While the war was being waged in Asia, not even in Aetolia had matters been quiet, the beginning of the trouble arising from the nation of the Athamanians. Athamania at that time, Amynander having been driven out, was held by a royal garrison under prefects of Philip, who by their arrogant and excessive rule had made men long for Amynander. To Amynander, then an exile in Aetolia, hope of recovering his kingdom was given by letters from his own people, who declared the state of Athamania. Messengers sent back by him told the leading men—of Argithea, for that was the capital of Athamania—that, if he had the minds of his countrymen well enough ascertained, he would come into Athamania, an auxiliary force having been obtained from the Aetolians, with the picked men of the Aetolians (which is the council of the nation) and with Nicander as praetor. When he saw them ready for everything, he kept informing them from time to time of the day on which he would enter Athamania with an army. At first there were four conspirators against the Macedonian garrison. These took to themselves six helpers apiece to carry through the business; then, trusting too little to their fewness—which was fitter for concealing the matter than for executing it—they added a number equal to the first. So, made fifty-two, they divided themselves into four parts: one part made for Heraclea, another for Tetraphylia, where the guard of the royal treasure had been wont to be, the third for Theudoria, the fourth for Argithea. So it was agreed among all that at first they should keep quiet and show themselves in the marketplace, as though they had come to transact some private business; on a fixed day they should call together the whole multitude to expel the Macedonian garrisons from the citadels. When that day came, and Amynander was on the borders with a thousand Aetolians, by the arrangement the Macedonian garrisons were driven out from four places at once, and letters were sent everywhere into the other towns, that they should free themselves from the unbridled domination of Philip and restore themselves to their ancestral and lawful kingdom. On every side the Macedonians are expelled. The town of Theium, the letter of Xeno the prefect of the garrison being intercepted and the citadel seized by the king’s men, held out against the besiegers a few days; then it too was handed over to Amynander, and all Athamania was in his power except the fort of Athenaeum, which lies close under the borders of Macedonia.

Philip, when he had heard of the defection of Athamania, having set out with six thousand armed men, came with vast speed to Gomphi. There, the greater part of his army left behind—for it would not be equal to such marches—with two thousand he came to Athenaeum, the one place that had been kept by his garrison. Thence, the nearest parts being tried, when he had easily perceived that the rest were hostile, he returned to Gomphi and came back into Athamania with all his forces together. Then he sends Xeno ahead with a thousand foot, bidding him seize Ethopia, which conveniently overhangs Argithea; and when he saw that place held by his own men, he himself pitched camp about the temple of Jupiter Acraeus. There, kept one day by foul weather, on the next day he set out to lead toward Argithea. As they marched, at once the Athamanians appeared, running this way and that over the hills that overhung the road. At the sight of them the foremost standards halted, and through the whole column there was fear and trembling, and each man for himself thought what would happen if the column were led down into the valleys that lay beneath the cliffs. This uproar forced the king—who, if they had followed, desired to escape the defiles in haste—to call back the foremost and lead the standards back by the same road by which he had come. The Athamanians at first followed quietly at an interval; after the Aetolians had joined them, they left these to press upon the column from the rear, while they themselves poured around the flanks, and certain of them, going ahead by a shorter way over known tracks, beset the passes; and so much panic was thrown into the Macedonians that they crossed the river after the manner of a headlong flight rather than of an orderly march, with much arms and many men left behind. This was the end of the pursuit. Thence the Macedonians returned safely to Gomphi, and from Gomphi into Macedonia. The Athamanians and Aetolians ran together from all sides to Ethopia to overwhelm Xeno and the thousand Macedonians. The Macedonians, trusting too little to their position, withdrew from Ethopia to a hillock higher and steeper on every side; whence the Athamanians, having found approach from several places, drove them out, and, as they were scattered and could not work out a way of flight over the trackless and unknown crags, partly took them, partly killed them. Many in their panic were hurled headlong down the precipices; very few escaped with Xeno to the king. Afterward, by a truce, leave was given to bury the slain. Amynander, his kingdom recovered, sent envoys both to Rome to the Senate and to the Scipios in Asia, who were lingering at Ephesus after the great battle with Antiochus. He sought peace, and excused himself that he had recovered his father’s kingdom through the Aetolians; he laid the blame on Philip.

The Aetolians set out from Athamania against the Amphilochians and, with the goodwill of the greater part, brought the whole nation back into their jurisdiction and sway. Amphilochia recovered—for it had once been the Aetolians’—with the same hope they crossed over into Aperantia; that too came into surrender for the most part without a contest. The Dolopians had never been the Aetolians’; they were Philip’s. These at first ran to arms; but afterward, when they learned that the Amphilochians were with the Aetolians, and of Philip’s flight from Athamania and the slaughter of his garrison, they too revolted from Philip to the Aetolians. With these nations lying round about them, when the Aetolians now believed themselves safe on every side from the Macedonians, word was brought to them that Antiochus had been conquered in Asia by the Romans; and not long after, the envoys returned from Rome without hope of peace, announcing that the consul Fulvius had already crossed over with an army. Terrified by this, having first summoned embassies from Rhodes and Athens, so that through the authority of those states their own prayers, lately rejected, might have an easier access to the Senate, they sent the leading men of the nation to Rome to try their last hope—having premeditated nothing, that they might not have war, until the enemy was almost in sight.

By now Marcus Fulvius, his army ferried across to Apollonia, was consulting with the leading men of the Epirotes from where he should begin the war. It pleased the Epirotes to attack Ambracia, which had then attached itself to the Aetolians: if the Aetolians came to defend it, the plains around were open for a battle; if they declined the contest, the siege would be no hard one; for there was both a supply of timber close at hand for raising mounds and the other works, and the Arethon, a navigable river, flowed past the very walls, convenient for bringing in what was needed, and the summer, fit for the business, was at hand. By these arguments they persuaded him to lead through Epirus. To the consul, as he came to Ambracia, the siege seemed a work of great toil. Ambracia lies beneath a rugged hill; the inhabitants call it Perranthes. The city, where the wall slopes toward the plains and the river, faces west; the citadel, which is set upon the hill, faces east. The river Arethon, flowing from Athamania, falls into a gulf of the sea called Ambracian from the name of the neighboring city. Besides that on this side the river fences it, on that the hills, it was also girt with a strong wall, with a circuit a little more than four miles in compass. Fulvius set two camps over against it from the plain, parted by a moderate interval, and one fort on high ground over against the citadel; all these he prepares to join with rampart and ditch in such a way that there should be neither egress for the besieged from the city nor approach from outside for bringing in aid. At the report of the siege of Ambracia the Aetolians had already mustered at Stratus by the edict of Nicander the praetor. Thence at first it had been in their mind to come with all their forces to ward off the siege; then, after they saw the city already for the most part fenced with works, and the camp of the Epirotes pitched across the river on level ground, they resolved to divide their forces. With a thousand light-armed men Eupolemus set out for Ambracia and entered the city through the fortifications not yet joined to one another. Nicander, with the rest of the band, had at first the plan of attacking the camp of the Epirotes by night, aid from the Romans being not easy because the river lay between; then, judging the undertaking dangerous, lest the Romans should somehow perceive it and his return thence not be in safety, deterred from this plan, he turned his march to the ravaging of Acarnania. The consul, the fortifications with which the city was to be fenced now finished, and the works finished too which he was preparing to bring up to the walls, assailed the walls in five places at once. Three works at equal intervals, where the approach was easier from the plain, he brought up over against what they call the Pyrrheum; one over against the temple of Aesculapius, one against the citadel. With rams he battered the walls; with hooked poles he swept off the battlements. The townsmen at first, both at the look of the thing and at the blows upon the walls dealt with terrible din, were seized by fear and trembling; then, when beyond their hope they saw the walls standing, their spirits recovered, they kept hurling down upon the rams either balanced weights of lead, or stones, or stout beams; and, casting iron grapples upon the hooks, they dragged them to the inner side of the wall and broke the poles short; besides this, by sallies—both by night against the guards of the works and by day against the outposts—they themselves carried terror to the enemy.

While matters at Ambracia were in this state, the Aetolians had by now returned from the ravaging of Acarnania to Stratus. Thence Nicander the praetor, having got hope of breaking the siege by a bold stroke, sends one Nicodamus with five hundred Aetolians into Ambracia. He fixed a certain night, and a certain time even of the night, at which both they from the city should attack the enemy’s works that lay over against the Pyrrheum, and he himself should make a terror at the Roman camp—reckoning that, with a twofold alarm, and the night swelling the panic, a memorable thing might be done. And Nicodamus, at dead of night, having eluded some of the watches and broken through others by a steady onset, the entrenchment surmounted, makes his way into the city, and added no little, both to the spirit of the besieged for daring all and to their hope; and, as soon as the appointed night came, of a sudden, by the arrangement, he attacked the works. The undertaking proved heavier in the attempt than in the effect, because no force was brought to bear from the outside—whether the praetor of the Aetolians was deterred by fear, or whether it seemed rather better to bring help to the Amphilochians, lately recovered, whom Perseus, the son of Philip, sent to recover Dolopia and the Amphilochians, was assailing with the utmost force. In three places, as has been said before, were the Roman works at the Pyrrheum, which the Aetolians attacked all at once, but neither with like equipment nor with like force: some came with blazing torches, others carrying tow and pitch and fire-darts, the whole line glowing with flames. They overwhelmed many of the guards at the first onset; then, after the shout and uproar was carried to the camp and the signal given by the consul, they take up arms and pour out from all the gates to bring aid. In one place the business was carried on with steel and fire; from two the Aetolians drew off, their undertaking foiled, having tried rather than entered the contest; the fierce fighting had concentrated upon one place. There, in different quarters, the two leaders Eupolemus and Nicodamus exhorted the fighters, and cherished them with a hope almost sure that Nicander would now, by the arrangement, be at hand and fall upon the enemy’s rear. This thing for a while sustained the spirits of the combatants; but afterward, when they received no signal by the arrangement from their own men, and saw the number of the enemy growing, forsaken, they pressed on the more sluggishly; at last, the matter given up, scarcely now with a safe retreat, they are driven in flight into the city, part of the works burned, and somewhat more slain than they themselves had lost. But if the thing had been done by the arrangement, there was no doubt that in one quarter at least the works could have been stormed with great slaughter of the enemy. The Ambracians and the Aetolians who were within not only drew back from the enterprise of that night, but for the rest of the time too, as though betrayed by their own, were the slacker toward dangers. No one now, as before, made sallies against the enemy’s outposts, but, posted along the walls and towers, they fought from a safe place.

Perseus, when he heard that the Aetolians were at hand, the siege of the city which he was assaulting given up, having only ravaged the fields, withdrew from Amphilochia and returned into Macedonia. The Aetolians too were called away from there by the ravaging of the seacoast. Pleuratus, king of the Illyrians, having sailed into the Corinthian gulf with sixty light galleys, with the Achaean ships that were at Patrae joined to him, was laying waste the seaboard of Aetolia. Against these a thousand Aetolians were sent, who, wherever the fleet had worked its way round through the windings of the shores, met it by shorter footpaths. And the Romans at Ambracia, by battering the walls with rams in several places, had laid a good part of the city bare, yet could not penetrate into the city; for a new wall was thrown up in place of the demolished one with equal speed, and armed men standing upon the ruins were as good as a fortification. And so, since the matter went forward too little for the consul by open force, he resolved to drive a hidden mine, the place being first covered over with mantlets; and for a good while, though they were at the work day and night, they escaped the enemy’s notice, not only digging beneath the earth but even carrying out the soil. A heap of earth, rising suddenly into view, was the townsmen’s index of the work, and in fear lest the walls, now undermined, should have made a way into the city, they set about drawing a trench within the wall over against that work which was covered by the mantlets. When they had reached such a depth as the lowest floor of the mine could be at, having made silence, in several places with ear laid to the ground they listened for the sound of the diggers. When they had caught it, they open a straight way into the mine. Nor was it any great work: for in a moment they came to the void where the wall had been propped up on stays by the enemy. There, the works joined where a way lay open from the trench into the mine, they waged a hidden battle beneath the earth, first with the very tools which they had used in the work, then quickly armed men too going down to it; afterward this was made slacker by their walling off the mine where they pleased, now with hair-cloths stretched in front, now with doors hastily set up against it. A new device too, of no great labor, was thought out against those who were in the mine. A jar pierced at the bottom, where a moderate pipe could be inserted, and an iron pipe, and an iron lid for the jar, this too pierced in several places, they made. This jar, filled with light down, its mouth turned toward the mine, they set in place. Through the holes of the lid very long spears, which they call sarisae, projected, to keep off the enemy. A slight spark of fire put into the down they kindled by blowing, a smith’s bellows being set at the head of the pipe. Thence not only a great force of smoke, but a sharper one too, from a certain foul stench of the burnt down, when it had filled the whole mine, scarcely could anyone endure within.

