In the consulship of Lucius Cornelius Scipio and Gaius Laelius, no matter was treated in the Senate, after those that touched religion, before that of the Aetolians. Both their envoys pressed the business, because they held but a short term of truce, and they were supported by Titus Quinctius, who had then returned to Rome from Greece. The Aetolians, as men who had more hope in the Senate’s pity than in their cause, pleaded as suppliants, balancing their old good services against their new misdeeds. But, present before the house, they were worn down by the questionings of the senators from every side, who wrung from them confession of guilt rather than answers; and, when bidden to withdraw from the Senate-house, they gave occasion to a great contest. Anger weighed more than pity in their cause, because the fathers were incensed at them not as enemies merely, but as an untamable and insociable race. After the dispute had gone on for several days, at last it was resolved neither to grant nor to deny peace; two conditions were laid before them: either to commit themselves to the free arbitration of the Senate, or to pay a thousand talents and hold the same men friends and foes. When they desired to have it made plain in what matters they were to commit the arbitration over themselves to the Senate, no certain answer was given them. So, the peace unmade, they were dismissed and ordered to leave the city that same day, and Italy within fifteen days.

Then began the debate on the consuls’ provinces. Both desired Greece. Laelius had great weight in the Senate. He, when the Senate had ordered the consuls either to draw lots or to settle the provinces between themselves, said they would act more becomingly if they left the matter to the judgment of the fathers rather than to the lot. Scipio, having answered to this that he would consider what he ought to do, after speaking with his brother alone and being bidden by him to entrust the matter boldly to the Senate, reported back to his colleague that he would do as he advised. When this affair—either new, or, by the antiquity of its precedents, now faded from memory—being brought up in expectation of a contest, had roused the Senate, Publius Scipio Africanus said that, if they decreed the province of Greece to his brother Lucius Scipio, he himself would go with him as legate. This utterance, heard with great approval, put an end to the contest: it was their pleasure to make trial whether King Antiochus would find more help in Hannibal conquered, or the Roman consul and legions in Africanus the conqueror; and well-nigh all decreed Greece to Scipio, Italy to Laelius. Then the praetors drew lots for their provinces: Lucius Aurunculeius the city jurisdiction, Gnaeus Fulvius the foreign, Lucius Aemilius Regillus the fleet, Publius Junius Brutus the Etruscans, Marcus Tuccius Apulia and the Bruttii, Gaius Atinius Sicily. To the consul, then, to whom Greece had been decreed as his province, for the army which he was to take over from Manius Acilius—two legions there were—there were added as reinforcement three thousand Roman-citizen foot, a hundred horse, and of the allies of the Latin name five thousand foot and two hundred horse; and it was added that, when he had come into his province, if it seemed to be for the public good, he should ferry the army across into Asia. To the other consul a whole new army was decreed, two Roman legions and of the allies of the Latin name fifteen thousand foot, six hundred horse. Quintus Minucius was ordered to bring his army over from the Ligurians—for he had already written that the province was finished and that the whole name of the Ligurians had come into surrender—into the country of the Boii, and to hand it over to the proconsul Publius Cornelius. The city legions, which had been enrolled the year before, were to be led down from the territory wherewith he had punished the conquered Boii in war, and were given to the praetor Marcus Tuccius, together with fifteen thousand foot of the allies and the Latin name and six hundred horse, for the holding of Apulia and the Bruttii. To Aulus Cornelius, praetor of the previous year, who had held the Bruttii with an army, it was commanded that, if the consul so thought fit, he should ferry his legions across into Aetolia and hand them to Manius Acilius, should he wish to remain there; but if Acilius preferred to return to Rome, that Aulus Cornelius should remain with that army in Aetolia. It was resolved that Gaius Atinius Labeo should take over the province of Sicily and the army from Marcus Aemilius, and enroll for reinforcement out of the province itself, if he would, two thousand foot and a hundred horse. Publius Junius Brutus was to enroll a new army for the Etruscans, one Roman legion and ten thousand foot of the allies and the Latin name and four hundred horse; Lucius Aemilius, whose province was the sea, was ordered to take twenty warships and naval allies from Marcus Junius the praetor of the previous year, and himself to enroll a thousand naval allies and two thousand foot; and with these ships and soldiers to set out for Asia and take over the fleet from Gaius Livius. To those holding the two Spains and Sardinia the command was prolonged for a year, and the same armies decreed them. Upon Sicily and Sardinia two tithes of grain each were imposed that year; all the Sicilian grain was ordered to be carried to the army in Aetolia, and from Sardinia part to Rome, part to Aetolia, to the same place as the Sicilian.

Before the consuls set out for their provinces, it was resolved that the prodigies should be expiated through the pontiffs. At Rome the temple of Juno Lucina had been struck from heaven, so that the gable and the doors were disfigured; at Puteoli the wall in several places and a gate were smitten by a thunderbolt and two men killed; at Nursia, in clear weather, it was well agreed that a storm-cloud had risen, and there too two free men were killed; the people of Tusculum reported that earth had rained among them, and those of Reate that a mule had foaled in their territory. These prodigies were expiated, and the Latin Festival was held anew, because to the Laurentes the flesh that ought to be given had not been given. A thanksgiving too was held for the sake of those religious scruples, to whatever gods the decemvirs proclaimed out of the Books that it should be made. Ten freeborn boys and ten maidens, all having fathers and mothers living, were employed at that sacrifice, and the decemvirs by night performed the divine rite with suckling victims. Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, before he set out, set up upon the Capitol, facing the road by which one ascends to the Capitol, an arch with seven gilded statues and two horses, and placed two marble basins before the arch.

During those same days forty-three of the chief men of the Aetolians, among whom were Damocritus and his brother, were brought to Rome by two cohorts sent by Manius Acilius and cast into the Lautumiae. The cohorts the consul Lucius Cornelius then ordered to return to the army.—Envoys came from Ptolemy and Cleopatra, the sovereigns of Egypt, with congratulations that the consul Manius Acilius had driven King Antiochus out of Greece, and with exhortation that they should ferry an army across into Asia: all things, they said, were stricken with fear, not in Asia only but even in Syria; the sovereigns of Egypt would be ready for whatever the Senate should decree. Thanks were rendered to the sovereigns; and it was ordered that gifts be given to the envoys, four thousand asses to each.

The consul Lucius Cornelius, when the things that were to be done at Rome had been carried through, proclaimed before the assembly that the soldiers whom he himself had enrolled as reinforcement, and those who were with Aulus Cornelius the propraetor in the Bruttii, should all muster at Brundisium on the Ides of Quinctilis. Likewise he named three legates, Sextus Digitius, Lucius Apustius, and Gaius Fabricius Luscinus, to draw together ships from every part of the seacoast to Brundisium; and, all things now ready, he set out from the city in the general’s cloak. About five thousand volunteers, Romans and allies, who had completed their terms of service under the command of Publius Africanus, presented themselves to the consul as he went forth and gave in their names. During those days in which the consul set out for the war, at the Apollinarian Games, on the fifth day before the Ides of Quinctilis, in clear weather and by day the light was darkened, when the moon had passed beneath the disk of the sun. And Lucius Aemilius Regillus, to whom the naval province had fallen, set out at the same time. To Lucius Aurunculeius the Senate gave the task of building thirty quinqueremes and twenty triremes, because there was a report that Antiochus, after the naval battle, was repairing a fleet considerably greater.

The Aetolians, after their envoys had brought back from Rome word that there was no hope of peace, although the whole of their seacoast that faces toward the Peloponnese had been laid waste by the Achaeans, mindful of their peril rather than of their loss, seized Mount Corax, that they might cut off the Romans’ road: for they did not doubt that the Romans would return at the beginning of spring to the storming of Naupactus. To Acilius, because he knew that this was looked for, it seemed better to attempt the unexpected and to assail Lamia: for the Lamians had been brought near to ruin by Philip, and now, by that very thing—that they feared nothing of the kind—they could be caught off their guard. Setting out from Elatia, he first pitched camp in the enemy’s land about the river Spercheus; thence, his standards moved by night, at first light he assailed the walls with an encircling ring. Great was the panic and uproar, as in a thing unforeseen. Yet more steadfastly than one would have believed they would, in so sudden a peril—the men fighting in defense, the women carrying weapons of every kind and stones up onto the walls—and with scaling-ladders now set up in many places, they held the city that day. Acilius, the signal for retreat given, led his men back into camp about midday; and then, their bodies refreshed with food and rest, before he dismissed the war-council he gave notice that they should be armed and ready before daylight; that unless the city were stormed he would not lead them back into camp. Attacking at the same hour as the day before, in many places at once, when the townsmen now failed in strength, now in weapons, now above all in spirit, within a few hours he took the city. There, the booty partly sold off, partly divided, a council was held on what he should do next. None thought good to march to Naupactus, the pass at Corax being held by the Aetolians. Yet, that the summer should not be idle, and that the Aetolians, having failed to obtain peace from the Senate, should none the less have it through his own delay, Acilius resolved to attack Amphissa. The army was led there from Heraclea over Mount Oeta. When he had pitched camp at the walls, he set about assaulting the city not with an encircling ring, as at Lamia, but with siege-works. In several places at once the ram was brought up, and, when the walls were being battered, the townsmen attempted nothing to prepare or devise against such a kind of engine; all their hope lay in arms and daring: by frequent sallies they kept disordering both the enemy’s outposts and the very men who were about the works and engines. Yet in many places the wall had been beaten down, when word was brought that the successor was coming, his army landed, through Epirus and Thessaly. The consul was coming with thirteen thousand foot and five hundred horse. He had already reached the Maliac gulf; and, men sent ahead to Hypata to bid them surrender the city, when no answer was given save that they would do nothing except by the common decree of the Aetolians, lest the siege of Hypata should hold him while Amphissa was not yet taken, having sent his brother Africanus ahead, he leads on to Amphissa. At their coming the townsmen, abandoning the city—for it was now in great part stripped of its walls—withdrew, all of them, armed and unarmed alike, into the citadel, which they hold to be impregnable.

The consul pitched camp about six miles from there. Thither envoys of the Athenians came, first to Publius Scipio, who had gone before the column, as has been said before, then to the consul, pleading on behalf of the Aetolians. A milder answer they got from Africanus, who—seeking a cause for honorably leaving the Aetolian war—had his eyes on Asia and King Antiochus, and had bidden the Athenians persuade not the Romans only to prefer peace to war, but the Aetolians too. Swiftly, at the Athenians’ prompting, a full embassy of the Aetolians came from Hypata, and their hope of peace was raised also by the speech of Africanus, whom they approached first, when he recalled that many nations and peoples, in Spain first, then in Africa, had come into his protection; that in all of them he had left greater monuments of clemency and kindness than of warlike valor. The matter seemed accomplished, when the consul, on being approached, brought back that same answer with which they had been put to flight by the Senate. Struck by this as by something new—for they saw that nothing had been gained either by the Athenians’ embassy or by Africanus’s gentle answer—they said they wished to refer it back to their own people. The return to Hypata was made, and no plan could be worked out: for there was nothing whence the thousand talents could be paid, and, if free arbitration were granted, they feared lest cruelty be wreaked upon their persons. So they ordered the same envoys to return to the consul and to Africanus, and to ask that, if they were willing truly to give peace and not merely to make a show of it, mocking the hope of wretched men, they would either take something off the sum of money, or order that the surrender be made to stop short of the citizens’ persons. Nothing was obtained to make the consul change; and that embassy too was dismissed without effect. The Athenians followed; and the chief of their embassy, Echedemus, recalled to hope the Aetolians, worn out by so many rebuffs and bewailing the fortune of their nation in unavailing lamentation, by advising them to seek a truce of six months, that they might send envoys to Rome: the delay, he said, would add nothing to their present ills, since these were the uttermost; through many chances, in the time thus interposed, their present disasters might be lightened. On Echedemus’s advice the same men were sent; and, Publius Scipio being approached first, through him they obtained from the consul the truce for the time they asked. And, the siege of Amphissa raised, Manius Acilius handed over his army to the consul and departed from the province, and the consul made again from Amphissa for Thessaly, that he might lead his army through Macedonia and Thrace into Asia.

Then Africanus to his brother: “The road on which you press forward, Lucius Scipio, I too approve; but the whole of it turns upon the goodwill of Philip, who, if he is faithful to our empire, will furnish us road and provisions and all the things that feed and aid an army on a long march; but if he fails us, you will have nothing safe enough anywhere through Thrace. Therefore it is my pleasure that the king’s mind be first explored. It will best be explored if the man who is sent shall come upon him while he is doing nothing prepared beforehand.” Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, by far the keenest of the young men at that time, chosen for this, by relays of posted horses, with a swiftness all but incredible, reached Pella on the third day from Amphissa—for it was thence he was dispatched. The king was at a banquet and had gone deep into his wine: that very unbending of his spirit took away the suspicion that he wished to make any change. And then, indeed, the guest was courteously received, and on the next day he saw provisions made ready for the army with good will, bridges built over the rivers, roads made firm where the passages were difficult. Carrying back this news, with the same swiftness with which he had gone, he met the consul at Thaumaci. Thence the army, gladdened by a surer and greater hope, came into Macedonia to all things made ready. The king both received them as they came with royal pomp and escorted them on. Much in him was seen of both address and graciousness, qualities that won him favor with Africanus, a man who, excellent as he was in all else, was likewise not averse to a courtesy that was without luxury. Thence, with Philip escorting and making all things ready not through Macedonia only but through Thrace as well, they came to the Hellespont.

