When Publius Cornelius Scipio, son of Gnaeus, and Manius Acilius Glabrio, the consuls, had entered upon their office, the conscript fathers, before they treated of the provinces, ordered that divine service be performed with full-grown victims in all the shrines where a lectisternium (the banquet spread for the gods) is wont to be held the greater part of the year, and that prayer be made—because the Senate had a new war in mind—that the matter might turn out well and happily for the Senate and the Roman people. All these sacrifices were favorable, and at the first victims the omens came out auspicious, and the haruspices answered thus: that by this war the bounds of the Roman people would be enlarged, and that victory and a triumph were foreshown. When this had been reported, the fathers, their minds loosed from religious scruple, ordered a bill to be brought before the people, asking whether it was their will and command that war be entered upon with King Antiochus and with those who had followed his faction; and that if this bill were carried, then, if the consuls so saw fit, they should refer the whole matter to the Senate. Publius Cornelius carried the bill through; then the Senate decreed that the consuls should draw lots for the provinces of Italy and Greece; that the one to whom Greece fell should, over and above that number of soldiers which Lucius Quinctius as consul had enrolled or levied for that province by the Senate’s authority, receive the army which the praetor Marcus Baebius had in the year before, by decree of the Senate, ferried over into Macedonia; and outside Italy he was permitted, should the situation require, to take auxiliaries from the allies, not above the number of five thousand. Lucius Quinctius, consul of the previous year, it was resolved should be sent as legate to that war. The other consul, to whom Italy had fallen as his province, was ordered to make war upon the Boii with whichever he preferred of the two armies the previous consuls had held, and to send the other to Rome, and these were to be the city legions, ready for wherever the Senate should determine. When these matters had been decreed, with the Senate intent on which province should be whose, then at last it was resolved that the consuls should draw lots. To Acilius fell Greece, to Cornelius Italy. The lot being then settled, a decree of the Senate was passed: because the Roman people had at that time ordered there to be war with King Antiochus and with those under his command, that for this cause the consuls should proclaim a supplicatio (a public thanksgiving of prayer at the gods’ couches), and that the consul Manius Acilius should vow Great Games to Jupiter and gifts at all the couches of the gods. This vow the consul pronounced in these words, with Publius Licinius the pontifex maximus leading him: "If the war which the people has ordered to be undertaken with King Antiochus shall be brought to a close according to the mind of the Senate and the Roman people, then to thee, Jupiter, the Roman people will hold Great Games for ten days running, and gifts shall be given at all the couches of the gods, of money in such amount as the Senate shall decree. Whatever magistrate shall hold those games, whenever and wherever he hold them, let these games be reckoned duly held and these gifts duly given." Then a thanksgiving was proclaimed by the two consuls, to last two days.

When the consuls had drawn lots for their provinces, the praetors at once drew theirs as well. To Marcus Junius Brutus fell the two jurisdictions; to Aulus Cornelius Mammula the Bruttii; to Marcus Aemilius Lepidus Sicily; to Lucius Oppius Salinator Sardinia; to Gaius Livius Salinator the fleet; to Lucius Aemilius Paulus Farther Spain. Their armies were decreed to them thus: to Aulus Cornelius were given the new soldiers enrolled the year before by the consul Lucius Quinctius under decree of the Senate, and he was ordered to guard the whole coast about Tarentum and Brundisium. To Lucius Aemilius Paulus, for Farther Spain, besides the army he was to receive from the proconsul Marcus Fulvius, it was decreed that he should lead three thousand new soldiers and three hundred horse, in such proportion that two parts of them should be of the allies of the Latin name and the third of Roman citizens. The like reinforcement was sent to Gaius Flaminius, whose command was being prolonged, in Nearer Spain. Marcus Aemilius Lepidus was ordered to take over both province and army together from Lucius Valerius, whom he was to succeed; and, if it seemed good, to keep Lucius Valerius in the province as propraetor, and to divide the province so that one part should run from Agrigentum to Pachynus, the other from Pachynus to Tyndaris; this stretch of coast Lucius Valerius was to guard with twenty warships. To the same praetor was given the charge of exacting two tithes of grain, and of seeing it carried to the sea and conveyed across to Greece. The like exaction of a second tithe in Sardinia was laid upon Lucius Oppius; only this grain it was resolved should be carried not to Greece but to Rome. Gaius Livius the praetor, to whom the fleet had fallen, was ordered to make thirty ships ready and cross over to Greece at the earliest possible moment, and to take ships from Atilius. The old ships that were in the dockyards Marcus Junius the praetor was charged to refit and arm, and to enroll freedmen as crews for that fleet. Sets of three envoys were sent into Africa to the Carthaginians and into Numidia to ask for grain to be carried to Greece, the price of which the Roman people should pay. And the state was so intent upon the equipment and care of that war that the consul Publius Cornelius issued an edict that, of those who were senators or had the right of speaking their opinion in the Senate, and of those who were the lesser magistrates, none should go farther from the city of Rome than that he could return thence the same day, and that not at one time should five senators be away from the city of Rome. In the brisk preparing of the fleet a dispute that arose between the praetor Gaius Livius and the maritime colonies held him up for a little. For when they were being pressed into the fleet, they appealed to the tribunes of the plebs; by these they were referred back to the Senate. The Senate, with all to a man agreeing, decreed that exemption from naval service did not belong to those colonies. Ostia and Fregenae and Castrum Novum and Pyrgi and Antium and Tarracina and Minturnae and Sinuessa were those which contended with the praetor over the exemption. The consul Manius Acilius then, by decree of the Senate, referred to the college of fetials the question whether war should be declared upon King Antiochus in his own person, or whether it was enough that it be announced at some garrison of his; and whether they bade war be declared separately upon the Aetolians too; and whether the alliance and friendship with them must be renounced before war was declared. The fetials answered that already before, when they had been consulted about Philip, they had decided it made no difference whether the declaration were made to the king in person or at a garrison; that the friendship seemed already renounced, since they had judged it just that, when the envoys had so often demanded redress, nothing should be either restored or made good; that the Aetolians had of their own accord declared war upon themselves, when they had seized Demetrias, a city of the allies, by force, had gone to attack Chalcis by land and sea, and had led King Antiochus over into Europe to make war upon the Roman people. When all was now sufficiently prepared, the consul Manius Acilius issued an edict that the soldiers Lucius Quinctius had enrolled, and those he had levied from the allies and the Latin name, who were to go with him into the province, and the tribunes of the soldiers of the first and third legions, should all muster at Brundisium on the Ides of May. He himself on the fifth day before the Nones of May went forth from the city in the general’s cloak. In those same days the praetors too set out for their provinces.

About the same time envoys came to Rome from two kings, Philip and Ptolemy, king of Egypt, Philip promising auxiliaries and money and grain for the war; while from Ptolemy there were even brought a thousand pounds of gold and twenty thousand pounds of silver. Nothing of this was accepted; thanks were rendered to the kings; and when each promised that he would come with all his forces into Aetolia and take part in the war, to Ptolemy this was excused; to Philip’s envoys the answer was given that he would do a thing welcome to the Senate and the Roman people if he did not fail the consul Manius Acilius. Likewise envoys came from the Carthaginians and from King Masinissa. The Carthaginians promised a thousand thousand pecks of wheat and five hundred thousand of barley for the army, half of it to be brought to Rome: this they asked, that the Romans accept it from them as a gift; and that they would fit out a fleet at their own cost, and that the tribute which they owed in several installments over many years they would pay all at once in cash. Masinissa’s envoys promised that the king would send five hundred thousand pecks of wheat and three hundred thousand of barley to the army in Greece, and to Rome three hundred thousand pecks of wheat and two hundred and fifty thousand of barley, and five hundred horsemen and twenty elephants, to the consul Manius Acilius. To both, concerning the grain, the answer was that the Roman people would use it on this condition, that they accept the price; concerning the fleet the Carthaginians were excused, except for any ships they owed by treaty; concerning the money likewise the answer was that they would accept none before its day.

While these things were going on at Rome, Antiochus at Chalcis, that he might not be idle through the season of winter quarters, partly worked upon the dispositions of the communities himself by sending envoys, and partly they came to him of their own accord, as the Epirotes by the common consent of their nation and the Eleans from the Peloponnese did. The Eleans were asking aid against the Achaeans, who, they believed, after the declaration of a war upon Antiochus not made to their own mind, would carry arms first of all against their own community. A thousand foot were sent to them with a Cretan, Euphanes, for commander. The embassy of the Epirotes was of a temper anything but free or single-minded toward either side; they wished to win favor with the king, yet with such care that they should give no offense to the Romans. For they asked that he should not draw them rashly into the cause, exposed as they were facing Italy on behalf of all Greece and the first to bear the brunt of the Roman onset; but that, if he himself could shield Epirus with land and naval forces, all the Epirotes would gladly receive him in their cities and harbors; and, if he could not do this, they besought him not to throw them naked and unarmed in the way of a Roman war. By this embassy it was plainly their aim that, whether—as they rather believed—he kept away from Epirus, all should stand untouched for them with the Roman armies, while favor enough had been won with the king for their having been ready to receive him had he come; or whether he came, even so there would be hope of pardon from the Romans, in that, not waiting for a distant aid from themselves, they had yielded to forces close at hand. To this embassy, so tangled, because it was not quite ready to him what answer to make, he said that he would send envoys to them, to speak of the things that touched them and himself in common. He himself set out for Boeotia, having for the show of his anger against the Romans those causes which I have named before—the murder of Brachylles and the war waged by Quinctius at Coronea because of the slaughter of Roman soldiers—but in truth because the once-excellent discipline of the nation had now for many generations been slipping, in public and in private, and many men were in that condition which could not last long without an overturning of affairs. He came to Thebes, the chief men of Boeotia pouring out to meet him from every side. There, in the council of the nation, although both by the attack made on the Roman garrison at Delium and at Chalcis he had begun a war by no small or doubtful first steps, yet he opened with the same speech he had used in his first conference at Chalcis and through his envoys in the council of the Achaeans, demanding that friendship be established with him, not that war be declared on the Romans. None was deceived as to what was afoot; yet a decree, under a mild pretext of words, was passed for the king against the Romans.