When matters at Ambracia were in this state, envoys from the Aetolians, Phaeneas and Damoteles, came to the consul with full powers by decree of the nation. For their praetor, when he saw on one side Ambracia being assaulted, on another the coast made unsafe by the enemy’s ships, on another the Amphilochians and Dolopia being laid waste by the Macedonians, and that the Aetolians were not equal to meeting three different wars at once, having called a council, consulted the Aetolian leaders on what was to be done. The opinions of all ran down to this: that peace be sought, if it could be had, on fair terms, if not, on terms that could be borne. The war had been undertaken in reliance on Antiochus; with Antiochus conquered by land and sea and driven well-nigh outside the bounds of the earth beyond the ridges of Taurus, what hope was there of sustaining the war? Let Phaeneas and Damoteles do what they should judge to be for the Aetolian interest, as in such a case, and consonant with their own good faith; for what counsel, or what choice of action, had fortune left them? Sent with these instructions, the envoys begged the consul to spare the city, to pity a nation once an ally—they would not say driven to madness by wrongs, but at least by miseries; the Aetolians had not deserved more ill in the war with Antiochus than they had deserved good before, when the war was waged against Philip; nor had thanks then been largely returned to them, nor ought punishment now to be laid upon them beyond measure. To this the consul answered that the Aetolians sought peace more often than ever sincerely. Let them imitate, in seeking peace, Antiochus, whom they had dragged into the war: he had withdrawn not from a few cities, over whose freedom the contest had been, but from all Asia this side of Mount Taurus, a rich kingdom. The Aetolians he would not hear treating of peace unless unarmed: arms first must be handed over to him, and all their horses; then a thousand talents of silver must be given to the Roman people, of which sum half should be paid down, if they wished to have peace. To this he would add it also into the treaty, that they should hold the same men friends and foes as the Roman people held. Against these terms the envoys, both because they were heavy and because they knew the untamed and changeable minds of their own people, returned home without giving any answer, that they might again and again consult the praetor and the chiefs, the matter being still entire, on what was to be done. They were received with shouting and reproach, asked how long they would drag the matter out, and bidden to bring back peace of whatever kind; and as they were returning to Ambracia, ambushes of the Acarnanians, with whom there was war, having been set near the road, they were surrounded and led off to Thyrreum to be kept under guard. This delay was thrown in the way of the peace, when the envoys of the Athenians and the Rhodians, who had come to plead on their behalf, were already with the consul. Amynander too, king of the Athamanians, a safe-conduct given, had come into the Roman camp, more anxious for the city of Ambracia, where he had spent the greater part of his exile, than for the Aetolians. Informed by these of the mischance of the envoys, the consul ordered them to be brought from Thyrreum; and after their arrival the treating of peace began. Amynander, which was most of all his own work, was busily striving to drive the Ambracians to surrender. When, by parleys with the chiefs, going up to the wall, he made too little headway, at last, by the consul’s leave, having entered the city, partly by counsel, partly by entreaty he prevailed that they should commit themselves to the Romans. And the Aetolians were excellently helped by Gaius Valerius, son of Laevinus—who had first struck a friendship with that nation—the consul’s brother, born of the same mother. The Ambracians, having first bargained that they should send out the Aetolian auxiliaries unharmed, opened their gates. Then it was agreed that they should give five hundred Euboic talents, of which two hundred down, three hundred over six years in equal installments; that they should restore the captives and deserters to the Romans; that they should make no city subject to their own jurisdiction which, after that time when Titus Quinctius had crossed over into Greece, had either been taken by force by the Romans or had come of its own will into friendship; that the island of Cephallania should be outside the bond of the treaty. Although these terms were somewhat lighter than their own hope, at the Aetolians’ request leave was given to refer them to the council. A small dispute held them up about the cities which, having once been under their own jurisdiction, they bore ill to have torn away as it were from their own body; yet to a man all ordered that the peace be accepted. The Ambracians gave the consul a golden crown of a hundred and fifty pounds’ weight. The bronze and marble statues and the painted panels, with which Ambracia was more richly adorned—because the royal residence of Pyrrhus had been there—than the other cities of that region, were all taken up and carried off; nothing besides was touched or violated.

The consul, having set out from Ambracia, pitched camp in the interior of Aetolia at Argos Amphilochicum—it is twenty-two miles distant from Ambracia. Thither at length the Aetolian envoys came, the consul wondering that they delayed. Then, after he learned that the council of the Aetolians had approved the peace, having bidden them set out for Rome to the Senate, and having granted that the Rhodians and Athenians too should go as intercessors, and given his brother Gaius Valerius to set out together with them, he himself crossed over into Cephallania. At Rome they found the ears and minds of the chief men forestalled with charges against Philip, who, by envoys and by letters, complaining that the Dolopians and the Amphilochians and Athamania had been snatched from him, and his garrisons, and at last his son Perseus too driven out of Amphilochia, had turned the Senate away from hearing their prayers. The Rhodians, however, and the Athenians were heard in silence. The Athenian envoy Leon, son of Hicesias, is even said to have moved them by his eloquence; who, using the well-worn likeness of a calm sea stirred up by the winds, and matching it to the multitude of the Aetolians, said that, while they had abode in their loyalty to the Roman alliance, they had rested in the inborn tranquillity of their nation; after Thoas and Dicaearchus had begun to blow from Asia, and Menestas and Damocritus from Europe, then that storm had arisen which had borne them, as it were upon a reef, against Antiochus. The Aetolians, long tossed about, at length brought it to pass that the terms of peace were agreed. These were as follows: “Let the nation of the Aetolians preserve the empire and majesty of the Roman people without guile. Let it suffer no army that shall be led against their allies and friends to pass through its borders, nor aid it with any help. Let it hold the same men foes as the Roman people holds, and bear arms against them, and wage war in like manner. Let it restore deserters, runaways, and captives to the Romans and their allies, except such as, having been captured and returned home, were captured again, or such as, at that time, were captured from among those who were then enemies of the Romans, when the Aetolians were within the Roman lines; of the others, those who shall be found within a hundred days shall be handed over without guile to the magistrates of the Corcyraeans; those who shall not be found, whenever each of them shall first be found, shall be restored. Let it give the Romans forty hostages, at the consul’s choice, none younger than twelve years nor older than forty; let no hostage be a praetor, a prefect of horse, a public scribe, nor any who has before been a hostage among the Romans. Let Cephallania be outside the laws of the peace.” Concerning the sum of money which they were to pay, and its installments, nothing was changed from what had been agreed with the consul; that, if they preferred to give gold for silver, they might, was agreed, provided that for ten silver pieces one gold piece were reckoned. “Whatever cities, fields, men have at any time been of the jurisdiction of the Aetolians, which of them, in the consulship of Titus Quinctius and Gnaeus Domitius, or after those consuls, were either subdued by arms or came of their own will under the sway of the Roman people—let the Aetolians not wish to have received any of them. Let Oeniadae, with its city and fields, belong to the Acarnanians.” On these terms a treaty was struck with the Aetolians.

In the same summer, and indeed on almost the same days on which these things were done by the consul Marcus Fulvius in Aetolia, the other consul, Gnaeus Manlius, waged war in Gallograecia, which I shall now proceed to relate. In early spring the consul came to Ephesus, and, the forces received from Lucius Scipio and the army reviewed, he held an assembly before the soldiers, in which, having praised their valor—because they had finished the war with Antiochus in a single battle—he exhorted them to take up a new war against the Gauls, who had both aided Antiochus with auxiliaries and were of so untamed a temper that to no purpose had Antiochus been removed beyond the ridges of Mount Taurus, unless the power of the Gauls were broken; and about himself too he added a few words, neither false nor immoderate. The soldiers heard the consul gladly, with frequent assent, believing that the Gauls had been a part of Antiochus’s strength; with the king conquered, there would be no weight in the forces of the Gauls alone, of themselves. The consul thought that Eumenes was away at an ill time—he was then at Rome—a man knowing the places and the men, and whose interest it was that the power of the Gauls should be broken. He therefore summons his brother Attalus from Pergamum, and, having urged him to take up the war along with him, and Attalus promising his own service and his people’s, sends him home to make ready. A few days later, as the consul was setting out from Ephesus, Attalus met him at Magnesia with a thousand foot and five hundred horse, his brother Athenaeus being bidden to follow with the rest of the forces, the guard of Pergamum being committed to those whom he believed faithful to his brother and the kingdom. The consul, the young man praised, advanced with all his forces to the Maeander and pitched camp, because the river could not be crossed by a ford and ships had to be drawn together for ferrying the army across. The Maeander crossed, they came to Hiera Come. There is there an august shrine of Apollo and an oracle; the prophets are said to give responses in verses not unpolished. Thence, after one more camp, they came to the river Harpasus, whither envoys came from the Alabandians, to ask that he should compel by his authority or by arms a fort which had lately fallen away from them to submit to the old jurisdiction. To the same place came also Athenaeus, brother of Eumenes and Attalus, with the Cretan Leusus and the Macedonian Corragus; they brought with them a thousand foot of mixed nations and three hundred horse. The consul, a tribune of the soldiers sent with a moderate band, took the fort by force, and gave it back, taken, to the Alabandians. He himself, in no way turning aside from the road, pitched camp at Antiochia on the river Maeander. The sources of this river rise at Celaenae. Celaenae was once the capital of Phrygia; thence men removed to a place not far from old Celaenae, and the name Apamea was given to the new city from Apama, sister of King Seleucus. And the river Marsyas, rising not far from the sources of the Maeander, falls into the Maeander, and the tale holds that at Celaenae Marsyas contended with Apollo in the playing of pipes. The Maeander, rising from the topmost citadel of Celaenae, running down through the middle of the city, passing first through the Carians, then the Ionians, is poured into the gulf of the sea which is between Priene and Miletus. To Antiochia, into the consul’s camp, Seleucus, son of Antiochus, came, under the treaty struck with Scipio, to give grain to the army. A small dispute arose about the auxiliaries of Attalus, because Seleucus said it had been agreed that grain should be given only to the Roman soldier. This too was settled by the firmness of the consul, who, a tribune sent, gave edict that the Roman soldiers should not receive it before the auxiliaries of Attalus had received theirs. Thence they advanced to what they call Gordiutichos. From that place they came in three camps to Tabae. The city is set on the borders of the Pisidians, in that part which slopes toward the Pamphylian sea. With the strength of that region unimpaired, it had men fierce for war. Then too the horsemen, a sally made, threw the Roman column into no slight disorder at the first onset; then, when it appeared that they were a match neither in number nor in valor, driven into the city they begged pardon for their error, ready to surrender the city. Twenty-five talents of silver and ten thousand medimni of wheat were demanded: thus they were received into surrender.

On the third day from there they came to the river Casus; setting out thence, they took the city Eriza at the first onset. They came to the fort Thabusion, overhanging the river Indus, to which the Indus had given its name from an elephant cast down into it. They were not far from Cibyra, and no embassy came from Moagetes, tyrant of that state, a man faithless and intractable in all things. To try his temper, the consul sends ahead Gaius Helvius with four thousand foot and five hundred horse. As this column was now entering the borders, envoys met it, announcing that the tyrant was ready to do what was commanded; they begged that he should enter the territory peaceably and restrain the soldier from ravaging the fields, and they brought fifteen talents in a golden crown. Helvius, having promised to keep the fields unharmed from ravaging, bade the envoys go to the consul. When they brought the same word to him, the consul said: “Neither have we Romans any token of the tyrant’s goodwill toward us, and it is agreed among all that he himself is such a man that we must think rather of his punishment than of his friendship.” Disturbed by this saying, the envoys asked nothing else than that he would accept the crown, and grant the tyrant the power of coming to him and the means of speaking and clearing himself. By the consul’s leave, on the next day the tyrant came into the camp, in dress and retinue scarcely up to the style of a moderately wealthy private man, and his speech was submissive and broken, belittling his own resources and complaining of the poverty of the cities under his sway. There were under him, besides Cibyra, Syleum and what is called Alimne. From these, while he stripped himself and his people, he promised that he would scrape together twenty-five talents, all but as one despairing of it. “Truly,” said the consul, “this mockery can be borne no longer. It was not enough that you did not blush, when absent, to cheat us through your envoys; present too, you persist in the same shamelessness. Will twenty-five talents drain your tyranny dry? Then, unless within three days you count out five hundred talents, look for ravaging in your fields, a siege in your city.” Terrified by this menace, he nevertheless persisted in his stubborn pretense of poverty; and gradually, by mean increases—now by cavilling, now by entreaties and feigned tears—he was brought up to a hundred talents. Ten thousand medimni of grain were added. All this was exacted within six days.

From Cibyra the army was led through the fields of the Sindenses, and, having crossed the river Caular, pitched camp. On the next day the column was led past the Caralitis marsh; they halted at Madamprum. As they advanced thence, the inhabitants fled from Lagus, the nearest city, in fear; the town, empty of men and stuffed with abundance of all things, they plundered. Thence they advanced to the sources of the river Lysis, and on the next day to the river Cobulatus. The Termessenses at that time, the city taken, were besieging the citadel of the Isiondenses. Those shut in, since there was no other hope of help, sent envoys to the consul begging aid: shut up with their wives and children in the citadel, they were awaiting death day by day, to be suffered either by the sword or by famine. To the consul, willing, a cause was offered for turning aside into Pamphylia. By his coming he freed the Isiondenses from the siege; to Termessus he gave peace, fifty talents of silver being accepted; likewise to the Aspendians and the other peoples of Pamphylia. Returning from Pamphylia, he pitched camp on the first day at the river Taurus, on the next at what they call Xyline Come. Setting out thence, by continuous marches he came to the city Cormasa. Darsa was the next city; he found it deserted in the inhabitants’ fear, full of abundance of all things. As he advanced past marshes, envoys came from Lysinoe surrendering their state. Thence they came into the territory of Sagalassus, rich and fertile with every kind of crop. Pisidians cultivate it, by far the best in war of that region. Both this fact gives them spirit, and the fruitfulness of the soil, and the multitude of men, and the situation of a city fortified beyond most. The consul, because no embassy had been at hand at the border, sent men to plunder into the fields. Then at last their stubbornness was broken, when they saw their goods carried and driven off; envoys sent, they obtained peace, having bargained for fifty talents and twenty thousand medimni of wheat and twenty thousand of barley. Advancing thence to the Rhotrini springs, he pitched camp at the village which they call Acoridos Come. Thither Seleucus came from Apamea on the next day. The sick then, and the useless baggage, having been sent off to Apamea, and guides of the route received from Seleucus, he set out that day into the Metropolitan plain, and on the next day advanced to Dyniae in Phrygia. Thence he came to Synnada, all the towns round about being deserted in fear. Dragging a column now heavy with their plunder, having scarcely accomplished a five-mile march in a whole day, he came to Beudos, which they call the Old. Thence he pitched camp at Anabura, and on the next day at the springs of the Alander, on the third at Abbassium. There he held a standing camp several days, because he had reached the borders of the Tolostobogii.

The Gauls, a great force of men, whether from scarcity of land or from hope of plunder, reckoning no nation through whose lands they would pass a match for them in arms, under the leadership of Brennus came to the Dardani. There a sedition arose; about twenty thousand men, with the chieftains Lonorius and Lutarius, a secession having been made from Brennus, turned their march into Thrace. There, fighting with those who resisted and imposing tribute on those who sought peace, when they had come to Byzantium, for some while they held the cities of that region of the Propontis, making it tributary. Then a desire seized them of crossing into Asia, hearing from near at hand how great was the richness of that land; and Lysimachia having been taken by guile, and the whole Chersonese held by arms, they came down to the Hellespont. There indeed, seeing Asia divided from them by a narrow strait, their spirits were far more fired to cross over; and they kept sending messengers to Antipater, the prefect of that coast, about the crossing. When this business was drawn out more slowly than their own hope, another fresh sedition arose between the chieftains. Lonorius went back, whence he had come, with the greater part of the men, to Byzantium; Lutarius took from the Macedonians—sent by Antipater under the show of an embassy to spy—two decked ships and three light galleys. With these, ferrying men over by day and by night, one party after another, within a few days he carried across all his forces. Not long after, Lonorius, with the help of Nicomedes king of Bithynia, crossed from Byzantium. Then the Gauls come together again into one and give auxiliaries to Nicomedes, who was waging war against Ziboeta, who held a part of Bithynia. And chiefly by their work was Ziboeta overcome, and all Bithynia passed into the sway of Nicomedes. Setting out from Bithynia, they advanced into Asia. Of the twenty thousand men, no more than ten thousand were armed; yet they cast so much terror upon all the nations that dwell this side of Taurus that, both those they had reached and those they had not, alike the farthest with the nearest, obeyed their command. At last, since there were three tribes—Tolostobogii, Trocmi, Tectosages—they divided into three parts, in each of which one of their peoples should hold Asia for its tribute. To the Trocmi was given the coast of the Hellespont; the Tolostobogii drew Aeolis and Ionia, the Tectosages the inland parts of Asia. And they exacted tribute from all Asia this side of Taurus, but took their own seat about the river Halys. And so great was the terror of their name—their numbers swelled too by a great offspring—that even the kings of Syria at the last did not refuse to pay tribute. The first of the inhabitants of Asia to refuse was Attalus, father of King Eumenes; and to his bold undertaking, beyond all men’s expectation, fortune was present, and, the standards joined, he was the superior. Yet not so far did he break their spirits that they should give up their empire: the same power lasted right up to the war of Antiochus with the Romans. Then too, Antiochus driven out, they had great hope, because they dwelt far from the sea, that the Roman army would not reach them.

