than three thousand foot apiece and about a hundred horse apiece; yet they fought not only with equal number and kind of arms, but with equal spirit too and equal hope. The Achaeans first, the torrent crossed, made a charge upon the Agrianians; then almost the whole line crossed the stream at a run. Long the fight stood doubtful. By number the Achaeans, themselves a thousand, drove four hundred from their ground; then, the left wing inclining, all strained toward the right. The Macedonians, as long as their ranks and, as it were, the close-packed phalanx held together, could not be moved; but after, their left flank bared, they tried to wheel their pikes round against the enemy coming from the side, thrown into confusion they at once made an uproar first among themselves, then turned their backs, and at last, their arms thrown away, poured out into headlong flight. They fled making for Bargyliae; to the same place Dinocrates too escaped. The Rhodians, having pursued as much of the day as remained, withdrew into camp. It is established well enough that, if the victors had at once made for Stratonicea, that city could have been recovered without a contest. The occasion for it was let slip, while time was worn away in recovering the forts and villages of the Peraea. Meanwhile the spirits of those who held Stratonicea with a garrison were strengthened. Soon Dinocrates too entered the walls with the forces that had survived the battle. In vain after that was the town besieged and assaulted, nor could it be recovered until somewhat later, through Antiochus. These things in Thessaly, these in Achaia, these in Asia were done in about the same days.

Philip, when he had heard that the Dardanians, from contempt of his kingdom now shattered, had crossed the borders and were laying waste the upper parts of Macedonia, although he was pressed in almost the whole world, fortune driving him and his men out on every side, nevertheless, reckoning it sadder than death to be driven even from the possession of Macedonia, after a levy had been hastily held through the cities of the Macedonians, with six thousand foot and five hundred horse fell unforeseen upon the enemy about Stobi in Paeonia. A great multitude of men was cut down in the battle, a greater, as it straggled through the fields in eagerness for plunder; those for whom flight was easy returned into their own borders without even trying the hazard of battle. By that one expedition, conducted otherwise than the rest of his fortune warranted, the spirits of his men being restored, he withdrew to Thessalonica.

Not so much in good time had the Punic war been ended, that there might not be war with Philip at the same time, as opportunely was Philip overcome now that Antiochus was setting war in motion from Syria; for besides that war was waged more easily against single foes than if both had brought their strength together into one, Spain too about the same time rose up to war with great commotion. Antiochus, when in the previous summer—all the cities which are in Coele Syria having been reduced from the dominion of Ptolemy into his own power—he had withdrawn into winter quarters at Antioch, kept those quarters no quieter than the campaigning season itself. For, straining with all the strength of his kingdom, when he had got ready vast forces by land and sea, at the beginning of spring, his two sons, Ardys and Mithridates, being sent ahead by land with the army and ordered to wait for him at Sardis, he himself set out with a fleet of a hundred decked ships, and besides with two hundred lighter vessels, cutters and pinnaces, at once to make trial along the whole coast of Cilicia and Lycia and Caria of the cities that were in Ptolemy’s dominion, and at once to aid Philip—for the war was not yet finished—with his army and his ships.

Many things the Rhodians dared excellently, by land and sea, for their loyalty toward the Roman people and for the whole name of the Greeks; nothing more magnificent than that at that season, not terrified by so great a mass of impending war, they sent envoys to the king, that he should not pass the Chelidoniae—it is a promontory of Cilicia, famous for the ancient treaty of the Athenians with the kings of the Persians: if he did not keep his fleet and his forces within that limit, they would go to meet him, not from any hatred, but lest they should suffer him to be joined with Philip and to be a hindrance to the Romans as they freed Greece. Coracesium at that time Antiochus was assaulting with siegeworks, after he had taken Zephyrium and Soli and Aphrodisias and Corycus and, Anemurium overcome—that too is a promontory of Cilicia—after Selinus was recovered. All these and the other forts of that coast being received into his dominion, either through fear or willingly, without a contest, Coracesium, its gates shut against expectation, was holding him. There the envoys of the Rhodians were heard. And although it was an embassy of the kind that could kindle a royal spirit, he tempered his anger and answered that he would send envoys to Rhodes and would charge them to renew the ancient rights of his own and his ancestors’ with that state, and to forbid them to dread the king’s coming: nothing should be to the harm or hurt of either them or their allies; for he would not violate the friendship of the Romans, and proof of it was both his own recent embassy to them and the Senate’s honorific decrees and answers concerning himself. Just then by chance the envoys had returned from Rome, courteously heard and dismissed, as the time demanded, the issue of the war against Philip being still uncertain. While the king’s envoys were transacting these things in the assembly of the Rhodians, a messenger came that the war had been finished at Cynoscephalae. This message received, the Rhodians, fear of Philip removed, gave up the plan of going to meet Antiochus with the fleet; but that other care they did not give up, of guarding the liberty of the allied states of Ptolemy, on whom war from Antiochus was impending. For some they aided with auxiliaries, others by foreseeing and forewarning the enemy’s attempts, and they were the cause of liberty to the Caunians, Myndians, Halicarnassians, and Samians. It is not worth while to pursue what was done severally in these places, since I scarcely suffice for those things that are proper to the Roman war.

At the same time King Attalus, sick, having been carried from Thebes to Pergamum, dies in his seventy-second year, when he had reigned forty-four. To this man fortune had given nothing toward the hope of a kingdom except riches. Using these at once prudently and at once magnificently, he brought it about that first to himself, then to others, he should seem not unworthy of a kingdom. Then, the Gauls being beaten in a single battle—a people which then, by their recent arrival, was the more terrible to Asia—he assumed the royal name, and to its greatness he always made his spirit equal. With the highest justice he ruled his own; he kept a singular good faith to his allies; he was kindly to his wife and children—he had four surviving—mild and munificent to his friends; and he left his kingdom so stable and firm that the possession of it came down to the third generation.

When this was the state of things in Asia and Greece and Macedonia, the war with Philip scarcely yet ended, peace at any rate not yet brought to completion, a huge war arose in Farther Spain. Marcus Helvius was holding that province. He informed the Senate by letter that the chieftains Culchas and Luxinius were in arms—with Culchas seventeen towns, with Luxinius the strong cities Carmo and Bardo, on the maritime coast the Malacini and Sexetani, and all Baeturia, and those who had not yet laid bare their minds were about to rise up to the movements of their neighbors. These letters being read out by the praetor Marcus Sergius, whose jurisdiction was that between citizens and foreigners, the fathers decreed that, the elections of praetors completed, whichever praetor had been allotted the province of Spain should at the first opportunity bring the matter of the Spanish war before the Senate.