This nation too thus joined to him, he returned to Chalcis, and, having sent letters ahead that the chief men of the Aetolians should assemble at Demetrias, with whom he might deliberate on the sum of affairs, he came thither by ship on the day appointed for the council. Both Amynander, summoned to take counsel from Athamania, and Hannibal the Carthaginian, long now not called in, were present at that council. The deliberation was about the nation of the Thessalians, whose disposition, in the view of all who were present, was to be sounded. On this point only were opinions divided: that some thought the matter should be pressed at once, others that it should be put off out of the winter—which was then about half spent—until the beginning of spring; and some judged that envoys only should be sent, others that one should go with all the forces and frighten them by fear, should they hold back. While the whole debate turned upon this single question, Hannibal, asked by name for his opinion, turned the king and those present toward a consideration of the war as a whole, in a speech such as this: "If, ever since we crossed into Greece, I had been called into council when the business was about Euboea and the Achaeans and Boeotia, I should have spoken the same opinion which today, when the business is about the Thessalians, I shall speak. Before all things I judge that Philip and the Macedonians must by every means be drawn into partnership in the war. For as to what concerns Euboea and the Boeotians and the Thessalians, who doubts that, being men who have no strength of their own, forever flattering the power at hand, they use the very fear they hold in their counsels for the obtaining of pardon, and that, the moment they see a Roman army in Greece, they will turn back to their accustomed master—and that it will do them no harm that, while the Romans were far off, they were unwilling to make trial of your might and of your present army? How much sooner, then, and how much better, is it to join Philip to us rather than these? Who, if once he has come down into the cause, will have nothing left to lose, and who brings forces such as were lately able not merely to be an addition to a Roman war but by themselves to withstand the Romans. With him joined to us—let the word breed no ill omen—how could I doubt of the outcome, when I see that those by whom the Romans prevailed against Philip will now be the very means by which they themselves are assailed? The Aetolians, who beat Philip—as is agreed among all men—will fight with Philip against the Romans; Amynander and the nation of the Athamanians, whose service in that war was greatest after the Aetolians’, will stand with us; Philip then, while you were idle, was bearing the whole mass of the war upon himself; now two greatest kings of Asia and of Europe will wage war with their strength against a single people—to say nothing of my own double fortune—a people that in our fathers’ age was not a match even for one king of the Epirotes; and what, in the end, will it be when set beside you? What thing, then, gives me confidence that Philip can be joined to us? One, the common advantage, which is the strongest bond of alliance; the other, you Aetolians as my warrant. For your envoy here, Thoas, among the other things he was wont to say to rouse Antiochus into Greece, above all kept affirming this, that Philip was chafing and bearing ill, under the show of peace, the terms of servitude imposed upon him. He likened the king’s anger in his words to that of a wild beast bound or caged and longing to break its bars. If such is his spirit, let us loose his bonds and break his bars, that his anger, so long pent up, may burst out against the common enemy. But if our embassy moves him not at all, then, since we cannot join him to us, let us at least take care that he be not joined to our enemies. Seleucus your son is at Lysimachia; if with the army he has with him he begins to ravage, through Thrace, the parts nearest to Macedonia, he will easily turn Philip from carrying aid to the Romans to defending his own above all. Concerning Philip you have my opinion: as to the plan of the war as a whole, what I thought you have not been ignorant from the very beginning. And if I had then been heard, the Romans would not be hearing of Chalcis taken in Euboea and the fort of the Euripus stormed, but of Etruria and the coast of Liguria and of Cisalpine Gaul ablaze with war, and—what is their greatest terror—of Hannibal in Italy. Now too I advise you to summon all your naval and land forces; let transports with supplies follow the fleet: for here, as we are few for the labors of war, so we are too many for the scantiness of our provisions. When you have drawn together all your strength, you will divide the fleet and keep part of it on station at Corcyra, that the crossing lie not open, free and safe, to the Romans, and part you will ferry to the coast of Italy that looks toward Sardinia and Africa; you yourself with all your land forces will advance into the territory of Bullis; thence you will keep guard over Greece, both presenting to the Romans the appearance that you are about to cross over, and, if the case demand it, crossing over indeed. This I advise, who, though I am not the most expert in all war, have at least learned to make war with the Romans by my own goods and ills. In the counsel I have given, I promise service neither faithless nor sluggish. May the gods approve that opinion which shall have seemed best to you."

Such, in the main, was the speech of Hannibal; which those present praised for the moment more than they followed up in the deeds themselves: for none of it was done, save that he sent Polyxenidas to summon the fleet and forces from Asia. Envoys were sent to Larisa to the council of the Thessalians, and a day was named for the Aetolians and Amynander to muster their army at Pherae; thither too the king came at once with his own forces. There, while he waited for Amynander and the Aetolians, he sent Philip of Megalopolis with two thousand men to gather the bones of the Macedonians around Cynoscephalae, where the war with Philip had been fought to a finish—whether prompted by the man himself, who sought to commend himself to the Macedonian nation and to bring odium upon the king for having left the soldiers unburied, or by that vanity inborn in kings, his mind set upon a design specious in show, empty in fact. A mound was made by heaping into one the bones that lay strewn here and there, which won no thanks from the Macedonians but stirred huge hatred toward Philip. And so the man who up to that time had meant to take his fortune as the council should decide, sent at once to the propraetor Marcus Baebius, that Antiochus had made an inroad into Thessaly, and that, if it seemed good to him, he should move out of his winter quarters; he himself would go forward to meet him, that they might consult what was to be done.

While Antiochus already had his camp at Pherae, where the Aetolians and Amynander had joined him, envoys came from Larisa, asking for what deed or word of the Thessalians he was provoking them with war, and at the same time praying that, the army withdrawn, he would, if anything seemed good to him, debate it with them through envoys. At the same time they sent five hundred armed men under the command of Hippolochus as a garrison into Pherae; these, shut out from entry, the king’s men now blocking all the roads, withdrew to Scotusa. To the envoys of the Larisaeans the king answered mildly, that he had entered Thessaly not to make war but for the sake of protecting and establishing the liberty of the Thessalians. A man was sent to deal with the Pheraeans to the like effect; and when no answer was given him, the Pheraeans themselves sent to the king as their envoy the chief man of the community, Pausanias. When he had pleaded much in the same strain as had been said for the Chalcidians in the conference at the strait of the Euripus—the cause being like—and some things even more boldly, the king bade them again and again deliberate, lest they take that counsel which, while they were over-cautious and provident for the future, they should at once repent of, and dismissed him. When this embassy had been reported back at Pherae, they did not for the least moment doubt that, in loyalty toward the Romans, they would endure whatever the chance of war might bring. And so both they were preparing themselves with the utmost effort to defend the city, and the king set about assaulting the walls from every side at once, and, as one who understood well enough—for there was no doubt—that on the issue of that city, the first he had assailed, it lay whether he should thereafter be scorned or feared by the whole nation of the Thessalians, he cast every terror upon the besieged from all sides. The first onset of the assault they sustained steadily enough; then, when many of the defenders fell or were wounded, their spirits began to waver. Recalled then by the chidings of their leading men to persevere in their purpose, they abandoned the outer ring of the wall and, their forces now failing, withdrew into the inner part of the city, around which a shorter circuit of fortification was thrown; at last, overcome by their evils, since they feared that, if taken by storm, there would be no pardon with the victor, they surrendered themselves. Delaying nothing thereafter, the king sent four thousand armed men, while the terror was fresh, to Scotusa. Nor was there any delay of surrender there, the men beholding the recent example of the Pheraeans, who had at last done under the lash of misfortune what at first they had stubbornly refused: along with the city itself the garrison of Hippolochus and of the Larisaeans was surrendered. All were dismissed by the king unharmed, because the king believed that this matter would be of great moment for winning over the hearts of the Larisaeans.

Within the tenth day after he had come to Pherae, these things accomplished, he set out with his whole army for Crannon and took it at his first coming. Thence he recovered Cierium and Metropolis and the strongholds round about them; and now all of that region except Atrax and Gyrton was in his power. Then he resolved to attack Larisa, reckoning that, whether by terror at the others stormed, or by the favor of the garrison dismissed, or by the example of so many communities surrendering themselves, they would not hold out longer in stubbornness. With the elephants ordered to be driven before the standards for terror’s sake, he advanced upon the city in square column, that the minds of a great part of the Larisaeans should waver uncertain between the present fear of the enemy and shame before their absent allies. In those same days Amynander with the youth of the Athamanians seized Pellinaeum, and Menippus, setting out into Perrhaebia with three thousand Aetolian foot and two hundred horse, took Malloea and Cyretiae by storm and laid waste the territory of Tripolis. These things swiftly done, they returned to the king at Larisa; they came up while he was deliberating what should be done about Larisa. There opinions tended in opposite directions, some judging that force should be applied and the matter not put off, but that he should assail the walls at once from every side with siege-works and engines—the city lying on level ground, with an open and flat approach on all sides—others recalling now that the strength of the city was by no means to be compared with that of Pherae, now that winter and the season of the year were fit for no warlike business, least of all for the siege and assault of cities. To the king, wavering between hope and fear, envoys from Pharsalus, who had come by chance to surrender their city, raised his spirits. Marcus Baebius meanwhile, having met with Philip in Dassaretia, by common counsel sent Appius Claudius to the relief of Larisa, who through Macedonia by forced marches came to the ridge of the mountains that is above Gonni. The town of Gonni is twenty miles from Larisa, set in the very jaws of the pass that is called Tempe. There, having measured out a camp wider than suited his forces, and having kindled more fires than were enough for use, he made upon the enemy the impression he had sought—that the whole Roman army was there with King Philip. And so the king, alleging to his own men that winter was pressing, after delaying only a single day withdrew from Larisa and returned to Demetrias, and the Aetolians and Athamanians retired within their own borders. Appius, although he saw the siege he had been sent to relieve already raised, nonetheless went down to Larisa, to confirm the spirits of the allies for the time to come; and the joy was twofold, in that the enemy had withdrawn from their borders and they beheld a Roman garrison within their walls.