Since war had to be waged with this enemy, so terrible to all that region, the consul addressed the soldiers in an assembly chiefly after this manner: “It does not escape me, soldiers, that of all the nations which inhabit Asia the Gauls stand foremost in the fame of war. Amid the gentlest race of men a fierce people, having ranged in war over well-nigh the whole world, has taken its seat. Tall are their bodies, long and reddened their hair, vast their shields, overlong their swords; add to this their songs as they begin the battle, their howlings and leapings, and the dreadful din of arms as they clash their shields after some ancestral fashion—all of it contrived on purpose for terror. But let these things be feared by those to whom they are strange and unwonted, by Greeks and Phrygians and Carians: to Romans the Gaulish tumult is familiar, and their empty shows are known as well. Once, at the first encounter, long ago at the Allia, our forefathers fled before them; from that time, now for two hundred years, they have cut them down and put them to flight like cattle stampeded, and well-nigh more triumphs have been celebrated over the Gauls than over the whole rest of the world. Now this has been learned by use: if you withstand the first onset, which they pour out with hot temper and blind rage, their limbs flow with sweat and weariness, their weapons waver; their soft bodies, their soft spirits, once the rage has sunk, the sun, the dust, the thirst lay low, so that you need not bring steel against them. Not legion against legion only have we tried them, but man matched with man: Titus Manlius, Marcus Valerius have shown how far Roman valor surpasses Gaulish frenzy. Marcus Manlius, one man, thrust down the Gauls as they climbed in column into the Capitol. And those forefathers of ours had to do with Gauls beyond doubt true-born, begotten in their own land; these now are degenerate, mongrel, and truly what they are called, Gallograeci. As with crops and cattle the seeds avail not so much to preserve the inborn kind as the property of the soil and the climate under which they are reared have power to change them. The Macedonians who hold Alexandria in Egypt, who hold Seleucia and Babylonia and their other colonies scattered through the world, have degenerated into Syrians, Parthians, Egyptians; Massilia, set among Gauls, has drawn something of their temper from its neighbours; of the Tarentines what has survived of that hard and rugged Spartan discipline? Whatever is begotten in its own seat grows the nobler; transplanted into an alien soil, its nature changing into that on which it feeds, it degenerates. Therefore you will cut down Phrygians loaded with Gaulish arms—conquerors over the conquered—just as you cut them down in the line of Antiochus. I fear rather lest there be too little glory in it than too much of war. King Attalus has often routed them and put them to flight. Do not suppose that only wild beasts, lately caught, keep that woodland fierceness at first, and then, when long fed by human hands, grow tame, while in the taming of man’s fierceness nature is not the same. Do you believe these to be the same men that their fathers and grandfathers were? Driven from home, exiles for want of land, they made their way through the harshest coast of Illyricum, then traversed Paeonia and Thrace, fighting with the fiercest nations, and seized these lands. Hardened by so many ills and made savage, them the land received—a land that would fatten them with abundance of all things. By a most rich soil, a most gentle climate, the mild tempers of their neighbours, all that fierceness with which they came has been tamed. You, by Hercules, men of Mars, must beware and flee as soon as may be the pleasantness of Asia: so much can these foreign delights do to quench the vigor of the spirit; so much avails the contagion of the neighbours’ way of life and habit. This, however, falls out happily, that, though they hold no strength at all against you, they keep among the Greeks the same fame as that ancient one with which they came; and you will have, as victors, the same glory of war among your allies as if you had conquered Gauls who kept the old likeness of their spirit.”

The assembly dismissed, and envoys sent to Eposognatus—who alone of the chieftains had both remained in the friendship of Eumenes and had refused Antiochus auxiliaries against the Romans—he moved camp. On the first day he came to the river Alander, on the next to the village which they call Tyscon. When envoys of the Oroandenses had come there seeking friendship, two hundred talents were demanded of them, and, at their entreaty, leave was given them to carry word home. Thence the consul led his army to Plitendum; then camp was pitched at Alyatti. Thither the men sent to Eposognatus returned, and envoys of the chieftain begging that he should not make war upon the Tectosages: Eposognatus himself would go to that nation and persuade them to do what was commanded. Pardon granted to the chieftain, the army then began to be led through the land they call Axylon. From the fact it has its name: it bears not a stick of wood, nor even thorns or any other fuel for fire; they use cattle-dung for firewood. While the Romans were encamped at Cuballum, a fort of Gallograecia, the enemy’s horsemen appeared with great uproar, and not only threw the Roman outposts into disorder by their sudden charge, but even killed some of them. When this tumult was carried into the camp, the Roman cavalry, pouring out suddenly from all the gates, routed and put the Gauls to flight and killed several as they fled. Thence the consul, perceiving that he had now reached the enemy, advanced with his column reconnoitred and drawn together with care. And when, by continuous marches, he had come to the river Sangarius, he set about making a bridge, because there was nowhere a crossing by ford. The Sangarius, flowing from Mount Adoreus through Phrygia, mingles near Bithynia with the river Tymbres; thence, greater now, its waters doubled, it is borne through Bithynia and pours itself into the Propontis, not so memorable for its size, however, as because it furnishes the dwellers along it a vast store of fish. The bridge finished and the river crossed, as they went along the bank, the Galli of the Great Mother from Pessinus met them with their emblems, chanting in fanatic strain that the goddess gave the Romans a way for the war, and victory, and the dominion of that region. When the consul had said that he accepted the omen, he pitched camp in that very place. On the next day he came to Gordium. It is no great town indeed, but a more frequented and busier mart than an inland place commonly is. It has three seas at well-nigh equal distance—the Hellespont, the sea by Sinope, and the shores of the other coast where the maritime Cilicians dwell; it borders besides on the territories of many great nations, whose mutual need of trade has drawn their commerce chiefly to that place. They found the town then deserted by the flight of its people, but stuffed with abundance of all things. While they were in standing camp there, envoys came from Eposognatus, announcing that he had gone to the chieftains of the Gauls but had obtained nothing fair; that from the lowland villages and fields they were removing in throngs, and, with wives and children, driving and carrying before them whatever they could bear and drive, were making for Mount Olympus, that thence by arms and the lie of the land they might defend themselves. Surer news afterward the envoys of the Oroandenses brought: that the state of the Tolostobogii had seized Mount Olympus; that the Tectosages, going apart, had made for another mountain, which is called Magaba; that the Trocmi, their wives and children deposited among the Tectosages, had resolved with a column of armed men to bring help to the Tolostobogii. There were then chieftains of the three peoples: Ortiago and Comboiomarus and Gaulotus. The chief ground for them in taking up war thus had been this: that, holding the highest mountains of that region, with all things conveyed up that would suffice for use however long the time, they reckoned they would wear out the enemy by weariness; for they thought he would neither dare to climb up through places so steep and unfavorable, and, if he tried, could be stopped or thrown down even by a small band, nor, sitting quiet at the foot of the cold mountains, would endure the cold or the want. And although the very height of the places protected them, they threw round those summits which they had occupied a ditch too, and other defenses. Of the providing of missile weapons they took the least care, because they believed that the very roughness of the place would supply stones in abundance.

The consul, because he had foreseen in his mind that the battle would be not at close quarters but at a distance, by the assaulting of positions, had prepared a vast store of javelins, of velites’ spears, of arrows and sling-bullets and small stones such as could be thrown from a sling; and, furnished with this apparatus of missiles, he leads toward Mount Olympus and pitches camp about five miles off. On the next day, when he had gone forward with four hundred horse and Attalus to view the nature of the mountain and the site of the Gaulish camp, the enemy’s horsemen—twice their number—pouring out from the camp turned them to flight; a few too of the fleers were killed, more wounded. On the third day, having set out with all his men to reconnoitre the ground, since no one of the enemy came out beyond the defenses, he rode safely round the mountain, and noticed that on the southern side there were earthen and gently sloping hills up to a certain point, on the north steep and well-nigh sheer cliffs, and that, with almost all else trackless, there were three roads: one in the middle of the mountain, where the ground was earthen, two difficult, on the side of the winter sunrise and of the summer sunset. Having surveyed these things, that day he pitched camp at the very foot; on the next, a sacrifice made, when he had obtained favorable omens at the first victims, he proceeds to lead his army, divided into three parts, against the enemy. He himself, with the greatest part of the forces, mounts where the mountain offered the most level approach; his brother Lucius Manlius he bids climb from the winter sunrise as far as the ground should allow and he could do so safely; if anything dangerous and sheer should meet him, not to fight with the unfairness of the ground nor bring force against what could not be surmounted, but to bend across the mountain toward him and join his own column; Gaius Helvius, with the third part, he bids go round gently along the lowest slopes, and then lead his column up from the summer sunset. And the auxiliaries of Attalus he divided into three equal parts, bidding the young man himself be with him. The cavalry, with the elephants, he left on the level next the hills; their prefects were charged to watch intently what was being done everywhere, and to be able to bring help wherever the case required. The Gauls, confident enough that they could not be approached from the two flanks, that they might close with arms the side which faced the south, send up about four thousand armed men to seize a hill overhanging the road, less than a mile from the camp, reckoning that there, as in a fort, they would block the way. When the Romans saw this, they make themselves ready for battle. Before the standards, at a moderate interval, go the velites, and from Attalus the Cretan archers and slingers and the Tralles and the Thracians; the standards of the foot, since the way was steep, are led at a slow pace, the men holding their shields before them so that they should only avoid the missiles and not seem likely to fight at close quarters. The battle was joined with missiles from a distance, at first even, the Gauls helped by their position, the Romans by the variety and abundance of their weapons; as the contest went on, nothing was now even. The Gauls’ shields, long but too narrow for the breadth of their bodies, and those flat, ill covered them. Nor had they now any other weapons but swords, of which, the enemy not coming to grips, there was no use. Stones—not of moderate size, since they had not made them ready, but such as each in his flurry had snatched to hand—they used, and, unpracticed, helping the blow neither with skill nor with strength. With arrows, bullets, javelins they were struck unawares and from every side, nor, their minds blinded by rage and fear, did they see what to do; and they were caught in a kind of fighting for which they are least fit. For just as at close quarters, where it is allowed in turn to suffer and to deal wounds, rage fires their spirits, so, when they are wounded by light weapons from hiding and from afar, and have nowhere to rush in their blind onset, they run, like beasts run through, headlong upon their own. Their wounds were laid bare, because they fight naked, and their bodies are fleshy and white, as men never stripped save in battle; so both more blood flowed from the abundant flesh, and the gashes showed the fouler, and the whiteness of their bodies was the more stained with black gore. But they are not so much moved by open gashes; sometimes, when the skin is cut and the wound is broader than deep, they even think they fight the more gloriously; but when the barb of an arrow or a bullet sunk within burns them with a slight wound to look at, and, as they search how to pluck the weapon out, it does not come, then, turned to frenzy and shame at perishing by so small a plague, they fling their bodies to the ground. So then on every side they fell; others, rushing upon the enemy, were pierced from all quarters, and, when they had come to close quarters, were butchered by the velites with their swords. This soldier carries a three-foot buckler and in his right hand javelins, which he uses at a distance; he is girt with a Spanish sword; and if he must fight at close quarters, the javelins shifted to the left hand, he draws his sword. Few of the Gauls now survived, who, after they saw themselves overcome by the light-armed and the standards of the legions pressing on, fled in disorder back to the camp, now full of panic and uproar, crowded as it was with women and children and the rest of the unwarlike throng. The hills, deserted by the enemy’s flight, the victorious Romans took. About the same time Lucius Manlius and Gaius Helvius, when they had climbed as far as the sloping hills gave a way, after they came to the trackless ground, bent their march to that part of the mountain which alone had a path, and both began, as if by agreement, to follow the consul’s column at a moderate interval—what at first would have been best to do, into which they were now driven by very necessity; for in such unfairness of ground reserves have often been of the greatest use, so that, if the foremost chance to be thrown down, the second both shield the routed and take up the fight fresh. The consul, after the foremost standards of the legions had reached the hills seized by the light-armed, bids the soldier breathe and rest a little while; at the same time he points out the bodies of the Gauls strewn over the hills, and asks: since the light-armed had fought such a fight, what was to be looked for from the legions, what from regular arms, what from the spirits of the bravest soldiers? The camp was theirs to take, into which the enemy, driven by the light-armed, was cowering. Yet he bids the light-armed go before, who, while the column stood, had spent that very time not idly in gathering missiles over the hills, that they might have enough to throw. They were now drawing near the camp; and the Gauls, lest their own works should too little protect them, had stood armed before the rampart. Then, overwhelmed with every kind of missile—since the more numerous and the closer they were, the less could any weapon fall in vain—in a moment of time they are driven within the rampart, only strong outposts being left at the very entrances of the gates. Upon the multitude crowded into the camp a vast shower of missile weapons was hurled, and that many were wounded the shouting, mingled with the wailing of women and children, made plain. Against those who had blocked the gates with their outposts the front-rankers of the legions threw their javelins. By these indeed they were not wounded, but, their shields pierced through, most of them stuck fast, fastened to one another; nor did they longer withstand the Roman onset. The gates now open, before the victors burst in, flight from the camp of the Gauls was made in all directions. They rush blindly through the roads, through the trackless; no headlong rocks, no cliffs stop them; they fear nothing but the enemy: and so most of them, falling headlong down the vast depth, are crippled and killed. The consul, the camp taken, holds the soldier from rapine and plunder; he bids each, for his own part, follow and press on and add panic to the stricken. The second column too, with Lucius Manlius, comes up; nor does he let them enter the camp; straightway he sends them to pursue the enemy, and himself a little after, the keeping of the captives handed to the tribunes of the soldiers, follows, reckoning the war finished if in that panic as many as possible were slain or taken. After the consul had gone out, Gaius Helvius with the third column arrives, nor could he hold his men from plundering the camp, and their booty—by a most unfair lot—became the prey of those who had not been in the battle. The horsemen long stood ignorant both of the battle and of the victory of their own; then they too, as far as the horses could climb, cut down or took the Gauls scattered in flight about the foot of the mountain. The number of the slain could not easily be reckoned, because there was flight and slaughter far through all the windings of the mountains, and a great part fell down the trackless cliffs into valleys of unfathomable depth, part were killed in the woods and thickets. Claudius, who writes that there were two battles on Mount Olympus, is the authority that up to forty thousand men were slain; Valerius Antias, who is wont to be more immoderate in swelling numbers, that not more than ten thousand. The number of captives beyond doubt reached forty thousand, because they had dragged with them a throng of every kind and age, after the manner of those removing house rather than going to war. The consul, the enemy’s arms burned in one heap, bade all bring their other booty together, and either sold what of it was to be paid into the treasury, or, with care that it should be as fair as possible, distributed it among the soldiers. All too were praised before the assembly, and each rewarded according to his desert, before all Attalus, with the utmost assent of the rest: for that singular young man’s valor and industry in all toils and dangers had been matched by his modesty too.