About the same time the consuls came to Rome; and as they held the Senate in the temple of Bellona and demanded a triumph on account of the things successfully done in the war, Gaius Atinius Labeo and Gaius Afranius, tribunes of the plebs, demanded that the consuls treat of the triumph separately: they would not suffer a common motion to be made on the matter, lest equal honor should fall to unequal desert. When Quintus Minucius said that the province of Italy had fallen to both, and that with common spirit and counsel he and his colleague had done the deeds, and Gaius Cornelius added that the Boii, crossing the Po against him to be a help to the Insubres and Cenomani, had been turned back to guard their own when his colleague laid waste their villages and fields, the tribunes admitted that Gaius Cornelius had done such great things in war that there could be no more doubt about his triumph than about the honor to be paid to the immortal gods; yet that neither he nor any other citizen had prevailed so far by favor and resources that, having won for himself a deserved triumph, he might give the same honor to a colleague impudently seeking it undeserved. Quintus Minucius, they said, had fought trivial battles in Liguria, scarcely worth the telling, and in Gaul had lost a great number of soldiers; they even named the military tribunes, Titus Juventius and Gnaeus Ligurius of the fourth legion, who in an unsuccessful fight had fallen with many other brave men, citizens and allies; and the surrenders of a few towns and villages had been made false and feigned for the occasion, without any pledge. These altercations between the consuls and the tribunes held for two days, and the consuls, vanquished by the perseverance of the tribunes, reported separately. To Gaius Cornelius a triumph was decreed by the consent of all. And the people of Placentia and Cremona added favor to the consul, giving thanks and recalling that they had been freed by him from siege, and very many of them even, when they had been captured among the enemy, taken out of slavery. Quintus Minucius, the motion only attempted, when he saw the whole Senate against him, said that he would triumph on the Alban Mount both by the right of consular imperium and by the example of many illustrious men. Gaius Cornelius triumphed over the Insubres and Cenomani while still in office. He carried many military standards, conveyed many Gallic spoils on captured wagons, and many noble Gauls were led before his chariot, among whom certain authors say there was Hamilcar, a leader of the Carthaginians; but the crowd of colonists of Cremona and Placentia, following the chariot in caps of liberty, more drew the eyes upon itself. He carried in the triumph two hundred and thirty-seven thousand five hundred of bronze, and seventy-nine thousand of silver in two-horse-stamped coin; seventy bronze pieces were distributed to the soldiers apiece, double to the horseman and the centurion. The consul Quintus Minucius triumphed over the Ligurians and the Boian Gauls on the Alban Mount. That triumph, as it was the less honored in its place and in the fame of the deeds, and because all knew that the cost had not been disbursed from the treasury, so in standards and wagons and spoils it was about equal; the sum of money too was nearly the same: two hundred and fifty-four thousand of bronze were carried across, fifty-three thousand two hundred of silver in two-horse-stamped coin; to the soldiers and centurions and horsemen the same was given apiece as his colleague had given.

After the triumph the consular elections were held. The consuls created were Lucius Furius Purpurio and Marcus Claudius Marcellus. The praetors made on the next day were Quintus Fabius Buteo, Tiberius Sempronius Longus, Quintus Minucius Thermus, Manius Acilius Glabrio, Lucius Apustius Fullo, and Gaius Laelius.

At about the end of the year a letter came from Titus Quinctius that he had fought, standards joined, with King Philip in Thessaly, and that the army of the enemy had been routed and put to flight. This letter was read out first in the Senate by the praetor Marcus Sergius, then, by the authority of the fathers, in the assembly, and on account of the things successfully done supplications for five days were decreed. A little after, envoys came both from Titus Quinctius and from King Philip. The Macedonians were brought outside the city into the public villa, and there a place and entertainment were furnished them, and the Senate was granted them at the temple of Bellona. There not many words were spoken, since the Macedonians said that whatever the Senate had resolved, that the king would do. Ten commissioners after the custom of the ancestors, from whose counsel the commander Titus Quinctius should give Philip the terms of peace, were decreed, and it was added that in that number of commissioners should be Publius Sulpicius and Publius Villius, who as consuls had held the province of Macedonia.

To the people of Cosa, demanding the same year that the number of their colonists be increased, a thousand were ordered to be enrolled, provided that no one should be in that number who had been an enemy after the consulship of Publius Cornelius and Tiberius Sempronius.

The Roman games that year, in the circus and on the stage, by the curule aediles Publius Cornelius Scipio and Gnaeus Manlius Vulso, were both made more magnificently than at other times and watched the more gladly on account of the things well done in the war, and were three times repeated in their entirety. The plebeian games were repeated seven times; Manius Acilius Glabrio and Gaius Laelius held those games; and from the money of fines they set up three bronze statues, of Ceres and Liber and Libera.

Lucius Furius and Marcus Claudius Marcellus, having entered upon the consulship, when the provinces were being dealt with and the Senate decreed Italy to both as their province, strove that they might draw lots for Macedonia together with Italy. Marcellus, the more desirous of the province, by saying that the peace was feigned and deceptive, and that the king would rebel if the army were carried away from there, had made the fathers wavering in their opinion. And perhaps the consul would have prevailed, had not Quintus Marcius Ralla and Gaius Atinius Labeo, tribunes of the plebs, said that they would interpose their veto unless the consuls first brought it before the plebs, whether they willed and ordered that there should be peace with King Philip. That bill was brought before the plebs on the Capitol; all thirty-five tribes ordered, "As you propose." And, that they might the more rejoice abroad that the peace in Macedonia was ratified, a grim message brought from Spain, and the letters made public, wrought the contrary: that Gaius Sempronius Tuditanus, proconsul in Nearer Spain, had been beaten in battle, that his army had been routed and put to flight, that many illustrious men had fallen in the line, and that Tuditanus, carried out of the battle with a grievous wound, had not long after expired. To both consuls Italy was decreed as their province, with those legions which the earlier consuls had had, and they were to enroll four new legions, two for the city, two to be sent whither the Senate had resolved; and Titus Quinctius Flamininus was ordered to hold his province with the same army—his command, it seemed, had already been prorogued long enough before. The praetors then drew lots for their provinces: Lucius Apustius Fullo the city jurisdiction, Manius Acilius Glabrio that between citizens and foreigners, Quintus Fabius Buteo Farther Spain, Quintus Minucius Thermus Nearer Spain, Gaius Laelius Sicily, Tiberius Sempronius Longus Sardinia. To Quintus Fabius Buteo and Quintus Minucius, to whom the Spanish provinces had fallen, it was decreed that the consuls should give single legions each, whichever they chose, of the four they had enrolled, and four thousand foot apiece and three hundred horse of the allies and of the Latin name; and they were ordered to go into their provinces at the first opportunity. The war in Spain was set in motion in the fifth year after it had been ended together with the Punic war.