The king, having set out from Demetrias for Chalcis, was caught by love of a Chalcidian maiden, the daughter of Cleoptolemus; and when he had worn down her father, first by intercession, then by entreating him himself in person—reluctant as he was to bind himself in connection with a fortune so much heavier than his own—at last, the thing gained, he celebrated the marriage as if in the midst of peace, and the rest of the winter—forgetful of how great two undertakings he had taken on at once, the Roman war and the freeing of Greece—all care of every matter laid aside, he passed in banquets and the pleasures that follow wine, and then in sleep, born of weariness of these rather than of satiety. The same luxury seized all the king’s officers who were anywhere set over the winter quarters, in Boeotia most of all; into the same the soldiers too poured themselves, and not one of them put on his arms or kept his post or his watches or did anything that belonged to a soldier’s work or duty. And so at the beginning of spring, when he had come through Phocis to Chaeronea, whither he had ordered the whole army to muster from every side, he easily perceived that the soldiers had wintered with discipline no stricter than their commander’s. He ordered Alexander the Acarnanian and Menippus the Macedonian to lead the forces to Stratus in Aetolia; he himself, having made sacrifice to Apollo at Delphi, went forward to Naupactus. Having held a council with the chief men of Aetolia, he came by the road that leads past Calydon and Lysimachia to Stratus, to meet his own men who were coming by the Maliac gulf. There Mnasilochus, a chief man of the Acarnanians, bought with many gifts, not only was himself winning over the nation to the king, but had also drawn over to his own view Clytus the praetor, in whose hands the supreme power then lay. He, since he perceived that the Leucadians—Leucas being the capital of Acarnania—could not easily be driven to revolt, on account of fear of the Roman fleet, which was with Atilius and which lay about Cephallania, attacked them by craft. For when he had said in the council that the inland parts of Acarnania must be protected, and that all who bore arms must go forth to Medion and Thyrreum, lest they be seized by Antiochus or the Aetolians, there were those who said that there was no need to call up all in tumult, that a garrison of five hundred men was enough. Having got that body of youth, with three hundred posted in garrison at Medion and two hundred at Thyrreum, he was working to this end, that they should come into the king’s power as hostages-to-be. About those same days the king’s envoys came to Medion; and when, after hearing them, it was being deliberated in assembly what answer should be given the king, and some judged that they must abide in the Roman alliance, others that the king’s friendship was not to be spurned, the opinion of Clytus seemed a middle one and was therefore accepted: that they should send envoys to the king and ask of him that he allow the Medionians to deliberate upon so great a matter in the council of the Acarnanians. Onto that embassy Mnasilochus and those of his faction were of set purpose thrust; and, men having been sent secretly to bid the king move up his forces, they themselves wasted time. And so the envoys had scarcely gone out when Antiochus was upon the borders, and soon was at the gates; and, while those who had had no part in the betrayal were in alarm and were in tumult calling the youth to arms, he was led into the city by Clytus and Mnasilochus; and, while others flowed to him of their own will, even those who dissented, forced by fear, gathered to the king. When he had soothed these, frightened as they were, with a calm speech, several peoples of Acarnania revolted to him, in hope of his published clemency. From Medion he set out for Thyrreum, Mnasilochus and the envoys sent ahead thither too. But the fraud uncovered at Medion made the Thyrreans more cautious, not more timid: for, giving an answer in no way involved, that they would accept no new alliance save by the authority of the Roman commanders, they shut their gates and posted armed men on the walls. And very opportunely for confirming the spirits of the Acarnanians, Gnaeus Octavius, sent by Quinctius, having received a garrison and a few ships from Aulus Postumius—who had been set over Cephallania by Atilius the legate—came to Leucas and filled the allies with hope that the consul Manius Acilius had already crossed the sea with his legions and that a Roman camp was in Thessaly. Because the season of the year, now ripe for sailing, made this rumor like the truth, the king, having placed a garrison at Medion and in certain other towns of Acarnania, withdrew from Thyrreum and through the cities of Aetolia and Phocis returned to Chalcis.

About the same time Marcus Baebius and King Philip—who had already before, through the winter, met in Dassaretia, and, after sending Appius Claudius into Thessaly to deliver Larisa from siege, had returned into winter quarters because the season was unripe for action—at the beginning of spring joined their forces and came down into Thessaly. Antiochus was then in Acarnania. As they came on, Philip attacked Malloea in Perrhaebia, Baebius Phacium; and, this taken almost at the first onset, he takes Phaestum with the same speed. Thence, having withdrawn to Atrax, he seizes from here Cyretiae and Eritium, and, garrisons posted through the recovered towns, joins himself again to Philip, who was besieging Malloea. At the approach of the Roman army, when they had surrendered themselves, whether for fear of his strength or in hope of pardon, they went in one column to recover those towns which the Athamanians had seized. These were: Aeginium, Ericinium, Gomphi, Silana, Tricca, Meliboea, Phaloria. Then they invest Pellinaeum, where Philip of Megalopolis was in garrison with five hundred foot and forty horse, and, before they assaulted it, they send to Philip men to warn him not to choose to make trial of the utmost force. To these he answered boldly enough that he would have entrusted himself either to the Romans or to the Thessalians, but would not commit himself into Philip’s power. After it appeared that force must be used, since it seemed that Limnaeum too could be assaulted at the same time, it was resolved that the king should go to Limnaeum; Baebius stayed behind to besiege Pellinaeum.

In those very days the consul Manius Acilius, having crossed the sea with twenty thousand foot, two thousand horse, and fifteen elephants, ordered the tribunes of the soldiers to lead the foot-forces to Larisa; he himself with the cavalry came to Limnaeum to Philip. At the consul’s coming the surrender was made without hesitation, and the royal garrison was handed over, and with them the Athamanians. From Limnaeum the consul set out for Pellinaeum. There first the Athamanians surrendered themselves, then Philip of Megalopolis too; and when King Philip happened to meet him as he came out of the garrison, he ordered him by way of mockery to be saluted as king, and, meeting him himself, addressed him as "brother" with a jest scarcely seemly for his own majesty. He was then led down to the consul, ordered into custody, and not long after sent to Rome in chains. The rest of the multitude of Athamanians, or of King Antiochus’s soldiers, who had been in the garrisons of the surrendered towns during those days, was handed over to King Philip; they amounted to about four thousand men. The consul set out for Larisa, there to take counsel on the sum of the war. On the road envoys from Cierium and Metropolis met him, surrendering their cities. Philip, having treated the Athamanian captives with especial indulgence, that through them he might win over the nation, and having got hope of mastering Athamania, led his army thither, the captives sent ahead into the communities. And they had great authority among their countrymen, recalling the king’s clemency and munificence toward them; and Amynander, whose majesty in person had kept some in loyalty, fearing that he should be handed over to Philip, his enemy of old, and to the Romans, then justly hostile because of his defection, withdrew with his wife and children from the kingdom and betook himself to Ambracia: thus all Athamania passed under the right and sway of Philip. The consul, having stayed a few days at Larisa chiefly to refresh the baggage-animals, worn out both by the voyage and afterward by the marches, as though the army had been renewed by a modest rest, advanced to Crannon. As he came on, Pharsalus and Scotusa and Pherae, and whatever garrisons of Antiochus were in them, surrendered. Of these, when he had asked which wished to remain with him, he handed over a thousand who were willing to Philip, and sent the rest back unarmed to Demetrias. Thence he recovered Proerna and the strongholds round about it. He then began to lead onward into the Maliac gulf. As he approached the defile above which Thaumaci lies, the whole armed youth, the town deserted, beset the woods and the roads and rushed upon the Roman column from the higher ground. The consul first sent men to confer with them from near at hand and deter them from such madness; when he saw them persevere in their undertaking, he sent a tribune around with the soldiers of two maniples, cut off the road to the city from the armed men, and took it empty. Then, when the shout of the captured city was heard at their backs, a slaughter was made of the ambushers fleeing from the woods on every side. From Thaumaci on the next day the consul came to the river Spercheus, and from there laid waste the lands of the Hypataeans.

While these things were being done, Antiochus was at Chalcis, perceiving now that he had sought nothing from Greece save the pleasant winter quarters at Chalcis and a marriage of ill repute. Then he fell to blaming the empty promises of the Aetolians and Thoas, but to admiring Hannibal not only as a far-seeing man but well-nigh a prophet of all that was now coming to pass. Yet, lest by sloth he should overthrow besides what had been rashly begun, he sent messengers into Aetolia, that, all the youth gathered, they should muster at Lamia; he himself led thither about ten thousand foot, filled out from those who had since come from Asia, and five hundred horse. And when there had mustered considerably fewer than ever before, and only the chief men were there with a few clients, and these said that everything had been diligently done by them to call out as many as possible from their communities—but that neither by authority nor favor nor command had they prevailed against those who shirked service—forsaken on every side, both by his own who lingered in Asia and by the allies who did not make good those things in hope of which they had summoned him, he withdrew within the pass of Thermopylae. This ridge, just as Italy is divided by the backbone of the Apennines, so cuts the middle of Greece in two. Before the pass of Thermopylae, turned toward the north, lie Epirus and Perrhaebia and Magnesia and Thessaly and the Phthiotic Achaeans and the Maliac gulf; within the jaws, sloping toward the south, lie the greater part of Aetolia and Acarnania and, with Locris, Phocis and Boeotia and the adjoining island of Euboea, and, with the land of Attica running out into the deep like a headland, set behind, the Peloponnese as well. This ridge, stretching from Leucate and the sea that faces west, through Aetolia to the other sea that fronts the east, has such rough places and crags set between that not only armies but not even light-armed men easily find any paths for crossing. The mountains at the eastern end they call Oeta, of which the highest is named Callidromus, in whose valley, sloping toward the Maliac gulf, there is a passage no wider than sixty paces. This is the one military road by which armies can be led across, if they are not hindered. Therefore the place is called Pylae ("the Gates"), and by others, because there are hot waters in the very jaws, Thermopylae, famous for the death of the Lacedaemonians against the Persians, more memorable than the battle.

