At the beginning of the year in which these things were done, Sextus Digitius, praetor in Nearer Spain, fought against those communities—very many of them—which had revolted after the departure of Marcus Cato, battles more frequent than worth the telling, and so generally unsuccessful that he handed over to his successor scarcely half the soldiers he had received. Nor is there any doubt that all Spain would have taken heart, had not the other praetor, Publius Cornelius Scipio, son of Gnaeus, fought many successful battles beyond the Ebro; and in their terror at this no fewer than fifty towns went over to him. These things Scipio had done as praetor; the same man, now propraetor, fell upon the Lusitanians as they were returning home laden with vast booty after ravaging the farther province, and attacked them on the very march, fighting from the third hour of the day to the eighth with the issue in doubt, inferior in number of soldiers, superior in all else: for he had clashed with a line crowded with armed men against a column long and encumbered with a throng of cattle, and with fresh troops against men worn out by a long march. For the enemy had set out at the third watch; to this night march three daylight hours had been added, and the battle had taken up the toil of the road with no rest granted. And so at the opening of the fight there was some vigor left in their bodies and spirits, and at first they had thrown the Romans into disorder; then for a little the fight was made even. At this crisis the propraetor vowed games to Jupiter, should he rout and cut down the enemy. At last the Romans pressed their advance more fiercely, and the Lusitanian gave ground, then turned his back outright; and when the victors had pressed hard upon the fugitives, as many as twelve thousand of the enemy were slain, five hundred and forty taken—almost all of them cavalry—and a hundred and thirty-four military standards captured. Of the Roman army seventy-three were lost. The battle was fought not far from the city of Ilipa; thither Publius Cornelius led back his army, victorious and rich in plunder. All this booty was laid out before the city, and the owners were given leave to identify what was theirs; the rest was handed to the quaestor for sale, and the proceeds from it were divided among the soldiers.

Gaius Flaminius the praetor had not yet set out from Rome when these things were being done in Spain. And so its reverses rather than its successes were the more loudly bruited about through him and his friends; and, since a great war had blazed up in the province, and since he was to receive the meager remnants of an army from Sextus Digitius—and those very men full of panic and flight—he had attempted to have one of the city legions decreed to him, to which, when he had added the soldiers enrolled by himself under a decree of the Senate, he might pick out of the whole number six thousand two hundred foot and three hundred horse: with that legion—for there was no great hope in the army of Sextus Digitius—he would carry the matter through. The older senators replied that decrees of the Senate ought not to be founded on rumors rashly trumped up by private men to win favor with the magistrates; that nothing ought to be held ratified save what the praetors wrote from their provinces or the legates reported; that if there were an emergency rising in Spain, it was their pleasure that emergency levies be raised outside Italy by the praetor. The mind of the Senate was that emergency soldiers be enrolled in Spain. Valerius Antias writes that Gaius Flaminius even sailed to Sicily for the sake of the levy, and that, making for Spain from Sicily, he was carried by a storm to Africa, where he administered the military oath to stragglers from the army of Publius Africanus; and to these levies in two provinces he added a third in Spain.

Nor in Italy was the war of the Ligurians growing with any less vigor. They were now besieging Pisae with forty thousand men, a multitude streaming in daily at the rumor of war and the hope of plunder. Minucius the consul came to Arretium on the day he had appointed for the soldiers to muster. Thence he led them in a hollow square to Pisae, and, when the enemy had moved their camp across the river not more than a mile from the town, the consul entered the city, beyond doubt saved by his coming. On the next day he too pitched camp across the river about five hundred paces from the enemy. Thence by light skirmishes he protected the lands of the allies from ravaging; to go out into the line he did not dare, with troops newly raised and gathered out of many kinds of men and not yet well enough known to one another that one might trust another. The Ligurians, relying on their numbers, both went out into line, ready to decide the whole issue, and, abounding in soldiers, sent out everywhere many bands along the borders of their territory to plunder; and when a great quantity of cattle and booty had been gathered, an escort was at hand to drive it into their strongholds and villages.

When the Ligurian war had come to a standstill at Pisae, the other consul, Lucius Cornelius Merula, led his army through the farthest borders of the Ligurians into the country of the Boii, where the conduct of the war was far other than it had been with the Ligurians. The consul went out into line; the enemy declined battle; and the Romans scattered to plunder, since no one came out to meet them—the Boii preferring to have their own goods pillaged with impunity rather than to join the contest in defending them. When everything had been sufficiently laid waste with fire and sword, the consul withdrew from the enemy’s land, and was leading his column toward Mutina carelessly, as though among a people at peace. The Boii, when they perceived that the enemy had left their borders, followed in a silent column, seeking a place for an ambush. By night they passed beyond the Roman camp and seized a pass through which the Romans had to march. But because they had done this with too little concealment, the consul—who had been wont to move his camp in the dead of night—waited for the light, lest the dark increase the terror in a sudden engagement, and even when he moved at light, nonetheless sent ahead a squadron of horse to reconnoiter. When word was brought back how great the forces were and in what place they lay, he ordered the baggage of the whole column to be thrown together in the center and the triarii to set a rampart about it, and with the rest of the army drawn up advanced upon the enemy. The Gauls did the same, when they saw that the ambush was uncovered and that they must fight in a straight and fair battle, where true valor would conquer. It was about the second hour when they clashed. The left wing of the allied cavalry and the special reserves were fighting in the front line; two consular legates were in command, Marcus Marcellus and Tiberius Sempronius, the consul of the year before. The new consul was now at the foremost standards, now held the legions back in reserve, lest in their zeal for the contest they run forward before the signal was given. He ordered the cavalry of those legions to be led out beyond the line into open ground by the tribunes of the soldiers Quintus and Publius Minucius; thence, when he had given the signal, they were to make a charge from the open. As he was doing this, a messenger came from Tiberius Sempronius Longus that the special reserves could not sustain the charge of the Gauls; that very many had been slain, and that those who survived had, partly from exhaustion, partly from fear, let their ardor for the fight slacken. Let him, if he saw fit, send up one of the two legions before disgrace should be incurred. The second legion was sent, and the special reserves drawn off. Then the battle was renewed, when a fresh legion, full in its ranks, had come up. The left wing was withdrawn from the fight; the right came up into the front line. The sun was scorching with vast heat the bodies of the Gauls, least able to endure the heat; yet in dense ranks, leaning now one against another, now upon their shields, they sustained the charges of the Romans. When the consul observed this, to throw their ranks into disorder he orders Gaius Livius Salinator, who commanded the cavalry of the wings, to send in his horses at the gallop, and the legionary cavalry to be held in reserve. This storm of horse first confounded and disordered, then scattered the line of the Gauls—yet not so that they turned their backs. Their leaders stood in the way, striking with their spear-shafts the backs of the panicked and forcing them to return to the ranks; but the cavalry of the wings, riding among them, would not suffer it. The consul implored the soldiers to make one more effort: the victory was in their hands; while they saw the enemy disordered and panicked, let them press on; if they suffered the ranks to be re-formed, they would have to fight again a battle whole and in doubt. He ordered the standard-bearers to advance the standards. All straining together, at last they turned the enemy. When they were giving their backs and pouring out in flight on every side, then the legionary cavalry was sent in to pursue them. Fourteen thousand of the Boii were slain that day; taken alive were one thousand and ninety-two, seven hundred and twenty-one cavalry, three of their leaders, two hundred and twelve military standards, sixty-three wagons. Nor was the victory bloodless for the Romans: above five thousand soldiers, their own or the allies’, were lost, twenty-three centurions, four prefects of the allies, and Marcus Genucius and Quintus and Marcus Marcius, tribunes of the soldiers of the second legion.

At about the same time letters from the two consuls were brought in, from Lucius Cornelius about the battle fought with the Boii at Mutina, and from Quintus Minucius from Pisae: that the holding of the elections fell to his lot; but that everything in Liguria was in so anxious a state that he could not withdraw from there without ruin to the allies and loss to the commonwealth. If it seemed good to the senators, let them send word to his colleague that the one who had his war as good as finished should return to Rome for the elections; if he were reluctant to do this, because that business did not fall to his lot, he for his part would do whatever the Senate decreed; but let them consider again and again whether it were not more to the public interest that an interregnum be entered upon than that the province be left by him in such a state. The Senate gave Gaius Scribonius the charge of sending two legates from the senatorial order to Lucius Cornelius the consul, who were to carry to him the letter his colleague had sent to the Senate and to announce that, unless he came to Rome to hold the election of successors to the magistrates, the Senate would suffer an interregnum to be entered upon rather than call Quintus Minucius away from a war still unfinished. The legates sent back word that Lucius Cornelius would come to Rome to hold the election of magistrates. Concerning the letter of Lucius Cornelius, which he had written after the battle with the Boii, there was a debate in the Senate, because the legate Marcus Claudius had written privately to most of the senators that thanks were owed to the fortune of the Roman people and to the valor of the soldiers for the success of the affair; that by the consul’s management a good number of soldiers had been lost, and that the enemy’s army, which there had been the chance of destroying, had slipped away: that the soldiers had perished the more numerously because those who should have brought help to the hard-pressed had come up too slowly out of the reserves; that the enemy had been let go out of their hands because the signal had been given too late to the legionary cavalry and they had not been allowed to pursue the fugitives.

On this matter it was resolved to decree nothing rashly; the deliberation was put off to a fuller house: for another care was pressing, namely that the state was suffering under usury, and that, though avarice had been bound by many laws on lending, a way of fraud had been entered upon, whereby debts were transcribed into the names of allies, who were not held by those laws: thus debtors were being overwhelmed by interest set free of all restraint. When a method of checking this was being sought, it was resolved to fix a day, the Feralia that had last been kept, that those allies who after that day had lent moneys to Roman citizens should declare them, and that from that day, in the matter of moneys lent, by whatever laws the debtor wished, the right should be rendered to the creditor. Then, when the declarations had laid bare the magnitude of the debt contracted by this fraud, Marcus Sempronius, tribune of the plebs, on the authority of the senators put it to the plebs, and the plebs ordained, that in the matter of moneys lent to allies and to those of the Latin name there should be the same right as with Roman citizens. These things were done in Italy, at home and in the field. In Spain there was by no means so much war as rumor had magnified. Gaius Flaminius in Nearer Spain took the town of Illucia in the territory of the Oretani, then led his soldiers into winter quarters, and through the winter several battles—none worth remembering—were fought against the raids rather of brigands than of an enemy, yet with varying issue and not without loss of soldiers. Greater things were done by Marcus Fulvius. He fought a pitched battle near the town of Toletum against the Vaccaei and Vettones and Celtiberians, routed and put to flight the army of those nations, and took King Hilernus alive.