Before either these praetors set out to a war almost new—because then for the first time they went to arms in their own name, without any Punic army or leader—or the consuls themselves moved from the city, they were ordered to make atonement, as is the custom, for the prodigies which were reported. Publius Villius, a Roman knight, setting out into the Sabine country, had been struck lifeless, himself and his horse, by a thunderbolt; the temple of Feronia in the territory of Capena had been struck from heaven; at the temple of Moneta the points of two spears had caught fire; a wolf, having entered by the Esquiline gate, when it had run down into the forum through the most crowded part of the city, escaped almost untouched through the Tuscan quarter and thence by the Cermalus through the Capene gate. These prodigies were atoned for with full-grown victims.

In the same days Gnaeus Cornelius Blasio, who before Gaius Sempronius Tuditanus had held Nearer Spain, entered the city in ovation by decree of the Senate. He carried before him fifteen hundred and fifteen pounds of gold, twenty thousand of silver, and thirty-four thousand five hundred stamped denarii. Lucius Stertinius, from Farther Spain, without even attempting the hope of a triumph, brought fifty thousand pounds of silver into the treasury, and from the spoils made two arches in the cattle market before the temple of Fortune and of Mater Matuta, and one in the Circus Maximus, and set gilded statues upon these arches. These things were done in about the course of the winter.

At that time Titus Quinctius was wintering at Elatia, and while the allies sought many things of him, the Boeotians sought and obtained that those of their nation who had served under Philip should be restored to them. This was easily obtained from Quinctius, not because he believed them worthy enough, but because, King Antiochus being now suspected, favor for the Roman name had to be won among the states. When these men were restored, it at once appeared how no gratitude had been won among the Boeotians; for they sent envoys to Philip giving him thanks for the men given back, just as if it had been granted to themselves, and not to Quinctius and the Romans, and at the next elections they made a certain Brachylles Boeotarch for no other cause than that he had been the prefect of the Boeotians serving under the king, passing over Zeuxippus and Pisistratus and the others who had been the authors of the Roman alliance. These men both took this ill for the present and conceived fear also for the future: if such things were done while a Roman army sat almost at the gates, what then would become of them when the Romans had set out for Italy, Philip from near by aiding the allies and hostile to those who had been of the opposite party? While they had Roman arms near, they resolved to make away with Brachylles, the chief of the king’s favorers. And, a time being taken for the deed, when, having dined in public, he was returning home drunk, with effeminate men escorting him who had attended the crowded banquet for sport’s sake, he is surrounded and killed by six armed men, of whom three were Italians, three Aetolians. There was a flight of his companions and a shrieking, and an uproar of men running through the whole city with lights; the assassins escaped by the nearest gate. At first light a crowded assembly, as if by previous notice or by the voice of a herald summoned, was in the theater. Openly they murmured that he had been killed by his own escort and those obscene men, but in their minds they marked out Zeuxippus as the author of the slaughter. For the present it pleased them to arrest those who had been with him and to hold an inquiry from them. While these are sought, Zeuxippus, with a steadfast spirit, for the sake of turning the charge from himself, came forward into the assembly and said that men erred who believed that so atrocious a slaughter pertained to those half-men, and, arguing many things plausibly to that side, by them he gained credence with some that, if he were conscious of guilt, he would never have offered himself to the multitude, nor made mention of that slaughter when no one provoked him; others did not doubt that, by impudently going to meet the charge, suspicion was being turned aside. A little after, the innocent men, tortured, though they themselves knew nothing, in the opinion of all named, as if by way of evidence, Zeuxippus and Pisistratus, with no argument added why they should seem to know anything. Zeuxippus, nevertheless, fled by night with a certain Stratonidas to Tanagra, fearing his own conscience more than the testimony of men conscious of nothing; Pisistratus, scorning the informers, remained at Thebes. There was a slave of Zeuxippus, the go-between and minister of the whole affair, whom Pisistratus, fearing him as an informer, by that very fear dragged out to informing. He sends a letter to Zeuxippus, that he should make away with the slave privy to the deed: he seemed to him not so fit for concealing the matter as he had been for doing it. The man who had carried this letter, ordered to give it to Zeuxippus as soon as possible, because there was no immediate opportunity of meeting him, hands it to that very slave, whom of all he believed most faithful to his master, and adds that it is from Pisistratus, on a matter greatly pertaining to Zeuxippus. Struck by conscience, when he had affirmed that he would deliver it at once, he opens it, and, the letter read through, in alarm flees back to Thebes and lays information before the magistrates. And Zeuxippus indeed, moved by the slave’s flight, withdrew to Anthedon, thinking it a safer place for exile; concerning Pisistratus and the others inquiries were held with torture, and punishment was exacted.

That slaughter maddened the Thebans and all the Boeotians to an execrable hatred of the Romans, believing that not without the design of the Roman commander had Zeuxippus, a chief of the people, contrived that crime. To rebel they had neither strength nor a leader; turning to what was nearest to war, brigandage, they took off soldiers, some in their lodgings, others wandering through the winter quarters as they came and went for various uses. Some on the very roads, at known hiding-places, were overwhelmed by ambushers; part, deceitfully led into deserted inns, were crushed; at last these crimes were done not only from hatred but also from greed of plunder, because the men were on their journeys with silver for the most part in their belts for the sake of trading. When at first a few, then from day to day more, were missing, all Boeotia began to be infamous, and the soldier went out from camp more timidly than in an enemy’s country. Then Quinctius sent commissioners through the states to inquire about the brigandage. Most of the slaughters were found about the Copais marsh; there the corpses were dug out of the mud and drawn from the pool, tied to stones or amphorae so as to be dragged into the deep by the weight; many crimes were found to have been done at Acraephia and Coronea. Quinctius at first ordered the guilty handed over to him, and that for the five hundred soldiers—for so many had been killed—the Boeotians should pay five hundred talents. When neither of these was done—the states only excusing themselves in words that nothing had been done by public counsel—he sent envoys to Athens and into Achaia to call the allies to witness that he would prosecute the Boeotians by a just and pious war, and, Appius Claudius being ordered to go with part of the forces to Acraephia, he himself with part besieged Coronea, the fields first laid waste where the two separate columns went from Elatia. Struck by this disaster, the Boeotians, when everything was filled with terror and flight, send envoys. When these were not admitted into the camp, the Achaeans and the Athenians came up. The Achaeans had more authority in their pleading, because, unless they obtained peace for the Boeotians, they had resolved to wage war together with them. Through the Achaeans opportunity of approaching and addressing the Roman was made for the Boeotians too, and, being ordered to hand over the guilty and to pay thirty talents by way of fine, peace was given them and the assault withdrawn.