With spirit by no means equal to theirs, Antiochus, his camp now pitched within the gates of that place, was further blocking the pass with fortifications, and, when he had thoroughly walled off everything with a double rampart and ditch, and with a wall too where the case required, out of the great plenty of stones lying scattered about, trusting well enough that a Roman army would never force its way there, sent the Aetolians—out of four thousand, for so many had mustered—partly to hold Heraclea as a garrison, which is set before the very jaws, partly to Hypata, having no doubt that the consul would assault Heraclea, and with many now reporting that all about Hypata was being laid waste. The consul, having ravaged first the territory of Hypata and then that of Heraclea—the Aetolian aid useless in both places—pitched his camp in the very jaws, near the springs of the hot waters, facing the king. Both bands of the Aetolians shut themselves up in Heraclea. Upon Antiochus, to whom, before he saw the enemy, everything had seemed sufficiently fortified and hedged about with garrisons, there came a fear lest the Roman should find some paths across the overhanging heights; for it was reported that the Lacedaemonians too had once been so encircled by the Persians, and lately Philip by these same Romans. And so he sends a message to the Aetolians at Heraclea, that they should render him at least this service in that war, to seize and hold the peaks of the mountains round about, lest the Romans cross anywhere. When this message was heard, a dissension arose among the Aetolians. One part judged that the king’s command must be obeyed and that they should go; another that they should stay at Heraclea against either fortune, so that, whether the king were beaten by the consul, they might have their forces whole and ready to bring aid to their own communities near at hand, or, if he conquered, they might pursue the Romans scattered in flight. Each part not only abode by its opinion but even carried out its plan: two thousand stayed at Heraclea; the other two thousand, divided three ways, seized Callidromus and Rhoduntia and Tichius—these are the names of the summits.

After the consul saw the higher places held by the Aetolians, he sends Marcus Porcius Cato and Lucius Valerius Flaccus, legates of consular rank, with two thousand picked foot apiece, against the forts of the Aetolians, Flaccus to Rhoduntia and Tichius, Cato to Callidromus. He himself, before he moved his forces against the enemy, called the soldiers into assembly and addressed them in few words: "I see that most of you, soldiers, of every rank, are men who served in this same province under the leadership and auspices of Titus Quinctius. In the Macedonian war the pass at the river Aoüs was harder to surmount than this: for these are gates, and, all else closed, there is one passage between two seas, as it were a natural one; the fortifications were then both set in more advantageous places and more strongly built; the enemy’s army was both greater in number and somewhat better in the kind of its soldiers: for there were Macedonians and Thracians and Illyrians, all most fierce nations, here are Syrians and Asiatic Greeks, the basest kinds of men and born for slavery; that king was most warlike, and trained from his very youth in wars with his neighbors the Thracians and Illyrians and with all the peoples round about; this one—to be silent about all the rest of his life—is the man who, when he had crossed from Asia into Europe to make war upon the Roman people, did nothing more memorable through the whole time of his winter quarters than that for love’s sake he took a wife out of a private house, and of a family obscure even among its own people, and, a new bridegroom, fattened as it were on the wedding feasts, came forth to battle. The chief of his strength and hope lay in the Aetolians, a nation most vain and most ungrateful, as you have first found by experience, and now Antiochus is finding. For they neither came in numbers, nor could be kept in camp, and they are in mutiny among themselves, and, when they had demanded the defense of Hypata and Heraclea, they protected neither but fled to the ridges of the mountains, while part shut themselves up in Heraclea. The king himself, having confessed that nowhere on a fair field does he dare not only to come to battle but not even to pitch his camp in the open, abandoning all the region before him which he used to boast he had taken from us and from Philip, has hidden himself within the crags—and not even before the jaws of the pass, as the Lacedaemonians once did by report, but with his camp drawn back deep within; and what difference is there, for showing fear, between this and shutting himself up to be besieged within the walls of some city? But neither will the narrows protect Antiochus, nor those summits the Aetolians which they have seized. Enough has been provided and forecast on every side, that there be nothing against you in the fight save the enemy. This you ought to set before your minds: that you contend not for the liberty of Greece alone—though that too would be a noble title, to free now from the Aetolians and from Antiochus the land once freed from Philip—nor that those things only will pass to you as your prize which are now in the royal camp, but that all that equipment too, which is daily expected from Ephesus, will be your booty; that you will thereafter open to Roman dominion Asia and Syria and all the richest kingdoms as far as the rising of the sun. And what then will be wanting, but that from Gades to the Red Sea we set our bounds at the Ocean, which girdles the round world in its embrace, and that the whole human race, second after the gods, revere the Roman name? For prizes so great prepare spirits worthy of them, that tomorrow, with the gods well helping, we may decide the issue in the field."

Dismissed from this assembly, the soldiers, before they tended their bodies, made ready their arms and weapons. At first light, the signal for battle displayed, the consul drew up his line, with a narrow front, to the nature and the straits of the place. The king, after he caught sight of the enemy’s standards, himself too led out his forces. The part of the light-armed he placed before the rampart in the front; then the strength of the Macedonians, whom they called sarisophoroi (pikemen, from the long sarissa), he set, as a sort of bulwark, around the fortifications themselves. To these, on the left wing, he posted a band of javelin-men and archers and slingers under the very roots of the mountain, that from the higher ground they might assail the enemy’s naked flanks. On the right, beside the Macedonians, at the very end of the works, where the ground that runs to the sea is closed by marshy mire and quagmires impassable, he placed the elephants with their accustomed guard, behind them the horse, and then, a moderate interval left, the rest of the forces in a second line. The Macedonians posted before the rampart at first easily sustained the Romans, who were trying the approach from every side, while those who from the higher ground poured down with their slings a storm, as it were, of bullets, and arrows and javelins at once, helped them much; then, as a greater and now unendurable force of the enemy pressed in, they were driven from their ground and, drawing back their ranks, withdrew within the works; thence from the rampart they made, as it were, a second rampart, with their spears thrust out before them. And the height of the rampart was so moderate that it both afforded their own men the higher ground for fighting and, because of the length of the spears, kept the enemy below them. Many, coming up rashly to the rampart, were run through; and they would either have drawn off with their attempt foiled, or more would have fallen, had not Marcus Porcius, the Aetolians cast down from the ridge of Callidromus and for the most part cut to pieces—for he had fallen upon them off their guard and most of them asleep—appeared above the hill that overhangs the camp. Flaccus had not had the same fortune at Tichius and Rhoduntia, having tried in vain to come up against those forts. The Macedonians and the others who were in the royal camp at first, while at a distance nothing appeared but a crowd and a column, believed it was the Aetolians, seeing a battle afar off, coming to their aid; but, as soon as the standards and the arms, known from near at hand, laid the error bare, so great a sudden panic seized them all that, casting away their arms, they fled. And the fortifications hindered the pursuers, and the narrowness of the valley through which they had to pursue, and most of all that the elephants were at the rear of the column, which the foot could scarcely pass, the horse in no way, the horses being afraid and raising a greater tumult among themselves than in the battle; the plundering of the camp too took up some time: yet that day they overtook the enemy at Scarphea. Many slain and taken on the very march—not horses and men only, but the elephants too which they could not capture were killed—they returned to the camp; which had that day, during the very time of the battle, been attacked by the Aetolians holding Heraclea as a garrison, with no result of an attempt bold enough. The consul, in the third watch of the following night, having sent the cavalry ahead to pursue the enemy, moved the standards of the legions at first light. The king had got a good start on the road, as one who did not halt from his headlong course before Elatia; there, having first gathered the remnants of the battle and the flight, he withdrew with a very small band of half-armed soldiers to Chalcis. The Roman cavalry did not indeed overtake the king himself at Elatia; a great part of the column, halting either from weariness or from straying—as men who fled without guides through unknown roads—they fell upon scattered and crushed; nor, save the five hundred who were about the king, did anyone out of the whole army escape, even out of the ten thousand soldiers whom, on Polybius’s authority, we have written that the king brought over with him into Greece—a tiny number. And what, if we were to believe Valerius of Antium, who writes that there were sixty thousand soldiers in the royal army, and that forty thousand of them fell, above five thousand were taken, with two hundred and thirty military standards? Of the Romans, a hundred and fifty in the very contest of the battle, and, defending themselves against the onset of the Aetolians, not more than fifty were killed. As the consul led his army through Phocis and Boeotia, the communities conscious of their defection stood before their gates with suppliant fillets, in fear lest they be plundered as enemies. But through all those days the column advanced just as in a land at peace, with no harassing of anything, until they came into the territory of Coronea. There a statue of King Antiochus, set up in the temple of Minerva Itonia, kindled his anger, and the soldiers were permitted to ravage the land lying about the temple; then the thought came into his mind that, since the statue had been set up by a common decree of the Boeotians, it was unworthy to vent his rage upon the single territory of Coronea. The soldier recalled at once, an end was made of ravaging; the Boeotians were only chidden in words for their ungrateful spirit toward the Romans amid benefits so great and so recent.