There remained the war entire with the Tectosages. The consul, having set out against them, came in three camps to Ancyra, a famous city in those parts, from which the enemy were a little more than ten miles away. While there was a standing camp there, a memorable deed was done by a captive woman. The wife of the chieftain Orgiago, of surpassing beauty, was kept among many captives; the centurion who had charge of that guard was both lustful and greedy, after the soldier’s fashion. He first tried her mind; and when he saw her shrink from a willing dishonor, he did violence to her body, which fortune had made a slave. Then, to soften the outrage of the injury, he holds out to the woman hope of return to her own people—and not even that, like a lover, for nothing. Having bargained for a fixed weight of gold, that he might have none of his own men privy to it, he allows her herself to send one of the captives, whomever she would, as a messenger to her people. He fixed a place near the river, whither not more than two of the captive’s kinsmen should come with the gold on the following night to receive her. By chance a slave of the woman herself was among the captives of the same guard. This man the centurion led out as messenger past the outposts at first dark. On the following night both the woman’s two kinsmen came to the appointed place, and the centurion with the captive. When they were showing the gold, which made up the sum of an Attic talent—for so much he had bargained—the woman, in her own tongue, commanded them to draw their swords and kill the centurion as he weighed the gold. His throat cut, she herself, carrying the severed head wrapped in her garment, came to her husband Orgiago, who had fled home from Olympus; and before she embraced him, she flung the centurion’s head before his feet, and, to him wondering whose head of man it was, or what deed this was, by no means womanly, she confessed to her husband both the outrage to her body and the vengeance for her chastity violated by force; and the rest, as it is handed down, she preserved by the sanctity and gravity of her life the glory of this matronly deed to the very end.

At Ancyra, in the standing camp, spokesmen of the Tectosages came to the consul, begging that he should not move camp before he had conferred with their kings: no terms of peace, they said, would not be preferable to war. A time was fixed for the next day, and a place which seemed most nearly midway between the camp of the Gauls and Ancyra. When the consul had come there at the time with an escort of five hundred horse, and, no Gaul being seen there, had gone back into camp, the same spokesmen return, excusing that, a religious scruple being raised, the kings could not come; the chief men of the nation would come, by whom the matter could be transacted just as well. The consul said that he too would send Attalus. To this conference both sides came. Attalus had brought three hundred horse for escort, and the terms of peace were debated; since an end could not be put to the matter in the absence of the leaders, it was agreed that the consul and the kings should meet at that place on the next day. The Gauls’ deceit looked to this: first, to waste time until they should ferry their goods, which they were unwilling to risk, with their wives and children across the river Halys; then, that they were laying an ambush for the consul himself, too little wary against the treachery of a parley. For this purpose they chose out a thousand horse of tried daring from their whole number; and the deceit would have succeeded, had not fortune stood on the side of the law of nations, which they had taken counsel to violate. The Roman foragers and woodcutters were led into that quarter in which the conference was to be; this the tribunes thought would be the safer, because they would have the consul’s escort as itself a post set over against the enemy; yet they placed another post of their own, of six hundred horse, nearer the camp. The consul, Attalus affirming that the kings would come and the matter could be transacted, having set out from camp, when with the same escort of horse as before he had advanced about five miles and was not far from the appointed place, suddenly, their horses driven on, sees the Gauls coming with a hostile charge. He halted his column, and, having bidden the horsemen make ready their weapons and their spirits, at first steadily received the beginning of the fight and did not give way; then, when the multitude bore him down, he began to give ground little by little, the ranks of the squadrons in no way thrown into confusion; at last, when there was now more peril in delay than safety in keeping the ranks, all poured out everywhere into flight. Then indeed the Gauls press the scattered men and cut them down; and a great part would have been overwhelmed, had not the post of the foragers, six hundred horse, met them. They, having heard from afar the fearful shouting of their own, when they had made ready their weapons and horses, fresh, took up the broken battle. And so fortune was at once reversed, and terror turned from the conquered upon the conquerors. At the first onset the Gauls were routed, and the foragers came running from the fields, and on every side the enemy met the Gauls, so that they had not even a flight safe or easy, because the Romans on fresh horses pursued the weary. Few therefore escaped; none was taken; far the greater part paid the penalty by death for the violated faith of the parley. The Romans, their spirits burning with rage, on the next day come against the enemy with all their forces.

For two days the consul spent in exploring the nature of the mountain by himself, that nothing should be unknown; on the third day, when he had attended to the auspices and then sacrificed, he leads out his forces divided into four parts, two to lead up the middle of the mountain, two from the flanks to climb against the wings of the Gauls. What of strength the enemy had, the Tectosages and Trocmi, held the center of the line, fifty thousand men; the cavalry, because there was no use for horses among the uneven crags, brought down to fight on foot, ten thousand men, they placed on the right wing; the Cappadocians of Ariarathes and the auxiliaries of Morzius filled up a number of about four thousand on the left. The consul, as on Mount Olympus, the light-armed placed in the front of the line, took care that an equally great store of missiles of every kind should be at hand. When they drew near, all was the same on both sides as had been in the former battle, save the spirits—both raised in the victors by their good fortune, and broken in the enemy, because, although they themselves had not been conquered, they counted the disaster of the men of their own race as their own. And so, begun from equal beginnings, the thing had the same issue. Like a cloud, the light missiles hurled overwhelmed the line of the Gauls. None dared either run forward from his ranks, lest they bare their bodies on every side to the blows, and, standing, the closer they were, the more wounds they took, as though men aimed at a fixed mark. The consul, reckoning that, when they were now of themselves in disorder, if he showed the standards of the legions they would at once turn to flight, the velites and the rest of the throng of auxiliaries received back among the ranks, advanced his line. The Gauls, both terrified by the memory of the disaster of the Tolostobogii, and bearing weapons clinging in their bodies, and weary both with standing and with wounds, did not endure even the first onset and shout of the Romans. The flight inclined toward the camp; but few took refuge within the defenses; the greater part, borne past to right and left, fled wherever the impulse carried each. The victors, following as far as the camp, cut down their backs; then in the camp they stuck fast in greed of plunder, and no one pursued. On the wings the Gauls stood longer, because they were reached later; but they did not endure even the first volley of missiles. The consul, because he could not drag those who had entered the camp away from plundering, sent those who had been on the wings straightway to pursue the enemy. Having followed for some space, yet not more than eight thousand men fell in the flight—for there was no battle—the rest crossed the river Halys. A great part of the Romans that night remained in the enemy’s camp; the rest the consul led back into his own camp. On the next day he reviewed the captives and the plunder, which was as great as a nation most greedy of seizing, when it had held everything by arms for many years this side of Mount Taurus, could heap up. The Gauls, gathered into one place from their flight scattered everywhere, a great part wounded or unarmed, stripped of all things, sent spokesmen to the consul about peace. Manlius bade them come to Ephesus; he himself—for it was now mid-autumn—hastening to leave the cold places near Mount Taurus, led his victorious army back into winter quarters on the seacoast.

While these things were being done in Asia, in the other provinces matters were quiet. At Rome the censors Titus Quinctius Flamininus and Marcus Claudius Marcellus revised the roll of the Senate; chosen princeps of the Senate for the third time was Publius Scipio Africanus; only four were passed over, no one who had held a curule office. And in the review of the cavalry the censorship was quite mild. They let out by contract the building of a substructure above the Aequimaelium on the Capitol, and the paving with flint of the road from the Porta Capena to the temple of Mars. The Campanians consulted the Senate as to where they should be assessed: it was decreed that they should be assessed at Rome. There were great floods that year; the Tiber overflowed the Campus Martius and the level parts of the city twelve times.

The war in Asia with the Gauls having been finished by the consul Gnaeus Manlius, the other consul, Marcus Fulvius, the Aetolians being thoroughly subdued, when he had crossed over into Cephallania, sent round among the states of the island to ask whether they preferred to surrender to the Romans or to try the fortune of war. Fear prevailed with all, so that they did not refuse surrender. Hostages then demanded—the poor peoples according to their means, but the Cranii and the Palenses and the Samaeans twenty each—they gave. An unhoped-for peace had shone upon Cephallania, when suddenly one state, the Samaeans, it is uncertain for what cause, revolted. They said they had feared, because their city was set in a convenient place, lest they be forced to remove by the Romans. But whether they themselves feigned that fear for themselves and by a vain dread roused a quiet mischief, or whether the matter, bandied about in talk among the Romans, was carried to them, nothing certain is known, save that, hostages now given, they suddenly shut their gates, and not even at the prayers of their own—for the consul had sent under the walls to try the pity of parents and countrymen—would they desist from their undertaking. Then, after nothing peaceable was answered, the city began to be besieged. He had all the apparatus of engines and machines carried over from the siege of Ambracia, and the works that had to be made the soldiers finished briskly. So in two places the rams brought up battered the walls. Nor was anything left undone by the Samaeans whereby either the works or the enemy could be kept off. Yet by two things chiefly they resisted: one, by always building a strong new wall within, beside the demolished one; the other, by sudden sallies, now upon the enemy’s works, now upon their outposts; and for the most part they were the superior in these fights. One device, of no great moment to relate, was found to check them. A hundred slingers were summoned from Aegium and Patrae and Dyme. From boyhood these were trained, after a certain fashion of their nation, to sling at the open sea with round stones, with which, mostly mixed with sand, the shores are strewn. And so they used that weapon with a stroke farther, surer, and stronger than the Balearic slinger. And the sling is not of a single thong, like the Balearic and other nations’ slings, but a triple strap, hardened with frequent stitching, so that the bullet should not, with a loose thong, roll in the casting, but, when it has settled balanced, be shot out as though sent from a bowstring. Accustomed to send their shots through rings of a moderate circle from a great distance, they wounded not the heads only of the enemy, but whatever spot of the face they had marked. These slings restrained the Samaeans, that they should not sally so frequently or so boldly, so much so that they begged from the walls that the Achaeans would withdraw a little while and watch them at rest fighting with the Roman outposts. Four months Same sustained the siege. When out of the few some of them daily were killed or wounded, and those who remained were weary both in body and in spirit, the Romans, by night, through the citadel which they call Cyatis—for the city, sloping toward the sea, faces west—the wall surmounted, made their way into the forum. The Samaeans, after they perceived that part of the city was taken by the enemy, fled with their wives and children into the greater citadel. Thence, on the next day, having surrendered, the city plundered, they were all sold under the crown.