A few days after, the ten commissioners came from Rome, from whose counsel peace was given to Philip on these terms: that all the cities of the Greeks which were in Europe and which were in Asia should have liberty and their own laws; that those of them which had been under the dominion of Philip, Philip should withdraw his garrisons from and hand over emptied to the Romans before the time of the Isthmian games; that he should withdraw them also from those which were in Asia—Euromus and Pedasa and Bargyliae and Iasus and Myrina and Abydus and Perinthus: for these too it pleased should be free; that concerning the liberty of the Cians, Quinctius should write to Prusias, king of the Bithynians, what had pleased the Senate and the ten commissioners; that Philip should give back to the Romans the captives and deserters, and hand over all his decked ships except five, and one royal ship of almost unwieldy size, which sixteen banks of oars drove; that he should have no more than five thousand armed men, nor any elephant; that he should wage no war beyond the borders of Macedonia without the order of the Senate; and that he should give a thousand talents to the Roman people, half in hand, half in installments over ten years. Valerius Antias relates that a tribute of four thousand pounds of silver for ten years was imposed upon the king; Claudius, four thousand two hundred pounds for thirty years, and twenty thousand pounds in hand. The same writer records that it was added by name that he should wage no war with Eumenes, the son of Attalus—he was then the new king. For these terms hostages were received, among them Demetrius, Philip’s son. Valerius Antias adds that the island of Aegina and the elephants were given as a gift to Attalus in his absence, and to the Rhodians Stratonicea and the other cities of Caria which Philip had held; and to the Athenians the islands Lemnos, Imbros, Delos, and Scyros.

All the cities of Greece approving this peace, only the Aetolians, muttering in secret, carped at the decree of the commissioners: that the letters were empty, sketched out with an idle show of liberty; for why were some cities handed over to the Romans and not named, others named and ordered to be free without being handed over, unless because those that were in Asia were freed, being safer by their very remoteness, while those that were in Greece—not even named—were quietly seized: Corinth and Chalcis and Oreus, with Eretria and Demetrias? And the accusation was not wholly groundless. For there was doubt about Corinth and Chalcis and Demetrias, because in the decree of the Senate by which the ten commissioners had been sent from the city, the other cities of Greece and Asia were beyond doubt freed, while concerning those three cities the commissioners had been ordered to do and determine what the times of the commonwealth demanded, out of the interest of the state and their own good faith. Antiochus was a king who, they did not doubt, would cross over into Europe as soon as his own strength sufficiently pleased him; they did not wish cities so opportune for the seizing to lie open to him. Setting out from Elatia, Quinctius crossed with the ten commissioners to Anticyra, thence to Corinth. There counsels about the liberty of Greece were debated for almost whole days in the council of the ten commissioners. Again and again Quinctius urged that all Greece must be freed, if they wished to blunt the tongues of the Aetolians, if they wished there to be true affection and majesty for the Roman name among all, if they wished to make it believed that he had crossed the sea to free Greece, not to transfer the dominion from Philip to himself. The others said nothing against this about the liberty of the cities; but that it was safer for the cities themselves to remain a little while under the protection of a Roman garrison than to receive Antiochus as master in Philip’s place. At last it was thus decreed: that Corinth should be given back to the Achaeans, yet so that there should be a garrison in the Acrocorinth; that Chalcis and Demetrias should be retained until the anxiety about Antiochus had passed away.

The appointed festival of the Isthmian games was at hand—always indeed and at other times crowded, both because of the passion for the spectacle inborn in the people, by which contests of every kind of skill and of strength and of swiftness are watched, and because, on account of the convenience of the place, which furnishes through two opposite seas the use of all things to the human race, that mart was the meeting-place of Asia and of Greece; but then they had assembled from every side not only for the accustomed uses, but raised up by expectation of what the future state of Greece would be, what their own fortune. Some supposed one thing, some another—not silently only, but bandying it about in talk too—of what the Romans would do; scarcely was anyone persuaded that they would withdraw from all of Greece. They had taken their seats for the spectacle, and a herald with a trumpeter, as is the custom, came forward into the middle of the arena, whence by a solemn formula the festival is wont to be proclaimed, and, silence being made with the trumpet, thus pronounced: "The Roman Senate and Titus Quinctius the commander, King Philip and the Macedonians being vanquished, declare free, exempt from tribute, and governed by their own laws the Corinthians, the Phocians, all the Locrians, and the island of Euboea, and the Magnesians, the Thessalians, the Perrhaebians, and the Achaeans of Phthiotis." He had run through all the peoples that had been under the dominion of King Philip. At the hearing of the herald’s voice there was a joy greater than men could take in all at once. Each scarcely believed enough that he had heard, and they gazed at one another in wonder, as at the empty appearance of a dream; what concerned each man, trusting their own ears least of all, they kept asking those nearest. The herald was called back, since every single man longed not only to hear but to see the messenger of his own liberty, and again he pronounced the same. Then, from a joy now made certain, so great an applause arose with shouting, and so often repeated, that it was easily apparent that of all good things nothing is more welcome to the multitude than liberty. The festival was then so hurriedly performed that neither the minds nor the eyes of any were intent on the spectacle; so wholly had a single joy forestalled the sense of all other pleasures. But when the games were dismissed, almost all made at a run for the Roman commander, so that, as the crowd rushed toward one man, with men longing to approach him, to touch his right hand, to throw garlands and fillets, he was not far from danger. But he was about three and thirty years old, and both the vigor of youth and the joy from so signal a fruit of glory supplied his strength. Nor was the gladness poured out only in the moment, but for many days renewed in grateful thoughts and in talk: that there was some people on earth which at its own expense, its own toil and peril, wages wars for the liberty of others, and renders this not to its neighbors, nor to men of near vicinity, nor to lands joined to it by the continent, but crosses seas, that there may be no unjust dominion in the whole world, and that everywhere right, divine law, and law might be most powerful. By a single voice of a herald all the cities of Greece and of Asia had been set free; to conceive this in hope had been the part of a bold spirit, to bring it to effect the part of both an immense valor and an immense fortune.