While these things were being done in Spain, the day of the elections was now drawing near. And so Lucius Cornelius the consul, leaving the legate Marcus Claudius with the army, came to Rome. When he had discoursed in the Senate of the things done by him, and in what state the province was, he complained to the conscript fathers that, after so great a war finished so happily by one successful battle, no honor had been paid to the immortal gods. He demanded next that they decree at once a thanksgiving and a triumph. But before the motion could be put, Quintus Metellus, who had been consul and dictator, said that at the same time letters had been brought to the Senate from the consul Lucius Cornelius and to a great part of the senators from Marcus Marcellus, at variance with one another, and that for this reason the deliberation had been put off, that it might be debated with the authors of those letters present. And so he had expected that the consul, who knew that something had been written against him by his own legate, when he himself had to come, would bring that man with him to Rome—since it was even more proper that the army be handed over to Tiberius Sempronius, who held command, than to a legate: as it was, the man seemed to have been removed on purpose who might say in person and prove to his face the things he had written, and, if he brought forward anything false, might be convicted, until the truth had been explored to a clear conclusion. And so he moved that none of the things the consul demanded be decreed for the present. When the consul went on no less briskly to move that thanksgivings be decreed and that he be allowed to ride into the city in triumph, Marcus and Gaius Titinius, tribunes of the plebs, said that they would interpose their veto, if a decree of the Senate were made on that matter.

The censors had been elected the year before, Sextus Aelius Paetus and Gaius Cornelius Cethegus. Cornelius closed the lustrum. The number of citizens registered was 143,704. There were great floods that year, and the Tiber flooded the low-lying parts of the city; about the Flumentan gate certain buildings even fell in ruin. And the Caelimontan gate was struck by lightning, and the wall round about was struck from heaven in many places; and at Aricia and at Lanuvium and on the Aventine it rained stones; and from Capua it was reported that a huge swarm of wasps had flown into the forum and settled in the temple of Mars; that they had been gathered with care and burned with fire. On account of these prodigies the decemvirs were ordered to consult the books, and a nine-day rite was performed, and a thanksgiving was proclaimed and the city was purified. In those same days Marcus Porcius Cato dedicated a little shrine to Victory the Maiden near the temple of Victory, two years after he had vowed it.

In the same year a Latin colony was led out to Castrum Frentinum by the three commissioners Aulus Manlius Volso, Lucius Apustius Fullo, and Quintus Aelius Tubero, by whose law it was being settled. Three thousand foot went, three hundred horse, a small number for the abundance of land. There might have been given thirty iugera to the foot, sixty to the horse. On the advice of Apustius a third part of the land was withheld, that they might later, if they wished, enroll new colonists. The foot received twenty iugera, the horse forty.

The year was now at its close, and canvassing had blazed up at the consular elections more than ever at any other time. Many and powerful men were candidates, patricians and plebeians: Publius Cornelius Scipio, son of Gnaeus, who had lately left the province of Spain after great exploits, and Lucius Quinctius Flamininus, who had commanded the fleet in Greece, and Gnaeus Manlius Volso—these patricians; while of the plebeians there were Gaius Laelius, Gnaeus Domitius, Gaius Livius Salinator, and Manius Acilius. But the eyes of all were turned upon Quinctius and Cornelius: for both, being patricians, were seeking the one place, and a recent glory in war commended each. But above all the contest was fired by the brothers of the candidates, two most illustrious generals of their age. The glory of Scipio was the greater, and the greater it was, the nearer to envy; Quinctius’s was the fresher, since he had triumphed that very year. To this was added that the one had now for nearly ten years been continually in men’s sight—a thing which makes great men less revered by the mere surfeit of them—and had been consul a second time after the defeat of Hannibal, and censor; whereas in Quinctius all was new and recent to win favor: he had neither sought anything from the people after his triumph nor obtained it. He said that he was canvassing for a brother german, not a cousin, for his own legate and partner in the conduct of the war; that he had carried on the campaign by land, his brother by sea. By these arguments he prevailed that he should be preferred to a candidate whom his brother Africanus was backing—whom the Cornelian house was backing, with a Cornelius as consul holding the election, whom so weighty a prejudgment of the Senate, when it judged him the best man in the state to receive the Idaean Mother coming from Pessinus into the city. Lucius Quinctius and Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus were made consuls: so little did Africanus prevail even in the matter of a plebeian consul, though he was striving for Gaius Laelius. On the next day were elected as praetors Lucius Scribonius Libo, Marcus Fulvius Centumalus, Aulus Atilius Serranus, Marcus Baebius Tamphilus, Lucius Valerius Tappo, and Quintus Salonius Sarra. The aedileship that year of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus and Lucius Aemilius Paulus was a notable one; they condemned many graziers, and from that money set gilded shields on the gable of the temple of Jupiter, and built one portico outside the Trigemina gate, with a market added by the Tiber, and another from the Fontinal gate to the altar of Mars, where the road led into the Campus.

For a long time nothing worth remembering had been done among the Ligurians; but at the close of that year the situation was twice brought into great peril: for both the consul’s camp was assailed and with difficulty defended, and, not long after, when the Roman column was being led through a narrow pass, the army of the Ligurians beset the very jaws of it. When there was no way out, the consul turned his column about and set about going back. But behind too the jaws of the pass were occupied by a part of the enemy, and the memory of the Caudine disaster came back not only to their minds but almost before their eyes. He had among his auxiliaries about eight hundred Numidian horse. Their prefect promised the consul that he would break out with his men on whichever side he wished—only let him say which part was the thicker with villages: upon those he would make his charge, and would do nothing sooner than cast fire upon the houses, so that the panic might force the Ligurians to leave the pass they were besieging and to scatter to bring help to their own. The consul, having praised him, loaded him with the hope of rewards. The Numidians mount their horses and began to ride up to the enemy’s outposts, provoking no one. At first sight nothing was more contemptible: men and horses small and slight, the rider ungirt and unarmed, save that he carries javelins with him, the horses without bridles, their very gait ungainly as they ran with stiff neck and head thrust forward. Deliberately heightening this contempt, they kept slipping from their horses and making a mockery and a spectacle of themselves. And so those who at first had been intent and ready in their outposts, in case they should be provoked, now for the most part watched unarmed and seated. The Numidians would ride up, then flee back, but little by little edged nearer the pass, as though carried off against their will by horses they had no power to govern. At last, clapping spurs to them, they burst out through the midst of the enemy’s outposts, and, riding out into more open country, set fire to all the buildings near the road; then they carried fire into the nearest village; they laid all waste with sword and flame. First the smoke was seen, then the shouting of the panicked in the villages was heard, at last the old men and boys fleeing made an uproar in the camp. And so without plan, without command, each for himself ran to protect his own; and in a moment the camp was abandoned, and the consul, freed from the siege, reached the place he had aimed at.

But neither the Boii nor the Spaniards, with whom there had been war that year, were so bitterly hostile to the Romans as the nation of the Aetolians. These, after the armies had been carried away out of Greece, had at first been in hope that Antiochus would come into the empty possession of Europe, and that neither Philip nor Nabis would stay quiet. When they saw nothing stirring anywhere, thinking that something must be set in motion and stirred up, lest by delaying their designs should wither, they proclaimed a council at Naupactus. There Thoas, their praetor, having complained of the wrongs of the Romans and the condition of Aetolia—that of all the nations and states of Greece they were the least honored after that victory of which they themselves had been the cause—moved that envoys be sent round to the kings, who should not only sound out their dispositions but move each by his own goad to war with Rome. Damocritus was sent to Nabis, Nicander to Philip, Dicaearchus, the praetor’s brother, to Antiochus. To the Lacedaemonian tyrant Damocritus said that, the maritime cities being taken from him, his tyranny was unstrung; from those he had had his soldiers, from those his ships and the crews of his ships; shut up almost within his own walls, he saw the Achaeans lording it in the Peloponnese; never would he have a chance of recovering his own, if he let slip the one that then was; there was no Roman army in Greece, nor would the Romans think Gytheum or the other maritime Laconians a cause worthy of their sending legions across into Greece again. These things were said to inflame the tyrant’s mind, that, when Antiochus had crossed into Greece, conscious that he had violated the Roman friendship by his wrongs against the allies, he should join himself to Antiochus. And Nicander was inciting Philip with a not dissimilar speech; the matter of his oration was even fuller, in that the king had been dragged down from a loftier height than the tyrant, and more things had been taken from him. To this was added the ancient renown of the kings of Macedon and the whole world traversed by the victories of that nation. And the counsel he brought was safe, he said, in both undertaking and outcome: for he did not advise Philip to move before Antiochus had crossed with an army into Greece; and a man who without Antiochus had so long sustained the war against the Romans and the Aetolians—with Antiochus joined to him and the Aetolians for allies, who had then been graver enemies than the Romans—with what strength, in the end, could the Romans resist him? He added concerning Hannibal as a leader, an enemy born to oppose the Romans, who had killed more of their leaders and soldiers than the number of those that survived. These things Nicander said to Philip; other things Dicaearchus said to Antiochus; and first of all that the spoils of Philip belonged to the Romans, the victory to the Aetolians; and that none other than the Aetolians had given the Romans entrance into Greece, and that the same men had furnished the strength to conquer. Then how great forces of foot and horse the Aetolians would furnish Antiochus for the war, what places for his land forces, what harbors for his naval ones. Then concerning Philip and Nabis he abused the truth with free lying: each was ready to rebel, and would snatch the first occasion of recovering what they had lost in the war. Thus throughout the whole world at once the Aetolians were stirring up war against the Romans. And yet the kings were either not moved or moved too slowly; Nabis at once sent round among all the maritime villages to foment risings in them, and won over some of the leading men to his cause by gifts, and slew others who stubbornly remained in the Roman alliance. To the Achaeans the charge of guarding all the maritime Laconians had been entrusted by Titus Quinctius. And so they at once both sent envoys to the tyrant to remind him of the Roman treaty and to warn him not to disturb the peace which he had so earnestly sought, and sent reinforcements to Gytheum, which was now being besieged by the tyrant, and envoys to Rome to report these things.

King Antiochus, that winter, having given his daughter in marriage to Ptolemy, king of Egypt, at Raphia in Phoenicia, and having withdrawn to Antioch, came through Cilicia, the Taurus range being crossed, at the very end of winter to Ephesus; thence, at the beginning of spring, his son Antiochus being sent into Syria to guard the farthest parts of the kingdom, lest anything be stirred behind his back in his absence, he himself set out with all his land forces to attack the Pisidians who dwell about Sida. At that time the Roman envoys Publius Sulpicius and Publius Villius, who had been sent to Antiochus, as was said before, were ordered first to approach Eumenes, and came to Elaea; thence they went up to Pergamum—there was the royal seat of Eumenes. Eumenes was eager for war against Antiochus, believing that a king so much more powerful would be a troublesome neighbor if there were peace, but that the same king, if war were stirred up, would be no more a match for the Romans than Philip had been, and that he would either be utterly destroyed, or, if peace were granted to him beaten, much taken from him would accrue to himself, so that thereafter he might easily defend himself against him without any Roman aid. Even if some adversity should befall, it was better to undergo whatever fortune with the Romans for allies than alone either to endure the rule of Antiochus or, refusing it, to be compelled by force and arms: on these grounds, by all the weight of his authority and counsel, he was urging the Romans to war.