The consul, his affairs in Cephallania ordered and a garrison set over Same, crossed into the Peloponnese, where the men of Aegium above all and the Lacedaemonians had long been summoning him. From the beginning of the Achaean League the assemblies of the nation had always been proclaimed at Aegium, whether this was granted to the dignity of the city or to the convenience of its situation. Philopoemen in that year first attempted to shake this custom, and was preparing to bring a law that the assemblies should be held by turns in all the cities that belonged to the Achaean League. And just at the consul’s coming, when the damiurgi of the cities—that is the highest magistracy—were summoning the people to Aegium, Philopoemen, who was then praetor, proclaimed the assembly at Argos. When it was plain that nearly all would gather there, the consul too, though he favored the cause of the Aegienses, came to Argos; and there, when the debate had been held and he saw the matter inclining the other way, he gave up his undertaking. The Lacedaemonians then turned him aside into their own quarrels. That city was troubled chiefly by its exiles, a great part of whom dwelt in the strongholds and towns of the Laconian seacoast, all of which had been taken from them. Resenting this, the Lacedaemonians—that they might have some access of their own and free to the sea, in case they should ever send envoys to Rome or elsewhere, and at the same time that there might be a market and a haven for foreign wares for their necessary uses—attacked by night and unawares seized a coastal village by the name of Las. The villagers and the exiles who dwelt there were at first dismayed by the unlooked-for stroke; then, gathering toward daybreak, with a light skirmish they drove the Lacedaemonians out. Yet the alarm ran through the whole seacoast, and in common the strongholds all and the villages and the exiles who had their homes there sent envoys to the Achaeans. Philopoemen the praetor, from the very first a friend to the exiles’ cause and always the Achaeans’ counselor for diminishing the power and authority of the Lacedaemonians, granted the council a hearing of their complaint; and on his motion a decree was passed: since Titus Quinctius and the Romans had handed over the strongholds and villages of the Laconian coast into the faith and guardianship of the Achaeans, and since the Lacedaemonians, who by the treaty ought to keep their hands from them, had assaulted the village of Las and done slaughter there, unless those who had been the authors and accomplices of that deed were given up to the Achaeans, the treaty would be held violated. Envoys were at once sent to Lacedaemon to demand them. This command seemed to the Lacedaemonians so haughty and unworthy that, had the city’s fortune been what of old it was, they would beyond doubt have taken up arms on the instant. But what most dismayed them was the fear that, if once by obeying these first commands they took the yoke upon them, then—what Philopoemen had long been contriving—he would deliver Lacedaemon to the exiles. Raging therefore with anger, they killed thirty men of the faction with which Philopoemen and the exiles had some partnership of counsel, and decreed that the alliance with the Achaeans be renounced and envoys sent at once to Cephallania, to surrender Lacedaemon to the consul Marcus Fulvius and to the Romans, and to beg him to come into the Peloponnese, to the city of Lacedaemon, to receive it into the faith and dominion of the Roman people. When the envoys reported this to the Achaeans, by the consent of all the cities that belonged to the League war was declared upon the Lacedaemonians. That it was not waged at once, the winter hindered; yet by small inroads, in the manner rather of brigandage than of war, their borders were laid waste, not by land only but also by ships from the sea. This disturbance brought the consul into the Peloponnese, and by his order an assembly was proclaimed at Elis and the Lacedaemonians summoned to plead. There was there great—not pleading only, but altercation; to which the consul, having for the rest answered ambiguously enough, courting either side, put an end with a single warning, that they refrain from war until they had sent envoys to Rome to the Senate. From both sides an embassy was sent to Rome. The exiles of the Lacedaemonians too laid their cause and embassy upon the Achaeans. Diophanes and Lycortas, both of Megalopolis, were the chief men of the Achaean embassy; and they, being at variance in public life, then too delivered speeches that agreed not at all between them. Diophanes referred the arbitration of all matters to the Senate: they would best put an end to the controversies between the Achaeans and the Lacedaemonians. Lycortas, after the precepts of Philopoemen, demanded that the Achaeans be allowed to act, by their treaty and their own laws, upon what they had decreed, and that the Romans preserve to them unimpaired the liberty of which they themselves had been the authors. Of great authority then among the Romans was the Achaean nation; yet it was resolved that nothing be changed concerning the Lacedaemonians. But the answer was so tangled that both the Achaeans took it that Lacedaemon had been committed to them, and the Lacedaemonians construed that not everything had been granted them. This power the Achaeans used immoderately and haughtily. Philopoemen’s magistracy was continued. He, at the beginning of spring, having proclaimed his army, pitched camp on the borders of the Lacedaemonians, then sent envoys to demand the authors of the revolt, promising both that the city should be in peace if it did this, and that those men should suffer nothing without their cause being heard. The rest, out of fear, were silent; those whom he had demanded by name professed that they themselves would go, faith being given them by the envoys that no violence should be done until they had pleaded their cause. Other illustrious men also went, both as advocates for the private persons and because they judged that their cause touched the commonwealth. Never before had the Achaeans brought the Lacedaemonian exiles with them into their borders, because nothing seemed so likely to alienate the minds of the city; then almost the front rank of the whole army were exiles. These, as the Lacedaemonians came to the gate of the camp, met them in a body; and at first they provoked them with railing, then, an altercation having arisen, as tempers were kindled, the fiercest of the exiles made an onset upon the Lacedaemonians. When these called the gods and the faith of the envoys to witness, both the envoys and the praetor sought to drive back the crowd and to shield the Lacedaemonians, and to keep off those who were already casting bonds upon some. As the tumult was stirred the crowd grew; and the Achaeans at first ran together to the spectacle; then, as the exiles cried aloud what they had suffered and begged for aid and at the same time affirmed that they would never have such an occasion if they let this one pass—that the treaty which had been hallowed on the Capitol, at Olympia, on the citadel at Athens was, through these men, void; that before they were bound anew by another treaty the guilty must be punished—the multitude, kindled by these words, at the cry of one man who shouted to them to strike, hurled stones. And so seventeen, upon whom bonds had been cast in the tumult, were killed. Sixty-three taken the next day, from whom the praetor had warded off violence—not because he wished them safe, but because he would not have them perish with their cause unheard—were thrown to the angry multitude; and when, to ears turned away, they had spoken a few words, all were condemned and handed over to punishment. This terror struck into the Lacedaemonians, it was commanded them first that they pull down their walls; then that all the foreign auxiliaries who had served for pay under the tyrants depart from the land of Laconia; then that the slaves whom the tyrants had freed—and that was a great multitude—depart before a fixed day; and that those who stayed there, the Achaeans should have the right of seizing, carrying off, and selling; that they abolish the laws and customs of Lycurgus and accustom themselves to the laws and institutions of the Achaeans: so they would be of one body and more easily agree on all matters. Nothing did they do more obediently than pull down their walls, nor bear anything more grievously than the recall of the exiles. A decree concerning their restoration was made at Tegea, in the common council of the Achaeans; and when mention was made that the foreign auxiliaries who had been disbanded and enrolled as Lacedaemonians—for so they called those who had been freed by the tyrants—had gone out of the city and scattered into the fields, it was resolved that, before the army was disbanded, the praetor should go with light troops and seize that kind of men and sell them by the right of plunder. Many were taken and sold. With that money, by the leave of the Achaeans, the colonnade at Megalopolis which the Lacedaemonians had destroyed was rebuilt. And the Belbinate territory, which the Lacedaemonians had unjustly held under the tyrants, was restored to that same city by an old decree of the Achaeans which had been made in the reign of Philip son of Amyntas. By these things the city of the Lacedaemonians, as it were unnerved, was long subject to the Achaeans; yet no loss was so great to them as the doing-away of the discipline of Lycurgus, to which they had been accustomed for eight hundred years.

From the council where the dispute between the Achaeans and the Lacedaemonians had been decided before the consul, Marcus Fulvius, because the year was now at its close, set out for Rome for the elections, and created consuls Marcus Valerius Messalla and Gaius Livius Salinator, having thrown out Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, who in that year too was a candidate and his enemy. Then were created praetors Quintus Marcius Philippus, Marcus Claudius Marcellus, Gaius Stertinius, Gaius Atinius, Publius Claudius Pulcher, Lucius Manlius Acidinus. The elections finished, it was resolved that the consul Marcus Fulvius return to his province and his army, and to him and his colleague Gnaeus Manlius the command was prolonged for a year. That year, in the temple of Hercules, a statue of the god himself was set up, by the response of the decemvirs, and a gilded six-horse chariot on the Capitol by Publius Cornelius: it was inscribed that the consul had given it. And twelve gilded shields were set up by the curule aediles Publius Claudius Pulcher and Servius Sulpicius Galba out of the money with which they had condemned the grain-dealers for cornering the corn-supply; and the plebeian aedile Quintus Fulvius Flaccus set up two gilded statues, one defendant being condemned—for they had prosecuted separately; his colleague Aulus Caecilius condemned no one. The Roman Games were thrice, the Plebeian Games five times wholly repeated.

When thereupon Marcus Valerius Messalla and Gaius Livius Salinator had entered upon the consulship on the Ides of March, they consulted the Senate concerning the commonwealth and the provinces and the armies. Concerning Aetolia and Asia nothing was changed; to the one consul Pisae with the Ligurians, to the other Gaul was decreed as his province. They were bidden to arrange between themselves or draw lots, and to enroll new armies, two legions each, and to require of the allies of the Latin name fifteen thousand foot apiece and twelve hundred horse. To Messalla fell the Ligurians, to Salinator Gaul. The praetors then drew lots: to Marcus Claudius came the city jurisdiction, to Publius Claudius the foreign; Quintus Marcius drew Sicily, Gaius Stertinius Sardinia, Lucius Manlius Hither Spain, Gaius Atinius Farther Spain. Concerning the armies it was so resolved: that the legions which had been under Gaius Laelius be brought over from Gaul to Marcus Tuccius the propraetor among the Bruttii; and that the army which was in Sicily be disbanded, and that the fleet which was there Marcus Sempronius the propraetor lead back to Rome. To the Spains were decreed the single legions which were then in those provinces, and that both praetors require three thousand foot and two hundred horse each of the allies as reinforcement and transport them with themselves. Before the new magistrates set out for their provinces, a three-day supplication on behalf of the college of decemvirs was ordered at all the crossroads, because by day, between about the third and fourth hour, darkness had come on. And a nine-day sacrifice was proclaimed, because it had rained stones on the Aventine.

The Campanians, since by a decree of the Senate which had been made the year before the censors had compelled them to be assessed at Rome—for before it had been uncertain where they should be assessed—asked that it be lawful for them to take Roman women to wife, and that, if any had taken them before, they might keep them, and that children born before that day should be to them lawful children and heirs. Both requests were granted. Concerning the townsmen of Formiae and Fundi and the Arpinates, Gaius Valerius Tappo, tribune of the plebs, promulgated a bill that they should have the casting of a vote—for before they had held citizenship without the suffrage. When four tribunes of the plebs interposed against this bill, because it was not brought by the authority of the Senate, being instructed that it was the people’s right, not the Senate’s, to grant the suffrage to whom it would, they desisted from their undertaking. The bill was carried, that the Formiani and Fundani should vote in the Aemilian tribe, the Arpinates in the Cornelian; and in these tribes they were then for the first time assessed, by the plebiscite of Valerius. Marcus Claudius Marcellus the censor, his colleague Titus Quinctius being beaten by lot, closed the lustrum. There were assessed of citizens 258,318 heads. The lustrum completed, the consuls set out for their provinces.

In that winter in which these things were done at Rome, to Gnaeus Manlius—first consul, then proconsul—wintering in Asia, embassies gathered from every side, from all the cities and nations that dwell this side of Mount Taurus. And as the victory over King Antiochus was more glorious and renowned to the Romans than that over the Gauls, so it was more joyful to the allies that it was over the Gauls than over Antiochus. The king’s servitude had been more bearable than the savagery of the monstrous barbarians and the daily uncertain terror with which, like a tempest, he carried them ravaging upon them. And so, as men to whom liberty had been given by the expulsion of Antiochus and peace by the subduing of the Gauls, they had come not only to give thanks but had brought also golden crowns, each according to its means. And there came envoys both from Antiochus and from the Gauls themselves, that the terms of peace might be dictated, and from Ariarathes king of the Cappadocians, to seek pardon and to atone with money for his offense, that he had aided Antiochus with auxiliaries. Upon him were imposed six hundred talents of silver; to the Gauls the answer was that, when King Eumenes had come, then he would give them their terms. The embassies of the cities were dismissed with kindly answers, more joyful even than they had come. The envoys of Antiochus were bidden to bring the money and the grain into Pamphylia, according to the treaty made with Lucius Scipio; thither he would come with his army. Then at the beginning of spring, his army reviewed, he set out and on the eighth day came to Apamea. There, a three-day halt being held, in three more marches from Apamea he came into Pamphylia, whither he had bidden the king’s men convey the money and the grain. Fifteen hundred talents of silver were received and carried to Apamea; the grain was divided among the army. Thence he led to Perga, the one place in those parts held by a royal garrison. As he drew near, the commander of the garrison came to meet him, asking a space of thirty days, that he might consult King Antiochus about handing over the city. The time being granted, by that day the garrison withdrew. From Perga, his brother Lucius Manlius being sent with four thousand soldiers to Oroanda to exact the remainder of the money out of what they had agreed, he himself, because he had heard that King Eumenes and the ten commissioners had come from Rome to Ephesus, bidding the envoys of Antiochus follow, led his army back to Apamea.

There, on the advice of the ten commissioners, a treaty was drawn up with Antiochus in words to about this effect: “Let there be friendship between King Antiochus and the Roman people on these terms and conditions: that the king suffer no army that is to wage war upon the Roman people or their allies to pass through the borders of his kingdom, or of those who shall be under his sway, nor aid it with provisions or any other help; and let the Romans and their allies render the same to Antiochus and to those who shall be under his command. Let Antiochus have no right of making war upon those who dwell in the islands, nor of crossing into Europe. Let him withdraw from the cities, lands, villages, and strongholds this side of Mount Taurus as far as the river Halys, and from the valley of Taurus as far as the ridges where it slopes toward Lycaonia. Let him carry nothing but their arms out of those towns, lands, and strongholds from which he withdraws; if he has carried anything off, let him duly restore it to the place where each thing belongs. Let him receive no soldier nor any other man out of the kingdom of Eumenes. If any citizens of those cities which pass from his kingdom are with King Antiochus, or within the borders of his kingdom, let them all return to Apamea before a fixed day; and those who, from the kingdom of Antiochus, are among the Romans and their allies shall have the right of departing or of remaining. Let him restore to the Romans and their allies the slaves, whether fugitives or taken in war, and any free man who has been taken captive or is a deserter. Let him deliver up all his elephants and procure no others. Let him deliver also his warships and their tackle, and let him keep no more than ten light galleys, of which none shall be driven by more than thirty oars, nor any ram-ship, for a war which he himself shall be the one to bring on. Let him not sail this side of the headlands of Calycadnus and Sarpedon, except a ship that carries money for tribute, or envoys, or hostages. Let King Antiochus have no right to hire soldiers from the peoples that are under the dominion of the Roman people, nor even to receive volunteers. Whatever houses and buildings of the Rhodians or their allies are within the borders of the kingdom of Antiochus, let them be the Rhodians’ or their allies’ by the same right as before the war; if any moneys are owed, let there be exaction of them; if anything has been carried off, let there be likewise the right of searching it out, recognizing it, and reclaiming it. If any cities which ought to be handed over are held by those to whom Antiochus gave them, let him withdraw the garrisons from these too, and see that they are duly delivered. Let him give twelve thousand Attic talents of good silver within twelve years in equal installments—the talent to weigh not less than eighty Roman pounds—and five hundred and forty thousand modii of wheat. To King Eumenes let him give three hundred and fifty talents within five years, and for the grain, which has been appraised, one hundred and twenty-seven talents. Let him give the Romans twenty hostages, and change them every three years, none younger than eighteen years nor older than forty-five. If any of the allies of the Roman people of their own accord make war upon Antiochus, let him have the right of repelling force with force, provided he hold no city by the law of war nor receive any into alliance. Let them decide their disputes among themselves by law and judgment, or, if both so please, by war.” Concerning the surrender of Hannibal the Carthaginian, and Thoas the Aetolian, and Mnasilochus the Acarnanian, and the Chalcidians Eubulidas and Philo, this too was written into the treaty, and that, if afterward it should please any to add, take away, or change anything, this might be done without breach of the treaty. The consul swore to this treaty; and to exact the oath from the king there set out Quintus Minucius Thermus and Lucius Manlius, who then by chance had returned from Oroanda. And he wrote to Quintus Fabius Labeo, who commanded the fleet, that he should set out at once for Patara, and cut to pieces and burn whatever royal ships were there. Setting out from Ephesus he either broke up or burned fifty decked ships. Telmessus he received on the same expedition, its townsmen dismayed by the sudden coming of the fleet. From Lycia straightway, having bidden those who had been left there to follow from Ephesus, he crossed through the islands into Greece. Staying a few days at Athens, until the ships should come from Ephesus to the Piraeus, he then led the whole fleet back to Italy.

