Amid the cares of great wars—some scarcely finished, others looming—there came between them a matter small to tell of, but one which, through partisan zeal, swelled into a great contest. Marcus Fundanius and Lucius Valerius, tribunes of the plebs, brought before the plebs a proposal to repeal the Oppian law. Gaius Oppius, tribune of the plebs, had carried that law in the consulship of Quintus Fabius and Tiberius Sempronius, in the very heat of the Punic war: that no woman should possess more than half an ounce of gold, nor wear a parti-colored garment, nor ride in a yoked vehicle in the city, or in a town, or within a mile of it, save for the sake of public religious rites. The tribunes of the plebs Marcus and Publius Iunius Brutus were defending the Oppian law and declared that they would not suffer it to be repealed; many nobles came forward to speak for and against; the Capitol was filled with a throng of men favoring and opposing the law. The matrons, whom neither counsel nor shame nor their husbands’ command could keep within doors, beset all the streets of the city and the approaches to the Forum, beseeching the men as they came down to the Forum that, with the commonwealth flourishing and the private fortune of all increasing day by day, they should suffer the women too to have their former adornment restored to them. This crowd of women grew greater day by day, for they were gathering even from the towns and the market-villages; already they were daring to approach and entreat the consuls and praetors and the other magistrates. But the one consul at least they found wholly inexorable, Marcus Porcius Cato, who spoke thus on behalf of the law that was being repealed: "If each of us, Quirites, had resolved to keep over the mother of his own household the right and the dignity of a husband, we should have less trouble with women as a body. As it is, our liberty, vanquished at home by female want of self-control, is here too in the Forum crushed underfoot and trampled; and because we did not contain them one by one, we dread them all together. For my part I used to reckon it a fable and an invented tale, that on a certain island the whole race of males was wiped out root and branch by a conspiracy of the women; but from no class is there not the gravest peril, if you suffer them their gatherings and councils and secret deliberations. And I can scarcely settle within my own mind whether the deed itself or the precedent of it is the worse: the one concerns us consuls and the rest of the magistrates, the other concerns you, Quirites. For whether what is laid before you is for the public good or not, that is the judgment of you who are about to go to the vote; this female stampede, whether it has arisen of its own accord or at your prompting, Marcus Fundanius and Lucius Valerius—and beyond doubt the fault of it touches the magistrates—I know not whether it is more unbecoming to you, tribunes, or to the consuls: to you, if you have now brought women in to stir up tribunician seditions; to us, if laws are now to be received through a secession of the women, as once through a secession of the plebs. "For my part, not without a certain blush did I just now make my way into the Forum through the midst of a column of women. Had not respect for the dignity and the modesty of them as individuals, rather than of them as a body, restrained me—lest they should seem to have been rebuked by a consul—I should have said: ‘What custom is this, of running out into public and blockading the streets and accosting other men’s husbands? Could you not each have asked your own that same thing at home? Or are you more winning in public than in private, and to other men than to your own? And yet not even at home, if modesty kept the matrons within the bounds of their own right, did it become you to concern yourselves what laws were here carried or repealed.’ Our ancestors would have no woman transact even a private affair without a guardian to authorize it; they would have them under the hand of fathers, of brothers, of husbands. We—if the gods please—now even suffer them to lay hold of the commonwealth and to mix themselves into the Forum and into the assemblies and the elections. For what else are they now doing through the streets and the crossways than urging the tribunes’ proposal and voting that the law be repealed? Give the reins to a nature that cannot govern itself, to an untamed creature, and then hope that they themselves will set a limit to their license! Unless you do it, this is the least of the things which, laid upon them by custom or by law, they endure with resentful spirit. Freedom in all things—nay, if we would speak the truth, license—is what they crave. "For what, if they carry this, will they not attempt? Run over all the laws concerning women by which your ancestors bound down their license and made them subject to their husbands; bound by all of these, you can still scarcely hold them in. What then? If you suffer them to pluck these rights away one by one and wrest them loose and at the last be made equal to their husbands, do you believe they will be bearable to you? The instant they have begun to be your equals, they will be your superiors. But, by Hercules, they object only to any new measure being passed against them; it is not a right but a wrong that they deprecate. Nay—the very law which you received and ordained by your own votes, which you have approved by the use and trial of so many years, this they would have you repeal; that is, by abolishing one law you are to weaken all the rest. No law is convenient enough for everyone; this only is asked, whether it profits the greater part and on the whole. If whatever right shall stand in any man’s private way is to be pulled down and demolished by him, what will it avail for the whole people to enact laws which presently those against whom they were passed can repeal? "Yet I should like to hear what it is for the sake of which the matrons have rushed out in a stampede into public and can scarcely keep themselves from the Forum and the assembly. That their parents, husbands, children, brothers may be ransomed from Hannibal? Far off is, and far off ever may it be, such a fortune of the commonwealth; yet even so, when it was upon us, you refused this to their dutiful prayers. But it was not duty nor anxiety for their own that gathered them: it is religion—they are to receive the Idaean Mother coming from Pessinus in Phrygia. What pretext, decent even to name, is held out before the female sedition? ‘That we may glitter with gold and purple,’ says she, ‘that we may ride through the city in carriages on festal days and on common, as though triumphing over the law beaten and repealed and over your votes captured and torn away; that there be no limit to expense, none to luxury.’ "Often have you heard me complain of the extravagance of women, often of that of men—and not of private men only but even of magistrates—and that the state labors under two opposite vices, avarice and luxury, those plagues which have overthrown all great empires. The better and happier the fortune of the commonwealth grows day by day, and the more its empire increases—and already we are crossing over into Greece and Asia, places filled with every enticement of the appetites, and laying hands even on the treasures of kings—the more I dread that these things will have captured us rather than we them. Tokens of peril, believe me, were those statues carried into this city from Syracuse. Already I hear far too many praising and marveling at the ornaments of Corinth and Athens and laughing at the clay antefixes of the Roman gods. I for my part prefer these gods propitious, and so I trust they will be, if we suffer them to remain in their own dwellings. "Within our fathers’ memory Pyrrhus, through his envoy Cineas, made trial with gifts of the spirits not of men only but of women too. Not yet had the Oppian law been passed to curb female luxury; yet no woman accepted. What cause do you suppose there was? The same that there was for our ancestors’ sanctioning no law upon this matter: there was no luxury to be curbed. As diseases must needs be known before their remedies, so appetites are born before the laws that set a limit to them. What called forth the Licinian law about the five hundred iugera, but the vast craving for adding field to field? What the Cincian law about gifts and presents, but that the plebs had now begun to be tributary and stipendiary to the Senate? And so it is no wonder at all that neither the Oppian nor any other law was then felt to be wanting, to set a limit to the expenditure of women, when they would not accept the gold and purple offered and pressed upon them unasked. If now Cineas were to go round the city with those gifts, he would have found women standing in the street to take them. "And of some appetites I cannot even arrive at the cause or the reason. For as that what is allowed to another should not be allowed to you may perhaps carry something of natural shame or indignation, so, when the dress of all is made equal, what does each one of you fear, lest it be marked out in herself? The worst kind of shame is that of thrift or of poverty; but the law takes both away from you, since you do not have what it is not allowed to have. ‘This very leveling,’ says that rich woman, ‘I cannot endure. Why am I not conspicuous, distinguished by gold and purple? Why does the poverty of other women lie hidden under the pretext of this law, so that they may seem, had it been allowed, to have been going to have what they cannot have?’ Do you wish, Quirites, to throw this rivalry upon your wives—that the rich should wish to have what no other can, and the poor, lest they be despised for this very thing, should stretch themselves beyond their means? Once they have begun to be ashamed of what they ought not, they will not be ashamed of what they ought. She who is able will provide from her own; she who is not able will ask her husband. Wretched that husband, both the one prevailed upon and the one not prevailed upon, when what he himself has not given he shall see given by another! Now they commonly entreat other men’s husbands, and—what is more—they ask for a law and for votes, and from certain men they obtain them. Against yourself and your own estate and your children you are open to entreaty; once the law has ceased to set a limit to your wife’s expense, you yourself will never set one. "Do not suppose, Quirites, that the matter will stand in the same place where it stood before the law upon this was passed. It is safer that a bad man not be accused than that he be acquitted; and luxury left unstirred would have been more bearable than it will be now—irritated by the very bonds, like a wild beast, and then let loose. I judge that the Oppian law must by no means be repealed. Whatever you shall do, I pray all the gods to prosper it."

After this the tribunes of the plebs as well who had declared they would interpose their veto, when they had added a few words to the same effect, then Lucius Valerius spoke thus on behalf of the proposal published by himself: "If only private men had come forward to urge and to dissuade what is asked by us, I too, reckoning that enough had been said for either side, should have awaited your votes in silence. As it is, since a man most weighty, the consul Marcus Porcius, has assailed our proposal not by his authority alone—which, even keeping silence, would have had weight enough—but by a long and elaborate oration besides, it is needful to answer in a few words. He spent, indeed, more words in chastising the matrons than in dissuading our proposal, and that too in such wise as to leave it in doubt whether the thing he reprehended the matrons had done of their own accord or at our prompting. I shall defend the measure, not ourselves, against whom the consul threw this out in word rather than that he meant in fact to arraign us. A gathering, a sedition, and at times a female secession he called it, that the matrons had asked you in public to repeal a law passed against them in war, in hard times, now in peace and with the commonwealth flourishing and prosperous. Great words, hunted out for the sake of magnifying the matter—I know that these and the rest are such; and that Marcus Cato is an orator not only weighty but at times even savage we all know, though by nature he is mild. For what new thing, after all, have the matrons done, that in crowds they came forth into public in a cause that touches themselves? Have they never before this time appeared in public? Your own Origines I shall unroll against you. Hear how often they have done it, and always for the public good. From the very beginning, in the reign of Romulus, when—

—the Capitol having been taken by the Sabines and a pitched battle joined in the middle of the Forum, was not the fight stayed by the running of the matrons between the two lines? What? When, the kings driven out, the legions of the Volscians under the leadership of Marcius Coriolanus had pitched their camp at the fifth milestone, did not the matrons turn aside that column by which this city would have been overwhelmed? Again, when the city had been taken by the Gauls, the gold by which the city was ransomed—did not the matrons by the common consent of all contribute it into the public store? In the last war, not to fetch up ancient instances, when money was needed, did not the moneys of widows help the treasury; and when new gods too were being summoned to bring aid to our doubtful fortunes, did not the matrons in a body go forth to the sea to receive the Idaean Mother? The cases, you say, are unlike. Nor is it my purpose to make the cases equal; it is enough to clear them of having done anything new. But what no one wondered at their doing in matters touching all alike, men and women, do we wonder at their doing in a cause that touches themselves in particular? And what, indeed, have they done? Proud ears we have, so help me, if, when masters do not disdain the prayers of slaves, we are indignant at being asked by honorable women.