Sulpicius, falling ill, stayed at Pergamum; Villius, when he had heard that the king was occupied with the Pisidian war, set out for Ephesus, and while he tarried there a few days, took pains to meet often with Hannibal, who happened then to be there, that he might sound out his mind, and, if in any way he could, take from him the fear that there was anything to dread for him from the Romans. By these conversations nothing indeed was accomplished, yet there followed of its own accord, as though it had been sought by design, that for them Hannibal became cheaper in the king’s eyes and more suspect in everything.

Claudius, following the Greek books of Acilius, hands down that Publius Africanus was on that embassy, and that he conversed with Hannibal at Ephesus, and even reports one exchange: that when Africanus asked whom Hannibal believed to have been the greatest general, he answered, Alexander, king of the Macedonians, because with a small band he had routed armies past numbering, and because he had traversed the farthest regions, which to look upon was beyond human hope. Asked then whom he placed second, he said Pyrrhus; he had first taught the laying-out of a camp; and besides, no one had chosen his ground or disposed his outposts more elegantly; he had also possessed the art of winning men to himself, such that the Italian nations preferred the rule of a foreign king to that of the Roman people, so long the leading power in that land. As he pursued the question, whom he reckoned third, Hannibal beyond doubt named himself. Then a laugh broke from Scipio, and he put in, "What would you say, if you had conquered me?" "Then truly," said he, "I should set myself both before Alexander and before Pyrrhus and before all other generals." And this answer, tangled with Punic craft and an unforeseen kind of flattery, moved Scipio, in that he had set him apart from the herd of generals as one beyond all reckoning.

Villius went forward from Ephesus to Apamea. Thither Antiochus too, on hearing of the coming of the Roman envoys, came to meet him. At Apamea, when they had met, the debate was nearly the same as had been at Rome between Quinctius and the king’s envoys. Word of the death of the king’s son Antiochus—whom I said a little before had been sent into Syria—broke off the conferences. There was great mourning in the palace and great longing for that young man: for he had already given such proof of himself that, had a longer life fallen to him, the nature of a great and just king would have shown clear in him. The dearer and more welcome he was to all, the more suspect was his death, men believing that his father, thinking a grievous successor was pressing upon his own old age, had made away with him by poison through certain eunuchs—men acceptable to kings for their service in such crimes. They added this cause too for the secret deed, that, having given Lysimachia to his son Seleucus, he had had no like seat to give Antiochus, that he might send him too far off from himself under cover of honor. Yet for some days the show of great mourning held the palace; and the Roman envoy, that he might not appear at an unseasonable time inconveniently, withdrew to Pergamum; the king, abandoning the war he had begun, returned to Ephesus. There, the palace shut up for mourning, he held secret counsels with a certain Minnio, who was the chief of his friends. Minnio, ignorant of all things foreign and estimating the king’s strength from the affairs done in Syria or Asia, believed that Antiochus was not only the superior in his cause, because the Romans demanded nothing fair, but would also prove superior in war. The king shunning a debate with the envoys—whether already having found it less prosperous, or confounded by his recent grief—Minnio professed that he would say what was for the cause, and persuaded that the envoys be summoned from Pergamum. Sulpicius had by now recovered; and so both came to Ephesus. The king being excused by Minnio, the matter began to be handled in his absence. There Minnio, with a prepared speech, said: "I see, Romans, that you use the specious title of freeing the Greek cities, but your deeds do not agree with your speech, and you have set up one rule of right for Antiochus while you yourselves use another. For how are the Smyrnaeans and the Lampsacenes more Greeks than the Neapolitans and the Rhegians and the Tarentines, from whom you exact tribute, from whom ships, by treaty? Why do you send a praetor every year to Syracuse and to the other Greek cities of Sicily with imperium and rods and axes? You would surely say nothing other than that, having overcome them in arms, you imposed these terms upon them. Receive from Antiochus the same plea concerning Smyrna and Lampsacus and the cities that are of Ionia or Aeolis. Conquered in war by his ancestors, made tributary and subject to taxes, he reclaims them to their ancient right: and so I should like to have this answered, if the matter is debated on fair terms and a cause for war is not being sought." To this Sulpicius said: "Antiochus acted modestly, in that, if there were no other arguments for his cause, he chose to have anyone rather than himself say these things. For what likeness has the case of those cities you have compared? From the Rhegians and Neapolitans and Tarentines, since they came into our power, by one unbroken tenor of right, always exercised, never interrupted, we exact what they owe by treaty. Can you, pray, say that, as those peoples have not by themselves nor through any other changed the treaty, so the cities of Asia, once they came into the power of the ancestors of Antiochus, have remained in the perpetual possession of your kingdom, and that some of them have not been in the power of Philip, others in that of Ptolemy, and others for many years, no one disputing, exercised their freedom? For if the fact that they once served, oppressed by the unfairness of the times, shall make a right after so many ages of reclaiming them into servitude, what is wanting but that nothing has been accomplished by us in freeing Greece from Philip, and his descendants may reclaim Corinth, Chalcis, Demetrias, and the whole nation of the Thessalians? But why do I plead the cause of the cities, which it is fairer that both we and the king himself should learn from their own pleading?" He ordered then that the embassies of the cities be called—already prepared beforehand and instructed by Eumenes, who reckoned that whatever strength was lost to Antiochus would accrue to his own kingdom. Several were admitted, and while each inserts now his complaints, now his demands, and mingles the fair with the unfair, they turned the debate into a wrangle. And so, with nothing relaxed and nothing obtained, the envoys returned to Rome just as uncertain of everything as they had come.

The king, having dismissed them, held a council on the Roman war. There one man more fiercely than another, because the more harshly each had spoken against the Romans, the greater was his hope of favor, some inveighed against the arrogance of the demands—men imposing laws on Antiochus, greatest of the kings of Asia, as though on Nabis conquered; and yet to Nabis his dominion in his own country and his native Lacedaemon had been left, while it seemed unworthy that Antiochus should do as he was bidden over Smyrna and Lampsacus. Others said that these cities were small and scarcely worth naming as causes of war for so great a king; but that the beginning of unjust commands was always made from small things—unless they believed that the Persians, when they demanded earth and water from the Lacedaemonians, had had need of a clod of earth and a draught of water. By a like trial the Romans were dealing over the two cities; and the other cities, the moment they saw two shake off the yoke, would go over to the liberating people. If freedom were not preferable to servitude, yet to every man the hope of changing his fortunes was more alluring than any present state.

Alexander the Acarnanian was in the council; once a friend of Philip, but lately, having abandoned him, he had followed the wealthier court of Antiochus, and, as one acquainted with Greece and not ignorant of the Romans, had been received into that degree of the king’s friendship that he sat in even his secret counsels. He, as though it were not being deliberated whether or not there should be war, but where and on what plan the war should be waged, affirmed that he set before his mind a victory not at all doubtful, if the king crossed into Europe and took up a seat for the war in some part of Greece. First of all, he would find the Aetolians, who dwell at the navel of Greece, in arms, as forerunners ready for all the hardest parts of war; and on the two horns, as it were, of Greece, Nabis would rouse everything from the Peloponnese, reclaiming the city of the Argives, reclaiming the maritime cities from which the Romans, having driven him out, had shut him within the walls of Lacedaemon, and from Macedon Philip would take up arms the moment he heard the war-trumpet sound: he knew his spirit, he knew his mind; he knew that, like wild beasts held by bars or chains, he had long been rolling huge wraths in his breast; he remembered too how often in the war Philip had been wont to pray all the gods to give him Antiochus for a helper, and that, if he now obtained that prayer, he would make no delay in rebelling. Only there must be no hesitating, no holding back: for on this turned the victory, if both the advantageous positions and the allies were seized beforehand. Hannibal too must be sent without delay into Africa to distract the Romans.

Hannibal was not admitted to the council, being suspect to the king on account of his conversations with Villius and held thereafter in no honor. At first he bore that affront in silence; then, thinking it better both to inquire the cause of the sudden estrangement and to clear himself, at a fit time he asked plainly for the cause of the displeasure, and, having heard it, said: "My father Hamilcar, Antiochus, when I was very small, as he was sacrificing, brought me to the altars and bound me by an oath that I would never be a friend of the Roman people. Under this oath I served thirty-six years; this oath drove me from my country in peace; this brought me, an exile from my country, to your court; under this oath for my guide, if you fail my hope, wherever I shall know there is strength, wherever there are arms, I will find them, searching the whole world over for some enemies of the Romans. And so, if any of your people are pleased to grow great with you by charges against me, let them seek some other matter for their growth from me. I hate the Romans and am hated by them. That I speak the truth in this, my father Hamilcar and the gods are witnesses. Therefore, when you ponder the Roman war, count Hannibal among your first friends; if anything compels you to peace, then for that counsel seek another with whom to deliberate." Such a speech not only moved the king but even reconciled him to Hannibal. The council broke up with this resolve: that the war should be waged.

At Rome they were indeed marking out Antiochus as an enemy in their talk, but were preparing nothing yet toward that war beyond their resolve. To both consuls Italy was decreed as their province, on the understanding that they should arrange between themselves or settle by lot which should preside over the elections of that year; to whichever of them that charge did not fall, it belonged to be ready, should there be need to lead the legions anywhere outside Italy. To this consul it was permitted to enroll two new legions and twenty thousand of the allies of the Latin name and eight hundred horse; to the other consul two legions were decreed, those which Lucius Cornelius, consul of the previous year, had had, and fifteen thousand of the allies and of the Latin name from the same army and five hundred horse. To Quintus Minucius his command was prolonged, with the army he had in Liguria; it was added that, by way of reinforcement, four thousand Roman foot and a hundred and fifty horse be enrolled, and that the allies be ordered to furnish to the same place five thousand foot and two hundred and fifty horse. To Gnaeus Domitius fell as his province service outside Italy, wherever the Senate should decide, to Lucius Quinctius Gaul and the holding of the elections. The praetors then drew their provinces by lot: Marcus Fulvius Centumalus the city jurisdiction, Lucius Scribonius Libo the jurisdiction over foreigners, Lucius Valerius Tappo Sicily, Quintus Salonius Sarra Sardinia, Marcus Baebius Tamphilus Nearer Spain, Aulus Atilius Serranus Farther Spain. But for these two the provinces were exchanged, first by a decree of the Senate, then by a vote of the plebs as well: to Aulus Atilius the fleet and Macedonia, to Baebius the Bruttii were decreed. To Flaminius and Fulvius their commands in the Spains were prolonged. To Atilius two legions were decreed for the Bruttii, those which the year before had been the city legions, and that the allies be ordered to furnish to the same place fifteen thousand foot and five hundred horse. Baebius Tamphilus was ordered to build thirty quinqueremes and to draw down from the dockyards the old ships, if any were serviceable, and to enroll crews; and the consuls were charged to give him two thousand of the allies and of the Latin name and a thousand Roman foot. These two praetors and two armies, by land and sea, were said to be preparing against Nabis, who was now openly attacking the allies of the Roman people; but the envoys sent to Antiochus were being awaited, and before they returned the Senate had forbidden the consul Gnaeus Domitius to leave the city. To the praetors Fulvius and Scribonius, whose province it was to administer justice at Rome, the charge was given that, besides the fleet over which Baebius was to preside, they should make ready a hundred quinqueremes.