Gnaeus Manlius, when among the other things that were to be received from Antiochus he had received the elephants also and had given them all as a gift to Eumenes, then heard the causes of the cities, many of them thrown into confusion amid the upheaval. And King Ariarathes, half of the money imposed upon him being remitted by the favor of Eumenes—to whom in those very days he had betrothed his daughter—was received into friendship. The causes of the cities being heard, the ten commissioners made the condition of each different. Those that had been tributary to King Antiochus and had sided with the Roman people, to these they granted immunity; those that had been of Antiochus’s party or tributary to King Attalus, all these they ordered to pay tribute to Eumenes. By name, besides, they granted immunity to the Colophonians who dwell in Notium, and to the Cymaeans and the Mylasenses; to the Clazomenians, over and above their immunity, they gave the island of Drymussa as a gift, and to the Milesians they restored what they call the sacred land, and to the people of Ilium they added Rhoeteum and Gergithum—not so much for any recent services as for the memory of their origin. The same was the reason for freeing Dardanus also. The Chians too and the Smyrnaeans and the Erythraeans, for the singular loyalty they showed in that war, they both endowed with land and held in every special honor. To the Phocaeans both the land they had held before the war was restored, and leave was given them to use their ancient laws. To the Rhodians was confirmed what had been granted by the earlier decree; Lycia and Caria were given them as far as the river Maeander, except Telmessus. To King Eumenes they added the Chersonese in Europe and Lysimachia, with the strongholds, villages, and land within the bounds that Antiochus had held; in Asia they restored to him both Phrygias—the one by the Hellespont, the other they call the Greater—and Mysia, which King Prusias had taken away, and Lycaonia and Milyas and Lydia, and by name the cities of Tralles and Ephesus and Telmessus. Concerning Pamphylia, since there was dispute between Eumenes and the envoys of Antiochus, because part of it is this side, part beyond the Taurus, the matter was referred entire to the Senate.

These treaties and decrees given, Manlius with the ten commissioners and the whole army set out for the Hellespont, and, the chieftains of the Gauls being summoned thither, dictated the terms on which they should keep peace with Eumenes, and gave them warning to make an end of their custom of wandering with arms and to keep themselves within the bounds of their own lands. Then, having gathered ships from the whole coast, and Eumenes’s fleet too, brought from Elaea by the king’s brother Athenaeus, he ferried all his forces across into Europe. Thence through the Chersonese, by moderate marches, dragging a column heavy with plunder of every kind, he held a standing camp at Lysimachia, that with beasts as fresh and unworn as possible he might enter Thrace, the journey through which men commonly dreaded. The day he set out from Lysimachia he reached the river they call the Melas, and the next day Cypsela. From Cypsela a road of about ten miles, wooded, narrow, and broken, lay before them; and because of the difficulty of the way the army was divided into two parts, the one ordered to go ahead, the other to close the column at a wide interval, and in the middle he set the baggage: there were the wagons with the public money and other precious plunder. So, as it went through the defile, of the Thracians not more than ten thousand, from four peoples—the Astii and the Caeni and the Maduateni and the Coreli—beset the road at the very narrows. There was an opinion that this was not done without the treachery of Philip king of the Macedonians: that he had known the Romans would return by no other way than through Thrace, and how much money they carried with them. In the van was the commander, anxious because of the unfavorableness of the ground. The Thracians stirred not at all while the armed men passed; but when they saw that the foremost had cleared the narrows and the rearmost were not yet drawing near, they fell upon the baggage and the packs, and, the guards being cut down, some plundered what was in the wagons, others led off the beasts under their loads. When the shouting was carried first to those who, having now entered the defile, were following, then also to the van, from both sides men ran together to the middle, and a disordered battle was joined in many places at once. The Thracians their very plunder, hampered with loads, and the most of them—that they might have hands free for seizing—unarmed, offered up to slaughter; the Romans the unfavorableness of the ground betrayed, the barbarians running against them by known paths and lurking at times in the hollow valleys. The very loads and wagons too, as chance laid them awkwardly in the way of this side or that, were a hindrance to the fighters. Here falls the plunderer, there the avenger of the plunder. As the ground was unfavorable or favorable to these or those, as was the spirit of the fighters, as was the number—for some had met more than they were themselves, others fewer—the fortune of the fight was various; many fell on both sides. Now night was coming on, when the Thracians withdrew from the battle, not in flight from wounds or death, but because they had plunder enough. The Romans’ van pitched camp outside the defile, in open ground, about the temple of Bendis; the other part remained, to guard the baggage, in the middle of the defile, surrounded by a double rampart. The next day, the pass being explored before they moved, they joined the van. In that battle, since a part both of the baggage and of the camp-followers, and a number of soldiers, had fallen—for it was fought well-nigh everywhere throughout the defile—the greatest loss was suffered in the death of Quintus Minucius Thermus, a brave and energetic man. That day they came to the river Hebrus. Thence they pass the borders of the Aenii, by the temple of Apollo which the inhabitants call the Zerynthian. Other narrows about Tempyra—this place has that name—receive them, no less broken than the former; but, because there is nothing wooded about, they offer not even lurking-places for an ambush. Hither, to the same hope of plunder, came the Thrausi, a people likewise of the Thracians; but, because the bare valleys made them, as they beset the narrows, to be seen from afar, there was less of terror and tumult among the Romans: for though the ground was unfavorable, yet they had to fight a regular battle, in open line, standards joined. In close order they advance, and with a shout, an onset made, first drove the enemy from the ground, then turned them; and then flight and slaughter began, the very narrows hindering their own. The Romans, victors, pitched camp at a village of the Maronitae—they call it Sale. The next day an open road, the Priatic plain, received them, and there for three days they stayed receiving grain, part from the fields of the Maronitae, who themselves brought it in, part from their own ships, which were following with provision of every kind. From the standing camp it was a day’s journey to Apollonia. Hence through the territory of the Abderitae they came to Neapolis. All this journey, through the colonies of the Greeks, was peaceful; the rest from there, through the midst of the Thracians, by day and by night, though not hostile, was yet suspect, until they came into Macedonia. The same army, when it had been led by Scipio along the same road, had found the Thracians milder, for no other reason than that there had been less plunder to be sought; though even then Claudius is the authority that as many as fifteen thousand Thracians met the column of Muttines the Numidian, which went ahead to explore the ground. That there were four hundred Numidian horse and a few elephants; that the son of Muttines burst through the midst of the enemy with a hundred and fifty chosen horsemen; that the same man soon after, when Muttines, with the elephants stationed in the center and the cavalry posted on the wings, had now joined hands with the enemy, raised a terror from the rear, and thence the enemy, thrown into confusion as by a cavalry storm, did not come up to the column of foot. Gnaeus Manlius led his army across through Macedonia into Thessaly. Thence, when he had come through Epirus to Apollonia, the winter sea not yet so despised that he dared to cross, he wintered at Apollonia.

At nearly the close of the year the consul Marcus Valerius came from the Ligurians to Rome to substitute new magistrates, no memorable deed having been done in his province whereby this might be a plausible cause of delay—that he had come to the elections later than usual. The elections for choosing consuls were held on the twelfth day before the Kalends of March; created were Marcus Aemilius Lepidus and Gaius Flaminius. The next day were made praetors Appius Claudius Pulcher, Servius Sulpicius Galba, Quintus Terentius Culleo, Lucius Terentius Massaliota, Quintus Fulvius Flaccus, Marcus Furius Crassipes. The elections finished, the consul referred to the Senate which provinces it should please to be the praetors’. They decreed two at Rome for the administration of justice, two outside Italy, Sicily and Sardinia, two in Italy, Tarentum and Gaul; and at once, before they entered office, they were ordered to draw lots. Servius Sulpicius drew the city jurisdiction, Quintus Terentius the foreign, Lucius Terentius Sicily, Quintus Fulvius Sardinia, Appius Claudius Tarentum, Marcus Furius Gaul.

That year Lucius Minucius Myrtilus and Lucius Manlius, because they were said to have struck the Carthaginian envoys, by order of Marcus Claudius the city praetor were handed over through the fetials to the envoys and carried off to Carthage.

Among the Ligurians there was report of a great war, and one swelling greater day by day. And so to the new consuls, on the day they brought before the Senate the matter of the provinces and of the commonwealth, the Senate decreed to both the Ligurians as their province. Against this decree of the Senate the consul Lepidus interposed, declaring it unworthy that both consuls should be shut up in the valleys of the Ligurians, while Marcus Fulvius and Gnaeus Manlius for two years now—the one in Europe, the other in Asia—reigned as substitutes, as it were, for Philip and Antiochus. If it pleased that armies be in those lands, consuls rather than private men ought to command them. They wandered with the terror of war among nations on which war had not been declared, selling peace for a price. If those provinces had need to be held by armies, then, as Lucius Scipio the consul had succeeded Manius Acilius, and Marcus Fulvius and Gnaeus Manlius the consuls had succeeded Lucius Scipio, so Gaius Livius and Marcus Valerius the consuls ought to have succeeded Fulvius and Manlius. Now at least, the Aetolian war finished, Asia recovered from Antiochus, the Gauls subdued, either consuls ought to be sent to the consular armies, or the legions brought back from there and at last given back to the commonwealth. The Senate, hearing this, persevered in its resolve, that both consuls should have the Ligurians as their province; it was resolved that Manlius and Fulvius withdraw from their provinces, lead their armies back from there, and return to Rome.

There was enmity between Marcus Fulvius and the consul Marcus Aemilius, and, over and above the rest, Aemilius reckoned that he had been made consul two years late by Marcus Fulvius’s doing. And so, to bring odium upon him, he brought into the Senate envoys of the Ambracians, suborned with accusations, who complained that, while they were at peace and had done what the earlier consuls commanded, and were ready to render the same obediently to Marcus Fulvius, war had been brought upon them: their fields first laid waste, the terror of pillage and slaughter cast upon the city, so that for that fear they were forced to shut their gates; then they had been besieged and assaulted, and every example of war shown upon them—slaughter, fire, ruin, the plundering of the city; wives and children dragged off into slavery, their goods taken away; and—what moved them above all—their temples throughout the whole city stripped of their ornaments; the images of the gods, nay the gods themselves, wrenched from their seats and carried off; bare walls and doorposts were left to the Ambracians, to adore, to pray and supplicate before. As they made these complaints, the consul, by questioning them in accusing fashion, as had been arranged, drew them on to say more, as though not of their own accord. The fathers being moved, the other consul, Gaius Flaminius, took up the cause of Marcus Fulvius, saying that the Ambracians had entered upon an old and worn-out path: so had Marcus Marcellus been accused by the Syracusans, so Quintus Fulvius by the Campanians. Why not, by the same procedure, suffer Titus Quinctius to be accused by King Philip, Manius Acilius and Lucius Scipio by Antiochus, Gnaeus Manlius by the Gauls, Marcus Fulvius himself by the Aetolians and the peoples of Cephallania? “That Ambracia was assaulted and taken, and the statues and ornaments carried off from it, and the other things done that are wont to be done in captured cities—do you suppose, conscript fathers, that either I, on Marcus Fulvius’s behalf, or Marcus Fulvius himself will deny it, who for these exploits is going to demand a triumph of you, who will carry Ambracia captured, and the statues which they charge were carried off, and the other spoils of that city before his chariot, and will fix them upon his own doorposts? There is no reason for them to separate themselves from the Aetolians; the cause of the Ambracians and of the Aetolians is one. And so let my colleague either exercise his enmities in some other cause, or, if he prefers it in this one above all, let him keep his Ambracians until the coming of Marcus Fulvius; I will not suffer anything to be decreed about the Ambracians or the Aetolians in the absence of Marcus Fulvius.” When Aemilius charged that the crafty malice of his enemy was, as it were, marked for all to see, and said that he would draw out the time by delay, lest he come to Rome with an enemy as consul, two days were consumed in the contest of the consuls; nor, with Flaminius present, did it seem that anything could be decreed. An occasion was seized, when Flaminius happened to be absent sick, and, on Aemilius’s motion, a decree of the Senate was passed: that all their goods be restored to the Ambracians; that they be free and use their own laws; that they levy what harbor-dues they wished by land and sea, provided the Romans and the allies of the Latin name were exempt from them; and concerning the statues and other ornaments which they complained had been taken from the sacred temples, that it was resolved, when Marcus Fulvius had returned to Rome, to refer the matter to the college of pontiffs, and that what they decided should be done. Nor was the consul content with this, but afterward, by reason of thin attendance, he added a decree of the Senate that Ambracia did not appear to have been taken by storm.

Then there was a supplication, by decree of the decemvirs, for the health of the people, for three days, because a grave pestilence was wasting the city and the fields. Then came the Latin Festival. Freed from these religious observances, and the levy completed—for each consul preferred to use new soldiers—they set out for their province, and dismissed all the veterans.

After the departure of the consuls, Gnaeus Manlius the proconsul came to Rome; and when the Senate had been granted him at the temple of Bellona by Servius Sulpicius the praetor, and he himself, having recounted his exploits, had demanded that for them honor be paid to the immortal gods and that it be allowed him to ride into the city in triumph, the greater part of the ten commissioners who had been with him gainsaid it, and before the others Lucius Furius Purpurio and Lucius Aemilius Paullus. They had been given, they said, as commissioners to Gnaeus Manlius for the making of peace with Antiochus and the completing of the terms of the treaty which had been begun with Lucius Scipio. Gnaeus Manlius had striven with all his might to disturb that peace, and to catch Antiochus by treachery, if he had given him the chance at himself; but Antiochus, the consul’s deceit being known, though he had often been entrapped by parleys sought, had avoided not only meeting him but even being seen by him. Desiring to cross the Taurus, he had with difficulty been held back by the prayers of all the commissioners, lest he choose to make trial of the disaster foretold by the verses of the Sibyl for those who pass the fated bounds; yet he had brought his army up and pitched camp almost on the very ridges, at the watershed. When he found there no cause for war, the king’s men keeping quiet, he had wheeled his army about against the Gallograeci—a nation on which war had been brought neither by the authority of the Senate nor by the order of the people. Who had ever dared to do such a thing on his own judgment? Of Antiochus, of Philip, of Hannibal and the Carthaginians the wars were most recent; concerning all of these the Senate had been consulted, the people had ordered, envoys had often been sent beforehand, restitution had been demanded, and at last men sent to declare war. “Which of these things, Gnaeus Manlius, was done, that we should reckon yonder a public war of the Roman people and not your own private brigandage? But were you even content with that, and did you lead your army by the straight road against those whom you had chosen for yourself as enemies? Or did you traverse, through all the windings of the roads, halting at the crossways, that wherever the column of Attalus, the brother of Eumenes, turned, there you, a hireling consul, with the Roman army might follow—did you roam through all the recesses and corners of Pisidia and Lycaonia and Phrygia, gathering a dole from the tyrants and the keepers of out-of-the-way forts? For what had you to do with Oroanda? what with other peoples equally harmless?”