"I come now to the matter at issue. Upon it the consul’s speech was twofold; for he was indignant both that any law at all should be repealed, and that this law in particular, which had been passed to curb female luxury. The former seemed a consular speech in defense of laws in general, the latter befitted the strictest morality against luxury; and so there is danger, unless we show what is empty in each, lest some error be poured over you. For just as, of those laws which were passed not for some occasion but for perpetual usefulness for all time, I confess none ought to be repealed save such as either use has convicted or some condition of the commonwealth has made useless, so I see that the laws which particular times have called for are, so to speak, mortal and changeable with the times themselves. Laws passed in peace, war commonly repeals; those passed in war, peace—as in the working of a ship some things serve in fair weather, others in foul. Since these are by their nature thus distinct, of which kind, pray, does that law appear to be which we are repealing? What? Is it some ancient royal law, born together with the city itself, or—what is next to that—written in the Twelve Tables by the decemvirs created to frame the code; without which our ancestors did not think the matronly honor could be preserved, so that we too must fear lest with it we repeal the modesty and the sanctity of women? Who, then, does not know that this is a new law, passed twenty years ago in the consulship of Quintus Fabius and Tiberius Sempronius? And since for so many years the matrons have lived under the best morals without it, what danger, pray, is there that, once it is repealed, they will pour themselves out into luxury? For if that law were old, or had for this end been passed, to set a limit to female appetite, there might be ground to fear that, repealed, it would incite them; but why it was passed, the very time will declare. Hannibal was in Italy, victorious at Cannae; he held now Tarentum, now Arpi, now Capua; he seemed about to move his army up to the city of Rome; the allies had fallen away; we had no soldiers for the reserves, no naval allies to guard the fleet, no money in the treasury; slaves were being bought to be armed, the price for them to be paid to their masters when the war was done; the publicans had undertaken to contract, against that same day, for furnishing the grain and the rest that the use of war demanded; we were giving slaves to the oar, in a number fixed by our property rating, with pay out of our own purse; all our gold and silver—the senators having set the example—we were bringing into the public store; widows and wards were paying their moneys into the treasury; a limit had been set how much wrought gold and silver, how much coined silver and bronze, we might keep at home—was it at such a time that the matrons were so taken up with luxury and adornment that the Oppian law was needed to curb it, when, because the sacrifice of Ceres had been broken off, all the matrons being in mourning, the Senate ordered the mourning ended within thirty days? To whom is it not plain that the want and misery of the state—because the moneys of all private men had to be turned to public use—wrote that law, to last just so long as the cause of writing it should last? For if whatever the Senate then decreed or the people ordained for the need of that time ought to be kept forever, why do we pay their moneys back to private men? Why do we let public contracts for ready money? Why are slaves not bought to serve as soldiers? Why do not we private men furnish rowers, as we furnished them then? All other orders, all men, shall feel the change of the commonwealth into a better state: shall the fruit of public peace and tranquility reach our wives alone not at all? We men shall use purple, wearing the bordered toga in our magistracies and priesthoods; our children shall wear togas bordered with purple; to the magistrates in the colonies and the municipia, and here at Rome to the lowest sort, the masters of the wards, we grant the right of the bordered toga—and not only that the living should have it for a mark of distinction, but that the dead too should be burned with it; to women alone shall we forbid the use of purple? And, when it is lawful for you, the husband, to use purple on your coverlet, will you not suffer the mother of your household to have a purple mantle, and shall your horse be more handsomely caparisoned than your wife is clothed? Yet in purple, which is worn out and consumed, I see some cause of tenacity—unjust, indeed, yet some cause; but in gold, in which, apart from the workman’s charge, there is no wastage, what is this grudging? Rather there is a safeguard in it, for both private and public uses, as you have found by trial. He said there was no rivalry among the women one with another, since none had the means of it. But, by Hercules, the grief and indignation of them all is real, when they see the ornaments allowed to the wives of the allies of the Latin name which have been taken from themselves, when they see those women conspicuous with gold and purple, those riding through the city, themselves following on foot—as though the seat of empire were in the others’ cities and not in their own. This might wound the spirits of men; what do you suppose it does to poor women, whom even small things move? No magistracies, no priesthoods, no triumphs, no decorations, no gifts or spoils of war can fall to them; neatness and adornment and dress—these are the women’s decorations; in these they delight and glory; this our ancestors called the women’s world. What else do they lay aside in mourning than the purple and the gold? What do they put on when they have come out of mourning? What in thanksgivings and supplications do they add but a more excellent adornment? Doubtless, if you repeal the Oppian law, it will not be in your discretion, should you wish to forbid any of those things which now the law forbids; your daughters, wives, sisters too—some men have them in their hand—will be the less in your power. Never, while their menfolk are safe, is the servitude of women shaken off; and they themselves loathe the freedom which widowhood and orphanhood bring; they had rather have their adornment in your discretion than in the law’s. And you ought to have them in your hand and guardianship, not in servitude, and to prefer being called fathers or husbands rather than masters. Hateful names the consul used just now, in calling it a female sedition and secession. For is there a danger that they will seize the Sacred Mount, as once the angry plebs did, or the Aventine? Whatever you shall resolve, this weakness of theirs must bear it. The more power you have, the more moderately ought you to use your command."

When these things had been said against the law and for the law, on the next day a considerably greater throng of women poured itself out into public, and in one body they beset all the doors of the Bruti, who were vetoing their colleagues’ proposal, nor did they desist before the veto was withdrawn by the tribunes. After that there was no doubt that all the tribes would repeal the law. It was repealed twenty years after it had been passed.

Marcus Porcius the consul, after the Oppian law had been repealed, set out at once with twenty-five warships, of which five were the allies’, to the harbor of Luna, the same army having been ordered to muster there; and, an edict having been sent along the seacoast and ships of every kind gathered, setting out from Luna he gave order that they should follow him to the harbor of the Pyrenees, whence he would advance against the enemy with the fleet in full strength. Having sailed past the Ligurian mountains and the Gallic gulf, they mustered on the day he had appointed. Thence they came to Rhoda, and the garrison of the Spaniards which was in the fort was dislodged by force. From Rhoda, with a favoring wind, they reached Emporiae. There all the forces except the naval allies were landed.

Even at that time Emporiae was two towns divided by a wall. One the Greeks held, sprung from Phocaea—whence the Massilians too—the other the Spaniards; but the Greek town, lying open to the sea, had its whole circuit of wall extending less than four hundred paces, while the Spaniards’, drawn farther back from the sea, had a wall three miles in circuit. A third element, Roman colonists, were added by the deified Caesar after the sons of Pompey had been overcome. Now all are merged into one body, the Spaniards first, and at last the Greeks too, having been admitted to Roman citizenship. One who saw them then would have wondered what guarded them, with the open sea set against them on one side and on the other the Spaniards, a people so wild and warlike. Discipline was the keeper of their weakness, which among stronger neighbors fear best maintains. The part of the wall that faced the fields they kept exceedingly well fortified, with but a single gate set in that quarter, of which one of the magistrates was always the unfailing keeper. By night a third part of the citizens kept watch on the walls; and not for the sake of custom or law only, but with as much care as if the enemy were at the gates, they both kept the watches and went the rounds. They received no Spaniard into the city; nor did they themselves rashly go out of it. To the sea the way out lay open to all. By the gate that faced the Spaniards’ town they never went out save in numbers—about a third part, those whose watches on the walls had been the night before. The cause of their going out was this: the Spaniards, knowing nothing of the sea, delighted in their commerce, and wished both to buy for themselves the foreign goods brought in by ship and to sell the fruits of their fields. The craving for this mutual traffic made the Spanish town open to the Greeks. They were the safer, too, because they sheltered under the shadow of Roman friendship, which—though with lesser strength than the Massilians—they cultivated with equal loyalty. Then too they received the consul and the army courteously and kindly. Cato, tarrying there a few days while he scouted out where and how great the enemy’s forces were, that not even his delay might be idle, spent all that time in drilling the soldiers. It happened to be the season of the year when the Spaniards had their grain on the threshing-floors; and so, forbidding the contractors to provide grain and sending them back to Rome, "The war," he said, "will feed itself." Setting out from Emporiae, he burns and lays waste the fields of the enemy, filling all with flight and terror.

At the same time, as Marcus Helvius was withdrawing from Farther Spain with a garrison of six thousand given him by the praetor Appius Claudius, the Celtiberians met him in a huge column at the town of Iliturgi. Valerius writes that there were twenty thousand armed men; that twelve thousand of them were slain, the town of Iliturgi taken, and all the grown males killed. Thence Helvius came to Cato’s camp, and, since the region was now safe from enemies, the garrison having been sent back into Farther Spain, he set out for Rome and, for his exploit happily achieved, entered the city in ovation. He brought into the treasury of unwrought silver fourteen thousand seven hundred and thirty-two pounds, and of coined bigati seventeen thousand and twenty-three, and of Oscan silver nineteen thousand four hundred and thirty-nine. The reason for the Senate’s refusing him a triumph was that he had fought under another’s auspices and in another’s province. He had returned, moreover, two years later, since—the province having been handed over to his successor Quintus Minucius—he had been kept there the following year by a long and grievous illness. And so Helvius entered the city in ovation only two months before his successor Quintus Minucius triumphed. He too brought thirty-four thousand eight hundred pounds of silver, and seventy-three thousand bigati, and two hundred and seventy-eight thousand of Oscan silver.

In Spain meanwhile the consul kept his camp not far from Emporiae. Thither came three envoys from Bilistages, the chieftain of the Ilergetes—among them one his son—complaining that their forts were being assaulted and that there was no hope of holding out unless the Roman sent a garrison: three thousand soldiers would suffice, and the enemy, if so great a force came, would not stand. To this the consul said that he was indeed moved both by their peril and by their fear; but that he by no means had so great a store of troops that, with a great force of the enemy not far off and the day looked for hourly when it must be fought out with standards joined, he could safely lessen his own strength by dividing the army. The envoys, when they heard this, weeping, threw themselves at the consul’s knees, begging him not to forsake them in straits so desperate: for whither would they go, repulsed by the Romans? They had no allies, no other hope anywhere on earth. They might have been free of that peril, had they been willing to fall from their faith and conspire with the rest; by no threats, no bugbears had they been moved, hoping that help and aid enough were theirs in the Romans. If that were nothing, if it were denied them by the consul, they called gods and men to witness that, unwilling and constrained—lest they suffer the same that the Saguntines had suffered—they would revolt, and would perish rather with the rest of the Spaniards than alone. And on that day, indeed, they were dismissed thus, without an answer. Through the night that followed, a divided care kept working upon the consul: he was unwilling to forsake the allies, unwilling to lessen the army, since that might bring him either delay in fighting or peril in the fight. His resolve stands not to lessen his forces, lest in the meantime the enemy work some disgrace; to the allies, he judges, hope must be held out in the room of substance: often, he reflected, things empty had prevailed for true, above all in war, and a man who believed he had some aid, just as if he had it, had been saved by confidence itself, by hoping and by daring. On the next day he answers the envoys that, although he fears lest by lending his strength to others he lessen it, yet he has regard for their time and peril rather than his own. He orders notice to be given to a third part of the soldiers out of all the cohorts to cook in good time the food they were to put aboard the ships, and the ships to be made ready against the third day. Two of the envoys he bids carry this word to Bilistages and the Ilergetes; the chieftain’s son, treating him courteously and with gifts, he keeps with him. The envoys did not set out before they had seen the soldiers put aboard the ships; and reporting this now as past doubt, they filled with the rumor of Roman aid drawing near not their own people only but the enemy too.

The consul, when enough had been displayed for show, orders the soldiers recalled from the ships; and since now that season of the year was drawing on in which things could be done, he himself pitched a winter camp three miles from Emporiae. Thence, as occasions offered—now on this side, now on that, a moderate guard being left in the camp—he led his soldiers to plunder into the enemy’s fields. They set out for the most part by night, both that they might advance as far as possible from the camp and that they might fall upon men off their guard. The business both exercised the new soldiers and caught a great number of the enemy; nor did they any longer dare to go outside the defenses of their forts. When in this way he had tried sufficiently the spirits both of his own men and of the enemy, he ordered the tribunes and prefects and all the cavalry and the centurions to be called together. "The time," he said, "which you have often wished for, has come, when the power should be given you of showing your valor. Hitherto you have served more after the manner of marauders than of men at war; now in a regular battle you shall match hands with the enemy as foe with foe; henceforth it will be allowed not to lay waste their fields but to drain the wealth of their cities. Our fathers, when in Spain there were both generals and armies of the Carthaginians, and they themselves had no soldier there, nevertheless willed that this be added to the treaty: that the river Ebro should be the boundary of their empire. Now, when two praetors, when a consul, when three Roman armies hold Spain, when of the Carthaginians for nearly ten years past not a man is in these provinces, our dominion this side of the Ebro is lost. This you must recover by arms and by valor, and force a nation that is rebelling—warring rashly rather than steadfastly—to take again the yoke it has thrown off." Having for the most part exhorted them in this manner, he proclaims that he will lead them by night to the enemy’s camp. So they were dismissed to look after their bodies.