Before the consul and the praetors set out for their provinces, there was a thanksgiving on account of prodigies. It was reported from Picenum that a she-goat had borne six kids at one birth, and that at Arretium a boy had been born with one hand, at Amiternum that it had rained earth, at Formiae that a gate and the wall had been struck from heaven, and—what most caused terror—that an ox of the consul Gnaeus Domitius had spoken: "Rome, look to yourself." On account of the other prodigies a thanksgiving was made; the haruspices ordered the ox to be kept and fed with care. The Tiber, brought against the city with a more violent rush than before, overthrew two bridges and many buildings, especially about the Flumentan gate. A huge rock, loosened either by the rains or by an earthquake too slight to be felt otherwise, fell from the Capitol into the Vicus Iugarius and crushed many. In the fields, flooded far and wide, the cattle were swept off, and there was wreck of the farmhouses.

Before Lucius Quinctius the consul reached his province, Quintus Minucius fought a pitched battle with the Ligurians in the territory of Pisae; he killed nine thousand of the enemy, and drove the rest, routed and put to flight, into their camp. That camp was assailed and defended with a great struggle right up to nightfall. By night the Ligurians stole away; at first light the Roman entered the empty camp; less booty was found, because they kept sending home from time to time the spoils taken from the fields. Minucius thereafter gave the enemy no respite; setting out from the territory of Pisae into the Ligurians’ country, he laid waste their strongholds and villages with fire and sword. There the Roman soldier was filled with the Etruscan plunder which had been sent off by the ravagers.

About the same time the envoys returned to Rome from the kings, who, since they had brought nothing that furnished a cause ripe enough for war except against the Lacedaemonian tyrant—whom the Achaean envoys too reported to be attacking the maritime coast of the Laconians against the treaty—Atilius the praetor was sent with a fleet into Greece to protect the allies. The consuls, since nothing was pressing from Antiochus, it was resolved should both set out for their provinces. Domitius came from Ariminum, by the nearest way, Quinctius through the Ligurians into the country of the Boii. The two columns of the consuls, in opposite directions, laid waste the enemy’s land far and wide. First a few of their cavalry with their prefects, then the whole senate, last those who had any fortune or rank, to the number of fifteen hundred, deserted to the consuls. And in both Spains too things were that year successfully done: for Gaius Flaminius stormed the fortified and wealthy town of Licabrum with sheds and took alive the noble chieftain Conribilo, and Marcus Fulvius the proconsul fought two successful battles against two armies of the enemy, stormed two towns of the Spaniards, Vescelia and Helo, and many strongholds; others went over to him of their own will. Then, having advanced into the Oretani and there too gained possession of two towns, Noliba and Cusibis, he went on to march to the river Tagus. There was Toletum, a small city but in a fortified position. As he was besieging it, a great army of the Vettones came to the aid of the people of Toletum. With these he fought a pitched battle successfully, and, the Vettones being routed, took Toletum by siege-works.

But at that time the wars which were being waged were less a care to the senators than the expectation of the not-yet-begun war with Antiochus. For although everything was being explored again and again through the legates, nevertheless rumors springing up rashly, with no authors at all, mixed much that was false with the true. Among these it had been brought word that, when Antiochus had come into Aetolia, he would at once send a fleet to Sicily. And so the Senate, although it had sent the praetor Atilius with a fleet into Greece, yet, because there was need not of forces only but of authority to hold the spirits of the allies, sent Titus Quinctius and Gnaeus Octavius and Gnaeus Servilius and Publius Villius as legates into Greece, and decreed that Marcus Baebius should move his legions forward from the Bruttii to Tarentum and Brundisium, and thence, if the situation should demand, cross over into Macedonia; and that the praetor Marcus Fulvius should send a fleet of twenty ships to guard the coast of Sicily; and that the man who should command that fleet should hold imperium—Lucius Oppius Salinator commanded it, who the year before had been plebeian aedile; and that the same praetor should write to his colleague Lucius Valerius that there was danger lest the fleet of King Antiochus cross over from Aetolia into Sicily: and so it was the Senate’s pleasure that, to the army he had, he should enroll up to twelve thousand emergency soldiers and four hundred horse, with which he might guard the maritime coast of the province on the side that faced Greece. This levy the praetor held not from Sicily itself only but from the surrounding islands, and strengthened with garrisons all the maritime towns that faced toward Greece. Food was added to the rumors by the arrival of Attalus, brother of Eumenes, who announced that King Antiochus had crossed the Hellespont with his army, and that the Aetolians were so preparing themselves as to be in arms at his coming. Thanks were given both to Eumenes in his absence and to Attalus present, and a free dwelling, a place, and entertainment were decreed him, and gifts were given: two horses, two sets of cavalry arms, and silver vessels of a hundred pounds’ weight and gold ones of twenty pounds’ weight.

Since messengers, one after another, kept bringing word that war was at hand, it seemed to the purpose that consuls be elected at the earliest possible time. And so a decree of the Senate was made that the praetor Marcus Fulvius should send a letter at once to the consul, by which he should be informed that it was the Senate’s pleasure that he hand over the province and army to his legates and return to Rome, and from the road send ahead an edict proclaiming the elections for choosing consuls. The consul obeyed that letter and, the edict having been sent ahead, came to Rome. In that year too there was great canvassing, because three patricians were candidates for the one place: Publius Cornelius Scipio, son of Gnaeus, who the year before had suffered a defeat, and Lucius Cornelius Scipio and Gnaeus Manlius Volso. To Publius Scipio—that it might appear that the honor had been deferred for so distinguished a man, not denied—the consulship was given; there is added to him as colleague from the plebs Manius Acilius Glabrio. On the next day were elected as praetors Lucius Aemilius Paulus, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, Marcus Iunius Brutus, Aulus Cornelius Mammula, Gaius Livius, and Lucius Oppius—each of these two had the surname Salinator; this Oppius was the one who had led the fleet of twenty ships to Sicily. Meanwhile, while the new magistrates were drawing their provinces by lot, Marcus Baebius was ordered to cross from Brundisium with all his forces into Epirus and to keep his forces about Apollonia, and the city praetor Marcus Fulvius was given the charge of building fifty new quinqueremes.

And the Roman people, indeed, was thus preparing itself against all the attempts of Antiochus; Nabis was now no longer putting off the war, but with all his might was attacking Gytheum, and, hostile to the Achaeans because they had sent a garrison to the besieged, was laying waste their fields. The Achaeans had not dared to take up the war before their envoys had returned from Rome, that they might know what was the Senate’s pleasure; after the return of the envoys they both proclaimed a council at Sicyon and sent envoys to Titus Quinctius, to seek his counsel. In the council the opinions of all were inclined to take up the war at once; a letter from Titus Quinctius threw in delay, in which he advised waiting for the praetor and the Roman fleet. When some of the leading men persisted in their opinion, others held that they ought to use the counsel of the man whom they had themselves consulted, the multitude awaited the opinion of Philopoemen. He was then praetor, and at that time surpassed all both in prudence and in authority. He, having premised that it was well ordained among the Aetolians that the praetor, when he had put the question of war, should not himself deliver an opinion, bade them determine as soon as possible what they wished: the praetor would carry out their decrees with faith and care and would strive that, so far as lay in human counsel, they should repent neither of peace nor of war. That speech had more weight to incite them to war than if by openly advising he had shown his desire to act. And so by a vast consensus war was decreed, the time and method of conducting it being freely left to the praetor. Philopoemen, besides that Quinctius so wished it, himself too judged that the Roman fleet must be awaited, which could protect Gytheum from the sea; but fearing that the matter would not allow delay, and that not Gytheum only but also the garrison sent to protect the city would be lost, he launched the ships of the Achaeans. The tyrant too had got ready a modest fleet to prevent any reinforcements being sent by sea to the besieged—three decked ships and some pinnaces and cutters, the old fleet having been handed over to the Romans by the treaty. That he might try the handiness of these new ships, and at the same time that all might be sufficiently fit for the contest, he daily took the rowers and soldiers out into the deep and exercised them in mock sea-fights, reckoning that on this turned the hope of the siege, if he should cut off the seaward reinforcements. The praetor of the Achaeans, as in the arts of land warfare he matched any of the famous generals either in experience or in genius, so was raw in naval matters—an Arcadian, a man of the interior, ignorant too of all things foreign, except that in Crete he had served as prefect of the auxiliaries. There was an old quadrireme, captured eighty years before, when it was carrying Nicaea, the wife of Craterus, from Naupactus to Corinth. Moved by its fame—for it had once been a noted vessel in the royal fleet—he ordered it brought down from Aegium, by now quite rotten and falling apart with age. With this ship then leading the fleet as the flagship, while in it Tiso of Patrae, prefect of the fleet, was sailing, the Laconian ships met them from Gytheum; and at the very first onset the old ship, which of itself took in water at every joint, was torn open against the new and firm vessel, and all who were in the ship were captured. The rest of the fleet, the flagship lost, fled, each as far as it had strength in its oars. Philopoemen himself fled in a light scouting vessel, nor made an end of flight before they came to Patrae. That event in no way diminished the spirit of a man of war who had tried many chances; nay rather, if in a naval matter, of which he was ignorant, he had come to grief, the more hope he conceived in those things in whose practice he was expert, and affirmed that he would make that joy of the tyrant’s a brief one.

