While these things—if indeed they were done in this year—were being transacted at Rome, both consuls were waging war among the Ligurians. That enemy was, as it were, born to keep up Roman military discipline through the intervals between great wars, nor did any other province whet the soldier more to valor. For Asia, by the pleasantness of its cities and the abundance of things by land and sea, by the softness of the enemy and the wealth of kings, made armies richer rather than braver. Especially under the command of Gnaeus Manlius they had been kept loosely and negligently: and so a somewhat rougher march in Thrace and a better-trained enemy chastised them with a great disaster. Among the Ligurians there was everything that might rouse the soldier: places mountainous and rough, which it was toil both to seize for themselves and to dislodge the enemy from when he had seized them first; roads steep, narrow, beset by ambushes; an enemy light and swift and sudden, who would let no time anywhere, no place, be quiet or secure; the assault of fortified strongholds, necessary, laborious and perilous at once; a needy country, which bound the soldiers to frugality and offered little plunder. And so no sutler followed, no long line of pack-beasts stretched out the column; there was nothing but arms and men placing all their hope in arms. Nor was there ever lacking with them either material or cause for war, because, by reason of their want at home, they raided the neighboring fields; yet there was no fighting that brought the whole issue into hazard.

Gaius Flaminius the consul, having fought several successful battles with the Friniates Ligurians in their own territory, received the nation into surrender. And he took away their arms. Because they handed these over with no honest good faith, when they were rebuked, they left their villages and fled to Mount Auginus. The consul followed at once. But, scattering again, and the greatest part of them unarmed, they fled headlong through trackless places and sheer rocks, where the enemy could not follow. So they passed across the Apennine. Those who had kept themselves in camp were surrounded and stormed. Thence the legions were led across the Apennine. There, defending themselves for a little while by the height of the mountain they had seized, soon they yielded to surrender. Then, with more careful search, their arms were sought out and all taken away. The war was then carried over to the Apuan Ligurians, who had so raided into the territory of Pisa and of Bononia that it could not be tilled. These too being thoroughly subdued, the consul gave peace to their neighbors. And because he had brought it about that the province was quiet from war, lest he keep the soldier in idleness, he carried a road from Bononia through to Arretium. Marcus Aemilius the other consul burned and laid waste the fields and villages of the Ligurians that were in the plains or the valleys, they themselves holding two mountains, Ballista and Suismontium. Then, attacking those who were on the mountains, he first wore them down with light skirmishes, and at last, when they were forced to come down into line, conquered them in a regular battle, in which too he vowed a temple to Diana. All this side of the Apennine subdued, he then attacked those beyond the mountains—among whom were also the Friniates Ligurians, whom Gaius Flaminius had not reached—and Aemilius subdued them all, took away their arms, and brought the multitude down from the mountains into the plains. The Ligurians being pacified, he led his army into Gallic territory, and carried a road from Placentia to Ariminum, to join it to the Flaminian Way. In the last battle, in which he fought with the Ligurians with standards joined, he vowed a temple to Juno the Queen. These things were done among the Ligurians in that year.

In Gaul Marcus Furius the praetor, seeking the appearance of war in peace, had taken away the arms of the innocent Cenomani. The Cenomani, complaining of this at Rome before the Senate, and referred to the consul Aemilius—to whom the Senate had given leave to investigate and decide—after a great contest with the praetor, won their cause. The praetor was ordered to give the arms back to the Cenomani and to withdraw from his province.

Then the Senate was granted to the envoys of the allies of the Latin name, who had gathered in great numbers from all Latium on every side. As they complained that a great multitude of their citizens had migrated to Rome and there been assessed, the task was given to Quintus Terentius Culleo the praetor to seek them out, and that, whomever the allies should prove to have been assessed before themselves—himself or his father—in the censorship of Gaius Claudius and Marcus Livius or after those censors, he should compel to return to the place where they had been assessed. By this search twelve thousand Latins returned home, the city being even then burdened by the multitude of foreigners.