At midnight, when he had given heed to the auspices, he set out, that he might seize the position he wished before the enemy were aware, and led his men round past the enemy’s camp; and at first light, the line drawn up, he sends three cohorts close up under the rampart itself. The barbarians, marveling that the Roman had appeared in their rear, run this way and that and themselves to arms. Meanwhile the consul among his own men: "Nowhere, soldiers, is there hope save in valor," he said, "and I have taken pains that there should be none. Between our camp and us the enemy stand in the middle, and in our rear is the enemy’s country. What is fairest is also safest: to have hope placed in valor." After this he orders the cohorts to be drawn back, that he might lure out the barbarians by a feint of flight. That which he had believed came to pass. Thinking the Romans had taken fright and were giving way, they burst out of the gate and fill with armed men all the space that had been left between their own camp and the enemy’s line. While they hurry to draw up their line, the consul, all his own now ready and in order, attacks them in disarray. The cavalry first he led into the fight from either wing; but on the right they were at once beaten, and, giving way in alarm, brought terror even upon the infantry. When the consul saw this, he orders two picked cohorts to be led round the enemy’s right flank and to show themselves in the rear before the lines of foot should clash. That terror, thrown upon the enemy, evened the matter, which had been inclining through the panic of the Roman cavalry; yet so disordered were the foot and horse of the right wing that the consul himself laid hold of some with his own hand and turned them upon the enemy. And so, as long as the fight was with missiles, the battle was doubtful, and now on the right side, whence the terror and flight had begun, the Roman hardly held his ground; on the left wing and in front the barbarians were being pressed, and in alarm kept looking back at the cohorts threatening their rear. When, the soliferrea and falaricae having been hurled, they drew their swords, then it was as though the battle had begun afresh. No longer were they wounded from afar by blind strokes out of the unseen, but, foot set to foot, all their hope was in valor and in strength. His own men now wearied, the consul kindled them by leading into the fight the reserve cohorts from the second line. A fresh line was formed; the unworn, assailing the wearied enemy with fresh weapons, first drove them through, as with a wedge, by a sharp charge, then turned them, scattered, to flight; and in a headlong race over the fields they made for their camp. When Cato saw all filled with flight, he himself rides back to the second legion, which had been posted in reserve, and orders the standards advanced and the men to come up at full pace to assault the enemy’s camp. If any ran forward out of his rank too eagerly, he himself, riding among them, strikes him with a javelin and bids the tribunes and centurions chastise such men. Now the camp was being assaulted, and with stones and stakes and every kind of missile the Romans were being kept off from the rampart. When the fresh legion was brought up, then both the spirit of the assailants grew and the enemy fought the more fiercely before the rampart. The consul surveys everything with his eyes, that he may burst in at the part where the resistance is least. At the left gate he sees few men; thither he leads the principes and hastati of the second legion. The post that had been set at the gate did not bear their charge; and the rest, when they see the enemy within the rampart, themselves, stripped of their camp, throw away their standards and arms. They are cut down in the gates, sticking fast in the narrows in their own crowding column. The men of the second legion cut down the enemy’s rear; the rest plunder the camp. Valerius Antias writes that above forty thousand of the enemy were slain that day; Cato himself—by no means a disparager of his own praises—says that many were slain, but adds no number. Three praiseworthy things he is thought to have done that day: one, that, leading his army round far from his ships and his camp, where they should have hope nowhere but in valor, he joined battle in the midst of the enemy; another, that he threw the cohorts against the enemy’s rear; the third, that, while all the rest poured out to pursue the enemy, he ordered the second legion, kept in array and order beneath its standards, to come up at full pace to the gate of the camp. Nothing thereafter was slackened toward victory. When, the signal for recall having been given, he had led his men back into camp laden with spoils, a few hours of the night being granted for rest, he led them out to plunder into the fields. They plundered the more widely because the enemy were scattered in flight; and this, no less than the adverse battle of the day before, drove the Emporitan Spaniards and their neighbors to surrender. Many too of other states, who had fled for refuge to Emporiae, gave themselves up. All these he addressed kindly and, having tended them with wine and food, sent home. At once thence he moved his camp, and wherever the column advanced envoys met him surrendering their states; and when he came to Tarraco, all Spain this side of the Ebro was now thoroughly subdued, and the captives—both Romans and of the allies and of the Latin name—who by various chances had been overtaken in Spain, were brought back by the barbarians as a gift to the consul. Then a rumor was spread abroad that the consul would lead his army into Turdetania, and it was even falsely reported that he had already set out against the remote mountaineers. At this idle rumor, without any author, seven forts of the state of the Bergistani revolted. These the consul, leading out his army, brought back into his power without a battle worth recording. Not long after, the same men, when the consul had returned to Tarraco, revolted again before he had advanced anywhere from there. Again they were subdued; but the same pardon was not granted to the conquered. All were sold under the crown into slavery, lest they should too often trouble the peace.

Meanwhile the praetor Publius Manlius, having taken over the veteran army from Quintus Minucius, whom he had succeeded, and added besides the likewise veteran army of Appius Claudius Nero from Farther Spain, sets out into Turdetania. Of all the Spaniards the Turdetani are held the least warlike; relying, however, on their numbers, they went to meet the Roman column. The cavalry, let loose upon them, at once threw their line into confusion. The infantry battle was scarcely a contest at all; the veteran soldiers, knowing the enemy and the war, made the fight no matter of doubt. Yet not even by that battle was the war brought to an end; the Turduli hire ten thousand Celtiberians for pay and were preparing to wage war with another people’s arms. The consul meanwhile, stung by the revolt of the Bergistani, and reckoning that the other states too would do the same as occasion served, takes away their arms from all the Spaniards this side of the Ebro. This they bore so ill that many laid violent hands upon themselves—a fierce race, who reckoned there was no life without arms. When this was reported to the consul, he ordered the senators of all the states to be summoned to him, and said: "It concerns you no less than us that you should not rebel, since indeed that has hitherto always been done to the greater harm of the Spaniards than to the labor of the Roman army. That this should not come to pass, I think can be guarded against in one way only: if it shall have been brought about that you cannot rebel. I wish to attain this by the gentlest road. Do you too help me in the matter with your counsel; no counsel shall I follow more gladly than that which you yourselves shall have brought." When they kept silence, he said that he gave them the space of a few days for deliberation. When, recalled at a second council too, they were still silent, in a single day, the walls of all being thrown down, he set out against those who did not yet obey; and as he came into each region, he received into surrender all the peoples who dwelt round about. Segestica alone, a weighty and wealthy state, he took with sheds and mantlets. He had the greater difficulty in subduing the enemy than those who had first come into Spain, because to those the Spaniards revolted out of weariness of the Carthaginians’ rule, whereas this man had, as it were, to reclaim them out of a liberty they had assumed back into servitude; and so he found everything in such commotion that some were in arms, others were being driven to revolt by siege, nor, had help not come in time, would they have held out longer. But in the consul there was such force of spirit and of genius that he himself attended to and managed all things, greatest and least, and not only planned and ordered what was to the purpose but for the most part carried it through in person; nor did he exercise his command over any one of them all more harshly and severely than over his own self; in thrift and watching and toil he vied with the meanest of the soldiers, nor had he anything of privilege in his army beyond the honor and the command.

A harder war in Turdetania the Celtiberians—called out for pay by the enemy, as was said before—were making for the praetor Publius Manlius. And so the consul, summoned thither by the praetor’s letter, led his legions. When he came there, the Celtiberians and the Turdetani kept their camps apart. With the Turdetani the Romans at once made light skirmishes, charging upon their outposts, and always came off victors from a contest however rashly begun. With the Celtiberians the consul orders the military tribunes to go to a parley and to offer them the choice of three terms: the first, if they were willing to cross over to the Romans and receive double the pay they had bargained for with the Turdetani; the second, if they would go home, the public faith being given that it should be no harm to them that they had joined the enemies of the Romans; the third, if they were utterly resolved on war, that they fix a day and a place where they should decide the matter with him by arms. A day for deliberation was asked by the Celtiberians. A council was held, the Turdetani mingled among them, with great uproar; the less on that account could anything be resolved. Although it was uncertain whether there was war or peace with the Celtiberians, the Romans nevertheless brought in their supplies no otherwise than in peace from the fields and forts of the enemy, often ten together entering their works, as though by a common compact of trade, under a private truce. When the consul could not lure the enemy out to battle, first he leads several light cohorts under the standards to plunder into the fields of an untouched region; then, hearing that all the Celtiberians’ packs and baggage had been left at Saguntia, he proceeds to lead his men thither to assault it. When they are stirred by no such thing, having paid the wage not to his own soldiers only but to the praetor’s as well, and leaving the whole army in the praetor’s camp, he himself with seven cohorts returned to the Ebro. With that so scanty a band he took several towns. There revolted to him the Sedetani, the Ausetani, the Suessetani. The Lacetani, a remote and woodland people, their inborn fierceness kept in arms—and besides the consciousness that, while the consul and the army were busied with the Turdulian war, they had laid the allies waste by sudden raids. And so, to assault their town, the consul leads not the Roman cohorts only but the young men, too, of the allies, who were deservedly hostile to them. They had a town long, but extending by no means so much in breadth. About four hundred paces from it he halted the standards. There, leaving a post of picked cohorts, he charged them not to move from that place before he himself had come to them; the rest of the forces he led round to the farther part of the city. The greatest in number of all his auxiliaries was that of the Suessetan youth; these he bids go up to assault the wall. When the Lacetani recognized their arms and standards, mindful how often they had ranged unpunished through their fields, how often they had routed and put them to flight with standards joined, the gate suddenly thrown open, they all burst out upon them. Scarcely could the Suessetani bear their shout, much less their charge. When the consul saw this come to pass, as he had reckoned it would, riding hard beneath the enemy’s wall he is carried off to the cohorts, and snatching them up—while all had poured out to pursue the Suessetani—where there was silence and solitude, he leads them into the city and seized everything before the Lacetani could get back. Soon he received in surrender the men themselves, who had nothing left but their arms. At once thence the victor leads to the fort of Bergium. That was chiefly a den of brigands, and from it raids used to be made into the pacified fields of that province. Thence there deserted to the consul the chief man of the Bergistani and began to clear himself and his countrymen: the commonwealth was not in their own hands; the brigands, once admitted, had made that fort wholly of their own power. The consul bade him return home, some plausible cause being feigned why he had been away: when he should perceive that the consul had come up under the walls and that the brigands were intent on guarding the ramparts, then he should remember to seize the citadel with the men of his faction. This was done as he had directed; and suddenly a double terror—here from the Romans climbing the walls, there from the citadel taken—encompassed the barbarians. Master of the place, the consul bade those who had held the citadel be free and keep their kinsmen and their own; the rest of the Bergistani he ordered the quaestor to sell; on the brigands he exacted punishment. The province pacified, he established great revenues from the iron and silver mines, by which, once set up, the province grew richer day by day. For these exploits in Spain the senators decreed a thanksgiving of three days.

In the same summer the other consul, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, in Gaul fought a successful pitched battle with a band of the Boii near the Litana forest; eight thousand Gauls are reported to have been slain; the rest, giving up the war, slipped away into their villages and fields. The consul kept his army for the rest of the summer about the Po, at Placentia and Cremona, and restored what had been thrown down in those towns by the war.

When such was the state of things in Italy and in Spain, in Greece the winter had been so passed by Titus Quinctius that—save for the Aetolians, to whom neither had rewards answering to their hope of victory fallen, nor could quiet long please them—all Greece together, enjoying the goods of peace and liberty, rejoiced exceedingly in its condition, and admired no more the valor of the Roman commander in war than, in victory, his temperance and justice and moderation. There is brought to him the decree of the Senate by which war had been resolved against Nabis the Lacedaemonian. On reading it, Quinctius proclaims an assembly at Corinth, with the embassies of all the allied states, for an appointed day. When to it the chief men had gathered in numbers from every side, so that not even the Aetolians were absent, he made use of such an oration as this: "The war against Philip the Romans and the Greeks waged not more with common spirit and counsel than each of us had his own causes of war. For Philip had violated the friendship of the Romans, now by aiding the Carthaginians, their enemy, now by assailing our allies here; and toward you he was such that, even if we forgot our own wrongs, your wrongs were a cause of war worthy enough for us. Today’s deliberation hangs wholly upon you. For I refer it to you, whether you wish to suffer Argos—seized by Nabis, as you yourselves know—to be under his sway, or judge it fair that a most noble and most ancient city, set in the midst of Greece, be reclaimed into liberty and be in the same condition as the other cities of the Peloponnese and of Greece. This deliberation, as you see, is wholly of a matter that pertains to you; the Romans it touches in nothing, save in so far as the servitude of one city does not suffer the glory of a liberated Greece to be full and entire. But if neither care for that city moves you, nor the example, nor the danger lest the contagion of that evil creep wider, we hold it fair and well. On this matter I consult you, meaning to abide by what the greater number shall vote."

After the speech of the Roman commander, the opinions of the others began to be reviewed. When the envoy of the Athenians, so far as he could, in rendering thanks had extolled the services of the Romans to Greece—"that, implored, they had brought aid against Philip, and unasked, of their own accord, were offering aid against the tyrant Nabis"—and had voiced indignation that services so great were nevertheless carped at by the talk of certain men who slandered what was to come, when they ought rather to confess their gratitude for things past, it was plain that the Aetolians were being attacked. And so Alexander, a chief man of the nation, inveighing first against the Athenians—once leaders and authors of liberty, now for the sake of their own flattery betraying the common cause—then complaining that the Achaeans, once Philip’s soldiers, deserters at the last when his fortune was sinking, had both recovered Corinth and were striving to hold Argos; that the Aetolians, the first enemies of Philip, ever allies of the Romans, who had bargained in the treaty that their cities and fields should be theirs when Philip was overcome, were being cheated of Echinus and Pharsalus—he charged the Romans with fraud, in that, holding out a vain title of liberty for show, they kept Chalcis and Demetrias with garrisons: they who, when Philip lingered to draw off his garrisons thence, had always been wont to cast it in his teeth that "never, so long as Demetrias and Chalcis and Corinth were held, would Greece be free"; and lastly that they were making Argos and Nabis the pretext for staying in Greece and keeping their army there. Let them carry their legions off to Italy; the Aetolians promised that Nabis would either, by terms and of his own will, withdraw his garrison from Argos, or be compelled by force and arms to be in the power of a consenting Greece.