During the very time of the battle, ten of the king’s ships with the prefect Isidorus lay at Thronium in the Maliac gulf. When thither Alexander the Acarnanian, heavy with wounds, had fled as messenger of the lost battle, the ships, in alarm from the fresh terror, made for Cenaeum in Euboea. There Alexander died and was buried. Three ships which, setting out from Asia, had held the same harbor, on hearing of the army’s disaster returned to Ephesus. Isidorus crossed from Cenaeum to Demetrias, in case flight should chance to bring the king thither. In those same days Aulus Atilius, prefect of the Roman fleet, intercepted great royal convoys of supplies that had now passed beyond the strait that is by the island of Andros; some ships he sank, others he took; those that were in the rear of the column turned their course into Asia. Atilius, having sailed back to the Piraeus, whence he had set out, with the train of captured ships, distributed a great quantity of grain both to the Athenians and to other allies of the same region.

Antiochus, on the consul’s approach having set out from Chalcis, first held Tenos, then crossed over to Ephesus. To the consul coming to Chalcis the gates lay open, since at his approach Aristoteles, the king’s prefect, had quitted the city. And the other cities in Euboea were surrendered without a contest; and after a few days, all thoroughly pacified with harm to no city, the army was led back to Thermopylae, far more praiseworthy for its restraint after victory than for the victory itself. Thence the consul sent Marcus Cato to Rome, that through him, an author beyond doubt, the Senate and the Roman people might know what had been done. He, from Creusa—the emporium of the Thespians, drawn back into the innermost recess of the Corinthian gulf—made for Patrae in Achaia; from Patrae he coasted the shores of Aetolia and Acarnania as far as Corcyra, and so crossed to Hydruntum in Italy. On the fifth day thence, by land, at a tremendous pace, he reached Rome. Entering the city before light, he made his way from the gate to the praetor Marcus Junius. He at first light summoned the Senate; whither Lucius Cornelius Scipio, some days before dismissed by the consul, when on his arrival he heard that Cato had gone before him and was in the Senate, came up while the other was expounding what had been done. Then the two legates, by order of the Senate, were brought before the assembly, and there set forth the same things as in the Senate concerning the deeds done in Aetolia. A thanksgiving for three days was decreed, and that the praetor should sacrifice with forty full-grown victims to whatever gods seemed good to him. In those same days Marcus Fulvius Nobilior too, who two years before had set out as praetor for Spain, entered the city in ovation; he carried before him a hundred and thirty thousand silver coins stamped with the two-horse car, and besides the coined money twelve thousand pounds of silver, a hundred and twenty-seven pounds of gold.

Acilius the consul sent ahead from Thermopylae to the Aetolians at Heraclea, that then at least, having proved the king’s emptiness, they should come to their senses, and, Heraclea surrendered, should think of begging from the Senate pardon for their madness or their error. The other communities of Greece too, he said, had in that war fallen away from the Romans, who had deserved most well of them; but because, after the king’s flight—on whose strength they had departed from their duty—they had not added stubbornness to their fault, they had been received back into faith; the Aetolians too, although they had not followed the king but summoned him, and had been leaders of the war, not allies, if they could repent, could also be safe. When to this nothing pacific was answered, and it appeared that the matter must be carried by arms and that, the king overcome, the Aetolian war remained whole, he moved his camp from Thermopylae to Heraclea, and on that very day, to learn the site of the city, rode round the walls on every side on horseback. Heraclea is set at the roots of Mount Oeta, the city itself on the plain, with a citadel overhanging it in a high place and on every side precipitous. Having surveyed all that was to be learned, he resolved to assault the city in four places at once. By the river Asopus, where the gymnasium also is, he set Lucius Valerius over the works and the assault; from the citadel, outside the walls, where the dwelling was almost more crowded than in the city, he gave the assault to Tiberius Sempronius Longus; over against the Maliac gulf, which part had a not easy approach, he placed Marcus Baebius; by the other little stream, which they call Melas, opposite the temple of Diana, Appius Claudius. By the great striving of these, within a few days the towers and rams and all the rest of the apparatus for assaulting cities were finished. And since the territory of Heraclea, all marshy and thick with tall trees, supplied generously timber for every kind of work, so too, because the Aetolians had fled within the walls, the deserted dwellings that were in the vestibule of the city furnished for various uses not only beams and planks but brick too and rubble and stones of varied size. And the Romans indeed assaulted the city more by works than by arms, while the Aetolians on the contrary defended themselves by arms. For when the walls were battered by the ram, they did not, as is usual, catch and turn aside the blows with nooses, but in armed bands—some even carrying fire to throw upon the siege-mounds—they sallied out. There were also arches in the wall fit for sallying, and they themselves, when they repaired the walls in place of the demolished, made them more frequent, that the enemy might be sallied against in more places. This in the first days, while their strength was whole, they did both in numbers and briskly; then from day to day fewer and more sluggishly. For indeed, though they were pressed by many things, nothing wore them down so much as the watches, the Romans relieving one another in the posts out of their great supply of soldiers, while the scant numbers of the Aetolians wore the same men down day and night with unremitting toil. For four and twenty days, so that no time was free of fighting, against an enemy assaulting from four sides at once, the labor of the night was joined unbroken to that of the day. When the consul knew that the Aetolians were now worn out, both by the reckoning of the time and because the deserters so affirmed, he entered upon this plan. At midnight he gave the signal for retreat, and, all the soldiers at once drawn off from the assault, he held them quiet in camp until the third hour of the day; then the assault, begun again, was carried on once more to midnight, and thereafter broken off until the third hour of the day. The Aetolians, reckoning that weariness, which had told upon themselves too, was the cause of the assault’s not being kept up, when the signal for retreat had been given to the Romans, withdrew, as if they too were recalled, each man for himself from his post, and did not appear in arms upon the walls before the third hour of the day. The consul, having broken off the assault at midnight, in the fourth watch assailed again from three sides with the utmost force, and on the one side ordered Tiberius Sempronius to keep his soldiers intent and awaiting the signal, having no doubt that, at the nocturnal tumult from wherever the shout was heard, the enemy would run together. The Aetolians, part of them asleep, their bodies worn with toil and watching, were rousing themselves from sleep, part, still awake, run in the darkness toward the din of the fighters. The enemy try partly to climb over through the ruins of the fallen wall, partly attempt the ascent by ladders, and against these the Aetolians run together from every side to bring aid. One side, on which were the buildings outside the city, is neither defended nor assaulted; but those who were to assault it stood intent, awaiting the signal; no defender was at hand. It was now growing light when the consul gave the signal; and without any contest they climbed over, partly through the half-ruined, partly by ladders over the whole walls. At the same moment the shout, the sign of the captured town, was heard; on every side the Aetolians, their posts deserted, fled into the citadel. The victors, by the consul’s leave, plunder the town, not so much from anger or hatred as that the soldier, held back through so many cities recovered from the enemy’s power, might at some place at last feel the fruit of victory. Then, having recalled the soldiers about midday and divided them into two parts, he ordered one to be led round by the roots of the mountains to a crag which, equal in height of summit, was, as it were, broken off from the citadel by the valley between, but the twin peaks of those mountains are so close that from the one summit weapons could be hurled into the citadel; with the other half of the soldiers the consul, about to climb up into the citadel from the city, awaited the signal from those who were to make their way to the crag at the rear. The Aetolians who were in the citadel did not bear, first the shout of those who had taken the crag, then the onset of the Romans from the city, their spirits now broken and nothing there prepared for enduring a siege longer—seeing that the women and children and the rest of the unwarlike throng had been gathered into the citadel, which could scarcely hold, much less protect, so great a multitude. And so at the first onset, casting away their arms, they surrendered themselves. Among the rest there was handed over Damocritus, a chief man of the Aetolians, who at the beginning of the war, when Titus Quinctius demanded the Aetolians’ decree by which they had resolved that Antiochus should be summoned, had answered that he would give it in Italy, when the Aetolians had pitched their camp there. For that boast his surrender was the greater joy to the victors.

At the same time at which the Romans were assaulting Heraclea, Philip, by agreement, was assaulting Lamia, having met the consul about Thermopylae as he returned from Boeotia, to congratulate him and the Roman people on the victory and to excuse himself for not having taken part in the war, hindered by sickness. Then, parting, they set out to assault two cities at once. They are about seven miles apart; and because Lamia, both being set on a hill, looks especially toward the region of Oeta, the interval seems exceedingly short, and everything is in view. When the Romans and Macedonians, as though a contest had been set before them, were eagerly day and night either at the works or in fights, the difficulty was the greater for the Macedonians in this, that the Romans assaulted with mound and mantlets and all works above the ground, the Macedonians underneath by mines, and in the rugged places flint impenetrable to iron often met them. And when the undertaking went forward too little, the king through parleys with the chief men tried the townsmen, that they should surrender the city, having no doubt that, if Heraclea were first taken, they would surrender to the Romans rather than to himself, and that the consul would make the relief of the siege a favor to himself. Nor did the expectation deceive him; for at once from Heraclea taken a message came that he should desist from the assault: that it was more just that the Roman soldiers, who had fought in the line with the Aetolians, should have the rewards of victory. So they withdrew from Lamia, and by the disaster of the neighboring city the townsmen themselves escaped suffering anything of the like.

A few days before Heraclea was taken, the Aetolians, a council called at Hypata, sent envoys to Antiochus, among whom Thoas too, the same as before, was sent. The instructions were that they should ask of the king, first that he himself, his land and naval forces gathered again, should cross over into Greece, then, if any matter held him back, that he should send money and auxiliaries; that this pertained both to his dignity and his good faith, that the allies be not betrayed, and also to the safety of his kingdom, that he not suffer the Romans, free of all care once they had made an end of the Aetolian nation, to cross over with all their forces into Asia. The things that were said were true; the more did they move the king. And so for the present he gave the envoys the money that was necessary for the uses of war; he affirmed that he would send land and naval auxiliaries. Thoas, one of the envoys, he kept back—and the man himself not unwilling to linger—that he might be present as an exactor of the promises.