Nabis, both elated by his success, and now having conceived a hope no longer doubtful that there would be no further peril from the sea, wished also to close the land approaches by garrisons set in advantageous positions. A third part of his forces being drawn off from the siege of Gytheum, he pitched camp at Pleiae: that place overhangs both Leucae and Acriae, by which it seemed the enemy would bring up their army. While there was a standing camp there, and few had tents, while the rest of the multitude had roofed huts woven of reeds with foliage that gave only shade, Philopoemen resolved to attack him unawares by an unforeseen kind of warfare, before he should come into the enemy’s sight. He gathered small craft into a hidden station in Argive territory; on them he put light-armed soldiers, mostly targeteers, with slings and javelins and the other light kind of armament. Thence, hugging the shores, when he had come to a headland near the enemy’s camp, he landed and by known paths reached Pleiae in the night, and, the sentries being asleep as in no nearby fear, he threw fire into the huts on every side of the camp. Many were consumed by the blaze before they were aware of the enemy’s coming, and those who had become aware could bring no help. With sword and flame all was consumed; very few from a peril so two-edged escaped to Gytheum, to the larger camp. The enemy thus struck down, Philopoemen led straightway to lay waste the Tripolis of the Laconian land, which is nearest to the border of the Megalopolitans, and, having carried off thence a great quantity of cattle and men, withdrew before the tyrant could send a garrison from Gytheum to the fields. Thence, his army gathered to Tegea, and the same council proclaimed both to the Achaeans and to the allies—in which were leading men also of the Epirotes and the Acarnanians—he resolved, since both the spirits of his own men had been sufficiently restored from the shame of the maritime disgrace and the enemy were thoroughly terrified, to lead to Lacedaemon, reckoning that in that one way alone the enemy could be drawn off from the siege of Gytheum. At Caryae first he pitched camp in the enemy’s land. On that very day Gytheum was taken by storm. Ignorant of this, Philopoemen moved his camp forward to Barbosthenes—it is a mountain ten miles from Lacedaemon. And Nabis, Gytheum recovered, setting out thence with an unencumbered army, when he had marched in haste past Lacedaemon, seized what they call the Camp of Pyrrhus, not doubting that this place was being made for by the Achaeans. Thence he went to meet the enemy. They held, because of the narrowness of the road, a long column of nearly five miles; the column was brought up by the cavalry and the greatest part of the auxiliaries, because Philopoemen thought the tyrant would attack his men in the rear with the mercenary soldiers, in whom he trusted most. Two things at once, both unlooked-for, struck him down: the one, that the place he was making for had been seized beforehand; the other, that he saw the enemy had met his foremost column, where, since the route lay through rugged ground, he did not see how the standards could be carried forward without the protection of light-armed troops. But Philopoemen was of singular skill and experience in leading a column and in choosing positions, nor had he exercised himself in this in the times of war only, but even in peace had trained himself in it most of all. Whenever he was making a journey anywhere and had come to a pass difficult of crossing, having surveyed the nature of the ground on every side—when he went alone, he turned it over in his own mind; when he had companions, he asked of them, if an enemy should appear in that place, what counsel must be taken if from the front, what if from the side, this one or that, what if he should attack from the rear; that the enemy might meet him drawn up in a straight line, might meet him in a disordered column merely fitted to the road. What ground he himself would seize, he worked out by thinking or asking, or with how many armed men, or with what kind of arms—for it made the greatest difference—he would use them; whither he should throw back the baggage, whither the packs, whither the unarmed crowd; with how great or what sort of guard he would protect these, and whether it were better to go on by the road on which he had begun to go, or to make back by that by which he had come; what ground too he should take for a camp, how much of the place he should enclose with the rampart, where there was convenient watering, where a supply of fodder and wood; what road would be safest as he moved his camp the next day, what the formation of the column. With these cares and considerations he had so exercised his mind from his earliest years that on such a matter no thought could be new to him. And then, first of all, he halted the column; next he sent to the foremost standards the Cretan auxiliaries and those whom they called Tarentines—horsemen who trail two horses with them each—and ordered the cavalry to follow close. He seized a crag above a torrent from which they could water; thither he gathered all the baggage and the crowd of camp-servants and surrounded them with armed men, and fortified a camp according to the nature of the ground; to set up tents on the broken and uneven soil was difficult. The enemy were five hundred paces off. From the same stream both sides, with a guard of light-armed men, drew water; and before the contest could be joined—such as is wont in nearby camps—night came between. On the next day it was plain that there must be fighting around the stream on behalf of the water-carriers. In the night, in a valley turned away from the enemy’s sight, he hid as great a multitude of targeteers as the place could conceal.

At dawn the light-armed Cretans and the Tarentine horsemen joined battle above the torrent; Telemnastus the Cretan was in command of his own countrymen, Lycortas of Megalopolis of the cavalry; the Cretans on the enemy’s side too, the auxiliaries, and the same kind of horse, the Tarentines, were the guard for the enemy’s water-carriers. For some time the battle was in doubt, the men being of the same kind on both sides and the arms equal; as the contest went on, the tyrant’s auxiliaries won by their numbers, and because it had been so directed by Philopoemen to his prefects, that after a moderate engagement they should incline to flight and draw the enemy on to the place of ambush. Following the fugitives in disorder through the valley, very many were both wounded and killed before they saw the hidden enemy. The targeteers had sat drawn up, so far as the breadth of the valley allowed, in such a way that they easily received their own fleeing men through the intervals of the ranks. Then they themselves rise up, fresh, unspent, in order; they make a charge upon the enemy, disordered, scattered, and wearied also by toil and wounds. Nor was the victory doubtful: at once the tyrant’s soldier turned his back, and, fleeing at a pace not a little swifter than that with which he had pursued, was driven into the camp. Many were slain and taken in that flight; and in the camp too there would have been panic, had not Philopoemen ordered the recall to be sounded, fearing the broken ground—and ground unfavorable wherever he should rashly advance—more than the enemy.

Then, conjecturing both from the fortune of the fight and from the temper of the leader in what panic he then was, he sends to him one of the auxiliaries under the guise of a deserter, to bring as ascertained that the Achaeans had resolved on the next day to advance to the river Eurotas, which flows close to the very walls, so as to cut off his road, that the tyrant might not have a retreat to the city when he wished, nor supplies be carried from the city into the camp, and at the same time that they would try whether any men’s minds could be solicited to revolt from the tyrant. The deserter won not so much credit for his words as he furnished to a man struck with fear a plausible reason for abandoning the camp. On the next day he ordered Pythagoras with the auxiliaries and the cavalry to keep watch before the rampart; he himself, as though going out into line with the main strength of his army, ordered the standards to be carried more quickly toward the city. Philopoemen, after he saw the column led off in haste at a quick pace through a narrow and downward road, sends out all his cavalry and the Cretan auxiliaries against the enemy’s outpost which was before the camp. They, when they saw the enemy at hand and themselves abandoned by their own men, first tried to withdraw into the camp; then, after the whole battle-line of the Achaeans, drawn up, was being brought up, in fear lest they be taken together with the camp itself, they set themselves to follow their own column, which had gone somewhat ahead. At once the targeteers of the Achaeans make a charge upon the camp and plunder it; the rest go on to pursue the enemy. The road was such as that a column scarcely free from hostile fear could with difficulty extricate itself: but when battle arose against the rearmost, and a terrible shout from those panicking behind was carried up to the foremost standards, every man for himself, casting away his arms, fled in different directions into the woods lying about the road, and in a moment the way was hedged with a heap of arms, especially of spears, which, falling for the most part point-forward, blocked the road as though a rampart had been set across it. Philopoemen, having ordered the auxiliaries to press on and pursue however they could—since for the cavalry at any rate flight would not be easy—himself led the heavier column by the more open road down to the river Eurotas. There, his camp pitched toward sunset, he waited for the light-armed troops, whom he had left behind to pursue the enemy. When these came at the first watch, announcing that the tyrant with a few had made his way through to the city, and that the rest of the multitude, unarmed, wandered scattered over the whole forest, he bids them tend their bodies; he himself, out of the rest of his force of soldiers—those who, because they had come earlier into camp, were refreshed, having taken food and a moderate rest—at once leads out picked men carrying nothing with them but their swords, and stationed them along the routes of the two gates which lead to Pharae and to Barbosthenes, where he believed the enemy would withdraw themselves out of the flight. Nor did his judgment deceive him. For the Lacedaemonians, as long as any of the light remained, withdrew by trackless paths through the middle of the forest; at early evening, when they caught sight of the lights in the enemy’s camp, they kept to hidden byways over against them; when they had passed beyond these, now thinking it safe, they came down into the open roads. There, caught by the enemy lying in wait, so many everywhere were slain and taken that scarcely a fourth part out of the whole army got away. Philopoemen, the tyrant shut up in the city, spent nearly thirty days of the following time in laying waste the fields of the Laconians, and, the tyrant’s strength weakened and almost broken, returned home, the Achaeans matching him in the glory of his deeds to the Roman general, and, so far as concerned the Laconian war, even preferring him.

While the war was going on between the Achaeans and the tyrant, the legates of the Romans went round the cities of the allies, anxious lest the Aetolians had turned the minds of any party toward Antiochus. The least pains they spent in approaching the Achaeans, whom, because they were hostile to Nabis, they judged faithful enough in other matters as well. First they went to Athens, thence to Chalcis, thence into Thessaly, and, having addressed the Thessalians in a crowded council, they turned their journey to Demetrias. Thither the council of the Magnetes had been summoned. There a more carefully wrought speech had to be made, because a part of the leading men were estranged from the Romans and wholly for Antiochus and the Aetolians, since, when it had been brought word that his son the hostage was being restored to Philip and the tribute imposed on him remitted, it had been brought among other empty tales that the Romans would restore Demetrias also to him. Lest this should come to pass, Eurylochus, chief of the Magnetes, and certain men of his faction preferred that everything be overturned by the coming of the Aetolians and Antiochus. Against these the argument had to be so framed that, in taking from them an empty fear, hope cut off should not estrange Philip, in whom there was more weight toward everything than in the Magnetes. This only was recalled: that, whereas all Greece was bound to the Romans by the benefit of freedom, that state especially was so; for there had been there not only a garrison of Macedonians, but a palace built up, that a master should always be present to be kept before their eyes; but that all this had been done in vain, if the Aetolians should bring Antiochus into Philip’s palace, and a king new and unknown were to be had instead of one known and tried. They call the supreme magistrate the Magnetarch; he then was Eurylochus, and, relying on that power, he denied that he and the Magnetes ought to dissemble what the rumor noised abroad about restoring Demetrias to Philip was; that this might not be done, everything must be both attempted and dared by the Magnetes. And in the heat of speaking, carried away too inconsiderately, he flung out that even then Demetrias was free only in appearance, but in very truth everything was done at the nod of the Romans. At this utterance there was a murmur of the multitude wavering, partly in assent, partly in indignation that he had dared to say it; Quinctius indeed so blazed up with anger that, stretching his hands to heaven, he called the gods to witness the ungrateful and perfidious spirit of the Magnetes. At this voice, when all were thoroughly frightened, Zeno, one of the leading men, of great authority both for the elegance of the life he had led and because he had always beyond doubt been of the Roman party, besought Quinctius and the other legates with tears not to charge the madness of one man upon the state; that each raved at his own peril; that the Magnetes owed not only their freedom but everything that men hold sacred and dear to Titus Quinctius and the Roman people; that no man could pray anything from the immortal gods which the Magnetes did not have from those Romans, and that they would sooner vent their fury upon their own bodies in madness than violate the Roman friendship. His speech was followed by the entreaties of the multitude; Eurylochus fled from the council by hidden ways to the gate and thence straightway into Aetolia. For now—and this more from day to day—the Aetolians were laying bare their revolt, and at that very time it happened that Thoas, chief of the nation, whom they had sent to Antiochus, had returned, and had brought with him Menippus, the king’s legate. These, before a council was granted them, had filled all men’s ears by rehearsing the land and sea forces: a huge mass of foot and horse was coming, elephants summoned from India, and—above all, by which they believed the minds of the multitude were most moved—so much gold was being conveyed that he could buy the Romans themselves. It was plain what that speech would set in motion in the council; for both that they had come and all that they were doing was reported to the Roman legates; and although hope was nearly cut off, nevertheless it seemed to Quinctius not amiss that some envoys of the allies should be present at that council, to remind the Aetolians of the Roman alliance and to dare to send forth a free voice against the king’s legate. The Athenians seemed most suitable for that matter, both because of the dignity of the state and because of their ancient alliance with the Aetolians. From them Quinctius asked that they send envoys to the Panaetolian council. Thoas first in that council reported his embassy. Menippus, brought in after him, said that it would have been best for all who dwelt in Greece and Asia that Antiochus could have intervened while Philip’s affairs were entire: each would have kept his own, and not everything would have come under the nod and dominion of Rome. "Now too," he said, "if only you carry steadily through to the end the counsels you have begun, Antiochus, with the gods helping and the Aetolians for allies, will be able to restore the affairs of Greece, however fallen, to their former dignity. But that dignity is placed in a freedom which stands by its own strength and does not hang upon another’s will." The Athenians, to whom first after the royal embassy power was given to say what they wished, passing over all mention of the king, reminded the Aetolians of the Roman alliance and of the deserts of Titus Quinctius toward all Greece: let them not rashly, by too great haste of counsels, overturn it; hot and audacious counsels were at first sight glad, in the handling hard, in the outcome grievous. The Roman legates, and among them Titus Quinctius, were not far off; while all was yet entire, let them rather debate in words about the things in dispute than arm Asia and Europe for a deadly war. The multitude, greedy for change, was wholly Antiochus’s, and held that the Romans ought not even to be admitted to the council; the older men chiefly among the leading men prevailed by their authority that a council be granted them. When the Athenians had reported this decree, it seemed good to Quinctius to go into Aetolia: for either he would move something, or all men would be witnesses that the blame of the war lay with the Aetolians, and that the Romans would take up arms that were just and almost necessary. When he had come there, Quinctius in the council, beginning from the origin of the Aetolian alliance with the Romans, and how often the faith of the treaty had been shaken by them, spoke briefly of the right of the cities about which there was dispute: if nevertheless they thought they had anything fair on their side, how much better it was to send envoys to Rome, whether they preferred to debate or to petition the Senate, than that the Roman people should fight with Antiochus, the Aetolians their trainers, not without great upheaval of the human race and the ruin of Greece? Nor would any feel the disaster of that war sooner than those who had stirred it up. These things the Roman prophesied in vain. Thoas next, and the rest of the same faction, heard with the assent of all, prevailed that—the council not even adjourned, and with the Romans absent—a decree be made by which Antiochus was summoned to free Greece and to arbitrate between the Aetolians and the Romans. To this so arrogant a decree their praetor Damocritus added an insult of his own: for when Quinctius demanded of him that very decree, not awed by the dignity of the man he said that for the present he had something else, more pressing, to attend to first; that he would give the decree and the answer in Italy before long, when he had pitched his camp on the bank of the Tiber: so great a frenzy at that time seized the nation of the Aetolians, so great a one their magistrates.