This empty boasting first roused Aristaenus, the praetor of the Achaeans. "May Jupiter Best and Greatest," he said, "and Queen Juno, in whose keeping Argos is, never suffer that city to be set as a prize between the Lacedaemonian tyrant and the Aetolian brigands, in such a strait that it be more wretchedly recovered by you than it was taken by him. The sea set between does not protect us from those robbers, Titus Quinctius; what will become of us, if in the midst of the Peloponnese they make themselves a stronghold? They have only the tongue of the Greeks, as they have the shape of men; in manners and in rites they live more savage than any barbarians—nay, than monstrous beasts. And so we ask you, Romans, both to recover Argos from Nabis, and so to settle the affairs of Greece that you leave them sufficiently pacified from the brigandage of the Aetolians too." The Roman, when all on every side were railing at the Aetolians, said he would have answered them, had he not seen all so set against them that they needed to be calmed rather than provoked. Content, therefore, with the opinion that was held about the Romans and the Aetolians, he said that he reported what was resolved concerning the war with Nabis, unless he should restore Argos to the Achaeans; and, since all had decreed war, he urged that each state send auxiliaries according to its strength. To the Aetolians he even sent an envoy, more to lay bare their minds—which is what came to pass—than in any hope that aught could be obtained.

He ordered the military tribunes to fetch the army from Elatia. During the same days, to the envoys of Antiochus too, treating of an alliance, he replied that he had no opinion to give in the absence of the ten commissioners; they must go to Rome, to the Senate. He himself proceeds to lead to Argos the forces brought from Elatia; and near Cleonae the praetor Aristaenus met him with ten thousand Achaeans and a thousand horse, and not far thence, the armies joined, they pitched camp. On the next day they came down into the plain of the Argives and take a place for their camp about four miles from Argos. The commander of the Laconian garrison was Pythagoras, at once the tyrant’s son-in-law and his wife’s brother, who, at the approach of the Romans, strengthened with strong garrisons both citadels—for Argos has two—and the other places that were either advantageous or suspect; but amid these doings he could by no means hide the panic thrown upon him by the coming of the Romans; and to the terror from without was added domestic sedition besides. There was an Argive, Damocles, a youth of greater spirit than judgment, who at first, an oath being interposed, having conferred with suitable men about expelling the garrison, while he was eager to add strength to the conspiracy, was too incautious a judge of men’s faith. As he was conferring with his own party, a guardsman sent by the commander came to summon him; he perceived that the plot was betrayed, and exhorted the conspirators who were present rather to take up arms with him than to die dragged off. And so with a few he proceeds into the forum, crying out that whoever wished the commonwealth safe should follow him, the author and leader of liberty. He moved no one at all, because they saw nowhere any hope near at hand, much less a garrison strong enough. As he was thus shouting, the Lacedaemonians surrounded and killed him with his men. Then certain others too were seized; of these the more were slain, a few thrown into prison; many, the next night, let down by ropes over the wall, fled for refuge to the Romans. These assured him that, had the Roman army been at the gates, that movement would not have been without effect, and that, if the camp were moved nearer, the Argives would not keep quiet; and Quinctius sent light-armed foot and horse, who, about Cylarabis—that is a gymnasium less than three hundred paces from the city—joined battle with the Lacedaemonians sallying from the gate and, with no great contest, drove them into the city. And the Roman commander pitched his camp in that very place where the fight had been. Then for one day he kept on the watch, to see whether any new movement should arise; after he saw the state crushed by fear, he calls a council about the assaulting of Argos. The opinion of all the chief men of Greece, save Aristaenus, was the same: since there was no other cause of the war, the war should be begun there above all. To Quinctius this by no means pleased, and he heard Aristaenus, arguing against the consent of all, with manifest approval; and he himself added that, since the war had been undertaken on behalf of the Argives against the tyrant, what could be less fitting than, the enemy left aside, to assault Argos? He, for his part, would make for the head of the war, Lacedaemon and the tyrant. And, the council dismissed, he sent light cohorts to forage. What was ripe round about was reaped and carried in; what was green, lest the enemy should soon have it, was trodden down and spoiled. Then he moved his camp, and, Mount Parthenius crossed, past Tegea, on the third day he pitched camp at Caryae. There, before he entered the enemy’s territory, he awaited the auxiliaries of the allies. There came from Philip fifteen hundred Macedonians and four hundred Thessalian horse. And now it was not the auxiliaries, of which there was abundance, but the supplies levied on the neighboring cities that were delaying the Roman. Great naval forces too were assembling: already from Leucas Lucius Quinctius had come with forty ships, already eighteen Rhodian decked ships, already King Eumenes was about the Cyclades islands with ten decked ships, thirty pinnaces, and other vessels of smaller build mixed in. Of the Lacedaemonians themselves, too, very many exiles, driven out by the tyrants’ wrong, gathered in the Roman camp in hope of recovering their country. There were, moreover, many—now for several generations, since the tyrants held Lacedaemon—driven out, some by one, some by another. The chief of the exiles was Agesipolis, to whom by the right of his line the kingship at Lacedaemon belonged, driven out as an infant by the tyrant Lycurgus after the death of Cleomenes, who was the first tyrant at Lacedaemon.

Though so great a war beset the tyrant by land and sea, and there was almost no hope for one who truly weighed his own strength and the enemy’s, he nevertheless did not give up the war, but called out from Crete a thousand chosen men of their youth—he had a thousand already—and kept in arms three thousand mercenary soldiers and ten thousand of his own people, together with the fortress-folk of the countryside, and fortified the city with ditch and rampart; and, lest any inward movement should arise, he held men’s minds by fear and the harshness of punishments, since he could not hope that they would wish the tyrant safe. Having certain of the citizens under suspicion, all his forces being led out into the plain—they themselves call it the Dromos—and arms laid aside, he orders the Lacedaemonians to be summoned to an assembly, and set armed guards about their assembly; and, with a brief preface why, in such a time, he must be forgiven for fearing and guarding against everything, and that it concerned themselves too that, if the present state of things made any men suspect, these should rather be hindered from being able to attempt anything than punished while attempting it—therefore he would keep certain men in custody until the storm that threatened should pass over; the enemy once repulsed—from whom, if only domestic treason were sufficiently guarded against, there was the less danger—he would release them at once: under cover of this he ordered the names of about eighty leading men of the youth to be called, and, as each answered to his name, handed him into custody; the next night they were all killed. Then certain of the Helots—these are from of old the fortress-folk, a rustic race—charged with having wished to desert, were driven through all the villages under the lash and put to death. By this terror the spirits of the multitude were struck dumb from every attempt at new designs. He kept his forces within the fortifications, reckoning himself no match should he wish to fight in line, and fearing to leave the city with the minds of all so wavering and uncertain.

Quinctius, all things now sufficiently ready, having set out from his standing camp, on the second day reached Sellasia above the river Oenus, in which place Antigonus, king of the Macedonians, was said to have fought a pitched battle with Cleomenes, the tyrant of the Lacedaemonians. Thence, when he had heard that the descent was by a hard and narrow road, men being sent ahead by a short circuit through the mountains to make the way passable, he reached the river Eurotas—flowing close beneath the very walls—by a track broad enough and open. There, as the Romans were measuring out their camp and Quinctius himself had gone forward with the cavalry and the light-armed, the tyrant’s auxiliaries fell upon them and threw into terror and tumult men who expected nothing of the kind, because no one had met them in all the march and they had passed as through a pacified country. For some while there was alarm—the foot calling on the horse, the horse on the foot, since each had least trust in himself; at last the standards of the legions came up, and, when the cohorts of the column’s front had been led into the fight, those who just now had been a terror were driven in disorder into the city. The Romans, when they had drawn back so far from the wall as to be beyond the cast of a missile, stood a little while in line of battle; after none of the enemy came out against them, they returned into camp. On the next day Quinctius proceeds to lead his forces, drawn up, along the river past the city, close under the very roots of Mount Menelaus; the legionary cohorts went first, the light-armed and the cavalry brought up the rear. Nabis kept within the wall, drawn up and ready beneath their standards, the mercenary soldiers in whom was all his trust, that he might attack the enemy from the rear. After the rearmost of the column had passed by, then from the town, with the same tumult as the day before when they had sallied, they burst out in several places at once. Appius Claudius was bringing up the rear; who, the spirits of his men made ready against what was to come, so that it should not befall unforeseen, at once wheeled the standards about and turned the whole column round upon the enemy. And so, as though straight lines had clashed, there was a regular battle for a while; at last Nabis’s soldiers inclined to flight—which would have been less deadly and panic-stricken, had not the Achaeans, knowing the ground, pressed upon them. They both made a huge slaughter and stripped of their arms most of those scattered everywhere in flight. Quinctius pitched camp near Amyclae; whence, when he had thoroughly laid waste all the places of crowded and pleasant country lying about the city, since now none of the enemy came out of the gate, he moved his camp to the river Eurotas. Thence he lays waste the valley lying beneath Taygetus and the fields reaching to the sea.

About the same time Lucius Quinctius received the towns of the maritime coast, partly by their own will, partly through fear or by force. Then, informed that Gytheum—the town that was the storehouse of all the Lacedaemonians’ maritime affairs—was not far from the sea where the Roman camp lay, he resolved to assail it with all his forces. It was at that time a strong city, furnished both with a multitude of citizens and residents and with all warlike apparatus. In good time, as Quinctius was assailing no easy task, King Eumenes and the fleet of the Rhodians came up. A vast multitude of naval allies, drawn together from three fleets, within a few days completed all the works that had to be made for the assault of a city fortified by land and sea. Now, the sheds brought up, the wall was being undermined; now it was being battered by rams. And so one tower, by repeated strokes, was overthrown, and what of the wall was round about laid low by its fall; and the Romans tried to burst in both from the harbor, where the approach was more level—that they might draw the enemy off from the more open place—and at the same time through the way laid open by the ruin. And it lacked little that they did not penetrate where they had aimed; but the hope held out of the city’s surrender slowed their charge—and then presently that same hope was thrown into confusion. Dexagoridas and Gorgopas commanded the city with equal authority. Dexagoridas had sent to the Roman legate that he would deliver up the city; and when the time and manner for it had been agreed, the betrayer is killed by Gorgopas, and the city was defended the more intently by the one man. And the assault would have become harder, had not Titus Quinctius come up with four thousand picked soldiers. He, when he had shown a line of battle drawn up on the brow of a hill not far distant from the city, and on the other side Lucius Quinctius pressed on from his works by land and sea, then indeed despair compelled Gorgopas too to take that counsel which in the other man he had avenged with death; and, having bargained that he be allowed to lead away from there the soldiers whom he kept for the garrison, he delivered the city to Quinctius. Before Gytheum was surrendered, Pythagoras, left in command at Argos, the guard of the city handed over to Timocrates of Pellene, came with a thousand mercenary soldiers and two thousand Argives to Lacedaemon, to Nabis.