After the Isthmian games Quinctius and the ten commissioners heard the embassies of the kings and peoples. First of all the envoys of King Antiochus were called. To them, as they cast about almost the same words they had transacted at Rome, with no substance behind them, it was now denounced—no longer obscurely, as before, when affairs were doubtful while Philip was unharmed, but openly—that he should withdraw from the cities of Asia which had belonged to the kings Philip or Ptolemy, should keep his hands off the free states, and should provoke none by arms: all the Greek cities everywhere ought to be in peace and in liberty. Above all it was denounced that he should neither cross over into Europe himself nor carry his forces across. The king’s envoys dismissed, an assembly of the states and peoples began to be held; and it was carried through the more quickly because the decrees of the ten commissioners were pronounced to the states by name. To the Orestae—it is a people of the Macedonians—because they had been the first to revolt from the king, their own laws were given back. The Magnesians and Perrhaebians and Dolopians too were pronounced free. To the people of the Thessalians, besides the liberty granted, the Achaeans of Phthiotis were given, Phthiotic Thebes and Pharsalus excepted. The Aetolians, demanding about Pharsalus and Leucas that they be restored to them by the treaty, they referred to the Senate. The Phocians and Locrians, as they had been before, with the authority of a decree added, they assigned to them. Corinth and Triphylia and Heraea—it too is a city of the Peloponnese—were given back to the Achaeans. Oreus and Eretria the ten commissioners were giving to King Eumenes, the son of Attalus, Quinctius dissenting; that one matter was referred to the judgment of the Senate; the Senate gave liberty to these states, Carystus being added. To Pleuratus were given Lychnidus and the Parthini; both were peoples of the Illyrians that had been under the dominion of Philip. They ordered Amynander to keep the forts which through the time of the war he had captured and taken from Philip.

The assembly dismissed, the ten commissioners, having divided the duties among themselves, departed each to free the states of his own region: Publius Lentulus to Bargyliae, Lucius Stertinius to Hephaestia and Thasus and the cities of Thrace, Publius Villius and Lucius Terentius to King Antiochus, Gnaeus Cornelius to Philip. He, having delivered his instructions on the lesser matters, asked whether the king could admit to his ears a counsel not only useful but even salutary; and when the king said that he would even give thanks if he brought out anything that was for his advantage, he strongly urged him, since he had obtained peace, to send envoys to Rome to seek alliance and friendship, lest, if Antiochus should make any move, he might seem to have waited and watched for the opportunities of the times to rebel. Philip was met at Thessalian Tempe. When he had answered that he would send envoys at once, Cornelius came to Thermopylae, where a crowded assembly of Greece is wont to be on fixed days—they call it the Pylaic—and especially warned the Aetolians to remain steadfastly and faithfully in the friendship of the Roman people. Of the chief men of the Aetolians, some complained mildly that the Romans’ spirit toward their people was not the same after victory as it had been in the war; others more fiercely accused and reproached them that not only had Philip not been conquered without the Aetolians, but the Romans could not even have crossed over into Greece. Against these things, that the matter might not pass into wrangling, the Roman, having forborne, said that they would obtain everything fair if they sent to Rome. And so on his authority envoys were decreed. This was the end the war with Philip had.

While these things were being done in Greece and Macedonia and Asia, a conspiracy of slaves made Etruria almost hostile. To inquire into and crush it, the praetor Manius Acilius Glabrio, to whom the jurisdiction between citizens and foreigners had fallen, was sent with one of the two city legions; some, still scattered, others now gathered together, he overcame by fighting; of these many were killed, many captured; others, scourged, he fixed to crosses—those who had been the leaders of the conspiracy—others he restored to their masters.

The consuls set out for their provinces. As Marcellus, having entered the borders of the Boii, was pitching camp on a certain hillock, his soldiers wearied through the whole day with making the road, a certain Corolamus, a chieftain of the Boii, having attacked with a great band, killed up to three thousand men; and several distinguished men fell in that disorderly fight, among them the prefects of the allies Titus Sempronius Gracchus and Marcus Junius Silanus and the military tribunes of the second legion Marcus Ogulnius and Publius Claudius. The camp, however, was vigorously fortified all round and held by the Romans, though the enemy, elated by the prosperous fight, assaulted it in vain. He then kept himself for some days in the same standing camp, while he both tended the wounded and refreshed the spirits of the soldiers from so great a terror. The Boii, as that people is least patient of bearing the tedium of delay, slipped away here and there into their forts and villages. Marcellus, the Po at once crossed, leads his legions into the territory of Comum, where the Insubres, the Comenses being called to arms, had their camp. The Gauls, made fierce by the battle of the Boii a few days before, join battle on the very march; and at first they so sharply attacked that they drove in the front-rank men. When Marcellus marked this, fearing that, once shaken, they might be routed, having set against them a cohort of the Marsi, he sent out all the squadrons of the Latin cavalry against the enemy. When their first and second charge had blunted the enemy as he bore himself fiercely, the rest of the Roman line too, being confirmed, first stood, then sharply bore in its standards. Nor did the Gauls hold out the contest longer, but turned their backs and fled in disorder. In that battle above forty thousand men were slain, Valerius Antias writes, eighty-seven military standards captured, and seven hundred and thirty-two wagons, and many golden torques, of which one of great weight Claudius writes was placed on the Capitol as a gift to Jupiter in his temple. The camp of the Gauls was stormed and plundered that day, and the town of Comum taken a few days after. Twenty-eight forts then went over to the consul. It is also disputed among the writers whether the consul led his army first against the Boii or the Insubres, and blotted out the adverse fight by a prosperous one, or whether the victory won at Comum was disfigured by the disaster received among the Boii.

After these things, done with fortune so varied, Lucius Furius Purpurio, the other consul, came into the Boii through the tribe Sapinia. He was now drawing near the fort Mutilum, when, fearing that he might be cut off at once by the Boii and the Ligurians, he led his army back by the same road by which he had brought it, and by a great circuit through open and therefore safe places reached his colleague. Thence, the armies joined, they first ranged through the territory of the Boii, plundering it as far as the town Felsina. That city and the other forts round about, and almost all the Boii except the youth, who were in arms for the sake of plundering—and had then withdrawn into the trackless woods—came into surrender. The army was then led across against the Ligurians. The Boii, thinking that they themselves seemed far off, and that they would catch the Roman column unawares, gathered too carelessly, followed through hidden passes. Not having overtaken them, the Po suddenly crossed by ship, and when they had thoroughly laid waste the Laevi and Libui, returning thence through the farthest borders of the Ligurians with their rustic plunder, they fall upon the Roman column. The battle was joined more quickly and sharply than if at a time and place appointed for the contest they had clashed with prepared minds. There it appeared how great a force anger has for goading the spirits; for the Romans fought so much more eager for slaughter than for victory that they scarcely left the enemy a messenger of the disaster. On account of these things done, the consuls’ letters being brought to Rome, a supplication for three days was decreed. A little after, the consul Marcellus came to Rome, and a triumph was decreed him by the great consent of the fathers. He triumphed in office over the Insubres and Comenses; the hope of a triumph over the Boii he left to his colleague, because the adverse fight in that nation had befallen himself in particular, while with his colleague it had been prosperous. Many spoils of the enemy were conveyed on captured wagons, many military standards; three hundred and twenty thousand of bronze were carried, two hundred and thirty-four thousand of silver in two-horse-stamped coin. To the foot-soldiers singly were given eighty of bronze, triple to the horseman and the centurion.