“But the war itself, in whose name you seek a triumph—how did you wage it? Did you fight on level ground, at your own time? You do rightly, indeed, to demand that honor be paid to the immortal gods: first, because they would not have the army pay the penalty for the rashness of a commander making war by no law of nations; then, because they set beasts, not enemies, against us. Do not suppose it is only the name of the Gallograeci that is mixed: long before, both their bodies and their spirits were mixed and tainted. Or, if those were Gauls, with whom war has been waged a thousand times in Italy with varying outcome, would a messenger have returned from there, so far as it lay in our commander? Twice was it fought with them, twice he went up on unfavorable ground, in a lower valley he set his line almost beneath the feet of the enemy. So that, had they not hurled weapons from the higher ground but flung down their bare bodies, they could have overwhelmed us. What then befell? Great is the fortune of the Roman people, great and terrible their name. By the recent overthrow of Hannibal, of Philip, of Antiochus, they were well-nigh thunderstruck. Such masses of bodies were driven into flight by slings and arrows; the sword was not bloodied in the line of battle in the Gallic war; like swarms of birds at the first rattle of missiles they flew away. But, by Hercules, those same men—fortune warning us what would have befallen had we had a real enemy—when on our return we fell among the Thracian banditti, were cut down, routed, stripped of our baggage. Quintus Minucius Thermus, in whom far more loss was suffered than if Gnaeus Manlius, by whose rashness that disaster fell, had perished, fell with many brave men; the army, bringing back the spoils of King Antiochus, scattered into three parts—here the van, there the rear, there the baggage—lay hidden one whole night among the brambles, in the lairs of wild beasts. For these things is a triumph sought? If no disaster and disgrace had been received in Thrace, over what enemies would you seek a triumph? Over those, I suppose, whom the Senate or the Roman people had given you as enemies. So to this Lucius Scipio, so to that Manius Acilius, over King Antiochus; so a little before to Titus Quinctius over King Philip; so to Publius Africanus over Hannibal and the Carthaginians and Syphax, was a triumph given. And even those least matters, when the Senate had already resolved on war, were yet inquired into—by whom it should be announced: whether it should be announced to the kings themselves, or whether it was enough that it be announced to some garrison. Do you wish, then, that all these things be polluted and confounded, that the fetial law be done away, that there be no fetials? Be it so—I would say it with the gods’ leave—let there be a casting-away of religion; let forgetfulness of the gods take hold of your breasts: is it your pleasure also that the Senate not be consulted about war? that it not be brought before the people, whether they will and order that war be waged with the Gauls? Just now, surely, the consuls wanted Greece and Asia; yet, you persevering in decreeing the Ligurians as their province, they were obedient to the word. Deservedly, then, will those seek a triumph of you, by whose authority they waged the war, after waging it prosperously.”

Such was the speech of Furius and Aemilius. Manlius, I have heard, replied in about this manner. “Tribunes of the plebs, conscript fathers, were wont in time past to oppose those who demanded a triumph; to whom I render thanks, that, whether to me or to the greatness of my exploits they have granted this, that they not only approved my honor by their silence, but even seemed ready, if there were need, to move it; while from the ten commissioners—if the gods so please—from that council which our ancestors gave to commanders for the dispensing and the honoring of victory, I find adversaries. Lucius Furius and Lucius Aemilius forbid me to mount the triumphal chariot, drag the conspicuous crown from my head; whom I, had the tribunes forbidden me to triumph, was going to cite as witnesses of my deeds. I envy no man’s honor, conscript fathers: you, but lately, deterred by your authority the tribunes of the plebs, brave and energetic men, when they were hindering the triumph of Quintus Fabius Labeo; he triumphed, whom his enemies vaunted to have waged no unjust war, but to have seen no enemy at all: I, who with a hundred thousand of the fiercest enemies have so often fought with standards joined, who took or slew more than forty thousand men, who stormed two camps of theirs, who left everything this side of the ridges of Taurus more peaceful than the land of Italy is, am not only cheated of a triumph, but plead my cause before you, conscript fathers, with my own commissioners as accusers. Their accusation, as you have observed, conscript fathers, was twofold: for they said both that I ought not to have waged war with the Gauls, and that I waged it rashly and imprudently. “The Gauls were not enemies, but you, when they were at peace and doing your commands, did them violence.” I shall not demand of you, conscript fathers, that what you commonly know of the savagery of the Gallic race, of its most bitter hatred against the Roman name, you should judge to hold also of those Gauls who inhabit these lands: the infamy and odium of the whole race set aside, weigh them by themselves. Would that King Eumenes, would that all the cities of Asia were present, and that you heard them complaining rather than me accused. Send, come now, envoys round all the cities of Asia, and ask by which heavier servitude they were freed—Antiochus removed beyond the ridges of Taurus, or the Gauls subdued. Let them tell how often their fields were laid waste, how often plunder was driven off, when there was scarce means of ransoming the captives, and they heard of human victims slaughtered and their own children sacrificed. Know that your allies paid tribute to the Gauls, and, freed by you from the king’s rule, would now have been paying it, had I held back. The farther Antiochus had been removed, the more ungovernably would the Gauls have lorded it in Asia, and whatever land there is this side of the ridges of Taurus you would have added to the dominion of the Gauls, not your own. But these things are so, you say; yet even Delphi, the common oracle of the human race, the navel of the earth, the Gauls once plundered, and not for that did the Roman people declare or bring war upon them. For my part I reckoned there was some difference between that time, when Greece and Asia were not yet within your law and dominion, for caring and taking heed of what was done in those lands, and this, when you have set Mount Taurus as the bound of the Roman empire, when you give liberty and immunity to cities, when to some you add territory, others you fine with land, on others you impose tribute, kingdoms you enlarge, diminish, give, and take away, and you judge it to be your care that they have peace by land and sea. Or, had Antiochus not withdrawn his garrisons—which were quiet in their own citadels—would you not have thought Asia freed; and, if armies of Gauls roamed at large, would your gifts which you gave to King Eumenes stand firm, would the liberty of the cities stand firm? But why do I argue these things thus, as though I had not received the Gauls as enemies but made them so? You I call to witness, Lucius Scipio, whose valor and good fortune, succeeding in turn to your command, I prayed of the immortal gods for myself not in vain; you, Publius Scipio, who held the right of a legate, the majesty of a colleague, both with your brother the consul and with the army—whether you know that there were legions of Gauls in Antiochus’s army, whether you saw them in the line, posted on either wing—for that seemed to be the strength—whether you fought them as lawful enemies, cut them down, brought back their spoils. And yet it was with Antiochus, not with the Gauls, that the Senate had decreed and the people had ordered war. But at the same time, as I suppose, they decreed and ordered it against those too who should be within his garrisons; of whom, except Antiochus—with whom Scipio had made peace, and with whom by name you had charged that a treaty be made—all were enemies who bore arms for Antiochus against us. In which cause, though the Gauls were before all, and certain chieftains and tyrants, I yet both made peace with the others, compelled to atone for their offenses for the dignity of your empire, and tried the spirit of the Gauls, whether they could be softened from their inborn savagery, and, after I saw them untamed and implacable, then at last I judged that they must be coerced by force and arms.”

“Now, since the charge of the war undertaken has been cleared, account must be rendered of the war waged. In which I should indeed be confident of my cause even if I pleaded not before a Roman but before a Carthaginian senate, where commanders are said to be hung upon the cross if they have managed a matter with a bad plan, though with prosperous outcome; but I, in that state which for that very reason calls in the gods to all things begun and done, because it subjects to no man’s cavil what the gods have approved, and has in its solemn words, when it decrees a supplication or a triumph, “because he has administered the commonwealth well and happily”—I, if I were unwilling, if I thought it grievous and arrogant to boast of valor, would demand, for my own good fortune and my army’s, that, because we conquered so great a nation without any loss of soldiers, honor be paid to the immortal gods, and I myself ride triumphant up into the Capitol, whence, having duly pronounced my vows, I set out; would you deny me this together with the immortal gods? For I fought on unfavorable ground. Tell me, then, on what more favorable ground I could have fought. When the enemy had seized a mountain and held themselves in a fortified place, surely one had to go to the enemy, if I wished to conquer. What? If they had a city in that place and held themselves within walls? Surely they had to be besieged. What? At Thermopylae did Manius Acilius fight with King Antiochus on level ground? What? Did not Titus Quinctius in the same way cast down Philip, holding the mountain ridges above the river Aous? For my part, hitherto, what kind of enemy they would either feign him to themselves or wish him to seem to you, I do not discover. If degenerate and softened by the pleasantness of Asia, what danger was there, even to men going up on unfavorable ground? If to be feared both for the fierceness of their spirits and the strength of their bodies, do you deny a triumph to a victory so great as this? Blind is envy, conscript fathers, and knows nothing else than to disparage virtues, to corrupt the honors and the rewards of them. I pray you so to pardon me, conscript fathers, if no longing to boast of myself, but the necessary defense against the charges, has made my speech longer than I wished. Or could I, even through Thrace, make the open passes that were narrow, and the level out of the steep, and the cultivated out of the wooded, and guarantee that nowhere should the Thracian brigands lurk in lairs known to them, that no piece of the baggage be snatched, that no beast be dragged off from so great a column, that no man be wounded, that from his wound no brave and energetic man, Quintus Minucius, should die? At this mischance—into which it fell unhappily, that we lost such a citizen—they stick fast; that, when the enemy had attacked us in an unfavorable pass, on alien ground, two lines at once, of the van and of the rear, surrounded our army as it stuck fast at the baggage; that many thousands fell and were taken on that very day, and many more a few days after—this, if they themselves keep silent, do they not believe that you will know it, when the whole army is witness of my speech? If I had not drawn the sword in Asia, if I had not seen an enemy, yet, as proconsul, I had earned a triumph in Thrace by two battles. But enough has now been said; nay, for that I have wearied you with more words than I wished, I would beg of you, and would have, your pardon, conscript fathers.”

The charges on that day would have prevailed over the defense, had they not drawn out the altercation till late. The Senate was dismissed in the belief that it would have refused the triumph. The next day both the kinsmen and friends of Gnaeus Manlius strove with the utmost might, and the authority of the elders prevailed, who said that no precedent had been handed down to memory that a commander who, his foes thoroughly conquered and his province finished, had brought his army home, should enter the city without chariot and laurel, a private man and unhonored. This sense of shame conquered ill-will, and in full numbers they decreed the triumph.

Then a greater contest, with a greater and more illustrious man, arose, which overwhelmed all mention and memory of this dispute. Against Publius Scipio Africanus, as Valerius Antias is the authority, two Quintus Petillii appointed a day for trial. This men interpreted, each according to his own bent. Some blamed not the tribunes of the plebs, but the whole state, that could suffer such a thing: the two greatest cities of the world were found ungrateful to their leading men at nearly the same time, but Rome the more ungrateful, since conquered Carthage had driven the conquered Hannibal into exile, while victorious Rome was driving out the victorious Africanus. Others held that no single citizen ought to tower so high that he could not be questioned under the laws; that nothing made so much for the leveling of liberty as that the most powerful man should be able to plead his cause. But what could be entrusted safely to anyone, least of all the supreme conduct of the state, if no account had to be rendered? Against him who could not endure equal justice, force was not unjust. These things were stirred in talk, until the day for pleading the cause came. Never before did anyone, nor that very Scipio himself, as consul or censor, go down into the Forum with a greater throng of men of every sort than, on that day, did the defendant. Bidden to plead his cause, without any mention of the charges, he began an oration so magnificent concerning his own deeds that it was sufficiently agreed that no one was ever praised either better or more truly. For they were spoken with the same spirit and genius by which they had been done, and there was no weariness to the ears, because they were recounted for the sake of his peril, not for glory. The tribunes of the plebs, when they had brought up the old charges of the luxury of the Syracusan winter-quarters and the Pleminian disturbance at Locri to lend credit to the present charges, accused the defendant of taking bribes, by suspicions rather than by proofs: that his son, taken captive, had been returned without ransom, and that Scipio had been courted by Antiochus in all other things, as though in his one hand lay the peace and the war of Rome; that he had been to the consul a dictator, not a legate, in the province; and that he had set out for no other purpose than that—what had long been believed by Spain, Gaul, Sicily, and Africa—this should be plain to Greece and Asia and all the kings and nations turned toward the east: that one man was the head and pillar of the Roman empire; that beneath the shadow of Scipio the city, mistress of the world, lay hidden; that his nod stood for the decrees of the fathers, for the orders of the people. Untouched by infamy, they pressed him with ill-will, as they could. The speeches being drawn out into night, the day was adjourned. When it came, the tribunes took their seats on the Rostra at first light; the defendant, cited, came up through the midst of the assembly to the Rostra with a great train of friends and clients, and, silence being made, said: “On this day, tribunes of the plebs, and you, Quirites, with Hannibal and the Carthaginians, standards joined, in Africa I fought well and happily. And so, since today it is fair that lawsuits and wranglings be set aside, I shall go hence at once to the Capitol, to salute Jupiter Best and Greatest, and Juno and Minerva, and the other gods who preside over the Capitol and the citadel, and I shall give them thanks, that on this very day, and often at other times, they gave me the mind and the means of conducting the commonwealth’s business with distinction. You too, Quirites, whom it suits, come with me, and pray the gods that you have leaders like me; if from my seventeenth year to old age you have always gone before my age with your honors, I have gone before your honors with my deeds.” From the Rostra he went up into the Capitol. At the same time the whole assembly turned away and followed Scipio, so that at last even the clerks and the messengers left the tribunes, nor was there anyone with them save the servile retinue and the herald who kept citing the defendant from the Rostra. Scipio, not on the Capitol only but through the whole city, went round all the temples of the gods with the Roman people. That day was almost more thronged, by the favor of men and the reckoning of his true greatness, than the one on which he rode into the city triumphing over King Syphax and the Carthaginians.