Antiochus, after the naval battle at Corycus, having had the whole winter free for his preparations by land and sea, had bent himself above all to the rebuilding of his fleet, that he might not be driven from the whole possession of the sea. It came back to his mind that he had been beaten when the fleet of the Rhodians was absent; and that, if that too should be present at the contest—and the Rhodians would not allow themselves to be late a second time—he would have need of a great number of ships, to match the enemy’s fleet in strength and in size. And so he had both sent Hannibal into Syria to summon the ships of the Phoenicians, and bidden Polyxenidas—the less prosperously the affair had gone, the more strenuously—both to refit those he had and to make ready others. He himself wintered in Phrygia, summoning auxiliaries from every side. He had even sent into Gallograecia: more warlike were they at that time, keeping still their Gallic temper, the stock of the race not yet run out. He had left his son Seleucus in Aeolis with an army to hold the coastal cities, which on the one side Eumenes from Pergamum, on the other the Romans from Phocaea and Erythrae were stirring to revolt. The Roman fleet, as has been said before, was wintering at Canae; thither, about the middle of winter, came King Eumenes with two thousand foot and five hundred horse. When he had said that great booty could be driven off from the enemy’s land that lay about Thyatira, by urging he prevailed upon Livius to send five thousand soldiers with him. Those sent carried off, within a few days, an enormous booty. Meanwhile at Phocaea a sedition arose, certain men drawing the minds of the multitude over to Antiochus. The winter quarters of the ships were burdensome, burdensome the tribute—for five hundred togas had been levied along with five hundred tunics—burdensome too the dearth of grain, on account of which the ships also and the Roman garrison departed; then indeed the faction which in the assemblies was drawing the commons toward Antiochus was freed from fear; the Senate and the aristocrats judged that they must stand fast in the Roman alliance; the authors of the defection prevailed the more with the multitude. The Rhodians, the more there had been delay the summer before, the earlier, at the vernal equinox, sent the same Pausistratus as prefect of the fleet with thirty-six ships. Already Livius from Canae, with thirty ships and seven quadriremes which King Eumenes had brought with him, was making for the Hellespont, to prepare what would be needed for the crossing of the army, which he supposed would come by land. Into the harbor which they call the Achaeans’ he first turned his fleet; thence he went up to Ilium, and, sacrifice made to Minerva, gave kindly hearing to the embassies of the neighboring towns from Elaeus and Dardanus and Rhoeteum, which surrendered their communities into his protection. Thence he sails to the jaws of the Hellespont, and, ten ships left on station over against Abydus, with the rest of the fleet he crossed into Europe to attack Sestus. Already as the armed men were coming up to the walls, the fanatic Galli first ran out before the gate in their solemn garb: by command of the Mother of the gods, they declared, they came as servants of the goddess to entreat the Roman to spare the walls and the city. None of them was harmed. Soon the whole senate with the magistrates came forth to surrender the city. Thence the fleet crossed over to Abydus. There, when their dispositions had been tried by parleys and no peaceable answer was given, they made themselves ready for the assault.

While these things were being done at the Hellespont, Polyxenidas, the king’s admiral—he was, moreover, a Rhodian exile—when he had heard that the fleet of his own countrymen had set out from home, and that Pausistratus the prefect had said certain things haughtily and contemptuously against him in a public harangue, taking up a particular contest of spirit against him, turned over day and night nothing else in his mind than how he might confute that man’s grand words by deeds. He sends to him a man known also to Pausistratus, to say both that he himself would be of great use to Pausistratus and to his fatherland, if it were allowed, and that by Pausistratus he could be restored to his fatherland. When Pausistratus, wondering, kept asking in what way these things could come to pass, he gave his pledge to the man who sought it, either to carry the matter through in common or to cover it in silence. Then the go-between said: that Polyxenidas would hand over to him the royal fleet, either the whole or the greater part of it; that for so great a service he bargained for no other price than his return to his fatherland. The greatness of the thing made the words such that he could neither believe nor reject them. He made for Panhormus in the Samian territory, and there halted to explore the matter that had been offered. Messengers ran to and fro, nor was credit given by Pausistratus before, in the presence of his messenger, Polyxenidas wrote with his own hand that he would do what he had promised, and sent the tablets stamped with his own seal. By that pledge indeed he reckoned the traitor bound over to him as if hired: for a man who lived under a king would not have committed himself so far as to give, against his own self, evidence attested by his own hand. Thereupon the plan of the feigned betrayal was framed. Polyxenidas would say that he would let drop the whole equipment of his fleet; that he would not keep oarsmen or naval crews in numbers at the fleet; that he would haul up certain ships under pretense of refitting, and send others away to the neighboring harbors; that he would keep a few in the roadstead before the harbor of Ephesus, which, if the case forced him to put out, he would throw into the contest. This negligence, which Pausistratus heard that Polyxenidas would maintain in his own fleet, he himself at once adopted. Part of his ships he sent to Halicarnassus to fetch supplies, part to the city of Samos, that he might be ready when he received the signal to attack from the traitor. Polyxenidas heightened the error by his feigning; he hauls up certain ships, refits the dockyards as though he were about to haul up others; the oarsmen he summons from winter quarters not to Ephesus, but musters them secretly at Magnesia. By chance a certain soldier of Antiochus, having come to Samos on a private matter, was seized as a spy and brought to Panhormus to the prefect. When asked what was being done at Ephesus, whether from fear or from a loyalty toward his own side that was not sincere, he laid all bare: that the fleet stood drawn up and ready in the harbor; that all the oarsmen had been sent to Magnesia; that very few ships had been hauled up, and the dockyards were being stripped bare; that never had naval affairs been managed more intently. That these things should not be heard as true, his mind, forestalled by error and by vain hope, brought about. Polyxenidas, all being sufficiently prepared, the oarsmen summoned by night from Magnesia and the ships that had been hauled up launched in haste, having spent the day not so much in equipment as because he did not wish his fleet to be seen setting out, after sunset set forth with seventy decked ships, and, the wind against him, before daylight gained the harbor of Pygela. There, having lain still by day for the same reason, by night he crossed to the nearest part of the Samian territory. From here, having ordered a certain Nicander, an arch-pirate, to make for Palinurum with five decked ships, and thence to lead armed men, by the nearest way through the fields, to Panhormus at the enemy’s back, he himself meanwhile, the fleet divided so as to hold the harbor’s mouth from either side, made for Panhormus. Pausistratus, at first for a little while thrown into confusion as by an unforeseen thing, then, an old soldier, his spirit quickly recovered, judging that the enemy could be kept off better by land than by sea, leads his armed men in two columns to the headlands which, with their horns thrust out, make the harbor from the deep, meaning thence easily to drive off the enemy with crossfire. When Nicander, seen on the land side, had thrown this undertaking of his into confusion, suddenly, his plan changed, he bids all embark. Then indeed a huge panic of soldiers and sailors alike arose, and there was as it were a flight into the ships, when they saw themselves hemmed in by sea and land at once. Pausistratus, judging that there was one road of safety, if he could force a way through the harbor’s mouth and break out into the open sea, after he saw his men embarked, bidding the rest follow, himself first, his ship driven on by the oars, makes for the harbor’s mouth. As his ship was already passing the jaws, Polyxenidas surrounds it with three quinqueremes. The ship, struck by the beaks, is sent under; its defenders are overwhelmed with missiles, and among them Pausistratus too, fighting strenuously, is slain. Of the remaining ships, some were caught before the harbor, some within it, certain ones taken by Nicander while they struggled off the land; only five Rhodian ships with two Coan escaped, by the terror of the flashing flame, a way made for them through the crowded ships: for on two poles projecting from the prow they carried before them, in iron pans, much kindled fire. The Erythraean triremes, when not far from Samos they had met the Rhodian ships in their flight—the very ships to which they were coming to be a guard—turned their course into the Hellespont to the Romans. About the same time Seleucus received Phocaea, betrayed by one gate opened through the watchmen; and Cyme and the other cities of that coast revolted to him for fear.

While these things were being done in Aeolis, Abydus, after it had endured the siege for several days, the royal garrison protecting its walls, when now all were weary—Philotas too, the prefect of the garrison, permitting it—its magistrates were treating with Livius over the terms for surrendering the city. The matter was held up because it was not well agreed whether the king’s men should be sent out armed or unarmed. While they were so engaged, when news came of the disaster to the Rhodians, the affair slipped from their hands: for Livius, fearing lest Polyxenidas, puffed up by the success of so great a thing, should overwhelm the fleet that was at Canae, at once abandoned the siege of Abydus and the guard of the Hellespont and launched the ships that had been hauled up at Canae; and Eumenes came to Elaea. Livius with his whole fleet, to which he had joined two Mitylenaean triremes, made for Phocaea. When he had heard that it was held by a strong royal garrison, and that the camp of Seleucus was not far off, having laid waste the seacoast, and the booty—men above all—hastily put aboard the ships, he tarried only until Eumenes should come up with his fleet, then made it his aim to seek Samos. Among the Rhodians the disaster, when first heard, wrought at once both panic and vast grief: for, besides the loss of ships and soldiers, they had lost the flower and the strength that had been in their youth, many of the nobles having followed, among other things, the authority of Pausistratus, which among their own people was deservedly the greatest; then the fact that they had been taken by guile, and by a fellow-citizen of all men, turned their grief to anger. They sent at once ten ships, and a few days after ten others, under Eudamus as prefect over all—a man whom they believed would be a leader by no means equal to Pausistratus in the other warlike virtues, but more cautious, the less spirit he had. The Romans and King Eumenes first brought their fleet to land at Erythrae. There, having tarried one night, on the next day they held the promontory of Corycus. Thence, when they wished to cross to the nearest part of Samian territory, without waiting for the sun’s rising, by which the helmsmen might mark the state of the sky, they put out into an uncertain weather. In mid-course, the north wind shifting round, they began to be tossed on a sea roughened with waves. Polyxenidas, reckoning that the enemy would make for Samos, to join themselves to the Rhodian fleet, set out from Ephesus and first halted at Myonnesus; thence he crossed to the island they call Macris, that he might, as the fleet passed by, fall upon any ships that strayed from the line, or attack the rear of the column at an opportune moment. After he saw the fleet scattered by the storm, reckoning it at first an occasion for attack, then, the wind growing stronger and rolling up greater waves, because he saw that he could not reach them, he crossed to the island of Aethalia, that from there on the next day he might attack the ships as they made for Samos from the deep. A small part of the Romans, at nightfall, held the deserted harbor of Samian territory; the rest of the fleet, tossed all night on the deep, ran down into the same harbor. There, having learned from the country folk that the enemy’s ships lay at Aethalia, a council was held whether they should fight at once, or await the Rhodian fleet. The matter being deferred—for so it was resolved—they crossed back to Corycus, whence they had come. Polyxenidas too, when he had stood by in vain, returned to Ephesus. Then the Roman ships, the sea being clear of enemies, crossed to Samos. Thither too the Rhodian fleet came a few days after. And, that it might appear that they had been waiting for it, they set out at once for Ephesus, either to decide the matter by a naval battle, or, if the enemy declined the fight—which mattered most for the spirits of the communities—to wring from him a confession of fear. Over against the harbor’s mouth they stood with their line of ships drawn up in front. After no one came against them, the fleet being divided, part stood at anchor in the roadstead at the harbor’s mouth, part landed soldiers on the shore. Against these, as they were now driving off a great booty, the country far and wide laid waste, Andronicus the Macedonian, who was in the garrison of Ephesus, when they were now drawing near the walls, made a sally, and, stripping them of a great part of the booty, drove them back to the sea and the ships. On the next day, an ambush set about midway along the road, the Romans went in column toward the city to draw the Macedonian outside the walls; then, when that very suspicion deterred any from coming out, they returned to the ships; and, the enemy fleeing by land and sea from a contest, the fleet sought Samos again, whence it had come. From there the praetor sent two allied triremes from Italy and two Rhodian, with Epicrates the Rhodian as prefect, to guard the strait of Cephallania. The Lacedaemonian Hybristas, with the youth of the Cephallanians, was making it unsafe by piracy, and the sea was now closed to the Italian supply-ships.

At the Piraeus, Epicrates met Lucius Aemilius Regillus as he was coming to succeed to the naval command; and he, hearing of the disaster to the Rhodians, since he himself had but two quinqueremes, took Epicrates with his four ships back with him into Asia; the open ships of the Athenians too escorted them. He crossed the Aegean sea to Chios. To the same place Timasicrates the Rhodian came from Samos at dead of night with two quadriremes, and, brought to Aemilius, said he had been sent for protection’s sake, because the royal ships were making that stretch of sea unsafe for the merchantmen by frequent raids from the Hellespont and Abydus. As Aemilius was crossing from Chios to Samos, two Rhodian quadriremes, sent to meet him by Livius, and King Eumenes with two quinqueremes, came up. After they had come to Samos, the fleet received from Livius and a sacrifice duly made, as is the custom, Aemilius called a council. There Gaius Livius—for he was the first asked his opinion—said that none could give counsel more faithfully than the man who advised another to do what he himself, if he were in the same place, would do: that he had had it in mind to make for Ephesus with the whole fleet, and to bring merchant-ships weighed down with much ballast, and to sink them in the harbor’s mouth; and that this barrier was of the less effort, because the harbor’s mouth was long and narrow and shallow, after the manner of a river. Thus, he said, he would take from the enemy the use of the sea and make their fleet useless. That opinion pleased no one. King Eumenes asked, what then? When, the ships sunk, they had bridled the entrance of the sea, would they depart thence with their fleet free, to bear aid to the allies and offer terror to the enemy, or would they none the less besiege the harbor with the whole fleet? For if they departed, who could doubt that the enemy would drag up the sunken masses and open the harbor with less effort than it was blocked? But if they must none the less stay there, what use was it for the harbor to be closed? Nay, on the contrary, those men, enjoying a most safe harbor and a most wealthy city, with all Asia furnishing supplies, would pass quiet summer quarters; the Romans, exposed on the open sea to waves and storms, in want of everything, would be in unbroken watch, themselves more bound and hampered—so that they could do none of the things that must be done—than that they should hold the enemy shut in. Eudamus, prefect of the Rhodian fleet, showed rather that that opinion displeased him than said himself what he thought should be done. Epicrates the Rhodian advised that, Ephesus being for the present let alone, a part of the ships should be sent into Lycia, and Patara, the capital of the nation, joined to their alliance. This would be of use for two great ends: both that the Rhodians, the lands over against their island pacified, could bend their whole strength to the care of one war, that which was against Antiochus, and that the fleet which was being made ready in Cilicia could be cut off from joining Polyxenidas. This opinion most moved them; yet it was resolved that Regillus should sail out with the whole fleet to the harbor of Ephesus, to strike terror into the enemy.