Quinctius and the legates returned to Corinth. Thereafter, that they might not seem—themselves stirred to nothing and sitting idle—to be awaiting the king’s arrival, the Aetolians did not, indeed, hold a council of the whole nation after the Romans were dismissed, but through the apocleti—so they call the more select council; it is made up of chosen men—they were debating in what way the situation in Greece might be overturned. Among all it was agreed that in the cities the leading men and all the best men were of the Roman alliance and rejoiced in the present state, while the multitude and those whose affairs were not to their own liking wished everything to be changed; the Aetolians in a single day conceived a hope—and a plan—not only audacious but even shameless: of seizing Demetrias, Chalcis, and Lacedaemon. Single leading men were sent to single cities: Thoas to Chalcis, Alexamenus to Lacedaemon, Diocles to Demetrias. This last the exile Eurylochus, of whose flight and the cause of his flight it was spoken before, assisted, because there was no other hope of his return to his country. Prompted by a letter of Eurylochus, his kinsmen and friends and those who were of the same faction, with his children and his wife in mourning garb, holding the wrappings of suppliants, approached a crowded assembly, beseeching them, singly and all together, not to suffer a man innocent and uncondemned to grow old in exile. And both the simple were moved by pity and the wicked and seditious by the hope of mingling the affairs in an Aetolian uproar: each for himself bade him be recalled. These things prepared, Diocles with all the cavalry—and he was then prefect of horse—set out under the appearance of bringing back his exiled guest-friend, and, having measured by day and night a vast march, when he was six miles from the city, at first light, three squadrons being chosen and the rest of the multitude of cavalry ordered to follow close behind, went ahead. When he was approaching the gate, he ordered all to dismount from their horses and to lead the horses by the reins very much in the manner of a march, the ranks loosened, that it might seem an escort of the prefect rather than a garrison. There, one of the squadrons being left at the gate, that the cavalry following might not be shut out, through the middle of the city and across the forum, holding Eurylochus by the hand, with many meeting and congratulating him, he led him home. Soon the city was full of cavalry, and the advantageous places were being seized; then men were sent into the houses to kill the leaders of the opposing faction. Thus Demetrias became the Aetolians’.

At Lacedaemon no force was to be brought against the city, but the tyrant was to be taken by guile—one whom, stripped of his maritime towns by the Romans, then driven even within the walls of Lacedaemon by the Achaeans, whoever should kill, that man would win the favor of the whole affair among the Lacedaemonians. They had a pretext for sending to him, in that he was wearying them with prayers that auxiliaries be sent him, since he had rebelled on their prompting. A thousand foot were given to Alexamenus and thirty horsemen chosen from the youth. To these it was announced by the praetor Damocritus, in the secret council of the nation, of which it was spoken before, that they should not believe themselves sent for the Achaean war or for any matter which each man might guess by his own opinion; whatever sudden plan circumstances should prompt Alexamenus to take, they should be ready to carry it out obediently, however unexpected, rash, audacious; and should take it as though they knew themselves sent from home to do that one thing. With these men so prepared Alexamenus came to the tyrant, whom on his arrival he at once filled with hope: that Antiochus had already crossed into Europe, would soon be in Greece, would fill lands and seas with arms and men; that the Romans would believe they had to do with no Philip; that the number of foot and horse and ships could not be reckoned; that the line of elephants would finish the war by its very appearance. The Aetolians were ready to come to Lacedaemon with their whole army, when the situation should require, but had wished to show themselves to the coming king in arms and in numbers. Nabis too must himself do the like, that he should not suffer the forces he had to molder under roofs in idleness, but lead them out and force them to maneuver under arms, at once sharpening their spirits and exercising their bodies; by habit the toil would be lighter, and by the courtesy and kindness of their leader could even be made not unpleasant. They began thereupon to be led out often before the city into the plain by the river Eurotas. The tyrant’s bodyguards used to stand about in the middle of the line; the tyrant, with at most three horsemen, among whom Alexamenus generally was, rode before the standards, visiting the outermost wings; on the right wing were the Aetolians, both those who had earlier been the tyrant’s auxiliaries and the thousand who had come with Alexamenus. Alexamenus had made it a habit of his now to ride round among the few ranks with the tyrant and to advise him what seemed to be to the purpose, now to ride over to his own men on the right wing, and presently thence, as though under orders that the situation had required, to withdraw himself to the tyrant. But on the day he had appointed for accomplishing the deed, having ridden a little while with the tyrant, when he had withdrawn to his own men, then to the horsemen sent with him from home he said: "The thing must now be done, young men, and dared, which you were bidden to carry out unflinchingly under my lead; make ready your spirits and your right hands, that no one hang back in what he shall see me doing; whoever shall have hesitated and set his own counsel against mine, let him know that there is no return to his household gods for him." A shudder seized them all, and they remembered with what instructions they had set out. The tyrant was coming from the left wing; Alexamenus orders the horsemen to lay down their spears and to look to him; he too gathers his own mind, confounded by the thought of so great a deed. When he was drawing near, he makes his charge, and, the horse run through, throws the tyrant down; as he lay the horsemen stab him; many blows being given in vain upon his cuirass, at last the wounds reached the naked body, and before help could come from the middle of the line, he breathed his last.

Alexamenus with all the Aetolians goes on at a quick pace to seize the palace. Fear at first seized the bodyguards, since the deed was done before their eyes; then, after they saw the Aetolian column going off, they run together to the abandoned body of the tyrant, and from guardians of his life and avengers of his death a crowd of onlookers was made. Nor would any man have stirred, if at once, the arms laid aside, the multitude had been called to an assembly and a speech made fitting to the occasion, and the Aetolians thereupon kept in numbers under arms without injury to anyone; but, as was fitting in a design begun by fraud, everything was done toward hastening the destruction of those who had done it. The leader, shut up in the palace, spent a day and a night in rummaging through the tyrant’s treasures; the Aetolians, as in a captured city—the city they wished to seem to have freed—turned to plunder. At once the indignity of the thing and the contempt it bred made the Lacedaemonians’ spirits unite. Some said the Aetolians must be driven out and the freedom, when it seemed to be restored, intercepted, must be reclaimed; others, that, to be the head of conducting the affair, some one of the royal stock must be taken up for show. There was a boy of that line, Laconicus, very young, brought up with the tyrant’s children; they set him on a horse and, snatching up arms, cut down the Aetolians wandering through the city. Then they burst into the palace; there they hew down Alexamenus, resisting with a few. The Aetolians, gathered about the Chalcioecus—it is a bronze temple of Minerva—are cut down; a few, casting away their arms, fled some to Tegea, some to Megalopolis; there, seized by the magistrates, they were sold under the crown. Philopoemen, on hearing of the murder of the tyrant, set out for Lacedaemon, and, when he had found everything thrown into confusion by fear, the leading men being summoned and a speech made such as ought to have been made by Alexamenus, he joined the Lacedaemonians to the alliance of the Achaeans—the more easily, too, because at about the same time Aulus Atilius with four-and-twenty quinqueremes put in at Gytheum.

In those same days, about Chalcis, Thoas—through Euthymidas, a leading man driven out by the power of those who were of the Roman alliance after the coming of Titus Quinctius and the legates, and through Herodorus, a merchant of Cius but powerful at Chalcis on account of his riches, those of Euthymidas’s faction having been prepared for the betrayal—had by no means the same fortune by which Demetrias had been seized through Eurylochus. Euthymidas from Athens—he had chosen that place for his dwelling—went first to Thebes, hence to Salganea; Herodorus to Thronium. Not far thence, in the Maliac gulf, Thoas had two thousand foot and two hundred horse, and light transports to the number of thirty. These, with six hundred foot, Herodorus was ordered to carry across to the island of Atalante, that thence, when he should have perceived the land forces now drawing near to Aulis and the Euripus, he might cross to Chalcis; he himself was leading the rest of his forces, mostly by night marches, with all the speed he could, to Chalcis. Micythio and Xenoclides, in whose hands then was the chief power at Chalcis after Euthymidas was driven out, whether suspecting it of themselves or the matter being disclosed, at first in panic placed no hope anywhere but in flight; then, after the terror subsided and they saw that not their country only but also the Roman alliance was being betrayed and abandoned, they fixed their minds on a plan such as this. There happened at that time to be at Eretria the yearly rite of Diana of Amarynthus, which is celebrated by a gathering not only of the natives but of the Carystians as well. Thither they sent men to entreat the Eretrians and Carystians to take pity on the fortunes of those born in the same island and to have regard for the Roman alliance; not to suffer Chalcis to become the Aetolians’; they would hold Euboea if they held Chalcis; the Macedonians had been grievous masters; the Aetolians would be far less tolerable. Regard for the Romans most of all moved the cities, having lately tried their valor in the war and their justice and kindness in victory. And so each city armed what strength of youth it had and sent it. When the townsmen of Chalcis had handed over to these the guarding of their walls, they themselves with all their forces crossed the Euripus and pitched camp at Salganea. Thence a herald first, then envoys, were sent to the Aetolians to inquire by what saying or doing of theirs allies and friends had come to attack them. Thoas, the leader of the Aetolians, answered that he came not to attack but to free them from the Romans; that they were now bound with a more splendid chain, but a far heavier one, than when they had had a Macedonian garrison in their citadel. But the Chalcidians for their part denied that they either served anyone or had need of anyone’s garrison. Thus the envoys, parting from the conference, went back to their own; Thoas and the Aetolians, since they had placed all their hope in this, that they should overwhelm them unawares, being by no means a match for a regular war and the assault of a city fortified by sea and land, returned home. Euthymidas, after he heard that the camp of his countrymen was at Salganea and the Aetolians had set out, himself too returned from Thebes to Athens; and Herodorus, when for several days he had intently awaited from Atalante a signal in vain, sent a scout-ship to learn what the delay was, and, after he saw the affair given up by his allies, made back for Thronium, whence he had come.