But the capture of Heraclea broke at last the spirits of the Aetolians, and a few days after they had sent envoys into Asia to renew the war and summon the king, casting aside their plans of war they sent spokesmen to the consul to sue for peace. As they began to speak, the consul interrupted them, saying that he had other matters to attend to first, and ordered them to return to Hypata, a ten days’ truce granted, and with Lucius Valerius Flaccus sent along with them; and to him they were to set out what they had meant to plead with the consul, and any other things they wished. When they had come to Hypata, the chief men of the Aetolians held a council before Flaccus, deliberating in what manner the matter should be handled with the consul. As they were preparing to begin with the ancient rights of their treaties and their services to the Roman people, Flaccus bade them keep off from those things which they themselves had violated and broken; that a confession of their fault would profit them more, and a speech turned wholly to entreaty: for the hope of safety lay not in their own cause but in the clemency of the Roman people; and that he would stand by them, as they pleaded as suppliants, both before the consul and at Rome in the Senate: for thither too envoys would have to be sent. This seemed to all the one road to safety, that they should commit themselves to the good faith of the Romans: for so they would lay upon the Romans a scruple against doing violence to suppliants, and they themselves would be nonetheless their own masters, should fortune show anything better. When they had come to the consul, Phaeneas, the chief of the embassy, ended a long speech, framed variously to soften the anger of the victor, by saying at the last that the Aetolians committed themselves and all that was theirs to the good faith of the Roman people. When the consul heard this, "See again and again," he said, "Aetolians, that you so commit yourselves." Then Phaeneas showed the decree in which it was set down in express words. "Since, then," said the consul, "you so commit yourselves, I demand that you hand over to me without delay Dicaearchus your fellow-citizen, and Menestas the Epirote"—he it was who had entered Naupactus with a garrison and driven it to revolt—"and Amynander with the chief men of the Athamanians, by whose counsel you fell away from us." Almost before he had finished, the Roman broke in: "Not into slavery," he said, "but into your good faith have we delivered ourselves, and I hold it certain that you are slipping through ignorance, in commanding us things that are not of the custom of the Greeks." To this the consul: "Nor by Hercules," he said, "do I greatly care now what the Aetolians may judge to have been done enough according to the custom of the Greeks, so long as I, in the Roman manner, exercise command over men but now surrendered by their own decree, and before that conquered in arms: and so, unless what I command is done quickly, I shall now order you to be put in chains." He ordered the fetters to be brought and the lictors to stand around. Then the boldness of Phaeneas and the other Aetolians was broken, and at last they perceived in what condition they stood, and Phaeneas said that for his own part he and the Aetolians who were present knew that what was commanded must be done, but that to decree these things there was need of a council of the Aetolians; for that he asked that he grant a ten days’ truce. The truce being granted at Flaccus’s plea for the Aetolians, they returned to Hypata. There, when in the council of the chosen, whom they call apocleti, Phaeneas had set forth both what was commanded and what had nearly befallen them, the chief men indeed groaned at their condition, yet judged that the victor must be obeyed and that the Aetolians must be summoned from all the towns to a council. But after the whole multitude, gathered, heard those same things, their spirits were so exasperated by the savagery of the command and its indignity that, had they been at peace, they could by that rush of anger have been roused to war. To their anger was added also the difficulty of the things commanded—for in what way could they hand over King Amynander at all?—and a hope offered by chance, in that Nicander, coming at that very time from King Antiochus, filled the multitude with empty expectation that a huge war was being prepared by land and sea. On the twelfth day after he had gone aboard ship, returning into Aetolia with his embassy accomplished, he had put in at Phalara on the Maliac gulf. Thence, when he had carried the money down to Lamia, he himself with light-armed men, in the early evening, while he made for Hypata by familiar paths across the open country between the Macedonian and Roman camps, fell in with a Macedonian outpost and was led to the king before the banquet was yet broken up. When this was reported, Philip, moved as though by the coming of a guest, not an enemy, bade him recline and feast, and then, the others dismissed and he alone kept back, forbade him indeed to fear anything for himself, but accused the perverse counsels of the Aetolians, ever recoiling upon their own heads, who had brought first the Romans, then Antiochus into Greece. But, forgetting the past, which can be blamed rather than corrected, he would not so act as to insult their adversity; the Aetolians too ought at last to make an end of their hatreds against him, and Nicander privately ought to remember that day on which he had been saved by him. So, men given to escort him into safety, Nicander came upon them at Hypata as they were deliberating about the Roman peace.

Manius Acilius, the booty around Heraclea sold or granted to the soldiers, after he heard that neither were the counsels at Hypata peaceful, and that the Aetolians had run together to Naupactus, to sustain there the whole onset of the war, sent Appius Claudius ahead with four thousand soldiers to seize the ridges where the crossings of the mountains were difficult, and himself climbed Oeta and made sacrifice to Hercules in that place which they call the Pyre, because there the mortal body of that god was burned. Thence, setting out with his whole army, he made the rest of the road with a column tolerably unencumbered; but when they had come to Corax—it is the highest mountain between Callipolis and Naupactus—there many of the baggage-animals were hurled down from the column, loads and all, and the men were sorely tried; and it was easily apparent with how slack an enemy the business was, who had beset so difficult a pass with no garrison to close the crossing. Then too, the army harassed, he came down to Naupactus, and, one fort set over against the citadel, he beleaguered the other parts of the city with his forces divided according to the lie of the walls. Nor had that assault less of work and labor than the one at Heraclea.

At the same time Messene too, in the Peloponnese, began to be assaulted by the Achaeans, because it had refused to be of their league. For two communities, Messene and Elis, were outside the Achaean league; they sided with the Aetolians. The Eleans, however, after Antiochus had been driven from Greece, had answered the Achaean envoys more mildly: that, the royal garrison dismissed, they would consider what they ought to do; the Messenians had dismissed the envoys without an answer and stirred up war, and, in alarm for their fortunes when now their land was being burned far and wide by an army poured out over it and they saw a camp being pitched near the city, they sent envoys to Chalcis to Titus Quinctius, the author of their liberty, to announce that the Messenians were ready to open their gates and surrender their city to the Romans, not to the Achaeans. Having heard the envoys, Quinctius set out at once from Megalopolis and sent to Diophanes, praetor of the Achaeans, to bid him at once lead his army back from Messene and come to him. Diophanes obeyed the word, and, the siege raised, going ahead himself unencumbered before the column, met Quinctius about Andania, a small town set between Megalopolis and Messene; and when he was setting forth the causes of the assault, Quinctius, having gently chided him for attempting so great a matter without his authority, bade him disband his army and not disturb a peace gained for the good of all. The Messenians he commanded to bring back their exiles and to be of the Achaean league; if they had anything about which they wished either to make objection or to be secured for the future, they should come to him at Corinth; Diophanes he ordered to put the council of the Achaeans at once at his disposal. There he complained of Zacynthus, the island intercepted by fraud, and demanded that it be restored to the Romans. Zacynthus had belonged to Philip, king of the Macedonians; this he had given as wages to Amynander, that he might be allowed to lead an army through Athamania into the upper part of Aetolia, by which expedition, the spirits of the Aetolians broken, he drove them to sue for peace. Amynander set Philip of Megalopolis over the island; afterward, in the war in which he joined himself to Antiochus against the Romans, Philip being recalled to the services of the war, he sent Hierocles of Agrigentum as his successor. He, after the flight of Antiochus from Thermopylae and the expulsion of Amynander from Athamania by Philip, of his own accord sent messengers to Diophanes, praetor of the Achaeans, and, having bargained for money, handed the island over to the Achaeans. The Romans judged it just that this should be their own prize of war: for it was not, they said, for Diophanes and the Achaeans that the consul Manius Acilius and the Roman legions had fought at Thermopylae. Against this Diophanes now sought to clear himself and his nation, now to argue about the right of the deed. Some of the Achaeans bore witness that they had spurned the matter from the beginning, and now upbraided the obstinacy of the praetor; and on their motion it was decreed that the matter be left to Titus Quinctius. Quinctius was, as he was harsh to those who opposed him, so likewise placable if you yielded. Laying aside the contention of voice and countenance, "If I judged," he said, "the possession of that island to be useful to the Achaeans, I would urge upon the Senate and the Roman people that they suffer you to hold it; but, just as I see the tortoise, when it is gathered into its own shell, to be safe against all blows, but, when it puts forth any parts, to have whatever it has bared exposed and weak, not unlike that I see you, Achaeans, shut in on every side by the sea, can easily both join to yourselves and, once joined, protect the things that are within the bounds of the Peloponnese, but, the moment that from greed of embracing more you go out beyond them, all that lies outside is to you naked and exposed to every blow." The whole council assenting, and Diophanes not daring to strive further, Zacynthus was handed over to the Romans.

About the same time King Philip, having asked the consul as he set out for Naupactus whether he wished him meanwhile to recover the cities which had fallen away from the Roman alliance, and the consul permitting it, moved his forces to Demetrias, not unaware how great a turmoil there then was. For, abandoned by every hope, when they saw themselves deserted by Antiochus and that there was no hope in the Aetolians, day and night they awaited either the coming of Philip their enemy, or that of the Romans, even more hostile in proportion as they were the more justly angered. There was there a disorderly crowd of the king’s men, who, at first few left in garrison, afterward more, most of them unarmed, carried thither in flight from the lost battle, had neither strength nor spirit enough to endure a siege: and so, when Philip had sent men ahead who held out hope of obtainable pardon, they answered that the gates lay open to the king. At his first entrance certain of the leading men quitted the city, and Eurylochus took his own life. The soldiers of Antiochus—for so it had been agreed—were led through Macedonia and Thrace, the Macedonians escorting them lest any do them violence, to Lysimachia. There were a few ships too at Demetrias, over which Isidorus was in command; these too were dismissed with their prefect. Thence he recovered Dolopia and Aperantia and certain communities of Perrhaebia.