In the same year King Antiochus, having wintered at Ephesus, tried to reduce all the cities of Asia to the ancient formula of his empire. And the rest indeed he saw would receive the yoke without much difficulty, either because they were set in level places or because they trusted too little in their walls and arms and youth; but Smyrna and Lampsacus were laying claim to liberty, and there was danger lest, if what they aimed at were granted them, other cities should follow Smyrna in Aeolis and Ionia, and Lampsacus on the Hellespont. Therefore he both himself sent from Ephesus to besiege Smyrna, and ordered the forces that were at Abydus—only a modest garrison being left—to be led to assault Lampsacus. Nor did he terrify them by force only, but through envoys, by gently addressing them and chiding their rashness and obstinacy, he tried to make them hope that they would shortly have what they sought, but only when it appeared sufficiently both to themselves and to all others that they held their liberty as obtained from the king, not as snatched on an occasion. Against these things it was answered that Antiochus ought neither to wonder nor to be angry if they did not, with a sufficiently even mind, suffer the hope of liberty to be put off. He himself, at the beginning of spring, having set out by ship from Ephesus, makes for the Hellespont, and ordered the land forces to be carried across from Abydus into the Chersonese. When at Madytus, a city of the Chersonese, he had joined the naval army to the land one, because they had shut their gates, he surrounded the walls with armed men; and as he was now bringing up his works, the surrender was made. The same fear gave into surrender the inhabitants of Sestus and the other cities of the Chersonese. He then came to Lysimachia with all his naval and land forces at once. When he had found it deserted and laid low almost wholly in ruins—for the Thracians had taken it and, after plundering, burned it a few years before—a desire seized him of restoring the noble city, set too in an opportune place. And so with all care he set about at once to restore both the buildings and the walls, and partly to ransom the Lysimachenes who were in slavery, partly to seek out and gather together those scattered by flight through the Hellespont and the Chersonese, partly to enroll new colonists with the hope of advantages set before them and in every way to people it; at the same time, that the fear of the Thracians might be removed, he himself with half the land forces set out to lay waste the nearest parts of Thrace, and left the rest, and all the naval allies, at the works of restoring the city.

About this time both Lucius Cornelius, sent by the Senate to settle the disputes between the kings Antiochus and Ptolemy, halted at Selymbria, and of the ten commissioners Publius Lentulus made from Bargyliae, Publius Villius and Lucius Terentius from Thasus, for Lysimachia. To the same place both Lucius Cornelius from Selymbria and, a few days after, Antiochus from Thrace came together. The first meeting with the envoys, and thereafter the invitation, was kind and hospitable; but when it began to be treated of the instructions and the present state of Asia, their spirits were exasperated. The Romans did not disguise that all his acts, from the time he had loosed his fleet from Syria, displeased the Senate, and they held it just that all the cities which had been of his dominion be restored also to Ptolemy; for as to those cities which, possessed by Philip, Antiochus had intercepted on the occasion when Philip was turned away into the Roman war—that indeed was not to be borne, that the Romans through so many years had drained out by land and sea such great dangers and labors, and Antiochus should have the prizes of the war. But granting that his coming into Asia could have been dissembled by the Romans as in no way pertaining to them, what of this?—that he had now even crossed into Europe with all his naval and land forces: how far was that from war openly declared upon the Romans? He indeed would deny it, even if he crossed into Italy; but the Romans would not wait until he could do so. Against these things Antiochus said that he wondered the Romans so diligently inquired what King Antiochus ought to have done, or how far by land and sea he ought to have advanced, and did not themselves consider that Asia in no way pertained to them, and that it was no more for them to inquire what Antiochus did in Asia than for Antiochus what the Roman people did in Italy. As for Ptolemy, of whom they complained that cities had been taken away, there was between him and Ptolemy both friendship, and he was so acting that shortly even a marriage alliance should be joined. Not even from Philip’s adverse fortune had he sought any spoils, nor crossed into Europe against the Romans; but what had once been the kingdom of Lysimachus—by whose defeat all that had been his became Seleucus’s by the right of war—he reckoned to be of his own dominion. While his ancestors were occupied with the care of other matters, Ptolemy first, then Philip too, had held certain of these places, usurping them as belonging to another’s possession. The Chersonese indeed, and the nearest parts of Thrace which are about Lysimachia—who doubted that they had been Lysimachus’s? To recover these into their ancient right he had come, and to found anew Lysimachia, destroyed by the onset of the Thracians, that his son Seleucus might have it as the seat of his kingdom. These debates being held for some days, a rumor brought without any sufficiently certain author concerning the death of King Ptolemy brought it about that no issue was put upon the talks. For both sides dissembled that they had heard it, and Lucius Cornelius, to whom the embassy to the two kings, Antiochus and Ptolemy, had been entrusted, sought a space of a modest time for meeting Ptolemy, that, before anything should be stirred in the new possession of the kingdom, he might forestall it by reaching Egypt; and Antiochus reckoned Egypt would be his if he then seized it. And so, the Romans dismissed and his son Seleucus left with the land forces to restore Lysimachia as he had begun, he himself sails with all the fleet to Ephesus, envoys being sent to Quinctius who should treat, to make it believed, that the king would make no innovation concerning the alliance. Coasting along the shore of Asia, he came into Lycia, and at Patara, when it was learned that Ptolemy was alive, the plan of sailing into Egypt was indeed given up; making nonetheless for Cyprus, when he had passed the promontory of the Chelidoniae, he was for a little while detained in Pamphylia about the river Eurymedon by a mutiny of the rowers. Setting out thence to what they call the headwaters of the river Sarus, a foul tempest, falling upon him, nearly sank him with his whole fleet. Many ships were broken, many cast ashore, many so swallowed by the sea that no one swam to land. A great force of men perished there, not only the unknown crowd of rowers and soldiers but even distinguished friends of the king. The remnants of the shipwreck gathered, since matters were not such that he might attempt Cyprus, he returned to Seleucia with a less opulent train than that with which he had set out. There, the ships ordered to be drawn up—for now even winter was at hand—he himself withdrew into winter quarters at Antioch. In this state were the affairs of the kings.