Nabis, as he had been thoroughly frightened at the first coming of the Roman fleet and the surrender of the towns of the maritime coast, so, when he had settled into a small hope from Gytheum being held by his own men, after he heard that this too had been delivered to the Romans, and that—when from the land there was no hope, all around being hostile—he was cut off from the whole sea as well, reckoning that he must yield to fortune, first sent a herald into the camp to find out whether they would suffer envoys to be sent to him. This obtained, Pythagoras came to the commander with no other charge than that the tyrant be allowed to confer with the commander. A council being called, when all judged that the parley should be granted, a day and a place are fixed. When they had come, with moderate forces following, to the hillocks of the middle ground, the cohorts being left there on guard, in sight of both sides, Nabis with picked guards of his person, Quinctius with his brother and King Eumenes and Sosilas the Rhodian and Aristaenus the praetor of the Achaeans and a few military tribunes came down. There, leave being given whether he preferred to speak first or to hear, the tyrant thus began: "If I myself could of my own self devise, Titus Quinctius, and you who are present, a cause why you should either have declared or should be making war on me, I should have awaited in silence the issue of my fortune; but as it is, I could not so command my spirit as not to wish to know, before I perished, why I was to perish. And, by Hercules, if you were such as the Carthaginians are by report—among whom nothing of the faith of alliance is held sacred—I should not wonder that with me too you took less care what you did; but now, when I look upon you, I see that you are Romans, who hold most sacred the treaties of things divine and, of things human, the faith of allies; when I look back upon myself, I trust I am one who has, both publicly, like the rest of the Lacedaemonians, a most ancient treaty with you, and in my own name a private friendship and alliance, lately renewed in the war with Philip. But, you say, I have violated and overthrown it, in that I hold the state of the Argives. How shall I defend this—by the fact, or by the time? The fact affords me a twofold defense; for I received that city at their own calling and surrender—I did not seize it—and I received it when it was of Philip’s party, not in your alliance. The time, moreover, frees me of it, because, when I already held Argos, the alliance was made with you, and you bargained that I should send you auxiliaries for the war, not that I should withdraw the garrison from Argos. Nay, by Hercules, in that controversy which is about Argos I am the superior, both by the equity of the matter—because I received not your city but the enemy’s, because one willing, not one forced by violence—and by your own confession, because in the terms of the alliance you left Argos to me. But the name of tyrant and my deeds press hard on me, because I call slaves to liberty, because I settle the needy plebs upon lands. As to this name, I can answer that I, whatever I am, am the same that I was when you yourself, Titus Quinctius, made the alliance with me. Then, I remember, I was called king by you; now I see myself called tyrant. And so, if I had changed the name of my power, it is I who must render account of my inconstancy; since it is you who change it, the account of yours is yours to give. As to the multitude increased by freed slaves and the land divided among the needy, I can indeed defend myself in this too by the right of the time: I had already done these things, such as they are, when you made the alliance with me and received auxiliaries in the war against Philip; but had I done them only now, I do not say, ‘how should I have injured you thereby or violated your friendship?’—but this: that I did it after the custom and institution of our ancestors. Do not measure by your own laws and institutions the things that are done at Lacedaemon. There is no need to compare them item by item. You choose your horseman by his property rating, your footman by the rating, and you wish a few to excel in wealth and the plebs to be subject to them; our lawgiver did not wish the commonwealth to be in the hand of a few, whom you call the Senate, nor one order or another to excel in the state, but believed that, through the equalizing of fortune and of station, there would be many to bear arms for their country. I confess that I have spoken at more length than befits the brevity proper to my country’s speech; and it could have been briefly concluded: that I have done nothing, since I established friendship with you, for which you should repent of it."

To this the Roman commander: "No friendship and alliance was made by us with you, but with Pelops, the just and lawful king of the Lacedaemonians, whose right the tyrants too, who afterward held power at Lacedaemon by force—because wars, now Punic, now Gallic, now others out of others, had occupied us—usurped, just as you too have done in this Macedonian war. For what could less befit us, who were waging war against Philip for the liberty of Greece, than to establish friendship with a tyrant?—and with a tyrant as savage as ever was the most savage and most violent toward his own. For us, indeed, even had you neither taken Argos by fraud nor held it, since we were freeing all Greece, Lacedaemon too had to be reclaimed into its ancient liberty and into its own laws—of which you just now made mention, as though a rival of Lycurgus. Shall it be our care that the garrisons of Philip be withdrawn from Iasus and Bargyliae, and shall we leave Argos and Lacedaemon, two most famous cities, once the lights of Greece, beneath your feet, to deface for us, in their servitude, the title of a liberated Greece? But the Argives sided with Philip. We remit this to you—be not angry on our behalf. We have it sufficiently ascertained that the fault in that matter was of two, or at most three, men, not of the state—as, by Hercules, in the summoning and receiving of you and your garrison into the citadel, nothing was done by public counsel. The Thessalians and Phocians and Locrians, by the consent of all, we know were of Philip’s party; yet we freed them with the rest of Greece. What, pray, do you suppose we shall do in the case of the Argives, who are guiltless of the public counsel? You said that the charges of slaves called to liberty and of land divided among needy men were cast at you—charges indeed not in themselves trifling; but what are those beside the crimes which by you and yours are daily committed, one heaped upon another? Show me a free assembly, either at Argos or at Lacedaemon, if it please you to hear the true charges of a most ungoverned despotism. To pass over all else as older—what slaughter at Argos did that Pythagoras, your son-in-law, make almost before my eyes? what did you yourself make, when I was now almost on the borders of the Lacedaemonians? Come now, those whom you proclaimed, when seized in the assembly with all your citizens hearing, that you would keep in custody—order them brought out in their chains; let their wretched parents, who falsely mourn them, know that they live. But granting that these things are now so, what is that to you, Romans? Will you say this to those who are freeing Greece? to those who, that they might free her, crossed the sea, and waged war by land and sea? Yet you, you say, and your friendship and alliance, I have not in particular violated. How often do you wish me to prove that you have done it? But I will not dwell on the many; I will embrace the sum. By what things, then, is friendship violated? Surely by these two especially: if you hold my allies for enemies, if you join yourself with my enemies. Both have been done by you; for Messene, received into our friendship by one and the same right of treaty as Lacedaemon, you—an ally yourself—took by force and arms, a city allied to us; and with Philip, our enemy, you bargained not alliance only but—if the gods please—even a marriage-tie, through Philocles his prefect; and, waging war against us, you made the sea about Malea infested with pirate ships, and took and killed well-nigh more Roman citizens than Philip did, and the Macedonian coast was safer than the promontory of Malea for the ships carrying supplies to our armies. Therefore spare, if you please, to vaunt the faith and rights of alliance, and, dropping the speech for the populace, speak as a tyrant and an enemy." Upon this Aristaenus now warned Nabis, now even entreated him, while it was allowed, while there was opportunity, to take thought for himself and his fortunes; then he began to recount by name the tyrants of the neighboring states who, having laid down their power and restored liberty, had passed an old age among their own people not only safe but even honored. These things being said and heard in turn, night almost broke off the parley. On the next day Nabis said that he would withdraw from Argos and lead off the garrison, since so it pleased the Romans, and would restore the captives and the deserters; if they demanded anything else, he asked that they put it forth in writing, that he might deliberate with his friends. So both time was given to the tyrant for deliberation, and Quinctius held a council, the chief men of the allies too being admitted. The opinion of the greatest part was that the war must be persisted in and the tyrant removed: never otherwise would the liberty of Greece be safe; it had been far better not to have stirred war against him than to give up the stirring of it; and that he himself, his despotism as it were approved, would be the stronger, having taken the Roman people as the author of his unjust rule, and would by his example incite many in other states to lie in wait against the liberty of their fellow-citizens. The commander’s own mind was more inclined to peace. For he saw that, the enemy driven within the walls, nothing remained but a siege, and that it would be a long one; for they would be assaulting not Gytheum—which yet had been itself surrendered, not stormed—but Lacedaemon, a city most strong in men and arms. The one hope had been if some dissension and sedition could be stirred up among them at the bringing up of the army; but when they saw the standards almost carried into the gates, no one had stirred. He added, too, that Villius, the legate returning thence, reported the peace with Antiochus untrustworthy, and that he had crossed into Europe with land and naval forces much greater than before. If a siege of Lacedaemon should occupy the army, with what other forces would they wage war against a king so strong and powerful? These things he said openly; that other care lay hidden beneath—lest a new consul should draw Greece as his province, and the victory of a war begun should have to be handed over to a successor. When by arguing against them he moved the allies not at all, by pretending to come over to their opinion he brought them all to assent to his own counsel. "May it turn out well," he said; "let us besiege Lacedaemon, since so it pleases; only let this not deceive you: since the assault of cities is a thing as slow as you yourselves know, and often brings weariness to the besiegers sooner than to the besieged, you ought even now so to set this before your minds—that we must winter about the walls of Lacedaemon. If this delay had only toil and danger, so that you were prepared in mind and body to endure them, I should exhort you; but as it is, it needs great expense besides—in the works, in the engines and artillery with which so great a city must be assaulted, in the supplies to be made ready for you and for us against the winter. Therefore, that you may not either suddenly take fright or shamefully abandon the thing begun, I judge that we must first write to your states and explore what spirit, what strength, each has. Of auxiliaries I have enough and to spare; but the more we are, the more things we shall need. The enemy’s country has now nothing but the bare ground; to this winter will be added, hard for bringing things from afar." This speech first turned the minds of all to looking back on each man’s own domestic ills—the sloth, the envy, and the disparagement of those who stayed at home against those who served; liberty hard to bring to consent; the public poverty; the niggardliness of contributing from private means. And so, their wishes suddenly changed, they left it to the commander to do what he should believe to be for the interest of the Roman people and the allies. Then Quinctius, only the legates and military tribunes being admitted, drew up these terms on which peace should be made with the tyrant: that there be a truce of six months for Nabis and the Romans and King Eumenes and the Rhodians; that Titus Quinctius and Nabis send envoys at once to Rome, that the peace might be confirmed by the authority of the Senate; that the day on which the written terms of peace should be delivered to Nabis be the beginning of the truce; that within ten days from that day all garrisons be withdrawn from Argos and the other towns that were in the Argive territory, and these be handed over empty and free to the Romans; that no slave—royal or public or private—be carried off thence, and if any had been carried off before, they be duly restored to their owners; that he restore the ships which he had taken from the maritime states, and that he himself keep no ship except two pinnaces driven by not more than sixteen oars; that he restore the deserters and captives to all the states of the allies of the Roman people, and to the Messenians all that should be found and that the owners should recognize; that to the Lacedaemonian exiles too he restore their children and wives—those of them who wished to follow their husbands, but that no wife be a companion of an exile against her will; that, of Nabis’s mercenary soldiers, to those who had gone over either to their own states or to the Romans all their goods be duly restored; that he have no city in the island of Crete, and the cities he had held he restore to the Romans; that he establish no alliance with any of the Cretans or with any other, nor wage war; that from all the states—both those he had himself restored and those that had handed over themselves and their possessions into the faith and sway of the Roman people—he withdraw all garrisons, and that he himself and his men keep away from them; that he build no town nor fort in his own or another’s territory; that, as security these things should be so, he give five hostages, such as should please the Roman commander, his own son among them, and a hundred talents of silver in hand and fifty talents in each single year for eight years. These, written out, the camp being moved nearer the city, are sent to Lacedaemon. And indeed none of them pleased the tyrant well enough, except that, beyond his hope, no mention had been made of bringing back the exiles; but most of all that thing offended him, that both his ships and the maritime states had been taken away. For the sea had been of great profit to him, since he held all the coast from Malea infested with pirate ships; and besides he had the youth of those states for his reserves, a kind of soldier by far the best. Although he himself had turned these terms over in secret with his friends, yet the report of all was abroad among the commons—the temperaments of the royal henchmen being as worthless for keeping secrets as for any other faith. They carped, not so much all of them at the whole, as each at the things that touched himself in particular. Those who held the wives of the exiles in marriage, or possessed something of their goods, were indignant, as men about to lose, not to restore. To the slaves freed by the tyrant there hovered before their eyes a liberty not only about to be void, but a servitude far fouler than it had been before, as they returned into the power of their angered masters. The mercenary soldiers took it ill both that the pay of their service would fall away in peace, and that they saw no return for themselves into states hostile no less to the henchmen than to the tyrants. These things, sowing them at first among themselves in their gatherings, they murmured; then suddenly they ran to arms. When the tyrant perceived the multitude sufficiently irritated of itself by this tumult, he ordered an assembly to be called. There, when he had set forth what was commanded by the Romans, and had falsely added certain things heavier and more unworthy, and at each point there was an outcry now from the whole, now from parts of the assembly, he asked what they would have him answer to these things, or what do. Almost with one voice all bade that no answer be given and that war be waged; and, each for himself, as a multitude is wont, bidding him be of good cheer and hope well, they said that fortune helps the brave. Roused by these voices, the tyrant proclaims that Antiochus and the Aetolians would aid him, and that he had forces enough and to spare to sustain a siege. The mention of peace had fallen out of all their minds, and they run to their posts, meaning to be quiet no longer. The sally of a few who provoked the fight, and javelins thrown, at once took from the Romans too all doubt that war must be waged. After that, light skirmishes for the first four days were joined without any sufficiently sure result; on the fifth day, in almost a regular battle, the Lacedaemonians were driven into the town so panic-stricken that some Roman soldiers, cutting down the backs of the fleeing, entered the city through the gaps in the walls, as they then were. And then indeed Quinctius—the enemy’s sallies sufficiently checked by that terror—reckoning that nothing remained but the assault of the city itself, having sent men to summon all the naval allies from Gytheum, meanwhile himself with the military tribunes rides round the walls to view the site of the city. Sparta had once been without a wall; the tyrants had lately set a wall against the open and level places; the higher places, hard of approach, they guarded with posts of armed men set as a fortification. When he had inspected everything sufficiently, judging that it must be assaulted with a ring of men, he encircled the city with all his forces—and they were, of Romans and allies, foot and horse together, land and naval forces together, about fifty thousand men. Some carried ladders, some fire, some other things by which they might not only assault but also terrify. They were ordered, a shout being raised, to come up from every side at once, so that the Lacedaemonians, in dread of all at once, might not know where first to meet them or whither to bring aid. What there was of strength in the army he divided into three; one part from the Phoebeum, another from the Dictynneum, a third from the place they call Heptagoniae—all these are open places without a wall—he orders to make the attack. When so great a terror had encompassed the city on every side, at first the tyrant, stirred both by the sudden shouts and by alarmed messengers, ran himself, or sent others, to whatever place was most hard pressed; then, dread being poured round on every side, he so stiffened that he could neither say what was to the purpose nor hear, and was not only destitute of counsel but scarcely in possession of his mind. The Lacedaemonians at first withstood the Romans in the narrows, and three lines at one time fought in different places; then, as the contest grew, it was by no means an equal battle. For the Lacedaemonians fought with missiles, from which the Roman soldier defended himself very easily, both by the size of his shield and because the blows were some empty, others quite light. For, by reason of the narrowness of the place and the crowded throng, they had not room to hurl their weapons with the run forward by which they are most driven home, nor even to make the effort from a free and steady footing. And so the weapons thrown from in front stuck in no bodies, in rare cases in the shields; some were wounded by those standing round from the higher places; soon, when they had advanced, even from the rooftops not weapons only but tiles too struck them unawares. Then, their shields raised above their heads and so joined together that there was no room either for blind blows or even for inserting a weapon from close by, a testudo being formed, they came up. And the first narrows for a little while held them, choked with their own and the enemy’s throng; after, pressing the enemy little by little, they advanced into a more open street of the city, their force and charge could no longer be withstood. When the Lacedaemonians had turned their backs and in headlong flight sought the higher places, Nabis indeed, trembling as if the city were taken, looked about by what way he himself might escape; but Pythagoras, while in all else he performed the spirit and the duty of a leader, then above all was the one cause that the city was not taken; for he ordered the buildings nearest the wall to be set on fire. When these had blazed up in a moment of time—the fire being helped by those who at other times are wont to bring aid to put it out—the roofs fell upon the Romans, and not fragments of tiles only but even charred beams reached the armed men, and the flame spread wide, and the smoke made a terror even greater than the danger. And so both those of the Romans who were outside the city, then most of all making their charge, drew back from the wall, and those who had already entered, lest they be cut off from their own by the fire rising in their rear, retired; and Quinctius, after he saw what the matter was, ordered the recall to be sounded. So, the city now all but taken, recalled, they returned into camp.