Before the consuls returned to Rome, Marcus Fulvius the proconsul came back from Aetolia; and when, at the temple of Apollo, he had discoursed in the Senate of the things done by him in Aetolia and Cephallania, he asked the fathers to think it fair that, for the commonwealth well and happily managed, honor be paid to the immortal gods, and to decree him a triumph. Marcus Aburius, tribune of the plebs, made it plain that he would interpose if anything were decreed on that matter before the coming of the consul Marcus Aemilius: he wished, he said, to oppose it, and, setting out for his province, had so charged him, that this dispute be kept entire until his coming. Fulvius was suffering only a loss of time; the Senate, even with the consul present, would decree what it wished. Then Fulvius: even if the feud of Marcus Aemilius with him were unknown to men, or with what an ungovernable and almost kingly anger he pursued those enmities, it would yet not have been to be borne that an absent consul should both stand in the way of the honor of the immortal gods and delay a merited and owed triumph—that a commander, his deeds excellently done, and a victorious army with plunder and captives should stand before the gates, until it pleased the consul, for this very reason delaying, to return to Rome. But indeed, since his enmities with the consul were most notorious, what fair thing could anyone expect from him, who, by means of thin attendance, had stealthily carried to the treasury a decree of the Senate that Ambracia did not appear to have been taken by force—Ambracia, which had been assaulted with mound and mantlets, where, the works being burned, others were made anew, where about the walls, above and below the ground, it was fought for fifteen days, where from first light, when the soldier had already crossed the walls, until night a long doubtful battle was held, where more than three thousand of the enemy were slain? Then, concerning the temples of the immortal gods despoiled in the captured city, what a cavil had he brought to the pontiffs? Unless it had been lawful to adorn the city with the ornaments of Syracuse and of the other captured cities, in the one capture of Ambracia the law of war was to have no force. He both begged the conscript fathers and asked of the tribune that they not suffer him to be a laughing-stock to his most arrogant enemy. From every side all either entreated the tribune or chid him. The speech of his colleague Tiberius Gracchus moved him most: that it was not of good example to exercise even one’s own feuds while in office; but for a tribune of the plebs to become the agent of others’ feuds was base and unworthy of the power of his college and of the sacred laws. Each man ought, by his own judgment, both to hate or love men and to approve or disapprove of matters, and not to hang upon another’s look and nod, nor be wheeled about by the impulses of another’s mind; that a tribune of the plebs should second an angry consul, and remember what Marcus Aemilius had charged him privately, but forget that the tribunate had been entrusted to him by the Roman people—and entrusted for the aid and liberty of private men, not for a consular tyranny. He did not even perceive this, that it would be handed down to memory and to posterity that, of the same college, of two tribunes of the plebs, the one had remitted his own enmities for the commonwealth, the other had exercised those of others, and at another’s bidding. Overcome by these chidings, when the tribune had withdrawn from the temple, on the motion of Servius Sulpicius the praetor a triumph was decreed to Marcus Fulvius. He, when he had given thanks to the conscript fathers, added that he had vowed Great Games to Jupiter Best and Greatest on the day on which he took Ambracia; that for that purpose a hundred pounds of gold had been contributed to him by the cities; and he asked that, out of that money which, carried in the triumph, he was going to place in the treasury, they order that gold to be set apart. The Senate ordered the college of pontiffs to be consulted whether it was necessary that all that gold be spent on the games. When the pontiffs answered that it did not pertain to religion how great an expense were made on the games, the Senate allowed Fulvius to spend as much as he would, provided it did not exceed the sum of eighty thousand. He had resolved to triumph in the month of January; but when he had heard that the consul Marcus Aemilius, having received a letter from the tribune of the plebs Marcus Aburius about the veto withdrawn, was himself coming to Rome to hinder the triumph, and had halted sick on the way, he advanced the day of his triumph, lest he have more contests in the triumph than in the war. He triumphed on the tenth day before the Kalends of January over the Aetolians and over Cephallania. Golden crowns of a hundred and twelve pounds were carried before his chariot; of silver, eighty-three thousand pounds; of gold, two hundred and forty-three pounds; a hundred and eighteen thousand Attic tetradrachms; twelve thousand four hundred and twenty-two Philippic coins; seven hundred and eighty-five bronze statues; two hundred and thirty marble statues; a great number of arms, weapons, and other spoils of the enemy, and besides, catapults, ballistae, and engines of every kind; the leaders, whether Aetolians and Cephallenians or the king’s men left there by Antiochus, to the number of twenty-seven. Many that day, before he was borne into the city, in the Circus Flaminius he honored with military gifts—tribunes, prefects, horsemen, centurions, Romans and allies. To the soldiers he distributed twenty-five denarii each out of the plunder, double to the centurion, triple to the horseman.

Now the time of the consular elections was drawing near; and because Marcus Aemilius, whose lot that charge was, could not attend them, Gaius Flaminius came to Rome. By him were created consuls Spurius Postumius Albinus and Quintus Marcius Philippus. Then were made praetors Titus Maenius, Publius Cornelius Sulla, Gaius Calpurnius Piso, Marcus Licinius Lucullus, Gaius Aurelius Scaurus, Lucius Quinctius Crispinus.

At the close of the year, the magistrates being already created, on the third day before the Nones of March, Gnaeus Manlius Vulso triumphed over the Gauls who inhabit Asia. The cause of his triumphing late was that he might not, while Quintus Terentius Culleo was praetor, plead his cause under the Petillian law and be consumed in the conflagration of another’s trial, by which Lucius Scipio had been condemned—the jurors the more hostile to him than to Scipio, because rumor had brought it that the military discipline, sternly preserved by Scipio, his own successor had corrupted with every kind of license. Nor were those things alone matter for ill-fame which were told as done in the province, far from men’s eyes, but even more those which were daily seen in his soldiers. For the origin of foreign luxury was brought into the city by the army from Asia. They first imported to Rome bronze-inlaid couches, costly coverlets, hangings and other woven stuffs, and what then were held to be magnificent furniture, side-tables and sideboards. Then were added to banquets girls playing the lute and the harp and other festive entertainments of the shows; the banquets themselves, too, began to be prepared with greater care and expense. Then the cook, to the ancients the cheapest of chattels both in estimation and in use, came to be of price, and what had been a menial service began to be reckoned an art. Yet hardly were those things which were then beheld the seeds of the luxury to come.