While these things were being done by Philip, Titus Quinctius, Zacynthus received from the Achaean council, crossed over to Naupactus, which was now for two months—and already near to destruction—being assaulted, and, if it were taken by storm, the whole name of the Aetolians there seemed likely to come to utter annihilation. But although he was deservedly angry with the Aetolians—for he remembered that they alone had disparaged his glory when he was freeing Greece, and had been moved not at all by his authority when, foretelling the very things that had now just come to pass, he sought to deter them from their mad undertaking—yet, believing it most of all his own work that no nation of the Greece freed by him should be utterly overthrown, he began to walk about the walls, that he might easily be recognized by the Aetolians. At once he was recognized by the nearest outposts, and it was spread through all the ranks that it was Quinctius. And so, a rush made from every side to the walls, each for himself stretching out his hands, with a shout in unison they called upon Quinctius by name to bring aid and to save them. And then indeed, though he was moved by these cries, he yet signified by a gesture of his hand that there was no help in his power; but after he came to the consul, "Has it escaped you, Manius Acilius," he said, "what is going on, or, though you see it well enough, do you judge that this bears in no great degree upon the sum of things?" He had roused the consul with expectation; and "Why not bring out," he said, "what the matter is?" Then Quinctius: "Do you not at all see that, Antiochus overcome, you are wearing away time in assaulting two cities, while now the year of your command is almost run round, whereas Philip, who saw neither the line nor the standards of the enemy, has joined to himself not only cities but already so many nations—Athamania, Perrhaebia, Aperantia, Dolopia? And yet it is not so much in our interest that the resources and strength of the Aetolians be lessened as that Philip not grow beyond measure; and that you and your soldiers do not yet hold, as the prize of your victory, two cities, while Philip holds so many nations of Greece." The consul assented to these things; but shame met him, should he withdraw from the siege with his undertaking foiled. The whole matter was thereupon left to Quinctius. He returned again to that part of the wall where a little before the Aetolians had cried out. There, when they begged him the more earnestly to take pity on the nation of the Aetolians, he ordered some to come out to him. Phaeneas himself and the other chief men came out at once. When they had thrown themselves at his feet, "Your fortune," he said, "makes me temper both my anger and my speech. The things I foretold would come to pass have come to pass, and not even this is left you, that they should seem to have befallen you undeserving: yet I, given by some lot to be the nurse of Greece, will not cease to do well even to the ungrateful. Send spokesmen to the consul to ask a truce of such length that you may be able to send envoys to Rome, through whom you may commit yourselves to the Senate concerning your case; I will be present before the consul as your defender and intercessor." So they did as Quinctius had advised, nor did the consul spurn the embassy; and, a truce granted to a fixed day on which the embassy could be reported back from Rome, the siege was raised and the army sent into Phocis.

The consul with Titus Quinctius crossed over to the Achaean council at Aegium. There it was debated about the Eleans and about restoring the exiles of the Lacedaemonians; neither matter was carried through, because the Achaeans wished the latter reserved to their own credit, while the Eleans preferred to be added to the Achaean league through themselves rather than through the Romans. Envoys of the Epirotes came to the consul, of whom it was sufficiently agreed that they had not been in the friendship with sincere good faith; yet they had given no soldier to Antiochus; they were charged with having aided him with money; that they themselves had sent envoys to the king not even they denied. To these, asking that they be allowed to remain in their former friendship, the consul answered that he did not yet know whether to reckon them in the number of enemies or of the pacified; that the Senate would be the judge of that matter; that he was referring their case whole to Rome; that for this he was granting a truce of ninety days. The Epirotes, sent to Rome, went before the Senate. As they recounted the hostile things they had not done rather than cleared themselves of those of which they were accused, an answer was given them such that they might seem to have obtained pardon rather than to have made good their cause. And the envoys of King Philip about the same time were brought into the Senate, congratulating it on the victory. To these, asking that they be allowed to sacrifice on the Capitol and to set a gift of gold in the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest, leave was granted by the Senate. They set up a golden crown of a hundred pounds. Not only was a kindly answer given to the king’s envoys, but Demetrius too, Philip’s son, who was a hostage at Rome, was given to the envoys to be led back to his father. The war which was waged with King Antiochus in Greece by the consul Manius Acilius had this end.

The other consul, Publius Cornelius Scipio, having drawn Gaul as his province, before he set out for the war that had to be waged with the Boii, demanded of the Senate that money be decreed to him for the games which, as praetor in Spain, he had vowed in the very crisis of a battle. He was thought to ask a thing both new and inequitable: they resolved, therefore, that the games which he had vowed, without consulting the Senate, on his own single judgment, he should hold either out of the spoils, if he had reserved any money for it, or at his own expense. These games Publius Cornelius held over ten days. About the same time the temple of the Idaean Great Mother was dedicated, which goddess that same Publius Cornelius—he who afterward had the surname Africanus—had, when brought over from Asia, carried up from the sea to the Palatine in the consulship of Publius Cornelius Scipio and Publius Licinius. The censors Marcus Livius and Gaius Claudius had let the contract for building the temple, by decree of the Senate, in the consulship of Marcus Cornelius and Publius Sempronius; thirteen years after it had been let, Marcus Junius Brutus dedicated it, and games were held on account of its dedication, which—the first stage-games, as Valerius Antias is the authority—were called the Megalesia. Likewise Gaius Licinius Lucullus, as duumvir, dedicated the temple of Youth in the Circus Maximus. Marcus Livius the consul had vowed it sixteen years before, on the day on which he cut down Hasdrubal and his army; the same man, as censor, let the contract for building it, in the consulship of Marcus Cornelius and Publius Sempronius. For the dedication of this too games were held, and everything was done with the greater scruple, because a new war with Antiochus was at hand.

At the beginning of that year in which these things were being done—Manius Acilius having now set out for the war, while the consul Publius Cornelius still remained at Rome—it is handed down to memory that two tamed oxen in the Carinae made their way up by the stairs onto the tiles of a building. The haruspices ordered them to be burned alive and their ashes thrown into the Tiber. At Tarracina and Amiternum it was reported that several times it had rained stones; at Minturnae that the temple of Jupiter and the shops about the forum had been struck from heaven; at Volturnum, at the mouth of the river, that two ships had been struck by lightning and burned up. On account of these prodigies, when the decemvirs by decree of the Senate had consulted the Sibylline books, they reported that a fast must be instituted to Ceres, and that it must be kept every fifth year; and that a nine-day rite be performed and there be a thanksgiving for one day; that they should make their supplication garlanded; and that the consul Publius Cornelius should sacrifice to whatever gods and with whatever victims the decemvirs had named. The gods appeased, now by duly paying the vows, now by expiating the prodigies, the consul set out for his province, and thence ordered Gnaeus Domitius the proconsul to disband his army and withdraw to Rome; he himself led the legions into the territory of the Boii.

About the same time the Ligurians, an army gathered under a sacred law, by night assailed unawares the camp of Quintus Minucius the proconsul. Minucius kept his soldiers drawn up within the rampart until daylight, intent that the enemy should nowhere climb over the fortifications. At first light he made a sally from two gates at once. Nor at the first onset, as he had hoped, were the Ligurians driven back; for more than two hours they sustained a doubtful contest; at last, as column after column burst out and fresh men relieved the weary in the fight, the Ligurians, worn out among other things by the watching too, at last turned their backs. Above four thousand of the enemy were cut down; of the Romans and the allies fewer than three hundred perished. About two months later the consul Publius Cornelius fought a brilliant pitched battle with the army of the Boii. Twenty-eight thousand of the enemy were killed, Valerius Antias writes, three thousand four hundred taken, a hundred and twenty-four military standards, one thousand two hundred and thirty horses, two hundred and forty-seven wagons; of the victors fourteen hundred and eighty-four fell. But although in the matter of the number there is too little faith to be put in the writer—since in magnifying it no one is more intemperate than he—yet that it was a great victory is plain, because both the camp was taken and the Boii, immediately after that battle, surrendered themselves, and because a thanksgiving on account of that victory was decreed by the Senate and full-grown victims were slain.

In those same days Marcus Fulvius Nobilior entered the city in ovation from Farther Spain. He carried over twelve thousand pounds of silver, a hundred and thirty thousand silver pieces stamped with the two-horse car, a hundred and twenty-seven pounds of gold.

The consul Publius Cornelius, hostages received from the nation of the Boii, mulcted them of about half their land, so that, if it wished, the Roman people might send colonies thither. Then, withdrawing to Rome as to an undoubted triumph, he disbanded his army and ordered it to be present at Rome on the day of the triumph; he himself, on the day after he came, the Senate summoned to the temple of Bellona, when he had discoursed of the things done by him, demanded that he be allowed to ride into the city in triumph. Publius Sempronius Blaesus, tribune of the plebs, judged that the honor of a triumph should not be denied to Scipio but deferred: that the wars of the Ligurians had always been joined to the Gallic; that those nations gave each other mutual aid from near at hand. If Publius Scipio, the Boii overcome in the field, had either himself passed with his victorious army into the country of the Ligurians, or had sent part of his forces to Quintus Minucius, who was now for the third year detained there by a doubtful war, the war with the Ligurians might have been finished off: as it was, soldiers had been led off to swell a triumph who might have done excellent service to the commonwealth, and could do so still, if the Senate were willing, by deferring the triumph, to restore what had been let slip through haste for the triumph. Let them bid the consul return with his legions into the province and give heed to subduing the Ligurians: unless those were forced into the right and judgment of the Roman people, not even the Boii would stay quiet: either peace or war must be had in both places. The Ligurians overcome, a few months later Publius Cornelius would triumph as proconsul, after the example of many who have not triumphed in their magistracy. To this the consul said that he had not drawn the Ligurians as his province, nor waged war with the Ligurians, nor did he demand a triumph over them; that he trusted Quintus Minucius, when they had shortly been subdued, would demand and obtain a well-earned triumph: that he himself demanded a triumph over the Gauls, the Boii, whom he had conquered in the field, stripped of their camp, whose whole nation he had received into surrender two days after the battle, from whom he had carried off hostages, the pledge of a peace to come. But indeed this was far greater, that he had killed so great a number of Gauls in the field as no commander before him had certainly fought against in thousands of the Boii. More than the half part of fifty thousand men was cut down, many thousands taken; old men and boys were left over to the Boii. And so could anyone wonder why his victorious army, when it had left no enemy in the province, had come to Rome to celebrate the consul’s triumph? If the Senate wished to use the service of these soldiers in another province also, in which way then did it believe they would go the readier to another danger and a new toil—if their wages for the former danger and toil were paid out to them without quibble, or if they were dismissed carrying hope in the place of substance, men already once deceived in their first hope? For as concerned himself, glory enough had been won for him for his whole life on that day on which the Senate, having judged him the best man, had sent him to receive the Idaean Mother. With this title, though neither consulship nor triumph were added, the bust of Publius Scipio Nasica would be honorable and honored enough. The whole Senate not only itself agreed to decree the triumph, but even by its authority compelled the tribune of the plebs to withdraw his veto. Publius Cornelius the consul triumphed over the Boii. In that triumph he carried across in Gallic wagons arms and standards and spoils of every kind, and Gallic bronze vessels, and along with the noble captives he led also a drove of captured horses. He carried over one thousand four hundred and seventy-one golden torques, besides this two hundred and forty-seven pounds of gold, of silver wrought and unwrought, in Gallic vessels not inelegantly made after their own fashion, two thousand three hundred and forty pounds, and two hundred and thirty-four thousand coins stamped with the two-horse car. To the soldiers who followed the chariot he distributed a hundred and twenty-five asses apiece, double to a centurion, triple to a horseman. On the next day, an assembly called, when he had discoursed of the things done by him and of the wrong of the tribune who would entangle him in a war not his own, to defraud him of the fruit of his own victory, he discharged the soldiers from their oath and dismissed them.