Quinctius, having gained more hope from the enemy’s fear than from the matter itself, through the three following days kept terrifying them, now by provoking them with attacks, now by fencing off certain points with works, that there might be no way out for flight. Driven by these threats, the tyrant again sent Pythagoras as his spokesman; whom Quinctius at first spurned and ordered to leave the camp, then, as he prayed in suppliant wise and fell at his knees, at last heard. His first speech was one that left all to the discretion of the Romans; then, when that, as it were empty and without effect, availed nothing, the matter was brought to this: that on those terms which had been delivered in writing a few days before a truce should be made, and the money and the hostages were received.

While the tyrant was being besieged, the Argives, with messengers one upon another bringing word that Lacedaemon was now all but taken, themselves too uplifted—and at the same time, because Pythagoras with the strongest part of the garrison had gone out, despising the fewness of those who were in the citadel—under the lead of one Archippus drove out the garrison; Timocrates of Pellene, because he had governed with clemency, they let go alive, his faith being pledged. Upon this rejoicing Quinctius came up, peace having been granted to the tyrant and Eumenes and the Rhodians and his brother Lucius Quinctius dismissed from Lacedaemon to the fleet. The joyful state proclaimed, for the coming of the Roman army and its commander, the most frequented of festal days and the famous spectacle of the Nemea—omitted on its fixed day because of the ills of war—and set the commander himself over the games. There were many things to heap up their gladness: the citizens had been brought back from Lacedaemon whom of late Pythagoras, and before him Nabis, had carried off; those had returned who, after the conspiracy was discovered by Pythagoras and the slaughter already begun, had escaped; they beheld, after a long interval, their liberty, and the Romans the authors of their liberty, to whom they themselves had been the cause of warring with the tyrant. On the very day of the Nemea, too, the liberty of the Argives was attested by the voice of the herald. As much joy as the restoration of Argos brought to the Achaeans in the common council of Achaia, so much did Lacedaemon, left in servitude, and the tyrant clinging to their side, afford them a gladness not unmixed; the Aetolians, indeed, tore at the matter in all their councils: with Philip there had been no ceasing from war until he withdrew from all the cities of Greece; to the tyrant Lacedaemon had been left; the lawful king, who had been in the Roman camp, and the other most noble citizens would live in exile; the Roman people had been made the henchman of Nabis’s despotism. Quinctius led his forces back from Argos to Elatia, whence he had set out for the Spartan war.

There are those who relate that the tyrant did not wage the war setting out from the town, but with a camp pitched against the Roman camp; and that he long delayed, because he was awaiting the auxiliaries of the Aetolians, and was at last forced to fight in line by a charge made by the Romans upon his foragers; that, conquered in that battle and stripped of his camp, he sought peace, fourteen thousand of his soldiers having fallen, more than four thousand being taken.

About the same time letters were brought both from Titus Quinctius concerning the things done at Lacedaemon, and from the consul Marcus Porcius out of Spain. In the name of each a thanksgiving of three days apiece was decreed by the Senate. The consul Lucius Valerius, when, after the rout of the Boii about the Litana forest, he had had a quiet province, returned to Rome for the sake of the elections and created as consuls Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus—for the second time—and Tiberius Sempronius Longus. The fathers of these had been consuls in the first year of the second Punic war. Then the praetorian elections were held; there were created Publius Cornelius Scipio and two Gnaeus Cornelii, Merenda and Blasio, and Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus and Sextus Digitius and Titus Iuventius Thalna. The elections finished, the consul returned to his province.

A new claim of right was that year attempted by the Ferentinates: that Latins who had given in their names for a Roman colony should be Roman citizens. The colonists enrolled for Puteoli and Salernum and Buxentum, who had given in their names, when on that account they bore themselves as Roman citizens, the Senate judged not to be Roman citizens.

At the beginning of the year in which Publius Scipio Africanus—for the second time—and Tiberius Sempronius Longus were consuls, the envoys of the tyrant Nabis came to Rome. To them the Senate was given audience outside the city, in the temple of Apollo. They asked, and obtained, that the peace which had been agreed with Titus Quinctius be ratified.

When the matter of the provinces was brought up, the Senate in full numbers was inclining to this opinion: that, since in Spain and Macedonia the war was finished, Italy should be the province of both consuls. Scipio judged that one consul was enough for Italy, and that Macedonia must be decreed to the other: a grievous war was threatening from Antiochus; he had already of his own accord crossed into Europe; what then did they suppose he would do, when on this side the Aetolians, enemies past doubt, were calling him to war, and on that side Hannibal, a commander famed for Roman disasters, was goading him on? While there was dispute about the consuls’ provinces, the praetors drew lots: to Gnaeus Domitius fell the city jurisdiction, to Titus Iuventius the foreign, to Publius Cornelius Farther Spain, to Sextus Digitius the Hither, to the two Gnaeus Cornelii—to Blasio Sicily, to Merenda Sardinia. It was not resolved to transport a new army into Macedonia, but that the one which was there be led back into Italy by Quinctius and disbanded; likewise that the army which was with Marcus Porcius Cato in Spain be disbanded; that Italy be the province of both consuls, and that they enroll two city legions, so that, the armies being disbanded which the Senate had voted, there should be in all eight Roman legions.

A sacred spring had been performed the year before, in the consulship of Marcus Porcius and Lucius Valerius. When Publius Licinius the pontiff reported that it had not been rightly performed—first to the college, then, on the authority of the college, to the senators—they resolved that it must be performed afresh at the discretion of the pontiffs, and that the Great Games, which had been vowed along with it, must be held at as great a cost as was customary; and that the sacred spring should be reckoned of the cattle that had been born between the Kalends of March and the day before the Kalends of May, in the consulship of Publius Cornelius and Tiberius Sempronius.

Then the censorial elections were held. There were created as censors Sextus Aelius Paetus and Gaius Cornelius Cethegus. As chief of the Senate they chose the consul Publius Scipio, whom the earlier censors too had chosen. Three senators in all they passed over, none of whom had held a curule office; and they won great favor besides with that order, because at the Roman games they ordered the curule aediles to set apart the senatorial seats from the people—for before this they had watched intermingled. From a very few of the knights, too, the horses were taken away, but no order was dealt with harshly. The Hall of Liberty and the Public Villa were by the same men restored and enlarged.

The sacred spring, and the votive Roman games which Servius Sulpicius Galba the consul had vowed, were performed. When men’s minds were taken up with the spectacle of them, Quintus Pleminius—who, on account of his many crimes against gods and men committed at Locri, had been cast into prison—had procured men to set fires by night in several places of the city at once, that, the state being thrown into confusion by the nocturnal tumult, the prison might be broken open. That design, made manifest by the information of accomplices, was reported to the Senate. Pleminius was sent down into the lower prison and put to death.

Colonies of Roman citizens were that year founded at Puteoli, Volturnum, and Liternum, three hundred men to each. Likewise colonies of Roman citizens were founded at Salernum and Buxentum. Those who founded them were the commissioners Tiberius Sempronius Longus—who was then consul—Marcus Servilius, and Quintus Minucius Thermus. The land was divided that had been the Campanians’. Likewise at Sipontum, into land that had been the Arpini’s, a colony of Roman citizens was founded by other commissioners, Decimus Iunius Brutus, Marcus Baebius Tamphilus, and Marcus Helvius. Likewise at Tempsa and Croton colonies of Roman citizens were founded. The Tempsan land had been taken from the Bruttii; the Bruttii had driven out the Greeks; Croton the Greeks held. The commissioners Gnaeus Octavius, Lucius Aemilius Paulus, and Gaius Laetorius founded Croton; Tempsa, Lucius Cornelius Merula and Quintus and Gaius Salonius founded.

Prodigies too there were that year, some seen at Rome, some reported. In the Forum and the Comitium and the Capitol drops of blood were seen; and several times the earth rained, and the head of Vulcan blazed. It was reported that milk had flowed in the river Nar; that freeborn boys had been born at Ariminum without eyes and nose, and in the Picene country one born having neither feet nor hands. These prodigies were expiated by decree of the pontiffs. And a nine-day sacrifice was performed, because the people of Hadria had reported that it had rained stones in their territory.

In Gaul Lucius Valerius Flaccus the proconsul, about Mediolanium, fought a pitched battle with the Insubrian Gauls and the Boii, who under the lead of Dorulatus had crossed the Po to rouse the Insubres. Ten thousand of the enemy were slain. During those days his colleague Marcus Porcius Cato triumphed from Spain. He carried in that triumph of unwrought silver twenty-five thousand pounds, of bigati a hundred and twenty-three thousand, of Oscan five hundred and forty, of gold one thousand four hundred pounds. To the soldiers from the spoil he distributed two hundred and seventy asses to each, threefold to a horseman.