At Rome that year for the first time three commissioners of the sacred banquets were made: Gaius Licinius Lucullus, tribune of the plebs, who had brought the law about creating them, and Publius Manlius and Publius Porcius Laeca. To these triumvirs, likewise as to the pontiffs, the right of wearing the bordered toga was given by the law. But there was a great contest that year between all the priests and the city quaestors, Quintus Fabius Labeo and Lucius Aurelius. Money was needed, because it had pleased that the last installment of the money contributed for the war be paid out to private persons. The quaestors demanded from the augurs and pontiffs the war-tax which they had not contributed during the war. The tribunes of the plebs being appealed to by the priests in vain, the tax of all the years through which they had not given it was exacted. The same year two pontiffs died, and new ones were chosen in their place: Marcus Marcellus the consul in the place of Gaius Sempronius Tuditanus, who as praetor had died in Spain, and Lucius Valerius Flaccus in the place of Marcus Cornelius Cethegus. And Quintus Fabius Maximus the augur died quite a young man, before he took any magistracy; nor was an augur chosen in his place that year.

The consular elections were then held by the consul Marcus Marcellus. The consuls created were Lucius Valerius Flaccus and Marcus Porcius Cato. The praetors then made were Gnaeus Manlius Vulso, Appius Claudius Nero, Publius Porcius Laeca, Gaius Fabricius Luscinus, Gaius Atinius Labeo, and Publius Manlius.

That year the curule aediles, Marcus Fulvius Nobilior and Gaius Flaminius, distributed a million pecks of wheat to the people at two asses apiece. This the Sicilians had conveyed to Rome for the honor of Gaius Flaminius himself and of his father; Flaminius had shared the favor of it with his colleague. The Roman games were both prepared magnificently and three times wholly repeated. The plebeian aediles, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus and Gaius Scribonius Curio, brought many graziers to the judgment of the people; three of these were condemned; from their fine-money they made a temple of Faunus on the island. The plebeian games were repeated for two days, and there was a banquet on account of the games.

Lucius Valerius Flaccus and Marcus Porcius Cato, the consuls, on the Ides of March, the day on which they entered upon their magistracy, when they had brought the matter of the provinces before the Senate, the fathers resolved that, since in Spain the war was swelling so much that there was now need of a consular leader and army, it should please that the consuls either arrange between themselves or draw lots for the provinces of Nearer Spain and Italy; that whichever the province of Spain had fallen to should carry with him two legions and fifteen thousand of the allies of the Latin name and eight hundred horse, and take twenty warships; that the other consul should enroll two legions—with these it was enough that the province of Gaul be held, the spirits of the Insubres and the Boii having been broken the year before. Cato drew Spain by lot, Valerius Italy. The praetors then drew their provinces: Gaius Fabricius Luscinus the city, Gaius Atinius Labeo the foreign, Gnaeus Manlius Vulso Sicily, Appius Claudius Nero Farther Spain, Publius Porcius Laeca Pisae, that he might be at the back of the Ligurians; Publius Manlius was given to the consul as a helper into Nearer Spain. To Titus Quinctius, with not only Antiochus and the Aetolians but now even Nabis, tyrant of the Lacedaemonians, suspected, the command was prorogued for a year, that he might have two legions. If any reinforcement were needed for these, the consuls were ordered to enroll it and send it into Macedonia. To Appius Claudius, besides the legion which Quintus Fabius had had, it was permitted to enroll two thousand foot and two hundred horse, new. An equal number of new foot and horse was decreed to Publius Manlius too into Nearer Spain, and the same legion which had been under the praetor Quintus Minucius was given. And to Publius Porcius Laeca, about Pisae, ten thousand foot and five hundred horse from the Gallic army were decreed. In Sardinia the command was prorogued to Tiberius Sempronius Longus.

The provinces thus distributed, the consuls, before they set out from the city, were ordered, by decree of the pontiffs, to perform the Sacred Spring which Aulus Cornelius Mammula the praetor had vowed, by the resolution of the Senate and the order of the people, in the consulship of Gnaeus Servilius and Gaius Flaminius. It was performed one and twenty years after it was vowed. About the same days Gaius Claudius Pulcher, son of Appius, was chosen and inaugurated augur in the place of Quintus Fabius Maximus, who had died the year before.

While men were now generally wondering that the war which Spain had set in motion was being neglected, a letter was brought from Quintus Minucius that he had fought, standards joined, successfully at the town of Turda against Budares and Baesadines, the Spanish commanders; that twelve thousand of the enemy had been slain, the commander Budares captured, the rest routed and put to flight. This letter read, there was less terror from the Spaniards, whence a huge war had been expected; all cares, especially after the arrival of the ten commissioners, were turned upon King Antiochus. These men, having first set forth what had been done with Philip and on what terms peace had been given, showed that no smaller mass of war was impending from Antiochus: that with a huge fleet and an excellent land army he had crossed into Europe, and, had not an empty hope—arisen from a still emptier rumor—of invading Egypt turned him aside, Greece would soon have blazed with war; for not even the Aetolians would keep quiet, a people both restless by temper and angry at the Romans. There clung in the very vitals of Greece another huge evil too, Nabis, now the tyrant of the Lacedaemonians, soon, if it were allowed, of all Greece, matching in greed and cruelty all the tyrants famous in story; and if it were allowed him to hold Argos, set as it were as a citadel upon the Peloponnese, then, the Roman armies carried off into Italy, Greece would have been freed from Philip in vain, and would have, in place of a far-off king, if nothing else, a neighbor tyrant for its master. When these things were heard from authorities at once so weighty and such as brought all that they reported explored by themselves, the matter, as far as it concerned Antiochus, seemed to need the more hastening—since the king, for whatever cause, had withdrawn into Syria—while the deliberation about the tyrant seemed the greater. When it had long been disputed whether there now seemed cause enough why war should be decreed, or whether they should permit Titus Quinctius, as far as it concerned Nabis the Lacedaemonian, to do what he judged to be for the public interest, they permitted it, reckoning that this was a matter which, hastened or deferred, was of no very great moment to the sum of the commonwealth; that this rather was to be marked, what Hannibal and the Carthaginians would do if war were set in motion with Antiochus.