While these things were being done in Italy, Antiochus at Ephesus was quite without care about the Roman war, as though the Romans would not cross over into Asia; which freedom from care a great part of his friends produced in him, whether through error or by flattery. Hannibal alone, whose authority with the king was at that time the very greatest, said that he wondered rather that the Romans were not already in Asia than doubted that they would come: that it was nearer to cross from Greece into Asia than from Italy into Greece, and that Antiochus was a far greater cause than the Aetolians; for Roman arms were of no less might by sea than by land. Their fleet, he said, had long been about Malea; he heard that lately new ships and a new commander for the conduct of the war had come from Italy: so let Antiochus cease to make peace for himself with empty hope. In Asia, and about Asia itself, he must shortly contend by land and sea with the Romans, and either the dominion must be wrested from men who aimed at the round world, or he himself must lose his kingdom. He alone seemed both to foresee the truth and to foretell it faithfully. And so the king himself, with the ships that were ready and equipped, made for the Chersonese, to strengthen those places with garrisons, should the Romans by chance come by land; the rest of the fleet he ordered Polyxenidas to make ready and launch; scouting ships he sent out to reconnoiter everything about the islands.

Gaius Livius, prefect of the Roman fleet, having set out from Rome with fifty decked ships to Naples, whither he had ordered the open ships that were owed by treaty to assemble from the allies of that coast, made thence for Sicily, and, having sailed past Messana through the strait, when he had received six Punic ships sent for aid, and had exacted from the men of Regium and Locri and the allies of the same obligation the ships that were due, reviewed his fleet and made for the deep at Lacinium. When he had come to Corcyra—the first of the communities of Greece he approached—having inquired about the state of the war (for not yet was all in Greece thoroughly pacified) and where the Roman fleet was, after he heard that the consul and the king were on station about the pass of Thermopylae, and that the fleet lay at the Piraeus, judging that he must hasten for every reason, he sailed straight on to the Peloponnese. Same and Zacynthus, because they had preferred to be of the Aetolian party, he straightway laid waste, and made for Malea, and, enjoying a prosperous voyage, in a few days came to the Piraeus to the old fleet. At Scyllaeum King Eumenes met him with three ships, having long at Aegina been uncertain of his counsel, whether to return to guard his kingdom—for he heard that Antiochus was preparing naval and land forces at Ephesus—or nowhere to depart from the Romans, on whose fortune his own hung. From the Piraeus Aulus Atilius, having handed over twenty-five decked ships to his successor, set out for Rome. Livius, with eighty-one decked ships, and besides many smaller, which were either open and beaked or beakless scouting vessels, crossed to Delos. About that time the consul Acilius was assaulting Naupactus. At Delos for some days—and it is a very windy region among the Cyclades, divided by straits now greater, now smaller—contrary winds held Livius. Polyxenidas, informed by the scouting ships disposed along the way that the Roman fleet lay at Delos, sent messengers to the king. He, abandoning what he was doing in the Hellespont, with his beaked ships, as much as he could hasten, returned to Ephesus and at once held a council, whether trial should be made of a naval battle. Polyxenidas denied that there should be any delay, and that above all they should engage before the fleet of Eumenes and the Rhodian ships were joined to the Romans: thus they would be in number not much unequal, in all else superior, both in the speed of their ships and in the variety of their auxiliaries. For the Roman ships, both being themselves unskillfully made and therefore unwieldy, came moreover, as men coming into an enemy’s land, laden with supplies; while their own, leaving everything peaceful around them, would have nothing but soldiers and arms. Their knowledge of the sea and the lands and the winds would help much too, all of which would throw the enemy, ignorant of them, into confusion. The author of the counsel, who was also to carry it out in act, moved them all. Two days they delayed in preparation; on the third, having set out with a hundred ships, of which seventy were decked, the rest open and all of smaller build, they made for Phocaea. Thence, when the king had heard that the Roman fleet was now drawing near, because he was not going to take part in the naval battle, he withdrew to Magnesia by Sipylus to make ready his land forces; the fleet hastened to Cissus, the harbor of the Erythraeans, as though there it would more conveniently await the enemy. The Romans, as soon as the north winds—for these had held for some days—fell, made from Delos for Phanae, a harbor of the Chians turned toward the Aegean sea; thence they brought their ships round to the city, and, supplies taken, crossed to Phocaea. Eumenes, having set out for Elaea to his own fleet, a few days later returned thence with twenty-four decked ships, and a few more open, to Phocaea, to the Romans as they were making ready and arraying themselves for the naval battle. Then, setting out with a hundred and five decked ships and about fifty open, at first, when they were driven toward the land by the north winds blowing crosswise, they were forced to go in a thin column, almost the ships one by one into single file; then, as the force of the wind was a little softened, they tried to cross over to the harbor of Corycus, which is above Cissus. When it was reported to Polyxenidas that the enemy was drawing near, glad of the chance of fighting, he himself extended the left wing into the deep, and ordered the captains of the ships to deploy the right wing toward the land, and advanced to battle on an even front. When the Roman saw this, he furled his sails and lowered his masts and, stowing his tackle at the same time, awaited the following ships. Now there were nearly thirty in the front, to make the left wing match which he set himself to make for the deep with his topsails raised, having ordered those who followed to direct their prows against the right wing near the land. Eumenes brought up the rear; but, as soon as the bustle of stowing the tackle began, he too, with all the speed he could, urged on his ships. Now all were in view of one another. Two Punic ships went before the Roman fleet, to meet which there came three of the king’s ships; and, as in an unequal number, two of the king’s surround one, and first sweep off the oars on either side, then armed men climb aboard, and, the defenders thrown down and cut to pieces, take the ship; the one that had engaged on equal terms, after it saw the other ship taken, before it should be surrounded by three at once, fled back to the fleet. Livius, kindled with indignation, drove with the flagship upon the enemy. Against this, when the two that had surrounded the one Punic ship were borne down in the same hope, he ordered the rowers to let down their oars into the water on either side for the steadying of the ship, and to cast iron hands upon the enemy’s ships as they came up, and, when they had made the fight like a fight on land, to remember Roman valor and not to count royal slaves the equals of men. Far more easily than before two had taken one, now one ship stormed and took two. And now the fleets too had clashed together on every side, and the fighting went on with ships mingled everywhere. Eumenes, who had come up last after the contest was joined, when he observed that the enemy’s left wing had been thrown into disorder by Livius, himself fell upon the right, where the fight was even. Nor very long after did the flight begin first from the left wing. For Polyxenidas, when he saw that he was beyond doubt being overcome by the valor of the soldiers, raised his topsails and set himself to flee at full spread; soon those too who had joined the contest near the land with Eumenes did the same. The Romans and Eumenes, as long as their rowers could hold out and they were in hope of harassing the rear of the column, pursued stubbornly enough. After they saw, by reason of the speed of the ships—light as they were—that they strove in vain to overtake their own laden with supplies, at last they desisted, thirteen ships taken with their soldiers and rowers, ten sunk. Of the Roman fleet one Punic ship, surrounded at the beginning of the contest by two, perished. Polyxenidas made no end of his flight before the harbor of Ephesus. The Romans that day stayed where the royal fleet had set out from; on the next day they set themselves to pursue the enemy. About the middle of their course there met them twenty-five decked Rhodian ships with Pausistratus, prefect of the fleet. These joined, they pursued the enemy to Ephesus and stood with their line drawn up before the mouth of the harbor. After they had wrung from the vanquished a sufficient confession, the Rhodians and Eumenes were dismissed to their homes; the Romans, making for Chios, sailed past Phoenicus, the first harbor of the Erythraean land, and, anchors cast for the night, on the next day crossed to the island, to the city itself. There, having delayed a few days chiefly to refresh the rowers, they crossed to Phocaea. There, four quinqueremes left to guard the city, the fleet came to Canae; and, since winter was now drawing on, a ditch and rampart thrown around them, the ships were hauled up.

At the end of the year the elections were held at Rome, at which were chosen as consuls Lucius Cornelius Scipio and Gaius Laelius, all men looking to Africanus for the finishing of the war with Antiochus. On the next day the praetors were chosen: Marcus Tuccius, Lucius Aurunculeius, Gnaeus Fulvius, Lucius Aemilius, Publius Junius, Gaius Atinius Labeo.