This glorious day was the last to shine for Publius Scipio. After it, when he foresaw ill-will and contests with the tribunes, the day being adjourned to a later one, he withdrew to Liternum, with the fixed purpose of not being present to plead his cause. His spirit and his nature were too great, and too used to a greater fortune, for him to know how to be a defendant and to lower himself to the humility of those who plead. When the day came and he began to be cited in his absence, Lucius Scipio pleaded sickness as the cause why he was absent. This excuse the tribunes who had appointed the day would not accept, and charged that he came not to plead his cause out of the same arrogance by which he had abandoned the court and the tribunes of the plebs and the assembly, and, with those from whom he had taken away the right of pronouncing sentence upon him and their liberty, had, escorting them as though dragging captives, celebrated a triumph over the Roman people, and had on that day made a secession to the Capitol from the tribunes of the plebs: “You have, then, the reward of that rashness of yours; by him under whose lead and authority you abandoned us, you are yourselves abandoned; and so much do our spirits dwindle day by day, that against the man to whom, seventeen years ago, when he had an army and a fleet, we tribunes of the plebs and an aedile dared to send into Sicily, to seize him and bring him back to Rome, against that man, now a private person, to drag him from his country house to plead his cause, we dare not send.” The tribunes of the plebs, being appealed to by Lucius Scipio, decreed thus: that, if sickness were pleaded as the excuse, it was their pleasure that the excuse be accepted and the day adjourned by their colleagues. There was at that time a tribune of the plebs, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, between whom and Publius Scipio enmities subsisted. He, when he had forbidden his name to be added to the decree of his colleagues, and all looked for a harsher sentence, decreed thus: that since Lucius Scipio had pleaded that sickness was the cause for his brother, this seemed to him sufficient; that he would not suffer Publius Scipio to be accused before he had returned to Rome; that then too, if he appealed to him, he would aid him, that he should not plead his cause: that to such a height, by his deeds and by the honors of the Roman people, had Publius Scipio come, by the consent of gods and men, that for him to stand a defendant beneath the Rostra and lend his ears to the revilings of young men was more shameful to the Roman people than to himself. He added to the decree his indignation: “Shall Scipio, the tamer of Africa, stand beneath your feet, tribunes? For this did he rout and put to flight four most noble Carthaginian generals and four armies in Spain; for this take Syphax, utterly conquer Hannibal, make Carthage tributary to us, remove Antiochus—for Lucius Scipio took his brother as partner in this glory—beyond the ridges of Taurus, that he should yield to two Petillii, that you should seek the palm over Publius Africanus? By no merits of their own, by no honors from you, shall illustrious men ever come into a safe and as it were hallowed citadel, where, if not venerable, at least inviolate, their old age may settle?” Both the decree and the speech added to it moved not only the rest but the accusers themselves, and they said they would deliberate what was their right and their duty. Then, the assembly of the plebs being dismissed, the Senate began to be held. There immense thanks were given by the whole order, chiefly by the consulars and the elders, to Tiberius Gracchus, because he had held the commonwealth dearer than private quarrels; and the Petillii were assailed with reproaches, that they had wished to shine by another’s unpopularity and sought spoils from the triumph of Africanus. Then there was silence about Africanus. He passed his life at Liternum without longing for the city; dying in the country, they say that he ordered himself to be buried in that very place, and a monument built there, that no funeral be made for him in his ungrateful fatherland. A memorable man; yet more memorable in the arts of war than of peace, and the first part of his life than the last, because in his youth wars were waged continually, while in old age his achievements too withered, and no matter was furnished for his genius. What was his second consulship to the first, even if you add the censorship? What the Asian legateship, both useless through ill health and disfigured by his son’s mischance, and after his return marked by the necessity either of submitting to trial or of deserting his country together with it? Yet of the Punic war brought to its end—than which the Romans waged none either greater or more perilous—he alone bore the foremost glory.

By the death of Africanus the spirits of his enemies grew bolder, of whom the chief was Marcus Porcius Cato, who even while he lived had been wont to bark at his greatness. By his prompting it is thought that the Petillii both began the matter while Africanus lived and, when he was dead, promulgated the bill. The bill was of this sort: “Is it your will and order, Quirites, that, as to the money taken, carried off, exacted from King Antiochus and those who were under his command, what of it has not been brought into the public treasury—that concerning this matter Servius Sulpicius the city praetor refer to the Senate, which of those who are now praetors the Senate wishes to investigate the matter?” Against this bill at first Quintus and Lucius Mummius interposed; they thought it fair that the Senate investigate the money not brought into the treasury, as had always been done before. The Petillii inveighed against the nobility and the kingly power of the Scipios in the Senate. Lucius Furius Purpurio, of consular rank, who had been among the ten commissioners in Asia, thought the bill should be framed more broadly—not only the moneys taken from Antiochus, but those from other kings and nations—aiming at Gnaeus Manlius his enemy. And Lucius Scipio, who, it was clear, would speak rather for himself than against the law, came forward as its opposer. He complained that this bill had arisen from the death of his brother Publius Africanus, the bravest and most illustrious of all men: it had been too little, he said, that Publius Africanus was not praised from the Rostra after his death, unless he were also accused; and the Carthaginians were content with the exile of Hannibal, but the Roman people was not sated even by the death of Publius Scipio, unless both the fame of him in his grave were torn, and his brother besides, as an addition to their hatred, were sacrificed. Marcus Cato spoke for the bill—there is extant a speech of his on the money of King Antiochus—and deterred the Mummian tribunes by his authority from opposing the bill. The veto, therefore, being remitted by them, all the tribes ordered as the bill proposed. Then, Servius Sulpicius referring whom they wished to investigate under the Petillian bill, the fathers ordered Quintus Terentius Culleo. By this praetor—so friendly to the Cornelian family that those who hand down that Publius Scipio died and was carried out at Rome (for that too is a tradition) have recorded that he, wearing the cap of liberty, as he had gone in the triumph, went also before the bier at the funeral, and gave mead at the Porta Capena to those who escorted the funeral, because he had been among other captives received from the enemy in Africa by Scipio; or else so unfriendly that, on account of a notable feud, he was chosen above all others by that faction which was adverse to the Scipios to conduct the inquiry—by this praetor, then, whether too fair or too unfair, Lucius Scipio was at once made defendant. At the same time the names of his legates were both laid and received—of Aulus and Lucius Hostilius Cato, and of Gaius Furius Aculeo the quaestor, and, that everything might seem tainted by the partnership of peculation, two clerks also and an orderly. Lucius Hostilius and the clerks and the orderly were acquitted before judgment was passed on Scipio; Scipio and Aulus Hostilius the legate and Gaius Furius were condemned: that, to grant peace more conveniently to Antiochus, Scipio had received six thousand pounds of gold and four hundred and eighty of silver more than he brought into the treasury; Aulus Hostilius eighty pounds of gold and four hundred and three of silver; Furius the quaestor a hundred and thirty pounds of gold and two hundred of silver. These sums of gold and silver I have found recorded in Antias. In the case of Lucius Scipio I should myself prefer that there be a copyist’s error rather than a falsehood of the writer in the sum of gold and silver: for it is more like the truth that the weight of silver was greater than of gold, and that the suit was assessed at four million rather than at twenty-four million, the more so because they hand down that the account of so great a sum was demanded even of Publius Scipio himself in the Senate, and that, when he had bidden his brother Lucius bring the account-book, he tore it up with his own hands, the Senate looking on, indignant that, when he had brought two hundred million into the treasury, an account of four million was required of him. With the same confidence of spirit, when the quaestors did not dare to take money from the treasury against the law, he demanded the keys and said that he would open the treasury, he who had brought it about that it was closed. Many other things, especially about the end of Scipio’s life, and his day of trial, his death, his funeral, his tomb, are told in conflicting ways, so that I have nothing to which fame, to which writings I should assent. There is no agreement about the accuser: some write that Marcus Naevius, others that the Petillii appointed the day; nor about the time at which the day was appointed; nor about the year in which he died; nor where he died or was buried: some say at Rome, others at Liternum, that he both died and was buried. In both places monuments and statues are shown: for at Liternum there was a monument and on the monument a statue set above, which we ourselves lately saw, thrown down by a storm; and at Rome, outside the Porta Capena, in the tomb of the Scipios, there are three statues, of which two are said to be of Publius and Lucius Scipio, the third of the poet Quintus Ennius. Nor do the writers of history alone disagree, but the speeches too—if indeed those that are circulated are their own—of Publius Scipio and of Tiberius Gracchus jar with one another. The heading of the speech of Publius Scipio has the name of Marcus Naevius tribune of the plebs; the speech itself is without the accuser’s name; it calls him now a good-for-nothing, now a trifler. Not even the speech of Gracchus has any mention of the Petillii as accusers of Africanus, or of a day appointed for Africanus. A wholly different story must be woven to suit the speech of Gracchus, and those authorities must be followed who say that, when Lucius Scipio was both accused and condemned for money taken from the king, Africanus was on a legateship in Etruria; that, on the report being brought of his brother’s mischance, he left the legateship and hastened to Rome, and, when from the gate he had betaken himself straight to the Forum, because it was said his brother was being led to prison, he thrust the orderly back from his body, and, the tribunes restraining him, did violence more piously than civilly. For from this Gracchus himself complains that the tribunician power was undone by a private man, and at the last, when he promises aid to Lucius Scipio, he adds that it is of a more tolerable precedent that the tribunician power and the commonwealth be seen to be vanquished by a tribune of the plebs rather than by a private man. But so does ill-will load this one violent injustice of his that, in upbraiding him for having so far degenerated from himself, it renders back to him his old praises of moderation and self-control, heaped up, in place of the present reproach: for he says that the people was once chastised by him, because they wished to make him perpetual consul and dictator; that he forbade statues to himself to be set up in the comitium, on the Rostra, in the Curia, on the Capitol, in the shrine of Jupiter; that he forbade it to be decreed that his image in triumphal dress should go forth from the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest. These things, even if set down in a eulogy, would mark the vast greatness of a spirit that restrained itself to a citizen’s habit in the matter of honors—which an enemy confesses by way of reproach. To this Gracchus the younger of the two daughters—for the elder had been given by her father, beyond doubt, to Publius Cornelius Nasica—is agreed to have been married. It is less certain whether she was both betrothed and married after her father’s death, or whether those opinions are true, that, when Lucius Scipio was being led to prison, and none of the colleagues gave aid, Gracchus swore that the enmities between himself and the Scipios remained, such as they had been, and that he did nothing for the sake of seeking favor; but that, into the prison to which he had seen Publius Africanus leading kings and enemy commanders, into that he would not suffer Africanus’s brother to be led; and that the Senate, dining by chance that day on the Capitol, rose and begged that Africanus betroth his daughter to Gracchus amid the banquet. These betrothals being duly made at a public festival, when Scipio had returned home, he said to his wife Aemilia that he had betrothed their younger daughter. When she, with womanly indignation that nothing about their common daughter had been deliberated with her, added that the mother ought not to have been without part in the counsel, even if he were giving her to Tiberius Gracchus, Scipio, glad of so harmonious a judgment, replied that she had been betrothed to that very man. These things about so great a man, however much they vary both in opinions and in the monuments of letters, I had to set forth. The trials being finished by the praetor Quintus Terentius, Hostilius and Furius, being condemned, gave sureties that same day to the city quaestors; Scipio, when he contended that all the money he had received was in the treasury, and that he had nothing of the public’s, began to be led to prison. Publius Scipio Nasica appealed to the tribunes and delivered a speech full of true distinctions, not common to the Cornelian gens only, but proper to his own family. The parents, he said, of himself and of Publius Africanus and Lucius Scipio—who was being led to prison—had been Gnaeus and Publius Scipio, most illustrious men. They, when through several years in the land of Spain, against many generals and armies of the Carthaginians and Spaniards, they had enlarged the fame of the Roman name not by war only but because they had given those nations a pattern of Roman temperance and good faith, had at the last both fallen for the commonwealth. And whereas it would have been enough for their descendants to guard their glory, Publius Africanus had so far surpassed his father’s praises as to have made men believe that he was sprung not from human blood but from a divine stock. Lucius Scipio, of whom the matter was in hand—to pass over what he had done in Spain, what in Africa, when he was his brother’s legate—had both been judged by the Senate worthy that out of the lot the province of Asia and the war with King Antiochus should be decreed to him, and worthy by his brother, who, after two consulships and a censorship and a triumph, went as legate with him into Asia. There, lest the greatness and splendor of the legate stand in the way of the consul’s praises, it had chanced to fall out that, on the day on which at Magnesia, standards joined, Lucius Scipio conquered Antiochus, Publius Scipio, sick, was some days’ journey away at Elaea. The enemy’s army had been no smaller than Hannibal’s, with whom it had been fought in Africa; Hannibal himself had been among many other royal generals, who was the commander in the Punic war. And the war, indeed, had been so waged that no one could so much as accuse even fortune: it was in peace that a charge was sought; that was said to have come up. Here the ten commissioners were at once arraigned, by whose counsel peace had been granted; although there had risen up out of the ten commissioners men who accused Gnaeus Manlius, yet that accusation had availed not only nothing for the credit of the charge, but not even for the delay of his triumph. But, by Hercules, in Scipio’s case the very terms of the peace were suspect, as too accommodating to Antiochus: for the kingdom had been left him entire; vanquished, he possessed everything that had been his before the war; though there had been a great quantity of gold and silver, nothing had been brought into the public treasury, all had been turned to private use. Or had there not been carried, before the eyes of all, in the triumph of Lucius Scipio, more gold and silver than in ten other triumphs, if all should be brought into one? For what should I say of the bounds of the kingdom? Antiochus had held all Asia and the nearest parts of Europe. How great a region of the earth that is, jutting from Mount Taurus to the Aegean Sea, how many not cities only but nations it embraces, all know. This region, stretching more than thirty days’ journey in length, ten between two seas in breadth, as far as the ridges of Mount Taurus, had been taken from Antiochus, and he had been driven into the farthest corner of the earth. What more could have been taken from him, had the peace been gratuitous? To Philip conquered Macedonia was left, to Nabis Lacedaemon, and no charge was sought against Quinctius: for he had not had Africanus for a brother; whose glory, when it ought to have profited Lucius Scipio, had by its ill-will harmed him. So much gold and silver was adjudged to have been carried into the house of Lucius Scipio as could not be raised by selling all his goods. Where, then, was that royal gold, where the many inheritances received? In a house which expenses had not drained, the heap of a new fortune ought to have stood forth. But what could not be raised from his goods, his enemies would seek from the body and the back of Lucius Scipio by vexation and insults, that a most illustrious man be shut up in prison among nocturnal thieves and brigands, and breathe his last in the stocks and the darkness, then be cast out naked before the prison. Not to the Cornelian family more than to the city of Rome would that be a thing to blush for. Against these things the praetor Terentius read out the Petillian bill, and the decree of the Senate, and the judgment made concerning Lucius Scipio: that, unless the money which had been adjudged were brought into the treasury, he had nothing he could do, save to order the condemned man to be seized and led to prison. The tribunes, when they had withdrawn into council, a little after Gaius Fannius, out of his own and his other colleagues’ opinion—except Gracchus—declared that the tribunes did not interpose against the praetor to prevent his using his power. Tiberius Gracchus decreed thus: that, to prevent what had been adjudged from being raised out of the goods of Lucius Scipio, he did not interpose against the praetor; but that Lucius Scipio, who had utterly conquered the richest king in the world, who had extended the empire of the Roman people to the farthest bounds of the earth, who had bound King Eumenes, the Rhodians, and so many other cities of Asia by the benefits of the Roman people, who had shut up in prison the many enemy generals led in his triumph—him he would not suffer to be among the enemies of the Roman people in prison and in chains, and he ordered him to be released. With such approval was the decree heard, with such gladness did men see Scipio dismissed, that it scarcely seemed the judgment had been made in the same state. Then the praetor sent the quaestors to take possession of the goods of Lucius Scipio in the public name. And in them not only did no trace whatever of the king’s money appear, but by no means so much was raised as the sum at which he had been condemned. There was collected for Lucius Scipio by his kinsmen and friends and clients so much money that, if he had accepted it, he would have been considerably richer than before his calamity. He accepted nothing; what was necessary for his living was bought back for him by his nearest kinsmen; and the ill-will of the Scipios had turned upon the praetor and his council and the accusers.