Gaius Livius, with two Roman quinqueremes and four Rhodian quadriremes and two open ships of Smyrna, was sent into Lycia, bidden first to put in at Rhodes and to share all his plans with them. The communities he sailed past—Miletus, Myndus, Halicarnassus, Cnidus, Cos—did earnestly what was commanded. When he had come to Rhodes, he both set forth to them for what purpose he had been sent and consulted them. All approving, and three quadriremes taken on to the fleet he had, he sails to Patara. At first a favoring wind was bearing them to the city itself, and they hoped to effect something by sudden terror; after the wind, veering about, began to roll up the sea with shifting waves, they prevailed indeed by the oars so as to hold the land; but there was neither a safe anchorage about the city, nor could they stand in the roadstead before the harbor’s mouth, the sea being rough and night at hand. Passing the walls, they sought the harbor Phoenicus, distant less than two miles from there, safe for the ships from the violence of the sea; but high cliffs hung over it above, which the townsmen swiftly seized, having taken on the royal soldiers whom they had in garrison. Against these Livius, although the ground was unfavorable and difficult of issue, sent the Issaean auxiliaries and the light-armed youth of Smyrna. These, while at first the fight was provoked rather than joined, with missiles and, against a few, light skirmishes, sustained the contest; after more flowed in from the city, and now the whole multitude was pouring out, fear came upon Livius lest both the auxiliaries should be surrounded and there should be danger to the ships even from the land. So he led out into battle not the soldiers only but also the naval allies, the throng of rowers, armed each with what weapons he could. Then too the battle was doubtful, and not some of the soldiers only, but Lucius Apustius fell in the disorderly fight; at last, however, the Lycians were routed and put to flight and driven into the city, and the Romans returned to the ships with a victory not unbloody. Thence, having set out into the Telmessic gulf, which touches Caria on one side and Lycia on the other, Patara being given up from any further attempt, the Rhodians were dismissed home, and Livius, sailing past Asia, crossed over into Greece, that, the Scipios met—who were then about Thessaly—he might cross to Italy.

Aemilius, after he learned that affairs in Lycia had been given up and Livius had set out for Italy—when he himself, driven back by a storm from Ephesus with his attempt frustrated, had returned to Samos—thinking it shameful that Patara had been attempted in vain, resolved to set out thither with the whole fleet and to assail the city with the utmost force. Having sailed past Miletus and the rest of the allies’ coast, in the Bargylietic gulf they made a landing at Iasus. A royal garrison held the city; the Romans laid waste the country round about in hostile fashion. Then, men sent to try the dispositions of the leading men and magistrates through parleys, after they answered that nothing was in their own power, he leads on to storm the city. There were exiles of the Iasians with the Romans; these in throngs set about entreating the Rhodians not to let a city both neighboring and kindred to them perish, guiltless; that they themselves had no other cause of exile than their loyalty toward the Romans; that those who remained in the city were held by the same force of the king’s men by which they themselves had been driven out; that the one mind of all the Iasians was to escape the king’s servitude. The Rhodians, moved by their prayers, King Eumenes too taken into counsel, partly by recalling their own ties of kinship, partly by pitying the lot of a city beset by a royal garrison, prevailed that the siege be desisted from. Having set out thence, the rest being pacified, as they skirted the coast of Asia, they came to Loryma—a harbor opposite Rhodes. There at the headquarters a talk first arose, in private among the tribunes of the soldiers, then came to the ears of Aemilius himself: that the fleet was being drawn away from Ephesus, from its own war, so that the enemy, left free in the rear, could attempt everything with impunity against so many neighboring cities of the allies. These things moved Aemilius; and, the Rhodians summoned, when he had asked whether the whole fleet could stand in the harbor at Patara, when they answered it could not, having found a cause for giving up the enterprise, he led the ships back to Samos.

During the same time Seleucus, son of Antiochus, when through all the season of winter quarters he had kept his army in Aeolis, partly to bear aid to the allies, partly to lay waste those whom he could not entice into alliance, resolved to cross into the bounds of the kingdom of Eumenes, while he was far from home, attacking with the Romans and the Rhodians the seaboard of Lycia. He first approached Elaea with hostile standards; then, the siege of the city given up, having laid waste the fields in hostile fashion, he leads on to storm Pergamum, the head and citadel of the kingdom. Attalus at first, by posting outposts before the city and by sallies of cavalry and light-armed troops, harassed the enemy rather than withstood him; at last, when through these slight encounters he had found himself in no part a match for their strength, and had withdrawn within the walls, the city began to be besieged. About the same time Antiochus too, having set out from Apamea, kept his standing camp first at Sardis, then not far from the camp of Seleucus, at the head of the river Caicus, with a great army mixed of various peoples. The most terror was in the four thousand Gauls hired for pay. These, with a few others mingled in, he sent to ravage the Pergamene territory far and wide. When these things were reported at Samos, first Eumenes, called away by the war at home, made for Elaea with his fleet; thence, when horsemen and light-armed foot were at hand, safe under their protection, before the enemy were aware or stirred, he hastened to Pergamum. There again slight battles by sallies began to be fought, Eumenes beyond doubt declining a decision of the main issue. A few days after, the Roman and Rhodian fleet, to bear aid to the king, came from Samos to Elaea. When it was reported to Antiochus that these had landed their forces at Elaea and that so many fleets had gathered into one harbor, and about the same time he heard that the consul was already in Macedonia with his army, and that what was needed for the crossing of the Hellespont was being made ready, reckoning that the time had come, before he should be pressed by land and sea at once, for treating of peace, he seized a certain hillock over against Elaea for his camp; there, all his forces of foot left behind, with the cavalry—and there were six thousand horse—he came down into the plain under the very walls of Elaea, a herald sent to Aemilius to say that he wished to treat of peace. Aemilius, Eumenes summoned from Pergamum and the Rhodians also taken in, held a council. The Rhodians did not spurn peace; Eumenes said it was neither honorable that peace be treated of at such a time, nor could an outcome be set to the matter: “For how,” said he, “shall we, shut up within our walls and besieged, honorably accept the terms of peace, as it were? Or to whom will that peace be valid which we have struck without the consul, not by the authority of the Senate, without the order of the Roman people? For I ask: peace made through you, will you return at once into Italy, about to withdraw fleet and army, or will you wait for what the consul shall please about the matter, what the Senate shall decree or the people command? It remains, then, that you stay in Asia, and that the forces, drawn back again into winter quarters, the war given up, drain the allies by the furnishing of supplies; and then, if it shall so seem good to those in whose power it lies, let us begin a new war wholly afresh—a war which we can, if from this present impetus of affairs nothing is remitted by any delay, with the gods willing, have finished before winter.” This opinion prevailed, and the answer was given to Antiochus that peace could not be treated of before the consul’s arrival. Antiochus, peace attempted in vain, having laid waste first the lands of the people of Elaea, then of the Pergamenes, his son Seleucus left there, made his way in hostile fashion to Adramytteum, and sought a wealthy district which they call the plain of Thebe, ennobled by the song of Homer; nor in any other place of Asia was greater booty won by the king’s soldiers. To the same Adramytteum, that they might be a protection to the city, Aemilius and Eumenes came, sailing round with their ships.

By chance during those same days there came to Elaea from Achaea a thousand foot with a hundred horse, Diophanes set over all those forces; whom, as they landed from the ships, men sent to meet them by Attalus led by night to Pergamum. All were veterans and skilled in war, and their leader himself was a disciple of Philopoemen, then the foremost commander of all the Greeks. They took two days at once for the rest of men and horses and for surveying the enemy’s posts—at what places and times they came up and withdrew. The king’s men used to come up almost to the foot of the hill on which the city stands. Thus there was free ravaging in their rear, no one running out from the city, not even to the outposts, to hurl from afar. After once, driven by fear, they had shut themselves within the walls, contempt of them, and thence negligence, arose among the king’s men. A great part kept their horses neither saddled nor bridled; a few left for arms and the ranks, the rest, dispersed, had scattered themselves at random over the whole plain, some turned to the sports and wantonness of youth, some eating under the shade, certain ones even stretched out in sleep. Diophanes, having watched these things from the high city of Pergamum, bids his men take arms and be ready at the gate; he himself goes to Attalus and said it was in his mind to try the enemy’s post. Attalus permitting it with difficulty—seeing as he did that one would fight with a hundred horse against six hundred, with a thousand foot against four thousand—he went out by the gate and sat down not far from the enemy’s post, awaiting his opportunity. And those who were at Pergamum believed it madness rather than daring, and the enemy, turned upon them for a little while, when they saw nothing stir, changed nothing themselves of their wonted negligence, but even, besides, mocked their fewness. Diophanes for some while kept his men quiet, as though they had been led out only for a spectacle; after he saw the enemy slipped away from their ranks, bidding the foot follow as fast as they could quicken their pace, he himself first among the horse, with his own troop, at the most headlong gallop he could, a shout raised at once by all foot and horse alike, falls suddenly upon the enemy’s post. Not the men only but the horses too, terrified, when they had broken their fastenings, made trepidation and uproar among their own. A few horses stood unafraid; even these they could not easily saddle or bridle or mount, the Achaeans bringing on a terror far greater than their number warranted. The foot indeed, ordered and prepared, fell upon men scattered through negligence and half-asleep. Slaughter and flight were made everywhere across the plains. Diophanes, having followed the routed as far as was safe, with great glory won for the nation of the Achaeans—for not men only but women too had watched from the walls of Pergamum—returned into the garrison of the city. On the next day the royal posts, more composed and ordered, pitched camp five hundred paces further from the city, and the Achaeans advanced at almost the same time and to the same place. For many hours both sides watched intently, as though the charge were now to come; after, not far from sunset, it was time to return to camp, the king’s men, their standards joined, began to go off in a column arranged for the march rather than for battle. Diophanes kept still while they were in sight; then with the same onset as the day before he runs in upon the rearmost column, and again struck so much panic and uproar that, when their backs were being cut down, no one halted for the sake of fighting; and, in alarm and scarcely keeping the order of the column, they were driven into camp. This daring of the Achaeans forced Seleucus to move his camp from the Pergamene territory.

Antiochus, after he heard that the Romans had come to protect Adramytteum, abstained indeed from that city; having laid waste the fields, he then stormed Peraea, a colony of the Mitylenaeans. Cotton and Corylenus and Aphrodisias and Priene were taken at the first onset. Thence through Thyatira he returned to Sardis. Seleucus, remaining on the seacoast, was to some a terror, to others a protection. The Roman fleet with Eumenes and the Rhodians went first to Mitylene, then back to Elaea, whence it had set out. Thence, making for Phocaea, they put in at an island they call Bacchium—it overlooks the city of the Phocaeans—and, the temples and statues which they had before spared—and the island was splendidly adorned—having plundered in hostile fashion, they crossed over to the city itself. When they were assaulting it, the parts divided among themselves, and it seemed that it could be taken without works, by arms and ladders, after a garrison of three thousand armed men sent by Antiochus had entered the city, the assault was at once given up and the fleet withdrew to the island, nothing else done save that the enemy’s land about the city was laid waste. Then it pleased them that Eumenes be dismissed home and prepare for the consul and the army what was needful for the crossing of the Hellespont, and that the Roman and Rhodian fleet return to Samos and be on station there, lest Polyxenidas move from Ephesus. The king returned to Elaea, the Romans and Rhodians to Samos. There Marcus Aemilius, the praetor’s brother, died.

The Rhodians, the funeral rites performed, against the fleet which rumor said was coming from Syria, set out with thirteen of their own ships and one Coan quinquereme and another from Cnidus to Rhodes, that they might be on station there. Two days before Eudamus came with his fleet from Samos, thirteen ships from Rhodes with Pamphilidas as prefect, sent against that same Syrian fleet, taking on four ships that were a garrison to Caria, freed Daedala and certain other forts of the Peraea from the siege which the king’s men were pressing. It pleased them that Eudamus should go out at once. To him too were added, to the fleet he had, six open ships. Having set out, when he had made all the haste he could, he overtakes those who had gone ahead at the harbor they call Megiste. Thence, when they had come in a single column to Phaselis, it seemed best to await the enemy there. Phaselis is on the border of Lycia and Pamphylia; it juts far out into the deep and is the first land seen by those making from Cilicia for Rhodes, and offers a far view of ships. For this reason chiefly the place was chosen, that they might be in the path of the enemy’s fleet; but—what they did not foresee—both from the unwholesome place and the season of the year—for it was midsummer—and besides from the unaccustomed smell, diseases began to fall commonly upon them, most of all on the rowers. From fear of this pestilence having set out, as they were sailing past the Pamphylian gulf, the fleet put in at the river Eurymedon, and they hear from the Aspendians that the enemy were at Side. The king’s men had sailed more slowly, the season of the etesian winds being against them, which is like a fixed thing with the westerly winds. The Rhodians’ ships were thirty-two quadriremes and four triremes; the royal fleet was of thirty-seven ships of larger build, among which it had three of seven banks, four of six. Besides these there were ten triremes. And these too learned from a certain watchtower that the enemy were at hand. Both fleets on the next day at first light, as though to fight that day, moved out from harbor; and after the Rhodians had passed the promontory that juts out from Side into the deep, at once both they were seen by the enemy and themselves saw them. On the royal side, the left wing, which was set toward the deep, Hannibal commanded; the right, Apollonius, one of the courtiers; and they had their ships already drawn up in front. The Rhodians were coming in a long column: first was the flagship of Eudamus; Chariclitus brought up the rear; Pamphilidas commanded the middle of the fleet. Eudamus, after he saw the enemy’s line drawn up and ready to engage, both himself is carried out into the deep, and bids those who followed in succession, keeping their order, form into front. That thing at first gave occasion for confusion: for he had not been carried so far into the deep that the line of all the ships could be deployed toward the land, and, himself hastening too precipitately, with only five ships he met Hannibal; the rest, because they had been bidden to form into front, did not follow. For the rearmost column no space toward the land was left; and while these were in alarm among themselves, already on the right wing the battle was being fought against Hannibal. But in a moment of time both the worth of the ships and skill in seamanship took all terror from the Rhodians. For both the ships, swiftly carried out into the deep, gave place behind each one of them to the one coming up toward the land, and if any had charged with its beak against an enemy ship, it either shattered the prow, or swept off the oars, or, passing by in free coursing between the lines, dealt a charge upon the stern. The greatest terror was caused by a royal seven-banker sunk by one blow of a far smaller Rhodian ship: and so now beyond doubt the enemy’s right wing was inclining to flight. Eudamus in the deep, Hannibal above all—far surpassing all the rest—was pressing, and would have surrounded him, had not, a signal raised from the flagship, by which it was the custom to gather the scattered fleet into one, all the ships that had conquered on the right wing run together to bear aid to their own. Then both Hannibal and the ships that were about him take to flight; nor could the Rhodians pursue, their rowers being in great part sick and therefore the sooner wearied. When in the deep, where they had halted, they were refreshing their strength with food, Eudamus, having watched the enemy dragging their crippled and mutilated ships by tow-line with the open ships, a little more than twenty whole ones drawing off, from the tower of his flagship, silence made, said: “Rise up and take in with your eyes an excellent spectacle.” All rose together, and, having watched the alarm and flight of the enemy, almost with one voice all cried out that they should pursue. The ship of Eudamus himself had been wounded with many blows; he bade Pamphilidas and Chariclitus pursue as far as they should think safe. They followed for some while; after Hannibal was drawing near the land, fearing lest they be shut in by the wind on the enemy’s coast, returning to Eudamus, they dragged with difficulty to Phaselis the captured seven-banker, which had been struck at the first encounter. Thence they returned to Rhodes, not so much glad of the victory as accusing one another that, when it had been possible, the whole fleet of the enemy had not been sunk or captured. Hannibal, struck by one adverse battle, did not even then dare to sail past Lycia, though he desired to join the old royal fleet as soon as possible; and, that this should not be free for him to do, the Rhodians sent Chariclitus with twenty beaked ships to Patara and the harbor of Megiste. Eudamus they bade return to Samos to the Romans with seven of the largest ships from that fleet which he had commanded, so that, by however much he availed in counsel and in authority, he might urge the Romans to the storming of Patara.