The consul Tiberius Sempronius, having set out for his province, led his legions first into the territory of the Boii. Boiorix, then their chieftain, with his two brothers, the whole nation roused to rebel, pitched his camp in open ground, so that it was plain they would fight, if the enemy entered their borders. The consul, when he perceived how great the enemy’s forces and how great their confidence, sends a messenger to his colleague to hasten his coming, if it seemed good to him: he himself, by holding back, would draw out the matter until his arrival. The same cause that made the consul delay made the Gauls hasten the matter—besides that the delay was giving the enemy heart—namely, to finish it before the forces of the consuls should be joined. Yet for two days they did nothing but stand ready to fight, if any should come out against them; on the third they came up to the rampart and assailed the camp at once on every side. The consul ordered the soldiers at once to take up arms; then he held them, armed, a little while, both to increase the enemy’s stolid confidence and to dispose the forces by which each should sally from the several gates. Two legions were ordered to carry their standards out by the two principal gates. But at the very issue the Gauls so thickly stood in the way that they closed the road. Long was the fight in the narrows; nor was the matter waged by right hands and swords more than by shields and the very bodies that, straining, pressed—the Romans, to carry their standards forth; the Gauls, either themselves to penetrate into the camp or to keep the Romans from going out. Nor could the lines be moved to this side or that before Quintus Victorius, centurion of the first rank, and Gaius Atinius, a military tribune—the latter of the fourth, the former of the second legion—a thing often tried in hard battles, snatched the standards from the standard-bearers and hurled them among the enemy. While they strive earnestly to recover the standard, the men of the second were the first to thrust themselves out of the gate. Now these were fighting outside the rampart, the fourth legion sticking in the gate, when another tumult arose from the rear part of the camp. Into the quaestorian gate the Gauls had burst, and had killed, as they resisted the more stubbornly, the quaestor Lucius Postumius—whose surname was Tympanus—and Marcus Atinius and Publius Sempronius, prefects of the allies, and about two hundred soldiers. The camp on that side had been taken, until an extraordinary cohort, sent by the consul to guard the quaestorian gate, both killed part of those who were within the rampart, and drove part out of the camp, and withstood those bursting in. About the same time the fourth legion too, with two extraordinary cohorts, burst out of the gate. So there were at once three battles round the camp in places apart, and the discordant shouts turned the minds of the fighters from the present contest to the uncertain fortunes of their own men. Until midday the fight went on with equal strength and nearly equal hope. When toil and heat had forced the soft and flabby bodies of the Gauls—least able to endure thirst—to withdraw from the fight, the Romans made a charge upon the few who held out, and, routing them, drove them into the camp. Then the signal for recall was given by the consul; at which the greater part drew back, but part, in eagerness for the contest and in hope of mastering the enemy’s camp, held on at the rampart. Their fewness despised, the Gauls all burst out of the camp; the Romans, thence routed—they who had refused the consul’s order—through their own panic and terror make for the camp. So on this side and that there was now flight, now victory, varying; yet of the Gauls about eleven thousand, of the Romans five thousand, were slain. The Gauls withdrew into the inmost of their borders; the consul led his legions to Placentia. Some write that Scipio, his army joined with his colleague’s, went ravaging through the lands of the Boii and Ligurians as far as the forests and marshes suffered him to advance; others, that, no memorable thing being done, he returned to Rome for the sake of the elections.

In this same year Titus Quinctius, at Elatia—whither he had led his forces back into winter quarters—spent the whole time of the winter in giving judgment and in undoing those things which, by the license either of Philip himself or of his prefects, had been done in the states, when, by increasing the power of the men of their own faction, they had pressed down the right and liberty of others. At the beginning of spring he came to Corinth, an assembly having been proclaimed. There he addressed the embassies of all the states, gathered round in the manner of an assembly, beginning first from the friendship entered into by the Romans with the nation of the Greeks, and from the commanders who had been in Macedonia before him, and from his own exploits. All was heard with great approval, except when it came to the mention of Nabis; it seemed by no means fitting for one freeing Greece to have left a tyrant—not only grievous to his own country but to be feared by all the states around—clinging to the vitals of a most noble state. Nor was Quinctius ignorant of this temper of their minds: if it could have been done without the destruction of Lacedaemon, he confessed, the mention of peace with the tyrant ought not to have been admitted to their ears; but now, since he could not be crushed otherwise than by the ruin of a most weighty state, it had seemed better to leave the tyrant weakened, and almost stripped of all his strength for harming anyone, than to suffer the state to die away under remedies more violent than it could endure, perishing in the very vindication of its liberty. To the recital of things past he added that it was in his mind to set out for Italy and to carry off the whole army; within ten days they should hear that the garrisons of Demetrias and Chalcis were withdrawn, and Acrocorinth he would at once, before their very eyes, hand over empty to the Achaeans, that all might know whether it was the custom of the Romans or of the Aetolians to lie—the men who had spread abroad in talk that liberty was ill committed to the Roman people, and that Roman masters had been taken in exchange for Macedonian. But to them it had never been of any account what they said or what they did; the rest of the states he warned to weigh their friends by deeds, not by words, and to understand whom they should trust and of whom beware. Let them use their liberty with moderation: tempered, it was wholesome both for individuals and for states; in excess, it was both grievous to others and, to those who held it, headlong and unbridled. Let the chief men and the orders take counsel for concord among themselves in the states, and all the states in common; against men of one accord neither any king nor any tyrant would be strong enough; discord and sedition made everything opportune for those who lay in wait, since the party that is the lower in a domestic struggle attaches itself to a foreigner rather than yield to a fellow-citizen. The liberty won by others’ arms, restored by a foreigner’s faith, let them guard and keep by their own care, that the Roman people might know that liberty had been given to the worthy, and its gift well bestowed.

When they heard these words, as of a parent, tears welled up for joy in all, so that they confounded even the speaker himself as he spoke. For a little while there was a murmur of men approving his words and warning one another to let those words sink into their breasts and minds, as though sent from an oracle. Then, silence being made, he asked of them that, if any Roman citizens were among them in slavery, they should seek them out and within two months send them to him in Thessaly; it was not honorable, even for themselves, that in a freed land the freers of it should be slaves. All cried out that, among the rest, they gave thanks for this too, that they had been reminded to discharge a duty so dutiful and so necessary. There was a vast number of those taken in the Punic war, whom Hannibal, when they were not ransomed by their own, had sold. A proof of their multitude is what Polybius writes, that the thing cost the Achaeans a hundred talents, when they had fixed the price at five hundred denarii a head to be repaid to the owners. For by that reckoning Achaia had twelve hundred. Add now, in proportion, how many it is likely that all Greece had.

The assembly was not yet dismissed, when they look back and see the garrison coming down from Acrocorinth and at once being led to the gate and going away. The commander, following their column—all escorting him and crying out that he was their preserver and liberator—having saluted and dismissed them, returned by the same way he had come to Elatia. Thence with all his forces he sends off the legate Appius Claudius; he orders him to lead through Thessaly and Epirus to Oricum and to await him there; for from there it was in his mind to carry the army across into Italy. And to his brother Lucius Quinctius, legate and prefect of the fleet, he writes to gather the transport ships to the same place from every coast of Greece. He himself, having set out for Chalcis, the garrisons withdrawn not from Chalcis only but from Oreus too and Eretria, held there an assembly of the Euboean states, and, having reminded them in what state of things he had received them and in what he left them, dismissed them. Thence he sets out for Demetrias; and, the garrison withdrawn, all escorting him as at Corinth and Chalcis, he proceeds into Thessaly, where the states had not only to be freed but to be reduced from all their filth and confusion into some tolerable form. For they had been disordered not only by the vices of the times and by royal violence and license, but by the restless temper of the nation too, which carried neither election nor assembly nor any council, from the very beginning down to our own age, without sedition and tumult. By the property rating chiefly he chose both the senate and the judges, and made the more powerful that part of the states to which it was the more expedient that all should be safe and at peace. So, when he had thus set Thessaly in order, through Epirus he came to Oricum, whence he was to cross. From Oricum all the forces were carried over to Brundisium. Thence through all Italy to the city they came, almost in triumph, with a train of captured things no less than their own marching before them. After they came to Rome, the Senate was given to Quinctius outside the city to set forth his exploits, and a triumph was decreed for his deserts by willing men. Three days he triumphed. On the first day he carried across arms, weapons, and statues of bronze and marble, more taken from Philip than what he had captured from the states; on the second, gold and silver, wrought and unwrought and coined. Of unwrought silver there were forty-three thousand two hundred and seventy pounds; of wrought, many vessels of every kind, most of them chased, some of rare art; and many things skillfully made of bronze; besides this, ten silver shields. Of coined silver there were eighty-four thousand of the Attic kind—they call them tetradrachms; the weight of silver in each is about three denarii. Of gold there were three thousand seven hundred and fourteen pounds, and one shield wholly of gold, and fourteen thousand five hundred and fourteen gold Philippei coins. On the third day a hundred and fourteen golden crowns, the gifts of the states, were carried across; and victims were led, and before the chariot many noble captives and hostages, among whom were Demetrius, son of King Philip, and Armenes, son of the tyrant Nabis, a Lacedaemonian. Then Quinctius himself was borne into the city. The soldiers followed the chariot in throngs, as the whole army had been carried off from the province. To these were distributed two hundred and fifty asses to a foot-soldier, double to a centurion, threefold to a horseman. They made a notable sight in the triumph who followed with shaven heads—those who had been delivered from slavery.

At the close of this year Quintus Aelius Tubero, tribune of the plebs, by decree of the Senate brought before the plebs, and the plebs ordained, that two Latin colonies should be founded, one in the country of the Bruttii, the other in the Thurine territory. For founding these, commissioners were created who should have the authority for three years: for the Bruttii, Quintus Naevius, Marcus Minucius Rufus, Marcus Furius Crassipes; for the Thurine territory, Aulus Manlius, Quintus Aelius, Lucius Apustius. These two elections Gnaeus Domitius, the city praetor, held on the Capitol.

Several temples were that year dedicated: one of Juno Matuta in the vegetable market, vowed and contracted for four years before by Gaius Cornelius the consul in the Gallic war—the same man, as censor, dedicated it; another of Faunus, for the building of which the aediles Gaius Scribonius and Gnaeus Domitius had two years before contracted out of the money of fines, and which the latter, as city praetor, dedicated. And a temple of Fortuna Primigenia on the Quirinal hill Quintus Marcius Ralla dedicated, created duumvir for that very purpose; Publius Sempronius Sophus the consul had vowed it ten years before in the Punic war, and had, as censor, contracted for it. And on the island Gaius Servilius the duumvir dedicated a temple of Jupiter; it had been vowed six years before in the Gallic war by Lucius Furius Purpurio the praetor, and was contracted for afterward by the same man as consul. These things were done that year.

Publius Scipio came from the province of Gaul to have consuls elected in his stead. There was an election of consuls, in which were created Lucius Cornelius Merula and Quintus Minucius Thermus. On the next day were created as praetors Lucius Cornelius Scipio, Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, Gaius Scribonius, Marcus Valerius Messala, Lucius Porcius Licinus, and Gaius Flaminius. The Megalesian stage-games Aulus Atilius Serranus and Lucius Scribonius Libo, curule aediles, were the first to hold. The Roman games of these aediles the Senate watched for the first time apart from the people, and it gave occasion for talk, as all novelty is wont: some thinking that at last there had been granted to the most ample order what it had long before deserved; others interpreting that whatever was added to the majesty of the fathers was taken from the dignity of the people, and that all such distinctions, by which the orders were divided, tended to the lessening both of concord and of equal liberty. For five hundred and fifty-eight years it had been watched in common; what had suddenly come about, that the fathers should be unwilling to have the plebs mingled with them in the theater? why should the rich man scorn the poor man as a fellow-sitter? It was a new and haughty caprice, neither desired nor instituted before by the senate of any nation. At the last, they say, even Africanus himself repented that, as consul, he had been the author of that thing: so little is any change from the old approved; men had rather abide by the old, except where use evidently convicts it.

At the beginning of the year in which Lucius Cornelius and Quintus Minucius were consuls, earthquakes were reported so frequently that men grew weary not only of the thing itself but of the holidays proclaimed on account of it; for neither could the Senate be held nor the commonwealth be administered, the consuls being taken up with sacrificing and expiating. At last, the decemvirs being ordered to consult the books, by their response there was a supplication for three days. Garlanded, they made supplication at all the couches of the gods, and it was proclaimed that all who were of one household should make supplication together. Likewise, on the authority of the Senate, the consuls proclaimed that no one, on a day on which—an earthquake being reported—holidays had been proclaimed, should on that day report another earthquake. Then the provinces—first the consuls, then the praetors—drew lots. To Cornelius fell Gaul, to Minucius the Ligurians; of the praetors who drew lots, Gaius Scribonius the city jurisdiction, Marcus Valerius the foreign, Lucius Cornelius Sicily, Lucius Porcius Sardinia, Gaius Flaminius Hither Spain, Marcus Fulvius Farther Spain.