Quinctius too, on hearing these things, coming from Corinth by ship, met King Eumenes in the Chalcidic Euripus. It was resolved that five hundred soldiers be left at Chalcis for a garrison by King Eumenes, and that he himself go to Athens. Quinctius made for Demetrias, whither he had set out, thinking that the freeing of Chalcis would have some weight with the Magnetes toward seeking again the Roman alliance, and, that there might be some protection for the men of his own party, he wrote to Eunomus, praetor of the Thessalians, to arm the youth, and sent Villius ahead to Demetrias to sound their dispositions, intending to undertake the matter on no other terms than if some part should incline toward regard for the old alliance. Villius was carried in a quinquereme to the mouth of the harbor. When all the multitude of the Magnetes had poured out thither, Villius asked whether they would rather he had come to friends or to enemies. The Magnetarch Eurylochus answered that he had come to friends; but let him keep away from the harbor and suffer the Magnetes to be in concord and freedom, and not, under the appearance of a conference, solicit the multitude. Thence there was a wrangle, not a conversation, when the Roman rebuked the Magnetes as ungrateful and foretold the disasters hanging over them, and the multitude clamored against him, accusing now the Senate, now Quinctius. So, the attempt frustrated, Villius withdrew to Quinctius. But Quinctius, a message having been sent to the praetor to lead his forces home, himself returned by ship to Corinth.

The affairs of Greece, interwoven with the Romans’, have carried me off as it were from my course, not because it were worth the labor to write them out in full for their own sake, but because they were the causes of the war with Antiochus. The consuls-designate being elected—for it was from there that I had turned aside—Lucius Quinctius and Gnaeus Domitius the consuls set out for their provinces, Quinctius into the Ligurians, Domitius against the Boii. The Boii kept quiet, and even their senate, with their children, and their prefects, with their cavalry—in all fifteen hundred—surrendered themselves to the consul. By the other consul the land of the Ligurians was laid waste far and wide and several strongholds taken, whence not only booty of every kind with captives was got, but some citizens and allies too were recovered who had been in the enemy’s power. In this same year a colony was led out to Vibo by a decree of the Senate and a vote of the plebs. Three thousand seven hundred foot went, three hundred horse; the three commissioners who led them out were Quintus Naevius, Marcus Minucius, and Marcus Furius Crassipes; fifteen iugera of land were given to each foot-soldier, double to a horseman. It had lately been the land of the Bruttii; the Bruttii had taken it from the Greeks. At Rome about the same time there were two very great alarms, the one of longer duration but milder: there was an earthquake for thirty-eight days, and for as many days there were holy days kept in anxiety and fear; for three days on this account a thanksgiving was held; the other was no empty panic but the true ruin of many: a fire breaking out from the Forum Boarium, the buildings facing the Tiber burned a day and a night, and all the shops with merchandise of great price went up in flames.

The year was now nearly at its close, and from day to day the report of the Antiochan war and the senators’ concern grew greater; and so, that all might be the more intent, the provinces of the magistrates-elect began to be discussed. They decreed that the consuls should have Italy and wherever the Senate should decide—all now knew that there was war against King Antiochus—for their provinces. To whichever fell that lot, four thousand foot of Roman citizens and three hundred horse, six thousand of the allies of the Latin name with four hundred horse, were decreed. The levy of these Lucius Quinctius the consul was ordered to hold, that nothing might delay the new consul from setting out at once whither the Senate should decide. Likewise concerning the praetors’ provinces it was decreed: that the first lot be the two jurisdictions, the city and that between citizens and foreigners; the second the Bruttii; the third the fleet, to sail whither the Senate should decide; the fourth Sicily; the fifth Sardinia; the sixth Farther Spain. Besides, Lucius Quinctius the consul was ordered to enroll two new legions of Roman citizens and twenty thousand foot of the allies and of the Latin name and eight hundred horse. That army they decreed to the praetor to whom the Bruttii should fall as his province.

Two temples of Jupiter were dedicated that year on the Capitol; Lucius Furius Purpureo had vowed one as praetor in the Gallic war, the other as consul; Quintus Marcius Ralla, as one of the two commissioners, dedicated them. Many severe judgments were passed that year against moneylenders, the curule aediles Marcus Tuccius and Publius Iunius Brutus prosecuting private men. From the fine of those condemned, a gilded four-horse chariot was set on the Capitol, and in the cell of Jupiter, above the gable of the little shrine, twelve gilded shields, and the same men built a portico outside the Trigemina gate among the timber-merchants.

While the Romans were intent on the preparation of the new war, not even by Antiochus was there any pause. Three cities held him back, Smyrna and Alexandria Troas and Lampsacus, which up to that day he could neither take by force nor entice into friendship by terms. Nor did he wish to leave them behind him as he crossed over himself into Europe. The deliberation about Hannibal too held him back. And first the open ships, which he had meant to send with him into Africa, were delayed; then a consultation was raised whether he should be sent at all, chiefly by Thoas the Aetolian, who, all Greece being filled with tumult, brought word that Demetrias was in their power, and, by the same lies about the king with which—multiplying his forces in words—he had raised the spirits of many in Greece, with these same he was also puffing up the king’s hope: that he was being summoned by the prayers of all, that there would be a concourse to the shores from which they had sighted the royal fleet. This same man dared to shake the king’s resolve about Hannibal, already nearly fixed. For he held both that no part of the ships ought to be detached from the royal fleet, and that, if ships were to be sent, no one ought less than Hannibal to be set over that fleet: that he was an exile and a Carthaginian, for whom either his own fortune or his genius could make a thousand new designs each day, and that the very glory of war by which Hannibal was commended, as it were for a dowry, was too great in a royal officer. The king ought to be conspicuous, the king alone to be seen as leader, alone as commander. If Hannibal should lose the fleet or the army, it would be the same loss as if they were lost through some other leader; if anything turned out prosperously, it would be Hannibal’s glory, not Antiochus’s; but if, in the whole war, the fortune of conquering the Romans should be given, what hope was there that Hannibal would live under a king, subject to one man, who had scarcely endured his own country? He had not so borne himself from his youth, having embraced in hope and spirit the empire of the whole world, as to seem one who in old age would endure a master. The king had no need of Hannibal as a leader; as a companion and counselor he could use the same man for the war. A moderate fruit from such a genius would be neither burdensome nor useless; if the highest were sought, it would overweigh both the giver and the receiver. No natures are so prone to envy as those of men who do not match their birth and fortune with their spirits, because they hate virtue and the good in another. At once the plan of sending Hannibal—the one thing that had been usefully thought of at the beginning of the war—was thrown aside. Elated most of all by the revolt of Demetrias from the Romans to the Aetolians, he resolved to put off no longer his setting out for Greece. Before he loosed his ships, he went up from the sea to Ilium, to sacrifice to Minerva. Thence, returning to the fleet, he set out with forty decked ships and sixty open ones, and two hundred transports with provisions of every kind and other warlike apparatus followed. He held first the island of Imbros; thence he crossed to Sciathus; there, the ships which had been scattered being gathered in the deep, he came first to Pteleum on the mainland. There Eurylochus the Magnetarch and the leading men of the Magnetes met him from Demetrias, and, glad at their numbers, on the next day he was carried with his ships into the harbor of the city; his forces he landed not far thence. There were ten thousand foot and five hundred horse, six elephants, forces scarcely enough to seize Greece undefended, far less to sustain a Roman war.

The Aetolians, after it was brought word that Antiochus had come to Demetrias, a council being proclaimed, made the decree by which they summoned him. The king, already set out from Demetrias, because he knew they would so decree, had advanced to Phalara on the Maliac gulf. Thence, the decree received, he came to Lamia, received with the vast favor of the multitude, with clappings and shoutings and whatever else marks the overflowing joy of a crowd. When it had come to the council, the king, brought in with difficulty by the praetor Phaeneas and the other leading men, silence being made, began to speak. His first words were of excuse, that he had come with forces so much smaller than the hope and expectation of all. That this ought to be the greatest token of his goodwill toward them—that, neither sufficiently prepared in any respect, and at a season unripe for sailing, he had at the call of their envoys obeyed without reluctance, and had believed that, when the Aetolians had seen him, they would reckon all their defense placed even in him alone. But he would amply fulfill the hope even of those whose expectation seemed for the present left unanswered: for as soon as the season of the year afforded a sea fit for sailing, he would fill all Greece with arms, men, and horses, all the seacoast with fleets, and would spare neither expense nor toil nor peril, until, the Roman empire thrust from their necks, he had made Greece truly free and the Aetolians the leading power in it. With the armies, supplies too of every kind would come from Asia; for the present it ought to be the Aetolians’ care that a supply of grain be furnished his men and a tolerable price for other things. In this sense the king, having spoken to the great assent of all, departed. After the king’s departure there was a contention between the two leading men of the Aetolians, Phaeneas and Thoas. Phaeneas held that Antiochus ought rather to be used as a reconciler of peace and an arbitrator concerning the matters in dispute with the Roman people than as a leader of war; that his coming and his majesty would have more force to make the Romans yield through respect than arms; that men, to avoid the necessity of war, remit voluntarily many things which cannot be wrung from them by war and arms. Thoas denied that Phaeneas was zealous for peace; rather he wished to break up the preparation of war, that through weariness both the king’s impulse might languish and the Romans have time to make ready: for that nothing fair could be obtained from the Romans had been sufficiently tried by embassies so often sent to Rome, by debating so often with Quinctius himself, nor would they have implored the help of Antiochus unless every hope had been cut off. Since that help had been offered more quickly than all had hoped, they must not grow slack, but must rather entreat the king that, since—what was the greatest thing—he had himself come as the champion of Greece, he should summon his land and sea forces too. The king in arms would obtain something; unarmed he would be of no weight with the Romans, not on behalf of the Aetolians only, but not even on his own behalf. This opinion prevailed, and they resolved that the king should be styled commander, and chose thirty leading men with whom he should consult on anything he wished.