Great joy was brought to the Romans first by the messenger of the victory, then by the arrival of the Rhodians; and it was plain that, if that care were taken from the Rhodians, they, being free, would keep the seas of that region safe. But the setting-out of Antiochus from Sardis, lest the maritime cities be overwhelmed, forbade them to depart from the guard of Ionia and Aeolis: they sent Pamphilidas with four decked ships to that fleet which was about Patara. Antiochus was not only drawing together the garrisons of the communities that were about him, but had sent envoys and a letter to Prusias, king of Bithynia, in which he inveighed against the crossing of the Romans into Asia: that they came to do away with all kingdoms, that there might be nowhere in the whole world any empire but the Roman; that Philip and Nabis had been crushed; that he himself was the third aimed at; that, as each was nearest to one already overthrown, through all of them, like a continuous conflagration, it would spread; that from himself the next step would be into Bithynia, since Eumenes had yielded into voluntary servitude. Prusias, moved by these things, the letters of the consul Scipio, but more of his brother Africanus, turned away from such a suspicion; who, beside the perpetual custom of the Roman people of increasing by every honor the majesty of allied kings, by his own domestic examples drove Prusias to earn his friendship: that he had received petty kings into his protection in Spain and left them kings; that Masinissa he had not only seated in his ancestral kingdom but set in the kingdom of Syphax, by whom he had before been driven out; and that he was now not only by far the most wealthy of the kings of Africa, but in the whole world the equal of any king you please in majesty or in strength. That Philip and Nabis, enemies and conquered in war by Titus Quinctius, had nonetheless been left in their kingdoms. That to Philip indeed in the year before even his tribute had been remitted and his son, a hostage, given back; and that he had recovered certain cities outside Macedonia, the Roman commanders suffering it. In the same dignity Nabis too would have remained, had not first his own madness, then the treachery of the Aetolians, made an end of him. The king’s mind was most confirmed after Gaius Livius, who before had commanded the fleet as praetor, came to him as legate from Rome and taught him how much both the hope of victory was surer for the Romans than for Antiochus, and the friendship would be more sacred and firmer with the Romans.

Antiochus, after he had fallen from the hope of an alliance with Prusias, set out from Sardis to Ephesus to inspect the fleet, which for some months had been equipped and made ready—more because he saw that with his land forces the Roman army and the two Scipios, the commanders, could not be withstood, than because naval warfare in itself had ever been tried by him with success, or was then a matter of great and sure confidence. Yet there was for the present some weight toward hope, because he had heard both that a great part of the Rhodian fleet was about Patara, and that King Eumenes had set out with all his ships into the Hellespont to meet the consul; something too puffed up his spirits, the Rhodian fleet that had been destroyed at Samos through the treachery prepared by the occasion. Relying on these things, Polyxenidas sent with the fleet to try by every means the fortune of a battle, he himself leads his forces to Notium. That is a town of Colophon, overhanging the sea, distant about two miles from old Colophon. The city itself too he wished to have in his power, so near to Ephesus that it could do nothing by land or sea which was not subject to the eyes of the Colophonians and through them known at once to the Romans, who, he did not doubt, when the siege was heard of, would move the fleet from Samos to bear aid to an allied city; that this would be the occasion for Polyxenidas to do his work. Therefore, having set about assaulting the city with works, the fortifications run down to the sea on two sides alike, on either side he joined mantlets and a mound to the wall, and brought rams up under penthouses. Terrified by these evils, the Colophonians sent spokesmen to Samos to Lucius Aemilius, imploring the protection of the praetor and the Roman people. Aemilius was offended both by the long idle delay at Samos—expecting nothing less than that Polyxenidas, twice in vain challenged by him, would grant the chance of a battle—and he thought it shameful that, while Eumenes’s fleet was helping the consul to ferry the legions into Asia, he himself should be tied to the relief of besieged Colophon, a thing that would have an uncertain end. Eudamus the Rhodian, who had both held him at Samos when he wished to set out into the Hellespont, and all pressed him and said how much better it was either to free the allies from siege, or to conquer again a fleet already once conquered and wrest from the enemy the whole possession of the sea, than, the allies deserted, Asia handed over to Antiochus by land and sea, to withdraw into the Hellespont, where Eumenes’s fleet was enough, away from his own part of the war. They set out from Samos to seek supplies, all being now consumed, and were preparing to cross to Chios: that was the granary of the Romans, and thither all the merchantmen sent from Italy directed their course. Having sailed round from the city to the back of the island—the parts that face the north wind are toward Chios and Erythrae—when they were preparing to cross, the praetor is informed by letter that a great quantity of grain had come to Chios from Italy, but that the ships carrying wine had been held back by storms; at the same time word was brought that the Teians had furnished supplies generously to the royal fleet and had promised five thousand jars of wine. He suddenly turned the fleet, in mid-course, to Teos, meaning either, with their consent, to use for his own the supplies prepared for the enemy, or to treat them themselves as enemies. When they had turned their prows toward the land, about fifteen ships appeared near Myonnesus, which the praetor at first, thinking them to be of the royal fleet, set about following; then it appeared that they were pirate cutters and pinnaces. Having plundered the seacoast of the Chians, as they were returning with booty of every kind, after they saw the fleet from the deep, they turned to flight. And they both surpassed it in speed, with their lighter craft built for that purpose, and were nearer the land: and so, before the fleet drew near, they fled to Myonnesus, whence the praetor, thinking he would drag the ships out of the harbor, ignorant of the place, followed. Myonnesus is a promontory between Teos and Samos. It is itself a hill rising, in the manner of a turning-post, to a sharp peak from a base broad enough; from the mainland it has access by a narrow path, on the sea side cliffs eaten by the waves shut it in, so that in certain places the overhanging rocks jut farther into the deep than the ships that lie at anchor. About these the ships, not daring to draw near lest they be under the stroke of the pirates standing on the rocks, wasted the day. At last, toward night, having desisted from the vain attempt, on the next day they came to Teos, and, the ships placed in the harbor that is at the back of the city—they themselves call it Geraesticus—the praetor sent out soldiers to ravage the land about the city. The Teians, the ravaging being before their eyes, sent spokesmen with fillets and suppliant garlands to the Roman. To these, as they were clearing their community of every hostile deed and word against the Romans, he charged both that they had aided the enemy’s fleet with all supplies, and how much wine they had promised Polyxenidas; that, if they would give the same to the Roman fleet, he would recall the soldiers from ravaging; if not, he would hold them as enemies. When the envoys had carried back this so grim an answer, the people were called into assembly by the magistrates, to take counsel what they should do. By chance on that day Polyxenidas, having set out with the royal fleet from Colophon, after he heard that the Romans had moved from Samos and pursued the pirates to Myonnesus and were ravaging the land of the Teians, their ships lying in the harbor of Geraesticus, himself, over against Myonnesus, cast anchor at the island the sailors call Macris, in a hidden harbor. Thence, exploring from near at hand what the enemy did, at first he was in great hope that, just as he had stormed the Rhodian fleet at Samos by besetting the jaws of the harbor to its destruction, so he would storm the Roman too. Nor is the nature of the place unlike: by promontories meeting one another the harbor is so closed that scarcely two ships at once can come out from it. By night Polyxenidas had it in mind to seize the jaws, and, with ten ships each standing at the promontories, which from either horn should fight against the flanks of the ships coming out, from the rest of the fleet, as he had done at Panhormus, armed men landed on the shores, to overwhelm the enemy by land and sea at once. That plan would not have been vain for him, had not, when the Teians had promised they would do as commanded, it seemed more fitting to the Romans, for the receiving of supplies, to bring the fleet over into the harbor that is before the city. It is said too that Eudamus the Rhodian pointed out the flaw of the other harbor, when by chance two ships in the narrow mouth had entangled and broken their oars; and among other things this also moved the praetor to bring the fleet over, that there was danger from the land, Antiochus keeping his standing camp not far off. The fleet brought over to the city, all being unaware, the soldiers and sailors landed for the dividing of supplies and especially of wine into the ships, when by chance about midday a certain countryman, brought to the praetor, reports that already for a second day a fleet stood before the island of Macris, and that a little before certain ships had been seen to move as though for departure. Struck by the sudden thing, the praetor bids the trumpeters sound, that any who had straggled through the fields should return; sends tribunes into the city to drive the soldiers and sailors to the ships. No otherwise than in a sudden fire or a captured city is there panic, some running into the city to recall their own, some from the city seeking the ships at a run, and with uncertain shouts, which the very trumpets drowned, with orders confused, at last there was a rush to the ships. Scarcely could each man know or reach his own for the uproar; and there would have been alarm with danger both at sea and on land, had not, the parts divided, Aemilius first with the flagship sailed out of the harbor into the deep, and, taking up those that followed, drawn up each in its own order into front; while Eudamus and the Rhodian fleet halted by the land, so that they might both embark without alarm and each ship go out as it was ready. Thus both the first ships deployed their order in the praetor’s sight, and the column was brought up by the Rhodians, and the line drawn up, as though they saw the king’s men, advanced into the deep. They were between Myonnesus and the promontory of Corycus when they caught sight of the enemy. And the royal fleet too, coming in a long column with its ships two abreast, itself deployed its line over against them, carried out only with its left wing so far that it could embrace and round the right wing of the Romans. When Eudamus, who brought up the column, saw this—that the Romans could not equal the line, and were all but already being rounded on the right wing—he urges on his ships—and the Rhodian ships were by far the swiftest of all in the whole fleet—and, the wing made equal, set his own ship against the flagship in which Polyxenidas was. Now with all the fleets together the battle was joined on every side. On the Roman side eighty ships were fighting, of which twenty-two were Rhodian; the enemy’s fleet was of eighty-nine ships; of the largest build it had three of six banks, two of seven. In the strength of the ships and the valor of the soldiers the Romans far surpassed the king’s men; the Rhodian ships in agility and the art of their helmsmen and the skill of their rowers. Yet the greatest terror to the enemy were those that carried fire before them, and that one thing which had been their salvation when surrounded at Panhormus was then the greatest factor toward victory. For from fear of the fire facing them, the royal ships, lest their prows should clash, when they had turned aside, both could not themselves strike the enemy with the beak, and offered themselves sidelong to the blows, and if any had charged, it was overwhelmed by the fire poured in, and they were in more alarm about the burning than about the battle. Yet most of all, as is wont, the valor of the soldiers prevailed in the war. For when the Romans had broken the enemy’s center, sailing round to the rear they set themselves against the king’s men who were fighting against the Rhodians; and in a moment of time both the center of Antiochus’s line and the ships surrounded on the left wing were being sunk. The right part, untouched, was frightened more by the disaster of the allies than by their own peril; but after they saw the others surrounded, and the flagship of Polyxenidas, the allies abandoned, giving sail, the topsails hastily raised—and the wind was favorable for those making for Ephesus—they take to flight, forty-two ships lost in that battle, of which thirteen, captured, came into the enemy’s power, the rest burned or sunk. Of the Romans two ships were broken, several wounded; one Rhodian ship was captured by a memorable chance. For when it had struck a Sidonian ship with its beak, the anchor, shaken out of its own ship by the very blow, with its hooked fluke, like an iron hand cast on, bound fast the prow of the other; thence, an uproar arising, when the Rhodians, desiring to tear themselves from the enemy, backed water, the anchor-cable was dragged and, entangled, swept off the other ship’s bank of oars; the ship that had been struck and clung fast captured the very vessel thus crippled. In this manner above all was the naval battle fought at Myonnesus.