When the consuls were expecting no war that year, letters from Marcus Cincius—he was prefect at Pisae—were brought, that twenty thousand armed Ligurians, a conspiracy being made through all the market-towns of the whole nation, had first laid waste the Lunensian country, then, crossing the Pisan border, had ranged over the whole coast of the sea. And so Minucius the consul, to whom the Ligurians had fallen as his province, on the authority of the Senate mounted the rostra and proclaimed that the two city legions which had been enrolled the year before should be at Arretium after the tenth day; in their place he would enroll two city legions. Likewise he proclaimed to the allies and the Latin name, to their magistrates and envoys who were bound to furnish soldiers, that they should come to him on the Capitol. To these he assigned fifteen thousand foot and five hundred horse, according to the number of each people’s younger men, and ordered them to go straight from the Capitol to the gate, and, that the matter might be hastened, to set out for the levy. To Fulvius and Flaminius three thousand Roman foot and a hundred horse apiece were decreed as reinforcements, and five thousand of the allies of the Latin name and two hundred horse; and the praetors were charged to disband the old soldiers when they had come into the province. When the soldiers who were in the city legions had gone in numbers to the tribunes of the plebs, that they should take cognizance of the cases of those who had either served out their campaigns or had illness as a reason why they should not serve, a letter of Tiberius Sempronius scattered that matter—in which it was written that ten thousand of the Ligurians had come into the Placentine country and had thoroughly laid it waste, with slaughters and burnings, even up to the very walls of the colony and the banks of the Po; that the nation of the Boii too was looking toward rebellion. On account of these things the Senate decreed that there was a state of tumult; and it did not please them that the tribunes of the plebs take cognizance of the soldiers’ cases, in such a way as to lessen the muster to the proclamation. They added too that the allies of the Latin name who had been in the army of Publius Cornelius and Tiberius Sempronius, and had been disbanded by those consuls, should assemble on the day, and at the place in Etruria, which Lucius Cornelius the consul had proclaimed; and that Lucius Cornelius the consul, setting out for his province, might in the towns and fields through which he was to go enroll and arm any soldiers he saw fit, and lead them with him, and have the right of disbanding any of them whenever he should wish.

After the consuls, the levy held, had set out for their provinces, then Titus Quinctius demanded that the Senate hear concerning the things which he himself, with the ten commissioners, had settled, and confirm them, if it seemed good, by its authority; they would do this the more easily, he said, if they heard the words of the envoys who had come from all Greece and a great part of Asia, and from the kings. These embassies were brought into the Senate by Gaius Scribonius the city praetor, and a kindly answer was given to all. With Antiochus, because the dispute was longer, the matter was delegated to the ten commissioners, part of whom had been either in Asia or at Lysimachia with the king. To Titus Quinctius it was entrusted that, these being called in, he should hear the words of the king’s envoys and answer them such things as could be answered consistently with the dignity and the interest of the Roman people. Menippus and Hegesianax were the chief men of the royal embassy. Of these, Menippus said that he did not know what perplexity their embassy could have, since they had come simply to seek friendship and to join an alliance. There were, moreover, three kinds of treaties by which states and kings made compacts of friendship among themselves: one, when in war laws were dictated to the conquered—for, when everything had been surrendered to him who was the stronger in arms, it was his right and discretion what of these the conquered should keep, and with what they should be mulcted; a second, when those equal in war came on equal terms into peace and friendship—for then things were claimed and restored by agreement, and, if the possession of any had been disturbed by the war, these were settled either by the formula of ancient right or by the convenience of each party; a third kind there was, when those who had never been enemies came together to join in friendship by a treaty of alliance—these neither dictate nor receive laws, for that belongs to the conqueror and the conquered. Since Antiochus was of that kind, he wondered that the Romans thought it fair to dictate laws to him—which of the cities of Asia they would have free and immune, which tributary, which they forbade the royal garrisons and the king to enter. For with Philip, an enemy, peace was so to be sanctioned; not with Antiochus, a friend, a treaty of alliance.

To this Quinctius: "Since it pleases you to deal by distinctions and to enumerate the kinds of joining friendships, I too will set down two conditions, outside which you may announce that there is none for the king for joining friendship with the Roman people: one, if he is willing that we take no thought for anything that pertains to the cities of Asia, that he too keep away from all Europe; the other, if he does not contain himself within the bounds of Asia and crosses over into Europe, that the Romans too have the right both to guard the friendships of the cities of Asia which they have, and to embrace new ones." "Nay," said Hegesianax, "it is unworthy even to hear, that Antiochus should be barred from the cities of Thrace and the Chersonese—those which Seleucus, his great-grandfather, won with the highest glory, King Lysimachus being conquered in war and cut down in the line, and left, and which, held with equal renown by the Thracians, Antiochus has partly recovered by arms, partly, where they were deserted (like Lysimachia itself), peopled afresh by recalling their inhabitants, and, where they were laid low by ruins and burnings, rebuilt at vast expense. What likeness, then, is there, that Antiochus should be led away from a possession so won, so recovered, and that the Romans should keep away from Asia, which was never theirs? Antiochus seeks the friendship of the Romans, but such as, once obtained, should be a glory to him, not a shame." To this Quinctius said: "Since indeed we are weighing things honorable—as it befits a people the chief of the world, and so great a king, to weigh them, either solely or at least first—which, pray, seems the more honorable: to wish all the cities of Greece that are anywhere free, or to make them slaves and tributary? If Antiochus thinks it fair for himself to reclaim into servitude the cities which his great-grandfather held by the right of war, but which his grandfather and his father never claimed as their own, the Roman people too holds it to be of its faith and constancy not to desert the patronage of Greek liberty which it has taken up. As it freed Greece from Philip, so it has in mind to free from Antiochus the cities of Asia which are of the Greek name. For not into royal servitude were the colonies sent into Aeolis and Ionia, but for the increase of the stock and the spreading of a most ancient race through the world." When Hegesianax hesitated, and could not deny that a more honorable cause was put forward under the title of liberty than of servitude, "Why," said Publius Sulpicius, who was the eldest of the ten commissioners, "do we not have done with shuffling? Choose one of the two conditions which were just now plainly set forth by Quinctius, or forbear to treat of friendship." "We, indeed," said Menippus, "neither wish nor are able to bargain anything by which the kingdom of Antiochus should be lessened."

On the next day Quinctius, when he had brought all the embassies of Greece and Asia into the Senate, that they might know with what spirit the Roman people, with what Antiochus, were toward the states of Greece, set forth both the king’s demands and his own: let them report to their states that the Roman people, with the same valor and the same faith with which it had vindicated their liberty from Philip, would vindicate it from Antiochus too, unless he withdrew from Europe. Then Menippus began to entreat both Quinctius and the fathers not to hasten to decree—by a decree whereby they would throw the world into confusion; let them take time for themselves and give the king time to think: he would think, when the conditions had been reported, and would either obtain something or, for the sake of peace, make some concession. So the matter was put off entire. It was resolved to send to the king the same envoys who had been with him at Lysimachia: Publius Sulpicius, Publius Villius, Publius Aelius.

Scarcely had these set out, when envoys from Carthage brought word that Antiochus was beyond doubt preparing war, with Hannibal as his minister, and threw in a fear lest the Punic war too be stirred up at the same time. Hannibal, a fugitive from his country, had come to Antiochus, as was said before, and was in great honor with the king—by no other art than that, to one long turning over plans about a Roman war, no one fitter on such a matter could be a sharer in the conversation. His opinion was always one and the same: that the war should be waged in Italy: Italy would furnish both supplies and soldiers to a foreign enemy; if nothing were stirred there, and the Roman people were allowed to wage war outside Italy with the strength and resources of Italy, neither the king nor any nation was a match for the Romans. For himself he demanded a hundred decked ships, ten thousand foot, a thousand horse: with that fleet he would first make for Africa; he had great confidence that the Carthaginians too could be driven by him to rebel; if they hung back, he would in some part of Italy stir up war for the Romans. The king ought, with all the rest, to cross into Europe and keep his forces in some part of Greece—not crossing over, but, what was enough for the show and rumor of war, ready to cross. When he had brought the king to this opinion, thinking that the minds of his countrymen must be prepared by him for it, he did not dare to write a letter, lest, by some chance intercepted, it should make his attempts manifest; having found at Ephesus a certain Aristo of Tyre, and tried his cleverness in lighter services, he sends him to Carthage with his charges, laden partly with gifts, partly with the hope of rewards to which the king himself too had assented. He tells him the names of those who must be met; he furnishes him too with secret tokens by which they should beyond doubt recognize that the charges were his. This Aristo, going about at Carthage, not the friends sooner than the enemies of Hannibal learned why he had come. And at first the matter was talked of much in gatherings and at feasts; then in the senate certain men said that nothing had been gained by Hannibal’s exile, if even in absence he could plot new things and, by working on men’s minds, disturb the state of the city; that a certain Aristo, a Tyrian stranger, had come furnished with charges from Hannibal and King Antiochus; that certain men daily wove secret conferences with him; that there was cooking in secret what would presently burst out to the ruin of all. All cried out that Aristo must be summoned and asked why he had come, and, unless he disclosed it, be sent with envoys to Rome; that enough had been paid in penalties for the rashness of one man; let private men sin at their own peril; the commonwealth must be kept not only beyond guilt but beyond the rumor of guilt. Summoned, Aristo cleared himself and used the firmest bulwark, that he had brought no letters to anyone; but he neither sufficiently explained the cause of his coming, and stuck fast above all in this, that they charged him with having conferred only with men of the Barcine faction. Thence an altercation arose, some bidding that he be now seized and kept as a spy, others denying that there was cause for an uproar; that it was of bad example for strangers to be snatched up about nothing; that the same would befall the Carthaginians at Tyre too and in the other trading-places to which they frequently resort. The matter was put off that day. Aristo, using a Punic device among the Carthaginians, at early evening hung up written tablets in a most frequented place over the daily seat of the magistrates; he himself, at the third watch, went aboard a ship and fled. On the next day, when the suffetes had sat down to give judgment, the tablets were seen, taken down, and read. It was written that Aristo had had charges to no one privately, but publicly to the elders—so they called the senate. The crime being thus made public, the inquiry about the few was the less keen; yet it was resolved to send envoys to Rome to lay the matter before the consuls and the Senate, and at the same time to complain of the wrongs of Masinissa.

Masinissa, after he perceived both that the Carthaginians were ill-famed and that they were at discord among themselves—the leading men suspected by the senate because of the conferences with Aristo, the senate by the people because of the information of the same Aristo—thinking there was room for injury, both laid waste their maritime country and compelled certain cities, tributary to the Carthaginians, to pay tribute to himself. They call that region Emporia; it is on the coast of the lesser Syrtis and of a rich soil; one city of it is Leptis, which paid the Carthaginians a talent a day as tribute. This whole region Masinissa then made hostile, and in some part a matter of doubtful possession—whether it were of his kingdom or of the Carthaginians. And because he learned that they would go to Rome at once both to clear themselves of the charges and to complain of him—men who would both load those matters with suspicions and dispute about the right of the tributes—he too sends envoys of his own to Rome. The Carthaginians, heard first concerning the Tyrian stranger, threw the fathers into care lest they must war with Antiochus and the Carthaginians at once. That suspicion pressed the charge home most of all: that the man whom it had been resolved to seize and send to Rome, neither him nor his ship had they kept in custody. Then about the land the dispute began with the king’s envoys. The Carthaginians defended their cause by the right of boundaries, because it was within those bounds within which Publius Scipio the victor had marked off the land that was of the Carthaginians’ right; and by the confession of the king, who, when he was pursuing Aphthir—a fugitive from his kingdom, wandering with part of the Numidians about Cyrene—had asked of them, as a favor, passage through that very land, as being beyond doubt of the Carthaginians’ right. The Numidians both charged them with lying about Scipio’s boundary-marking, and, if anyone wished to demand the true origin of the right, asked what land in Africa was the Carthaginians’ own: to newcomers, as much ground as they could embrace with a cut ox-hide had been granted, as a favor, for the fortifying of a city; whatever they had advanced beyond Byrsa, their own seat, they held got by force and wrong. Nor could they prove that they had possessed the land in question—not to say always, from the time they began, but not even for any long while: now those men, now the kings of the Numidians, had usurped the right as occasion offered, and the possession had always been in the hands of him who had been the stronger in arms. Of whatever condition the matter had been before the Carthaginians were enemies and the king of the Numidians an ally and friend to the Romans, let them suffer it to be his, and not interpose themselves to keep him who was able from holding it. It was resolved to answer the envoys of each party that they would send men into Africa to settle, between the Carthaginian people and the king, on the spot. The men sent—Publius Scipio Africanus and Gaius Cornelius Cethegus and Marcus Minucius Rufus—the matter heard and inspected, left everything in suspense, their opinions inclining to neither side. Whether they did this of their own accord, or because it had been so charged them, is not so certain as it seems to have been suited to the time, that they should be left with the contest entire; for, were it not so, Scipio alone, either by his knowledge of the matter or by his authority, having so deserved of both, could have ended the dispute by a nod.