The council thus dismissed, the whole multitude dispersed into their several cities; the king on the next day consulted with their apocleti where he should begin the war. It seemed best to attack first Chalcis, lately attempted in vain by the Aetolians; and that for that matter there was need of speed rather than of great effort and apparatus. And so the king set out with a thousand foot who had followed him from Demetrias, through Phocis, and by another route the leading men of the Aetolians, a few of the younger men being called out, met him at Chaeronea and followed with ten decked ships. The king, his camp pitched at Salganea, himself with the leading men of the Aetolians crossed the Euripus by ship, and, when he had landed not far from the harbor, the magistrates too of the Chalcidians and the leading men came forward before the gate. A few from either side met for a conference. The Aetolians earnestly urged that, saving the friendship of the Romans, they should take the king too for ally and friend: for he had not crossed into Europe to make war, but to free Greece—and to free it in deed, not in words and pretense, as the Romans had done; and that nothing was more useful to the cities of Greece than to embrace both friendships; for thus, safe from the wrong of either, they would always be under the protection and assurance of the other. For if they did not receive the king, let them see what they must suffer at once, when the help of the Romans was far off, and the enemy Antiochus, whom they could not resist with their own strength, was before their gates. To this Micythio, one of the leading men, said that he marveled to free whom Antiochus had crossed into Europe, leaving his own kingdom: for he knew no city in Greece that either had a garrison, or paid tribute to the Romans, or, bound by an unequal treaty, endured laws it did not wish; and so the Chalcidians needed neither any champion of freedom, since they were free, nor any garrison, since by the benefit of that same Roman people they had peace and freedom. The king’s friendship they did not spurn, nor that of the Aetolians themselves. That first thing they would do as friends, if they left the island and went away: for it was fixed for themselves not only not to receive them within their walls, but not even to make any alliance save by the authority of the Romans. When these things were reported to the king at the ships, where he had halted, for the present—for he had not come with such forces that he could do anything by force—it seemed good to return to Demetrias. There, since his first undertaking had turned out vain, the king consulted with the Aetolians what should be done next. It was resolved to try the Boeotians, the Achaeans, and Amynander, king of the Athamanians. They reckoned the nation of the Boeotians estranged from the Romans ever since the death of Brachylles and what had followed it; of the Achaeans they believed that Philopoemen, the leading man, was hostile and hateful to Quinctius through rivalry of glory in the Laconian war. Amynander had to wife Apama, daughter of a certain Alexander of Megalopolis, who, giving out that he was descended from Alexander the Great, had imposed on his two sons the names Philip and Alexander, and on his daughter Apama; and Philip, the elder of the brothers, following his sister, famous for her royal marriage, had gone into Athamania. Him, vain by nature as it happened, the Aetolians and Antiochus had pushed into the hope of the kingdom of Macedon, on the ground that he was truly of the stock of kings, if he should join Amynander and the Athamanians to Antiochus. And that vanity of promises prevailed not only with Philip but also with Amynander.

In Achaea a council was granted at Aegium to the envoys of Antiochus and of the Aetolians, in the presence of Titus Quinctius. The envoy of Antiochus was heard before the Aetolians. He, like most of those whom royal wealth nourishes, a man of empty speech, filled lands and seas with the hollow sound of words: that an innumerable mass of cavalry was being carried across the Hellespont into Europe, some mailed, whom they call cataphracts, some using arrows from horseback and, when nothing is sufficiently covered, planting their shots the more surely from the back of a fleeing horse. To these cavalry forces—though even the armies of all Europe gathered into one might be overwhelmed by them—he added manifold forces of foot, and terrified with the very names of nations scarcely heard in the telling, naming the Dahae, the Medes, the Elymaeans, and the Cadusians. Of naval forces indeed, which no harbors in Greece could hold, the Sidonians and Tyrians held the right wing, the Aradians and the Sidetae from Pamphylia the left, nations which none had ever equaled in naval skill or valor. As for money, as for the other apparatus of war, it was superfluous to rehearse them: they themselves knew that the kingdoms of Asia had always abounded in gold. And so the Romans would have to do not with Philip nor with Hannibal—the one the leading man of a single city, the other shut within the bounds of the kingdom of Macedon only—but with the great king of all Asia and part of Europe. Yet he, though he came from the farthest bounds of the East to free Greece, demanded nothing of the Achaeans whereby their faith toward the Romans, their earlier allies and friends, might be injured: for he did not ask that they take up arms with him against them, but that they join themselves to neither side. Let them wish peace to both parties, as befits friends standing between; let them not interpose themselves in the war. Almost the same thing was asked by Archidamus, the envoy of the Aetolians, that they should maintain quiet—the easiest and safest course—and, as spectators of the war, await the outcome of others’ fortunes without any risk to their own. Then he was carried by the intemperance of his tongue into railing, now upon the Romans in common, now upon Quinctius himself in particular, calling them ungrateful and reproaching them that not only the victory over Philip had been won by the valor of the Aetolians, but their very safety, and that he himself and his army had been saved by their work. For when had that man ever performed the office of a general? He had seen him in the line taking auspices and sacrificing and pronouncing vows after the manner of a little sacrificing priest, while he himself flung his own body in his stead before the weapons of the enemy. To this Quinctius said that Archidamus had had regard for those before whom, rather than those to whom, he spoke: for the Achaeans knew well that all the ferocity of the Aetolians was in words, not in deeds, and showed itself in councils and assemblies rather than in the line; and so he had set little store by the opinion of the Achaeans, to whom he knew he was known, but had vaunted himself before the king’s envoys and, through them, before the absent king. But if anyone had been ignorant before of what had joined Antiochus and the Aetolians, it could have appeared from the envoys’ talk: by lying in turn and vaunting the strength they did not have, they had puffed each other up with empty hope and been puffed up: "while these men tell that Philip was conquered by them, that the Romans were protected by their valor, and—what you were just now hearing—that you and the rest of the cities and nations will follow their party, the king on the other side vaunts clouds of foot and horse and covers the seas with his fleets. But the matter is most like the dinner of my Chalcidian host, a man both good and a clever entertainer, at whose house, kindly received at the time of the summer solstice, when we wondered whence he had at that season of the year game so various and so abundant, the man—not so boastful as these are—said with a smile that that variety and the look of venison were made out of a tame pig with seasonings." This could be aptly said of the king’s forces, which had been vaunted a little before: for the various kinds of arms and the many names of unheard-of nations, Dahae and Medes and Cadusians and Elymaeans, were all Syrians, a stock much better, because of their servile dispositions, for slaves than for soldiers. "And would that I could set before your eyes, Achaeans, the running to and fro of the great king, now from Demetrias to Lamia to the council of the Aetolians, now to Chalcis; you would see in the king’s camp scarcely the likeness of two little legions ill filled; you would see the king now all but begging grain from the Aetolians to measure out to his soldiers, now seeking money on loan at interest for their pay, now standing before the gates of Chalcis, and soon, shut out from there, doing nothing else but looking at Aulis and the Euripus and returning into Aetolia. Ill did Antiochus trust the Aetolians, and the Aetolians the king’s empty vaunting: the less ought you to be deceived, but rather to trust to the tried and proven faith of the Romans. For as to what they say is best, that you should not interpose yourselves in the war—nothing, on the contrary, is so foreign to your interests; for without thanks, without dignity, you will be the prize of the victor." He was thought to have answered not absurdly against both, and it was easy for his speech to be received with fair and favoring ears. For there was neither debate nor doubt but that all should judge the same men enemies and friends to the Achaean nation whom the Roman people had judged so, and should order war to be proclaimed against both Antiochus and the Aetolians. They also at once sent auxiliaries, whither Quinctius advised, of five hundred soldiers to Chalcis and five hundred to the Piraeus. For at Athens matters were not far from sedition, certain men dragging the multitude—venal for a price in the hope of largesses—toward Antiochus, until Quinctius was summoned by those who were of the Roman party, and, a certain Leon accusing him, Apollodorus, the author of the revolt, was condemned and cast into exile.

And from the Achaeans, indeed, the embassy returned to the king with a grim answer; the Boeotians replied nothing certain: when Antiochus had come into Boeotia, then they would deliberate what they ought to do.

Antiochus, when he had heard that both the Achaeans and King Eumenes had sent a garrison to Chalcis, thinking that he must make haste, that his own men might both forestall them and, if they could, intercept those coming, sends Menippus with about three thousand soldiers and Polyxenidas with the whole fleet; he himself, a few days after, leads six thousand of his own soldiers, and out of the force that could be hastily gathered at Lamia not so very many Aetolians. The five hundred Achaeans and the modest aid sent by King Eumenes, under the lead of Xenoclides of Chalcis, the roads not yet beset, crossed the Euripus in safety and reached Chalcis; the Roman soldiers, about five hundred themselves too, came when Menippus already had his camp before Salganea, at the Hermaeum, where is the crossing from Boeotia into the island of Euboea. Micythio was with them, who had been sent as envoy from Chalcis to Quinctius to ask for that very garrison. He, after he saw the passes beset by the enemy, abandoning the route to Aulis, turned to Delium, intending to cross thence into Euboea. There is a temple of Apollo at Delium, overhanging the sea; it is five miles from Tanagra; thence the crossing by sea to the nearest part of Euboea is less than four miles. There, both in a fane and grove of that sanctity and that sacred right which belong to temples that the Greeks call asyla, and while war was not yet either proclaimed or so begun that they had heard of drawn swords or blood shed anywhere—when in great ease some of the soldiers had turned to the sight of the temple and grove, others wandered unarmed on the shore, and a great part had dispersed through the fields to gather wood and fodder—suddenly Menippus, attacking them scattered everywhere, cut them down, took about fifty alive; very few escaped, among them Micythio, picked up by a small transport. That affair, as it was grievous to Quinctius and the Romans for the loss of soldiers, so seemed to have added something to the justice of making war on Antiochus. Antiochus, his army brought up to Aulis, when he had again sent spokesmen, partly of his own, partly Aetolians, to Chalcis, to treat of those same things as lately, with heavier threats, easily obtained—Micythio and Xenoclides striving against it in vain—that the gates be opened to him. Those who were of the Roman party left the city at the king’s coming. The soldiers of the Achaeans and of Eumenes held Salganea, and in the Euripus a few Roman soldiers were fortifying a fort to guard the place. Menippus set about assaulting Salganea, the king himself the fort of the Euripus. First the Achaeans and the soldiers of Eumenes, having bargained that it be allowed them to depart without harm, withdrew from the garrison; the Romans more stubbornly guarded the Euripus. Yet these too, when they were besieged by land and sea and now saw siege-engines and artillery being brought up, did not endure the siege. When the king held what was the chief place of Euboea, not even the other cities of that island refused his command; and he seemed to himself to have begun the war with a great opening, in that so great an island and so many convenient cities had come into his power.