Terrified by this, Antiochus, because, driven from possession of the sea, he distrusted his ability to defend distant places, ordered the garrison to be withdrawn from Lysimachia, lest it be overwhelmed there by the Romans—a counsel mistaken, as the event itself afterward taught. For it was not only easy to defend Lysimachia from a first onset of the Romans, but even to endure a siege through the whole winter, and to bring the besiegers too to the last want by drawing out the time, and meanwhile to try the hope of peace as occasion offered. But he not only handed Lysimachia over to the enemy after the adverse naval battle, but even withdrew from the siege of Colophon and betook himself to Sardis; and thence into Cappadocia, to Ariarathes, to summon auxiliaries, and wherever else he could, to draw together forces, he sent men, his mind now bent on one plan only—to fight it out in a pitched battle.

Regillus Aemilius, after the naval victory, having set out for Ephesus, his ships drawn up before the harbor, when he had wrung from the enemy the last confession that the sea was yielded, sails to Chios, whither before the naval battle he had directed his course from Samos. There, when he had refitted the ships shattered in the battle, he sent Lucius Aemilius Scaurus with thirty ships to the Hellespont for the ferrying over of the army, and bade the Rhodians, adorned with a share of the booty and the naval spoils, return home. The Rhodians went briskly first to ferry over the consul’s forces; and, that duty too discharged, then at last returned to Rhodes. The Roman fleet crossed from Chios to Phocaea. This city is set in the innermost recess of a bay, of oblong shape; a wall embraces a space of two thousand five hundred paces, then it draws in from either side into a kind of narrower wedge; they themselves call it Lampter. There the breadth opens to twelve hundred paces; thence a tongue running out a thousand paces into the deep divides the middle of the bay, as it were, like a boundary-mark; where it joins by a narrow neck, it has two most safe harbors turned toward either region. The one that faces south they call Naustathmus from the fact, because it holds a vast number of ships; the other is close to Lampter itself. When the Roman fleet had seized these most safe harbors, before he assailed the walls either with ladders or with works, the praetor judged that men should be sent to try the dispositions of the leading men and magistrates. After he saw them obstinate, he set about assaulting in two places at once. One part was thin of buildings; temples of the gods held a good deal of the ground; there first, the ram brought up, he began to batter the walls and towers; then, when the multitude ran together there to defend, on the other part too the ram was brought up; and now on both sides the walls were being thrown down. At their fall, when the Roman soldiers were making a charge through the very heap of ruins, and others were even attempting the ascent of the walls by ladders, the townsmen resisted so obstinately that it easily appeared there was more help in arms and valor than in walls. Forced, then, by the soldiers’ peril, the praetor ordered the retreat to be sounded, lest he expose the unwary to men raging with desperation and fury. The battle broken off, not even then did they turn to rest, but ran together from every side to fortify and wall up what had been laid low by the ruins. As they were intent on this work, Quintus Antonius came upon them, sent by the praetor, who, chiding their stubbornness, should show that the Romans had more care than they themselves that there should be no fighting to the destruction of the city; that, if they would desist from their fury, the chance was given them of surrendering on the same condition under which they had before come into the protection of Gaius Livius. When they had heard this, a space of five days taken to deliberate, the hope of aid from Antiochus tried meanwhile, after the envoys sent to the king had reported that there was no protection in him, then they opened their gates, having bargained that they should suffer nothing hostile. When the standards were being carried into the city and the praetor had proclaimed that he wished the surrendered to be spared, a shout was raised on every side that it was an unworthy thing that the Phocaeans, never faithful allies, always hostile enemies, should mock with impunity. From this cry, as if by a signal given by the praetor, they run this way and that to plunder the city. Aemilius at first resisted and recalled them, saying that captured cities, not surrendered ones, were plundered, and that even in these the decision lay with the commander, not the soldiers. After anger and greed were more powerful than command, heralds sent through the city, he bids all the free men assemble to him in the forum, lest they be harmed; and in all things that were in his own power the praetor’s good faith held firm: he restored to them their city and fields and their own laws; and, because winter was now coming on, he chose the harbors of Phocaea for the fleet to winter in.

At about the same time word is brought to the consul, who had crossed the bounds of the Aenii and the Maronitae, that the royal fleet had been conquered at Myonnesus and that Lysimachia had been abandoned by its garrison. This was far more joyful than the news of the naval victory, especially after they came there, and the city, stuffed with supplies of all things, as though prepared for the army’s coming, received them where they had set before themselves the uttermost want and toil in besieging the city. There they kept a standing camp a few days, that the baggage and the sick might come up, who had been left behind here and there throughout all the forts of Thrace, worn out by sicknesses and the length of the road. All being taken up again, they entered once more upon the march and came through the Chersonese to the Hellespont. There, all things made ready for the crossing by the care of King Eumenes, as though onto a peaceful shore with none forbidding, the ships put in one here, one there, they crossed without disorder. That thing indeed raised the Romans’ spirits, seeing that the crossing into Asia was granted to them—a thing they had believed would be one of great contest. They then kept a standing camp at the Hellespont for some while, because the days on which the sacred shields are moved had by chance fallen out, days of religious scruple for marching. The same days had separated Publius Scipio from the army by a still closer scruple, because he was a Salian; and he himself too was a cause of the delay, while he came up.

During those days by chance an envoy had come from Antiochus into the camp, Heraclides of Byzantium, bringing instructions concerning peace; and great hope that it would be obtainable was brought him by the delay and hesitation of the Romans, who, he had believed, the moment they had touched Asia, would go to the royal camp in a streaming column. He resolved, however, not to approach the consul before Publius Scipio, and so it had been ordered by the king. In him he had the greatest hope, both because the greatness of his spirit and the surfeit of his glory made him most placable, and it was known to the nations what manner of conqueror that man had been in Spain, and then in Africa, and also because his son, taken captive, was in the king’s power. As to where and when and by what chance he was captured, like most other things, the authorities do not sufficiently agree. Some relate that at the beginning of the war, as he was making from Chalcis for Oreus, he was surrounded by the royal ships; others, that after the crossing into Asia, sent with a Fregellan squadron to reconnoiter the royal camp, the enemy’s cavalry pouring out to meet him, as he was withdrawing, in that uproar he slipped from his horse and, with two horsemen, was overpowered, and so was led to the king. This is sufficiently agreed: that, if peace with the Roman people had held and there had been private guest-friendship between the king and the Scipios, the youth could not have been kept or honored more generously or kindly than he was. For these reasons, when the envoy had awaited the coming of Publius Scipio, after he came, he approaches the consul and asks that he hear his instructions. A full council called, the envoy’s words were heard. He, many embassies having before been sent to and fro in vain about peace, said that he had this very confidence of obtaining it, because the earlier envoys had obtained nothing: for Smyrna and Lampsacus and Alexandria Troas and Lysimachia in Europe had been tossed about in those disputes; of which the king had now given up Lysimachia, lest they should say he held anything in Europe; that he was prepared to hand over those cities which were in Asia, and any others the Romans might wish to claim from the royal sway, because they were of their party; that of the expense too incurred in the war the king would furnish the Roman people the half. These were the terms of peace; the rest of his speech was that, mindful of human affairs, they should both moderate their own fortune and not press another’s. Let them bound their empire by Europe; that too was immense; and that the several parts could have been more easily got by acquiring than the whole held; but if they wished to draw away some part of Asia as well, provided they bounded it by no doubtful regions, the king would suffer his own moderation to be overcome by the Roman greed, for the sake of peace and concord. Those things which seemed to the envoy great toward obtaining peace seemed small to the Romans: for they both judged it just that the king should furnish the whole expense incurred in the war, by whose fault the war had been stirred up, and that not from Ionia only and Aeolis ought the royal garrisons to be withdrawn, but, just as all Greece had been freed, so all the cities that were in Asia should be freed; and that this could be done in no other way than that Antiochus yield up possession of Asia this side of Mount Taurus.

After the envoy judged that he could obtain nothing fair in the council, he set about trying, in private—for so it had been ordered—the mind of Publius Scipio. First of all he said that the king would give him back his son without ransom; then, ignorant both of Scipio’s spirit and of Roman custom, he promised a vast weight of gold, and, the royal name only excepted, partnership in the whole kingdom, if through him he should obtain peace. To these Scipio said: “That you are ignorant of all Romans, and of me, to whom you have been sent, I wonder the less, since I see that you are ignorant of the fortune of him from whom you come. Lysimachia should have been held, that we might not enter the Chersonese; or a stand should have been made at the Hellespont, that we might not cross into Asia, if you meant to sue for peace as men anxious about the outcome of the war: but, the crossing into Asia conceded, and not the bridle only but even the yoke accepted, what discussion on equal terms is left, when the sovereignty must be borne? Of the king’s munificence I shall hold the greatest gift, my son; for the rest, I pray the gods that my fortune may never want it; my spirit, at least, shall not want. For so great a gift toward me he shall find me grateful toward him, if he shall desire a private gratitude for a private benefit; publicly I will neither have anything from him nor give. What I can give for the present is faithful counsel. Go, announce in my words: let him desist from war, let him refuse no condition of peace.” These things moved the king not at all, reckoning that the hazard of war would be safe, since terms were being dictated to him just as if he were already conquered. The mention of peace therefore laid aside for the present, he bent his whole care upon the equipment of the war.

The consul, all things made ready for carrying out his designs, when he had moved from his standing camp, came first to Dardanus, then to Rhoeteum, both communities pouring out to meet him. Thence he advanced to Ilium, and, his camp pitched in the plain that lies beneath the walls, when he had gone up into the city and citadel, he sacrificed to Minerva, guardian of the citadel; and the Ilians, in every honor of deed and word, set before all others the Romans as sprung from themselves, and the Romans were glad of their origin. Thence, having set out, at the sixth encampment they came to the head of the river Caicus. There too King Eumenes—having first tried to lead his fleet back from the Hellespont into winter quarters at Elaea, then, the winds adverse, when for several days he had not been able to round the promontory of Lecton—landed, and, that he might not fail at the beginnings of the action, by the nearest way hastened with a small band into the Roman camp. From the camp he was sent back to Pergamum to make ready supplies, and, the grain handed over to those whom the consul had ordered, he returned to the same standing camp. Thence, provisions for several days prepared, the plan was to go against the enemy before winter should overtake them.

The royal camp was about Thyatira. There, when Antiochus had heard that Publius Scipio, sick, had been carried to Elaea, he sent envoys to bring back the son to him. Not only to a father’s heart was the gift welcome, but to his body too the joy was healthful; and at last sated with the embrace of his son, he said: “Announce that I render thanks to the king; that I can repay no other gratitude now than to advise him not to go down into the battle-line before he has heard that I have returned to the camp.” Although sixty thousand foot and more than twelve thousand horse at times raised his spirits to the hope of battle, Antiochus, nonetheless moved by the authority of so great a man—in whom he had placed all the supports of fortune against the uncertain outcomes of war—withdrew, and, having crossed the Phrygius river, pitched camp about Magnesia, which is by Sipylus; and, lest, if he wished to draw out the time, the Romans should attempt his fortifications, when he had drawn a ditch six cubits deep, twelve wide, he surrounded the ditch on the outside with a double rampart, and on the inner lip set a wall with frequent towers, whence the enemy could easily be kept from the crossing of the ditch.

The consul, thinking the king was about Thyatira, by continuous marches on the fifth day came down to the Hyrcanian plain. Thence, when he heard that he had set out, following his tracks, on this side of the Phrygius river, four miles from the enemy, he pitched camp. There about a thousand horse—the greatest part were Gallograeci, and certain Dahae and archer-horsemen of other nations mingled in—having crossed the river in disorderly fashion, made a charge upon the outposts. At first they threw the unordered into confusion; then, when the contest grew longer, and the number of the Romans, by easy support from the nearby camp, increased, the king’s men, now wearied and not sustaining the greater numbers, trying to withdraw about the bank of the river, before they entered the stream, were some of them slain by those pressing on their rear. For the next two days there was silence, neither side crossing the river; on the third day after, the Romans all crossed together and pitched camp about two thousand five hundred paces from the enemy. As they were measuring out the camp and busied with fortifying, three thousand chosen horse and foot of the king’s men came up with great terror and uproar; somewhat fewer were on outpost duty; these, however, by themselves, no soldier called away from the fortification of the camp, both at first sustained an equal battle, and, the contest growing, drove off the enemy, a hundred of them slain, about a hundred captured. Through the next four days the lines, drawn up on both sides, stood before the rampart; on the fifth day the Romans advanced into the middle of the plain; Antiochus moved his standards forward not at all, so that the hindmost were less than a thousand feet from the rampart.

The consul, after he saw the battle declined, on the next day called a council on what he should do, if Antiochus should not grant the chance of fighting. Winter was pressing; either the soldiers must be kept under hides, or, if he wished to retire into winter quarters, the war must be put off into summer. Never did the Romans so utterly despise any enemy. It was shouted from every side that he should lead on at once and use the soldiers’ ardor, who—as though not war must be waged with so many thousands of the enemy, but an equal number of cattle slaughtered—were ready to invade the camp through the ditches, through the rampart, if the enemy did not come out to battle. Gnaeus Domitius, sent to reconnoiter the road, and at what point the enemy’s rampart could be approached, after he reported all things sure, on the next day it was resolved to move the camp nearer; on the third day the standards were carried forward into the middle of the plain and the line began to be drawn up. Nor did Antiochus, thinking he must dissemble no further—lest he both diminish his own men’s spirits by declining battle and increase the enemy’s hope—forbear; he himself too led out his forces, advancing so far from the camp that it appeared he would fight.

The Roman line was of almost a single form, both in the kind of men and of arms. There were two Roman legions, two of the allies and the Latin name; each had five thousand four hundred men. The Romans held the center of the line, the Latins the wings; the foremost standards were of the hastati, then those of the principes, the triarii closed the rear. Outside this regular line, as it were, on the right hand the consul drew up the auxiliaries of Eumenes, mingled with the targeteers of the Achaeans, about three thousand foot, on an even front; beyond them he set fewer than three thousand horse, of whom eight hundred were Eumenes’s, all the rest Roman cavalry; at the far end he placed the Trallians and the Cretans—each making up the number of five hundred. The left wing seemed not to need such auxiliaries, because the river and the steep banks shut it in on that side; yet four troops of horse were posted there. This was the sum of the forces of the Romans, with two thousand mixed Macedonians and Thracians, who had followed of their own will; these were left to guard the camp. Sixteen elephants they placed in reserve behind the triarii: for, besides that they did not seem able to withstand the multitude of the royal elephants—and there were fifty-four—the African elephants do not stand against even an equal number of Indian, whether because they are surpassed in size—for those far excel them—or in strength of spirit.