Men of the faction opposed to Hannibal kept writing again and again to the leading Romans, each to his own host, that messengers and letters had been sent by Hannibal to Antiochus, and that from the king envoys had come to him in secret; that, as certain wild beasts grow gentle by no art, so the spirit of that man was untamable and implacable; that he complained the state was withering in the mold of leisure and being lulled to sleep by sloth, and could not be roused without the clash of arms. These things the memory of the earlier war—waged no more, and stirred no less, through that one man—made probable. He had also, by a recent act, irritated the spirits of many powerful men. The order of judges dominated at Carthage at that season, most of all because the same men were perpetual judges. The property, repute, and life of all were in their power. Whoever had offended one of that order had all against him, nor was there lacking an accuser before judges thus incensed. Under their so unbridled rule—for they did not use their excessive power in a citizen’s way—Hannibal, made praetor, ordered the quaestor to be summoned before him. The quaestor counted this for nothing; for he both was of the opposite faction and, because from the quaestorship he was passing to the judges, the most powerful order, was already bearing his spirit in accord with the power soon to be his. Hannibal, deeming this indeed unworthy, sent a messenger to seize the quaestor, and, bringing him before the assembly, accused not so much the man himself as the order of judges, before whose pride and power neither the laws were anything nor the magistrates. And when he marked that his speech was received with favorable ears, and that their pride was burdensome to the liberty of even the lowest, he forthwith promulgated and carried a law that judges should be chosen for single years, and that no one should be judge for two continuous years. But as great as was the favor he had won by that deed with the plebs, so much had he offended the spirits of a great part of the leading men. He added another thing too, by which, to the public good, he stirred up private quarrels for himself. The public revenues were partly slipping away through negligence, partly were a prey and a spoil to certain of the leading men and the magistrates, and the money which should be paid in tribute to the Romans, each in its own year, was wanting, and a heavy tax seemed to threaten private persons. Hannibal, after he had marked how great the revenues were by land and sea and on what things they were spent, and what of them the ordinary uses of the state consumed, and how much peculation diverted, declared in the assembly that, all the outstanding moneys being exacted and the tax remitted to private persons, the state would be rich enough to furnish the tribute to the Romans—and he made good his promise.

Then indeed those whom for some years the public peculation had fed, as if their goods had been snatched from them, not the spoils of their thefts wrung out, incensed and angry, kept inciting the Romans against Hannibal—the Romans themselves too seeking a cause of hatred. So, with Publius Scipio Africanus long resisting—who thought it little in keeping with the dignity of the Roman people to subscribe to the hatreds of Hannibal’s accusers and to insert the public authority into the factions of the Carthaginians, and held it not enough to have conquered Hannibal in war unless, like accusers, they swore a false charge against him and lodged the indictment—at last they prevailed that envoys be sent to Carthage to charge before their Senate that Hannibal was entering into counsels of making war together with King Antiochus. Three envoys were sent: Gnaeus Servilius, Marcus Claudius Marcellus, Quintus Terentius Culleo. When these had come to Carthage, by the counsel of Hannibal’s enemies they ordered it to be said, to those asking the cause of their coming, that they had come to settle the disputes which the Carthaginians had with Masinissa, king of the Numidians. This was commonly believed; Hannibal alone it did not deceive that he was the one sought by the Romans, and that peace had been given to the Carthaginians on such terms that an inexpiable war remained against him alone. And so he resolved to yield to the time and to fortune; and, everything being prepared beforehand for flight, having shown himself that day in the forum for the sake of turning aside suspicion, at the first darkness, in his forensic dress, he went out by the gate with two companions ignorant of his plan. When the horses had been ready in the place where he had ordered, crossing by night the Byzacium—so they call a certain region of the country—on the next day he reached his own tower on the sea between Acylla and Thapsus. There a ship, made ready and furnished with rowers, received him. So Hannibal departed from Africa, more often pitying his country’s fortune than his own. The same day he crossed to the island of Cercina. There, when he had found in the harbor several Phoenician merchant ships with their wares, and a running-together of men greeting him had been made as he went out from his ship, he ordered it to be said to those who inquired that he was being sent as an envoy to Tyre. Fearing, nevertheless, lest some one of those ships, setting out by night, should announce at Thapsus or Hadrumetum that he had been seen at Cercina, he ordered a sacrifice prepared, and the masters of the ships and the merchants invited, and the sails with their yards begged from the ships, that an awning—it chanced to be midsummer—might be made for those dining on the shore. With as much preparation as the matter and the time allowed, the feast of that day was celebrated; and the banquet was drawn out, with much wine, into the late part of the night. Hannibal, as soon as he had time to deceive those who were in the harbor, loosed his ship. The rest, drowsy, when on the next day at last they rose from sleep full of their carousing, spent some hours, late as it now was, in carrying back into the ships and stowing and fitting the tackle.

At Carthage a running-together of the multitude accustomed to throng Hannibal’s house was made at the vestibule of his dwelling. When it was spread abroad that he did not appear, the crowd gathered into the forum, seeking the chief man of the state; and some said he had taken to flight—which was the truth—others that he had been killed by the treachery of the Romans, and this they murmured the more generally, and you might have seen varied faces, as in a state where some favored now these parts, now those, and torn with factions; it was then at last brought that he had been seen at Cercina. And when the Roman envoys had set forth in the Senate that it was ascertained by the Roman fathers both that King Philip had before made war upon the Roman people kindled most of all by Hannibal, and that now letters and messengers had been sent by him to Antiochus and the Aetolians, and counsels entered into of driving Carthage to defection, and that he had set out nowhere else than to King Antiochus; that he would not keep quiet before he had kindled war in the whole world; that this ought not to be unpunished for him, if the Carthaginians wished to satisfy the Roman people that nothing of these things had been done by their will or by public counsel—the Carthaginians answered that they would do whatever the Romans judged fair.

Hannibal, with a prosperous course, reached Tyre, and, received by the founders of Carthage as by a second fatherland—a man so renowned with every kind of honors—having delayed a few days, sails to Antioch. There, when he had heard that the king had already set out into Asia, and had met the king’s son celebrating the solemn festival of games at Daphne, courteously received by him, he made no delay in sailing. At Ephesus he overtook the king, still wavering in mind and uncertain about the Roman war; but the coming of Hannibal made no small weight toward the working of his spirit. The spirits of the Aetolians too were at the same time alienated from the Roman alliance, whose envoys, demanding back Pharsalus and Leucas and certain other states under the first treaty, the Senate referred to Titus Quinctius.