The royal line was more various, in its many nations, in the unlikeness of arms and auxiliaries. Sixteen thousand foot were armed in the Macedonian manner, who were called phalangites. This was the center of the line, divided in front into ten parts; these parts it distinguished by setting two elephants between each; from the front inward the line extended in thirty-two ranks of armed men. This was both the strength in the king’s forces, and, besides by its other aspect, by the elephants towering so high among the armed men, it offered great terror. Huge they themselves were; and the frontlets and crests and the towers set upon their backs, and, standing in the towers besides the driver, four armed men each, added to their look. To the right flank of the phalangites he set fifteen hundred Gallograecian foot. To these he joined three thousand mailed horse—they themselves call them cataphracts. To these was added a squadron of about a thousand horse; they called it the agema; they were Medes, picked men, and horsemen of the same region mixed of many nations. Adjoining these, a herd of sixteen elephants was posted in reserve. On the same side, the wing a little advanced, was the royal cohort; from their kind of arms they were called argyraspides; then the Dahae, mounted archers, twelve hundred; then light-armed troops, three thousand, of nearly equal number, part Cretans, part Trallians; two thousand five hundred Mysian archers were joined to these. The far end of the wing four thousand closed, Cyrtian slingers and Elymaean archers mixed. To the left wing, joined to the phalangites, were fifteen hundred Gallograecian foot, and two thousand Cappadocians armed like them—they had been sent to the king by Ariarathes—; then auxiliaries mixed of every kind, two thousand seven hundred, and three thousand mailed horse and a thousand other horse, a royal squadron with lighter coverings for themselves and their horses, but in other respects of no unlike equipment: they were mostly Syrians mixed with Phrygians and Lydians. Before this cavalry were scythed chariots and the camels they call dromedaries. On these sat Arab archers, holding thin swords four cubits long, that from so great a height they might reach the enemy. Then another multitude, equal to that which was on the right wing: first the Tarentines, then two thousand five hundred Gallograecian horse, then a thousand Neocretans and, in the same equipment, fifteen hundred Carians and Cilicians and as many Trallians and four thousand targeteers—they were Pisidians and Pamphylians and Lycians; then auxiliaries of the Cyrtians and Elymaeans equal to those posted on the right wing, and sixteen elephants standing at a moderate interval. The king himself was on the right wing; his son Seleucus and Antipater, his brother’s son, he set over the left; the center of the line was entrusted to three—Minnio and Zeuxis and Philip, the master of the elephants.

A morning mist, lifted into clouds as the day grew, gave a haze; then a damp, as from the south wind, drenched everything, as it were; which things were nothing at all to the Romans, the same were most inconvenient to the king’s men: for both the dimness of light, in a line of modest size, did not take from the Romans the view in all directions, and the damp, their whole armament being heavy, dulled neither swords nor javelins; the king’s men, with a line so wide, could not, even from the center, look round upon their own wings, much less could the farthest see one another, and the damp had softened the bows and slings and the throwing-thongs of the javelins. The scythed chariots too, by which Antiochus had believed he would throw the enemy’s line into disorder, turned their terror upon his own. They were armed chiefly in this manner: about the pole, projecting ten cubits from the yoke, they had points like horns, with which to transfix whatever was set in their way, and at the ends of the yokes two scythes each projected around, one level with the yoke, the other lower, bent down toward the ground, the former to cut off whatever was thrust at from the side, the latter to reach those who had slipped and were coming up beneath; likewise from the axles of the wheels on either side two scythes each, turned different ways, were fastened in the same manner. Chariots armed thus, because, if they had been placed at the end or in the center, they would have had to be driven through their own men, the king had placed in the first line, as has been said before. When Eumenes saw this—not ignorant of the fight, and how doubtful a kind of help it was, if anyone should strike fear into the horses rather than attack them in a proper battle—he bids the Cretan archers and slingers and the javelin-throwers of the cavalry run out, not in a body, but as scattered as they could possibly be, and from all parts at once heap missiles upon them. This, like a storm, partly by the wounds of missiles cast from every side, partly by discordant shouts, so dismayed the horses that suddenly, as if unbridled, they were borne this way and that in uncertain course; whose charge both the light-armed and the nimble slingers and the swift Cretan in a moment avoided; and the cavalry, by pursuing, increased the uproar and panic of horses and camels—and these too at once dismayed—with shouting and with the manifold throng of those standing about. Thus the chariots are driven off into the middle of the plain between the two lines; and, the empty mockery removed, then at last, the signal given on both sides, they ran together to a proper battle. But that vain thing was soon the cause of a true disaster. For the reserve auxiliaries, which had been placed nearest, terrified by the panic and dismay of the chariots, were themselves too turned to flight and laid all bare as far as the cataphract horse. When the Roman cavalry, the reserves scattered, had come up to these, they did not sustain even their first charge: some were routed, others, because of the weight of their coverings and arms, were overpowered. Then the whole left wing gave way, and, the auxiliaries between the horse and those they call phalangites being thrown into confusion, terror penetrated as far as the center of the line. There, at once the ranks disordered and the use of their over-long spears—the Macedonians call them sarissas—hampered by the running-in of their own men, the Roman legions brought up their standards and hurled their javelins upon the disordered. Not even the elephants set between them deterred the Roman soldier, accustomed now from the African wars both to avoid the beast’s charge and either to assail it from the flank with javelins, or, if he could get nearer, to cut its hamstrings with the sword. By now almost the whole center of the line was laid low in front, and the reserves, surrounded, were being cut down from the rear, when in another part they received word of the flight of their own and the shouting of men in panic now almost at the very camp. For Antiochus, from the right wing, when he saw there—through his confidence in the river—no reserves except four troops of horse, and these, while they kept close to their own, leaving the bank bare, made a charge upon that part with his auxiliaries and cataphract cavalry; and he pressed not only from the front, but, the wing turned round from the river, urged them now from the flank as well, until the horse first, then the nearest of the foot, in headlong course, were driven to the camp. Over the camp presided Marcus Aemilius, a tribune of the soldiers, the son of Marcus Lepidus, who a few years after was made pontifex maximus. He, where he saw the flight of his own, ran up with the whole guard, and bade them first stand, then return into the battle, chiding their panic and shameful flight; threats then followed, that they were rushing blind to their own destruction, if they did not obey his word; at last he gives his men the signal to cut down the foremost of the fugitives, and to drive the throng of those following back upon the enemy with steel and wounds. This greater fear overcame the lesser: forced by a double dread, they first halted; then they too returned into the battle, and Aemilius with his guard—and there were two thousand brave men—stoutly withstood the king as he pursued in disorder, and Attalus, brother of Eumenes, from the right wing, where the enemy’s left had been routed at the first charge, when from the left he saw the flight of his own and the uproar about the camp, came up in time with two hundred horse. Antiochus, after he saw both those whose backs he had just now seen returning to the battle, and another throng pouring in both from the camp and from the line, turned his horse to flight. Thus, victorious on both wings, the Romans, over heaps of bodies, which they had piled most of all in the center of the line, where both the strength of the bravest men and their arms by their weight had hindered flight, press on to plunder the camp. The horse of Eumenes first of all, then the rest of the cavalry too, pursue the enemy everywhere over the whole plain and cut down the hindmost, as they overtake each. But to the fugitives a greater bane was their own throng, mixed with chariots and elephants and camels, when, the ranks broken up, as if blind, they rushed one over another and were trodden down by the charge of the beasts. In the camp too a slaughter was made, huge and almost greater than in the line: for both the flight of the foremost inclined chiefly to the camp, and, in confidence of this multitude, those who were on guard fought more stubbornly before the rampart. Held back at the gates and the rampart, which they had believed they would take by the very charge, the Romans, after they at last broke through, from anger made a heavier slaughter. Up to fifty thousand foot are said to have been slain that day; of horse three thousand; one thousand four hundred were captured, and fifteen elephants with their drivers. Of the Romans several were wounded; there fell not more than three hundred foot, twenty-four horse, and, of Eumenes’s army, twenty-five.

And on that day indeed the victors, the enemy’s camp plundered, returned to their own with great booty; on the next day they were stripping the bodies of the slain and gathering the captives. Envoys came from Thyatira and from Magnesia by Sipylus to surrender their cities. Antiochus, fleeing with a few, more gathering to him on the very road, with a modest band of armed men, about midnight withdrew to Sardis. Thence, when he had heard that his son Seleucus and certain of his friends had gone forward to Apamea, he too at the fourth watch, with his wife and daughter, made for Apamea, the guard of the city handed to Xeno, Timon set over Lydia; but these being spurned, by the consent of the townsmen and the soldiers who were in the citadel, envoys were sent to the consul. About the same time, too, men came from Tralles and from Magnesia which is on the Maeander and from Ephesus to surrender their cities. Polyxenidas had left Ephesus on hearing of the battle, and, carried with his fleet as far as Patara in Lycia, from fear of the station of the Rhodian ships which were at Megiste, landed and with a few sought Syria by a journey on foot. The communities of Asia were surrendering themselves into the protection of the consul and the sway of the Roman people. The consul was now at Sardis; thither too Publius Scipio came from Elaea, as soon as he could bear the toil of the journey.

About the same time a herald from Antiochus, through Publius Scipio, asked and obtained from the consul that the king be allowed to send spokesmen. A few days after, Zeuxis, who had been prefect of Lydia, and Antipater, his brother’s son, came. Eumenes being met first, whom, on account of old contests, they believed most averse from peace, and, finding him more placable than both their own and the king’s hope, then they approached Publius Scipio and through him the consul; and, a full council granted them at their request for the delivering of their instructions, “We have not so much anything to say ourselves,” said Zeuxis, “as to ask of you, Romans, by what atonement we may expiate the king’s error, and obtain peace and pardon from the victors. With the greatest spirit you have always pardoned conquered kings and peoples; with how much greater and more placable a spirit it becomes you to do this in this victory, which has made you lords of the world? Now that your contests with all mortals are laid down, it behooves you, no otherwise than gods, to consult for and spare the human race.” Already before the envoys came, it had been decreed what should be answered. It pleased them that Africanus should answer. He is reported to have spoken in this manner: “Of the things that were in the power of the immortal gods, we Romans have those which the gods have given; but our spirits, which are of our own mind, we have borne and bear the same in every fortune, and neither have prosperous things lifted them up nor adverse diminished them. Of this thing—to pass over others—I would give you your own Hannibal as witness, could I not give you yourselves. After we crossed the Hellespont, before we saw the royal camp, before we saw your line, when Mars was common and the outcome of the war uncertain, of the terms which, while you treated of peace, we offered—equal to equals—the same now, as victors, we offer to the vanquished: keep from Europe; withdraw from all Asia that is this side of Mount Taurus. Then, for the expenses incurred in the war, you shall give fifteen thousand Euboic talents—five hundred in hand, two thousand five hundred when the Senate and the Roman people shall have approved the peace; then a thousand talents through twelve years. To Eumenes too it is our pleasure that four hundred talents be repaid, and the grain that remains of what was owed to his father. When we have made this compact, that we may hold it for certain you will perform it, there will indeed be some pledge, if you give twenty hostages at our choice; but it will never be clear enough to us that there is peace for the Roman people where Hannibal shall be: him before all things we demand. Thoas the Aetolian too, the kindler of the Aetolian war, who armed both you by their confidence and them by yours against us, you shall give up, and with him Mnasilochus the Acarnanian and Philo and Eubulidas of Chalcis. In a worse fortune of his own will the king make peace, because he makes it later than he could have made it. If now he shall delay, let him know that the majesty of kings is more difficult to be drawn down from the highest pinnacle to the middle than to be hurled from the middle to the lowest.” The envoys had been sent by the king with these instructions, to accept every condition of peace: and so it pleased them that envoys be sent to Rome; the consul divided his army into winter quarters at Magnesia on the Maeander and Tralles and Ephesus. To Ephesus, to the consul, a few days after, the hostages were brought from the king, and the envoys who were to go to Rome came. Eumenes too at the same time set out for Rome, at which the king’s envoys did. There followed them the embassies of all the peoples of Asia.

While these things were being done in Asia, two proconsuls at about the same time returned to Rome from their provinces with the hope of a triumph, Quintus Minucius from the Ligurians, Manius Acilius from Aetolia. The deeds of each being heard, a triumph was denied to Minucius, but decreed to Acilius by great consent; and he was carried into the city in triumph over King Antiochus and the Aetolians. There were borne before him in that triumph two hundred and thirty military standards, three thousand pounds of unwrought silver, of coined Attic tetradrachms one hundred and thirteen thousand, of cistophori two hundred and forty-nine thousand, many vessels of chased silver and of great weight; he carried also the king’s silver furniture and magnificent raiment, golden crowns, the gifts of allied communities, forty-five, and spoils of every kind. He led thirty-six noble captives, Aetolian and royal commanders. Damocritus, the Aetolian leader, a few days before, when he had escaped from prison by night, on the bank of the Tiber, the guards having overtaken him, before he could be seized, ran himself through with a sword. Only soldiers to follow the chariot were lacking; otherwise the triumph was magnificent both in spectacle and in the fame of its deeds.

The joy of this triumph was lessened by a grim message from Spain: that in an adverse battle among the Bastetani, under the leadership of the proconsul Lucius Aemilius, near the town of Lyco, six thousand of the Roman army had fallen to the Lusitanians; that the rest, in panic, driven within the rampart, had with difficulty defended the camp, and, after the manner of fugitives, had been led back by long marches into pacified territory. These things were reported from Spain; from Gaul the praetor Lucius Aurunculeius brought envoys of the people of Placentia and Cremona into the Senate. As they complained of a dearth of colonists—some consumed by the chances of war, some by disease, while certain had abandoned the colonies from weariness of their Gallic neighbors—the Senate decreed that Gaius Laelius the consul, if it seemed good to him, should enroll six thousand families to be distributed among those colonies, and that the praetor Lucius Aurunculeius should appoint three commissioners to lead out those colonists. Appointed were Marcus Atilius Serranus, Lucius Valerius Flaccus son of Publius, and Lucius Valerius Tappo son of Gaius. Not long after, when the time of the consular elections now drew near, Gaius Laelius the consul returned from Gaul to Rome. He not only, by the decree of the Senate passed in his absence, enrolled colonists as reinforcement for Cremona and Placentia, but also both proposed that two new colonies be led out into the land that had been the Boii’s, and, on his motion, the fathers so resolved.

At the same time a letter of the praetor Lucius Aemilius was brought concerning the naval battle fought at Myonnesus, and that Lucius Scipio the consul had ferried his army across into Asia. For the naval victory a thanksgiving for one day was decreed; for a second day, because the Roman army had then for the first time pitched camp in Asia, that this matter might turn out prosperous and happy. The consul was ordered to sacrifice with twenty full-grown victims at each of the thanksgivings.

Then the consular elections were held with great contention. Marcus Aemilius Lepidus was a candidate amid the ill repute of all, because he had left his province of Sicily for the sake of canvassing, without consulting the Senate whether he might do so. Candidates with him were Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, Gnaeus Manlius Vulso, Marcus Valerius Messalla. Fulvius alone was made consul, since the others did not fill up their centuries, and he on the next day, Lepidus thrown out—for Messalla lay nowhere in the count—named Gnaeus Manlius his colleague. The praetors then made were two Quintus Fabii, Labeo and Pictor—Pictor had that year been inaugurated flamen of Quirinus—Marcus Sempronius Tuditanus, Spurius Postumius Albinus, Lucius Plautius Hypsaeus, Lucius Baebius Dives.

In the consulship of Marcus Fulvius Nobilior and Gnaeus Manlius Vulso, Valerius Antias is the authority that there was a widely-spread rumor at Rome, and held almost for certain, that, for the sake of recovering the young Scipio, the consul Lucius Scipio and with him Publius Africanus had been called out to a conference with the king and themselves seized, and, the commanders captured, the army had at once been led against the Roman camp, and that, this stormed, all the forces of the Romans had been destroyed. On this account the Aetolians had taken heart and refused to do as commanded, and their chief men had set out into Macedonia and to the Dardani and into Thrace to hire auxiliaries for pay. To carry these tidings to Rome, Aulus Terentius Varro and Marcus Claudius Lepidus had been sent from Aetolia by the propraetor Aulus Cornelius. He weaves into this tale further, that the Aetolian envoys in the Senate had, among other things, been asked this too, whence they had heard that the Roman commanders in Asia had been captured by King Antiochus and the army destroyed; and that the Aetolians had answered that they had been informed by their own envoys, who had been with the consul. Of this rumor, because I have no other authority, I have neither affirmed the matter as in my own opinion, nor passed it over as empty.

The Aetolian envoys, brought into the Senate, when both their cause and their fortune urged them to seek pardon as suppliants by confessing either guilt or error, beginning from their good services to the Roman people and all but reproaching them with their own valor in the war against Philip, both offended the ears by the insolence of their speech and, by recalling old and forgotten things, brought the matter to this, that the memory of the nation’s misdeeds, no little more numerous than its services, came over the minds of the fathers, and they who had need of pity stirred up anger and hatred. Asked by one senator whether they would commit the arbitration over themselves to the Roman people, then by another whether they would hold the same men friends and foes as the Roman people, answering nothing to these, they were ordered to go out of the temple. It was then shouted by almost the whole Senate that the Aetolians were still wholly Antiochus’s and that their spirits hung from that single hope: therefore the war must be waged with them as enemies beyond doubt, and their fierce spirits subdued. This thing too kindled anger, that at the very time when they were seeking peace from the Romans, they were making war upon Dolopia and Athamania. A decree of the Senate was passed, on the motion of Manius Acilius, who had conquered Antiochus and the Aetolians, that the Aetolians be ordered to set out from the city that day and to leave Italy within fifteen days. Aulus Terentius Varro was sent to guard their road, and it was proclaimed that, if any embassy thereafter came to Rome from the Aetolians, except by leave of the commander who held that province, and with a Roman legate, they would all be treated as enemies. So the Aetolians were dismissed.

The consuls then made report concerning the provinces; it pleased them to draw lots for Aetolia and Asia. To him who had drawn Asia by lot, the army which Lucius Scipio had was decreed, and as reinforcement for it four thousand Roman foot, two hundred horse, and of the allies and the Latin name eight thousand foot, four hundred horse; with these forces he was to wage the war with Antiochus. To the other consul the army which was in Aetolia was decreed, and he was permitted to enroll as reinforcement the same number of citizens and allies as his colleague. The same consul was ordered also to fit out the ships which had been made ready the year before and lead them with him; and to wage war not only with the Aetolians, but also to cross over to the island of Cephallania. It was charged to the same man that, if he could do it consistently with the public good, he should come to Rome for the elections: for, besides that the annual magistrates must be chosen in succession, it was their pleasure that censors too be created. If any matter should detain him, he should inform the Senate that he could not be present at the time of the elections. Aetolia fell to Marcus Fulvius by lot, Asia to Gnaeus Manlius. The praetors then drew lots: Spurius Postumius Albinus the city and foreign jurisdictions, Marcus Sempronius Tuditanus Sicily, Quintus Fabius Pictor, the flamen of Quirinus, Sardinia, Quintus Fabius Labeo the fleet, Lucius Plautius Hypsaeus Nearer Spain, Lucius Baebius Dives Farther Spain. To Sicily one legion and the fleet which was in that province were decreed, and the new praetor was to exact two tithes of grain from the Sicilians and send the one into Asia, the other into Aetolia. The same was ordered to be exacted from the Sardinians, and that grain to be carried to the same armies as the Sicilian. To Lucius Baebius reinforcement was given for Spain, a thousand Roman foot, fifty horse, and six thousand foot of the Latin name, two hundred horse; to Plautius Hypsaeus for Nearer Spain a thousand Roman foot were given, two thousand of the allies of the Latin name and two hundred horse; that with these reinforcements the two Spains might each have a single legion. To the magistrates of the previous year, to Gaius Laelius with one army, the command was prolonged for a year; prolonged too to Publius Junius, propraetor in Etruria, with that army which was in the province, and to Marcus Tuccius, propraetor in the Bruttii and Apulia.

Before the praetors went into their provinces, there was a contest between Publius Licinius the pontifex maximus and Quintus Fabius Pictor the flamen of Quirinus, such as there had been in the memory of the fathers between Lucius Metellus and Postumius Albinus. The one, a consul setting out with his colleague Gaius Lutatius into Sicily to the fleet, Metellus the pontifex maximus had detained for the sacred rites; the other, this praetor, that he might not set out for Sardinia, Publius Licinius held back. Both in the Senate and before the people the matter was fought with great contentions, and commands were imposed to and fro, and pledges seized, and fines pronounced, and the tribunes appealed to, and an appeal made to the people. Religion at the last prevailed; the flamen was ordered to be obedient to the word of the pontiff; and the fine, by order of the people, was remitted to him. In anger at his province being snatched away, as the praetor was trying to abdicate his magistracy, the fathers deterred him by their authority and decreed that he should administer justice among foreigners. The levies then completed within a few days—for not many soldiers had to be enrolled—the consuls and praetors set out for their provinces.

A report then concerning the things done in Asia was rashly spread without authority, and a few days after sure messengers and a letter of the commander were brought to Rome, which brought not so much joy from the recent fear—for they had ceased to fear being conquered in Aetolia—as from the old reputation, because, to those entering upon that war, he had seemed a grave enemy both by his own strength, and because he had Hannibal as director of his soldiery. Yet they resolved that nothing either about sending the consul into Asia should be changed, nor that his forces should be diminished, from fear lest there should be war to be waged with the Gauls.

Not long after, Marcus Aurelius Cotta, legate of Lucius Scipio, came to Rome with the envoys of King Antiochus, and King Eumenes and the Rhodians. Cotta first in the Senate, then before the assembly by order of the fathers, set forth what had been done in Asia. A thanksgiving then was decreed for three days, and forty full-grown victims were ordered to be sacrificed. Then, first of all, an audience of the Senate was given to Eumenes. When he had both briefly rendered thanks to the fathers, because they had freed him and his brother from siege and delivered his kingdom from the injuries of Antiochus, and had congratulated them that they had managed their affairs prosperously by land and sea, and that they had routed and put to flight King Antiochus, and, having stripped him of his camp, had driven him first from Europe, then from Asia too that is this side of Mount Taurus, he then said that he would rather they learn his own services from their own commanders and legates than from his recounting them. These things all approving and bidding him speak for himself, his modesty in that respect laid aside, what he judged it just should be granted him by the Senate and the Roman people—the Senate would act the more freely and fully, if it could, according as his services were—to these the king said that, if the choice of rewards were offered him by others, he would gladly, the means of consulting the Roman Senate once given, use the counsel of that most august order, that he might not seem either to have desired anything immoderately or to have asked too little modestly; but indeed, since they themselves were about to give, much more ought their munificence toward himself and his brothers to be of their own judgment. By this speech of his the conscript fathers were not at all deterred from bidding him speak for himself; and, when for some while, on the one side by indulgence, on the other by modesty, there had been a contest between men yielding to each other by turns, with a courtesy no less mutual than insoluble, Eumenes withdrew from the temple. The Senate persisted in the same opinion, so that it said it was absurd that the king should not know with what hope or request he had come; that he himself best knew what was suited to his kingdom; that he knew Asia far better than the Senate; he must therefore be recalled and compelled to bring out what he wished and what he thought. Brought back into the temple by the praetor and bidden to speak, the king said: “I would have persevered in keeping silence, conscript fathers, did I not know that you would soon call the embassy of the Rhodians, and that, when they had been heard, there would be a necessity for me to speak. And that speech indeed will be the more difficult, because their demands will be such that they seem to seek not only nothing that is against me, but not even anything that properly pertains to themselves. For they will plead the cause of the Greek cities, and will say that they ought to be set free. When this is obtained, who doubts that they will turn away from us not only those cities which shall be freed, but also our old tributaries, while they themselves will hold them, bound by so great a benefit, allies in word, but in truth subject to their sway and beholden? And, if it please the gods, while they aim at these great resources, they will dissemble that it pertains to themselves in any part; they will say only that it becomes you and is consistent with your former deeds. Lest this speech deceive you, you will have to take heed, and lest you not only unequally depress some of your allies too much and exalt others beyond measure, but also lest those who bore arms against you be in a better state than your allies and friends. As far as concerns me, in other matters I would rather seem to have yielded within the bounds of my right to any man you please, than to have striven too obstinately in maintaining it; but in a contest of friendship for you, of goodwill toward you, of the honor that shall be paid by you, I can be surpassed with anything but an equal mind. This greatest inheritance I received from my father, who, first of all who dwell in Asia and Greece, came into your friendship and carried it on with perpetual and constant loyalty to the last end of his life; nor did he show you only a faithful and good spirit, but took part in all the wars you waged in Greece, by land and sea, with every kind of supplies aided you so that none of your allies could be matched with him in any part; at the last, while he was exhorting the Boeotians to your alliance, he fell senseless in the very assembly and not long after expired. Having entered upon his footsteps, in goodwill indeed and zeal in honoring you I could add nothing—for these were unsurpassable; but that I might surpass him in the deeds themselves and in services and in the cost of my offices, fortune, the times, Antiochus, and the war waged in Asia furnished the matter. Antiochus, king of Asia and of part of Europe, was giving me his daughter in marriage; he was restoring at once the cities that had revolted from us; he held out great hope for the future of enlarging my kingdom, if I had waged the war against you with him. I will not boast of this, that I committed no offense against you; rather will I recount those things which are worthy of the most ancient friendship of our house with you. With my forces of foot and ships, so that none of your allies could equal me, I aided your commanders; I furnished supplies by land and sea; at the naval battles, which were fought in many places, I was present at all; nowhere did I spare my own labor or peril. What is most wretched in war, I suffered a siege, shut up in Pergamum with the utmost hazard at once of my life and of my kingdom. Freed then from the siege, when on one side Antiochus, on the other Seleucus, had their camps about the citadel of my kingdom, leaving my own affairs, with my whole fleet I met your consul Lucius Scipio at the Hellespont, to aid him in ferrying his army across. After your army had crossed into Asia, I never departed from the consul; no Roman soldier was more constant in your camp than I and my brothers; no expedition, no cavalry battle was made without me; in the line I stood there, I guarded that part in which the consul wished me to be. I will not say this, conscript fathers: who in this war can be compared with me in services toward you? I would not dare to compare myself to any of all the peoples or kings whom you hold in great honor. Masinissa was your enemy before he was your ally, nor, his kingdom safe, did he flee to your camp with his auxiliaries, but an exile, driven out, all his forces lost, with a troop of horse: yet him, because in Africa against Syphax and the Carthaginians he stood with you faithfully and zealously, you not only restored to his ancestral kingdom, but, the most wealthy part of Syphax’s kingdom added, made him most powerful among the kings of Africa. With what reward, then, and what honor are we worthy in your eyes, who were never your enemies, always your allies? My father, I, my brothers have borne arms for you not in Asia only, but also far from home in the Peloponnese, in Boeotia, in Aetolia, in the war of Philip, of Antiochus, of Aetolia, by land and sea. What then do you ask? someone may say. I, conscript fathers, since I must obey you who wish me at all events to speak, if you have driven Antiochus beyond the ridges of Taurus with this mind, that you yourselves should hold those lands, I would rather have no neighbors nor borderers than you, nor by any other thing do I hope my kingdom will be safer and more stable; but if it is in your mind to withdraw thence and to lead away your armies, I would dare to say that no one of your allies is worthier to possess what was won by you in war than I. But it is a magnificent thing, you will say, to free enslaved cities. So I think, if they did nothing hostile against you; but if they were of Antiochus’s party, how much more worthy of your wisdom and equity is it to consult for well-deserving allies than for enemies?”

The king’s speech was pleasing to the fathers, and it easily appeared that they would do all things munificently and with a ready mind. A brief embassy of the Smyrnaeans was interposed, because a certain one of the Rhodians was not present. The Smyrnaeans being highly commended, because they had chosen to suffer all extremities rather than surrender themselves to the king, the Rhodians were brought in. Their chief of embassy, having set forth the beginnings of the friendship with the Roman people and the services of the Rhodians, first in the war of Philip, then of Antiochus, said: “Nothing, conscript fathers, in our whole pleading, is more difficult or more troublesome to us than that our dispute is with Eumenes, with whom alone, most of all kings, both privately, as individuals, and—what moves us more—publicly, our state has guest-friendship. But it is not our own minds, conscript fathers, that divide us, but the nature of things, which is most powerful, so that we, being free, plead also the cause of the freedom of others, while kings wish all things to be enslaved and subject to their sway. Yet however the matter stands, our modesty toward the king hinders us more than the dispute itself is either embarrassing to us or likely to offer you a perplexed deliberation. For if no honor could otherwise be paid to an allied and friendly king, and one who has deserved well in this very war whose rewards are in question, unless you handed over free cities into servitude to him, the deliberation would be doubtful, lest you either dismiss a friendly king unhonored, or depart from your own settled practice and deform the glory won in the war of Philip by the servitude of so many cities; but from this necessity, either of diminishing your favor to a friend or your own glory, fortune nobly delivers you. For, by the gods’ kindness, your victory is no less glorious than rich, which may easily free you from that debt, as it were. For both Lycaonia and both the Phrygias and all Pisidia and the Chersonese and the lands lying about Europe are in your power, any one of which, added to the king, can multiply the kingdom of Eumenes, but all given can make him equal to the greatest kings. It is permitted you, then, both to enrich your allies with the rewards of war and not to depart from your settled practice and to remember what title you held out before against Philip, now against Antiochus, of war; what you did to Philip conquered; what is now desired and expected of you—not more because you have done it than because it becomes you to do it. For to different men the cause of arms is honorable and approvable on different grounds: those that they may possess land, these villages, these towns, these harbors and some stretch of sea-coast; you neither desired these before you had them, nor now, when the world is in your dominion, can you desire them. For your dignity and glory among all the human race, which has now long regarded your name and empire next to the immortal gods, you have fought. What it was hard to win and seek, perhaps it is harder to guard. You have undertaken to defend from royal servitude the liberty of a most ancient and noble nation, illustrious both by the fame of its deeds and by every recommendation of culture and learning; this patronage of a whole nation received into your protection and clientship it becomes you to maintain perpetually. Not more are the cities that are on the ancient soil Greek than their colonies, once set forth thence into Asia; nor has a changed land changed their race or their manners. We have dared to vie in a pious contest of any good art and virtue with each city’s parents and founders. Most of you have visited the cities of Greece, have visited those of Asia: except that we are farther from you, in no other thing are we surpassed. The Massilians, whom, if natural disposition could be conquered, as it were by the genius of the soil, so many untamed nations poured around would long ago have made savage, we hear are in such honor, in such deserved dignity with you, as if they dwelt in the very navel of Greece. For they have kept not only the sound of their tongue and their dress and habit, but, before all things, their manners and laws and character pure and whole from the contagion of their neighbors. The boundary of your empire is now Mount Taurus; whatever is within that hinge ought to seem to you nothing remote; whither your arms have reached, thither let your law, set forth from here, reach also. Let the barbarians, to whom the commands of masters have always been instead of laws, have kings, in whom they rejoice; the Greeks bear their own fortune, but your spirit. Once they embraced even empire with their domestic strength; now they desire that empire, where it is, may there be perpetual; they hold it enough to guard their liberty with your arms, since they cannot with their own. But, you will say, certain cities sided with Antiochus. And others before with Philip, and the Tarentines with Pyrrhus; not to enumerate other peoples, Carthage is free under her own laws. How much you owe to this your own example, see, conscript fathers; you will bring yourselves to deny to the greed of Eumenes what you denied to your own most just anger. With what brave and faithful service we have aided you, both in this and in all the wars you have waged on that coast, we leave to your own judgment. Now, in peace, we bring this counsel, which, if you approve it, all will judge that you have used your victory more magnificently than you conquered.” The speech seemed suited to the greatness of Rome.

After the Rhodians the envoys of Antiochus were called. They, in the common manner of those seeking pardon, having confessed the king’s error, besought the conscript fathers to consult rather for their own clemency than for the king’s fault, who had given punishment enough and more than enough; and, at the last, to confirm by their authority the peace granted by Lucius Scipio the commander, on whatever terms he had granted it. And the Senate resolved that that peace should be kept, and a few days after the people so ordered. The treaty was struck on the Capitol with Antipater, the chief of the embassy and likewise brother’s son of King Antiochus.

Then other embassies too from Asia were heard. To all of them this answer was given, that the Senate would send ten commissioners, after the custom of their ancestors, to arbitrate and settle the affairs of Asia: that the sum, however, would be this—that of the lands this side of Mount Taurus which had been within the bounds of Antiochus’s kingdom, all should be assigned to Eumenes, except Lycia and Caria as far as the river Maeander; that these should belong to the state of the Rhodians; that the other cities of Asia which had been tributary to Attalus should pay the same tribute to Eumenes; but those which had been tributary to Antiochus should be free and exempt. These ten commissioners they decreed: Quintus Minucius Rufus, Lucius Furius Purpurio, Quintus Minucius Thermus, Appius Claudius Nero, Gnaeus Cornelius Merula, Marcus Junius Brutus, Lucius Aurunculeius, Lucius Aemilius Paulus, Publius Cornelius Lentulus, Publius Aelius Tubero. To these, in matters of present arbitration, free powers were granted; on the sum of affairs the Senate determined. All Lycaonia and both the Phrygias and Mysia, the royal forests, and of Lydia and Ionia the towns outside those which had been free on the day on which it was fought with King Antiochus, and by name Magnesia by Sipylus, and that Caria which is called Hydrela and the Hydrelitan territory facing Phrygia, and the forts and villages along the river Maeander and the towns, except such as had been free before the war, Telmessus likewise by name and the camp of the Telmessians, except the territory which had been Ptolemy of Telmessus’s—all these things which are written above, it was ordered, should be given to King Eumenes. To the Rhodians Lycia was given, except that same Telmessus and the camp of the Telmessians and the territory which had been Ptolemy of Telmessus’s: these were excepted both from Eumenes and from the Rhodians. To these also was given that part of Caria which is nearer the island of Rhodes across the river Maeander—towns, villages, forts, lands that face toward Pisidia, except such of their towns as had been in liberty on the day before it was fought with King Antiochus in Asia.

When the Rhodians had given thanks for these things, they spoke concerning the city of Soli, which is in Cilicia: that they too, like themselves, were sprung from Argos; that from this brotherhood there was to them a brotherly affection toward them; that they sought this extraordinary boon, that they should free that community from royal servitude. The envoys of King Antiochus were called, and the matter was dealt with them, and nothing was obtained, Antipater protesting the treaty, against which it was that by the Rhodians not Soli but Cilicia was sought, and the ridges of Taurus crossed. The Rhodians recalled into the Senate, when they had set forth how greatly the royal envoy strove, added that, if the Rhodians at all judged that matter to pertain to the dignity of their state, the Senate would by every means overcome the obstinacy of the envoys. Then indeed the Rhodians gave thanks more earnestly than before, and said that they would yield rather to the arrogance of Antipater than offer a cause for disturbing the peace. So nothing about Soli was changed.

During those days in which these things were done, envoys of the Massilians announced that Lucius Baebius the praetor, setting out for his province of Spain, had been surrounded by the Ligurians, a great part of his companions slain, himself wounded, had with a few, without his lictors, fled to Massilia, and within three days had expired. The Senate, having heard this matter, decreed that Publius Junius Brutus, who was propraetor in Etruria, his province and army handed over to one of the legates, whomever he saw fit, should himself set out into Farther Spain, and that that should be his province. This decree of the Senate and a letter were sent by the praetor Spurius Postumius into Etruria, and Publius Junius the propraetor set out for Spain. In which province, some while before the successor came, Lucius Aemilius Paulus—who afterward conquered King Perseus with great glory—when in the previous year he had managed the affair not prosperously, an army hastily collected, fought a pitched battle with the Lusitanians. The enemy were routed and put to flight; eighteen thousand armed men were slain; two thousand three hundred captured and the camp stormed. The fame of this victory made affairs in Spain more tranquil.

In the same year, on the third day before the Kalends of January, the Latin colony of Bononia was led out by decree of the Senate by the commissioners Lucius Valerius Flaccus, Marcus Atilius Serranus, and Lucius Valerius Tappo. Three thousand men were settled; to the horsemen seventy iugera each were given, to the rest of the colonists fifty each. The land had been taken from the Gallic Boii; the Gauls had driven out the Etruscans.

In the same year many and famous men sought the censorship. This matter, as though it had in itself the cause of no great contest, stirred up another contention far greater. Candidates were Titus Quinctius Flamininus, Publius Cornelius Scipio son of Gnaeus, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, Marcus Porcius Cato, Marcus Claudius Marcellus, Manius Acilius Glabrio, who had conquered Antiochus at Thermopylae and the Aetolians. Toward this man above all, because he had held many largesses by which he had bound a great part of the people, the favor of the people inclined. Since so many nobles bore it ill that a new man should be so far preferred to them, Publius Sempronius Gracchus and Gaius Sempronius Rutilus, tribunes of the plebs, named a day for him, because of the royal money and the booty—a good deal of which had been taken in the camp of Antiochus—he had neither carried in his triumph nor brought into the treasury. The testimonies of the legates and military tribunes were various. Marcus Cato above the others was conspicuous as a witness; whose authority, won by the unbroken tenor of his life, the white toga of a candidate lessened. He, as a witness, said that the gold and silver vessels which he had seen among the rest of the royal booty when the camp was taken, those he denied to have seen in the triumph. At the last, into the special odium of this man, Glabrio said that he desisted from his candidacy, since what the noble men silently resented, that same a new competitor was assailing him for with unspeakable perjury. A fine of a hundred thousand had been proposed; twice it was contested over; the third time, when the accused had desisted from his candidacy, neither would the people cast their vote on the fine, and the tribunes desisted from that business. Titus Quinctius Flamininus and Marcus Claudius Marcellus were created censors.

During those days, when the Senate had been given to Lucius Aemilius Regillus, who had conquered the prefect of King Antiochus at sea, outside the city in the temple of Apollo, his deeds being heard—with how great fleets of the enemy he had fought, how many ships he had thence sunk or captured—a naval triumph was decreed him by great consent of the fathers. He triumphed on the Kalends of February. In that triumph forty-nine golden crowns were carried; money by no means so great for the show of a royal triumph, thirty-four thousand two hundred Attic tetradrachms, one hundred thirty-two thousand three hundred cistophori. Then there were thanksgivings by decree of the Senate, because Lucius Aemilius had prosperously managed the commonwealth in Spain.

Not long after, Lucius Scipio came to the city; who, that he might not yield to his brother’s surname, wished to be called Asiaticus. Both in the Senate and in the assembly he discoursed of the things done by him. There were those who interpreted that war to have been greater in reputation than in difficulty of the matter: that it had been finished in one memorable battle, and the glory of that victory had been plucked beforehand at Thermopylae. But to one estimating truly, the war at Thermopylae was rather an Aetolian than a royal war: for with how small a part of his strength did Antiochus there fight? In Asia stood the strength of all Asia, the auxiliaries of all nations drawn together from the farthest bounds of the East. Deservedly, then, both to the immortal gods was paid the greatest honor that could be, because they had made even a huge victory easy, and to the commander a triumph was decreed. He triumphed in the intercalary month, on the day before the Kalends of March. This triumph was greater than that of his brother Africanus as a spectacle to the eyes, but, in the recollection of the events and the estimation of the peril and the contest, no more to be compared than if you should set commander against commander, or Antiochus as a leader against Hannibal. He carried in his triumph two hundred and twenty-four military standards, one hundred and thirty-four representations of towns, one thousand two hundred and thirty-one elephant tusks, two hundred and thirty-four golden crowns, of silver one hundred thirty-seven thousand four hundred and twenty pounds, two hundred twenty-four thousand Attic tetradrachms, three hundred twenty-one thousand seventy cistophori, one hundred forty thousand gold Philippics, of silver vessels—all were chased—one thousand four hundred and twenty-three pounds, of gold vessels one thousand and twenty-three pounds. And the royal commanders, prefects, courtiers, thirty-two, were led before the chariot. To the soldiers twenty-five denarii each were given, double to the centurion, triple to the horseman. Both pay and a double ration of grain were given after the triumph; after the battle fought in Asia he had given double. He triumphed about a year after he left the consulship.

At about the same time both Gnaeus Manlius the consul came into Asia and Quintus Fabius Labeo the praetor came to the fleet. But the consul did not lack matter for war with the Gauls; the sea was at peace, Antiochus being conquered. To Quintus Fabius, considering on what he might best fix, lest he should seem to have held an idle province, it seemed best to cross over to the island of Crete. The Cydoniates were waging war against the Gortynians and the Cnossians, and a great number of captives of Roman and Italian stock was said to be in servitude throughout the whole island. Having set out with the fleet from Ephesus, when first he touched the shore of Crete, he sent messengers around the communities, that they should desist from arms and bring back the captives, sought out in their several cities and lands, and send envoys to him, with whom he might treat of matters pertaining alike to the Cretans and the Romans. The Cretans were not greatly moved by these things; except the Gortynians, none restored the captives. Valerius Antias wrote that up to four thousand captives were restored from the whole island, because they feared the threats of war; and that this was the cause of Fabius’s obtaining a naval triumph from the Senate, though he had done no other thing. From Crete Fabius returned to Ephesus; thence, three ships sent to the coast of Thrace, he ordered the garrisons of Antiochus to be withdrawn from Aenus and Maronea, that those communities might be in liberty.