In his triumph Gnaeus Manlius carried golden crowns of two hundred and twelve pounds, of silver two hundred and twenty thousand pounds, of gold two thousand one hundred and three pounds, a hundred and twenty-seven thousand Attic tetradrachms, two hundred and fifty thousand cistophori, sixteen thousand three hundred and twenty gold Philippic coins; and many arms and Gallic spoils were carried past on wagons; fifty-two leaders of the enemy were led before his chariot. To the soldiers he distributed forty-two denarii each, double to the centurion, triple to the horsemen, and gave double pay to the foot; many of all ranks, honored with military gifts, followed his chariot, and such songs were sung by the soldiers upon their commander that it was easily plain that they were sung upon an indulgent and favor-courting leader, and that the triumph was thronged by military rather than by popular favor. But to win the people’s favor too the friends of Manlius availed, by whose striving a decree of the Senate was passed that, out of the money which had been carried in the triumph, the war-tax contributed by the people into the public chest, what of it had not before been repaid, should be repaid. The city quaestors paid out, with care and good faith, twenty-five and a half asses for each thousand of bronze.

At the same time two military tribunes came from the two Spains with letters from Gaius Atinius and Lucius Manlius, who held those provinces. From these letters it was learned that the Celtiberians and the Lusitanians were in arms and laying waste the fields of the allies. The Senate referred the deliberation on that matter entire to the new magistrates.

At the Roman Games that year, which Publius Cornelius Cethegus and Aulus Postumius Albinus were giving, a mast in the circus, being unstable, fell upon the statue of Pollentia and threw it down. Moved by this religious sign, the fathers resolved both that one day be added to the games, and that two statues be set up in place of the one, and a new one made and gilded. And the Plebeian Games were repeated for one day by the aediles Gaius Sempronius Blaesus and Marcus Furius Luscus.

The following year turned the consuls Spurius Postumius Albinus and Quintus Marcius Philippus away from the army and the care of wars and provinces to the punishing of a conspiracy within the state. The praetors drew their provinces: Titus Maenius the city, Marcus Licinius Lucullus the jurisdiction between citizens and foreigners, Gaius Aurelius Scaurus Sardinia, Publius Cornelius Sulla Sicily, Lucius Quinctius Crispinus Hither Spain, Gaius Calpurnius Piso Farther Spain. To both consuls was decreed the inquiry into secret conspiracies. A Greek of no standing came first into Etruria, possessed of none of those many arts which that most learned of all nations brought in to us for the cultivation of mind and body—a petty sacrificer and a seer; nor one who, by an open religion, professing his trade and his teaching in public, imbued minds with error, but a priest of secret and nocturnal rites. There were initiations, which at first were imparted to a few, then began to be spread abroad among men and women. To the religion were added the pleasures of wine and feasting, that the minds of more might be enticed. When wine had inflamed their spirits, and night, and the mingling of males with females, of tender age with the older, had quenched every distinction of modesty, corruptions of every kind began first to be practiced, since each had ready to hand the pleasure to which he was by nature the more inclined. Nor was the mischief of one kind only—the promiscuous debauchery of freeborn men and women—but from the same workshop went forth false witnesses, forged seals and wills and informations, and from the same place poisons and murders within households, so that at times not even the bodies survived for burial. Much was dared by guile, most by violence; and the violence was hidden, because amid the howlings and the din of drums and cymbals no voice of those crying out under debauchery and murder could be heard.

The taint of this evil passed from Etruria to Rome like the contagion of a disease. At first the size of the city, more able to hold and to bear such evils, concealed it; at last the information reached the consul Postumius, chiefly in this manner. Publius Aebutius, whose father had served on a public horse, had been left a ward, and then, his guardians dead, had been brought up under the guardianship of his mother Duronia and his stepfather Titus Sempronius Rutilus. The mother was devoted to her husband, and the stepfather, because he had so managed the guardianship that he could not render an account, desired either that his ward be put out of the way, or be made bound to him by some chain. The one road to his corruption was the Bacchanalia. The mother accosted the young man: she had vowed, while he was sick, that as soon as he recovered she would initiate him to Bacchus; bound by the vow, she wished, through the kindness of the gods, to discharge it. There was need of ten days’ chastity; on the tenth day she would, after he had dined and been duly washed clean, lead him into the shrine. There was a noted courtesan, the freedwoman Hispala Faecenia, not worthy of the trade to which, as a young slave-girl, she had grown used, and who, even after she had been manumitted, kept herself by the same calling. With her Aebutius had an intimacy, by reason of neighborhood, in no way harmful either to the young man’s estate or to his repute; for he had been loved and sought of her own accord, and, since his own people supplied everything grudgingly, he was maintained by the little courtesan’s bounty. Nay, she had so far advanced, taken by their intimacy, that, after her patron’s death, because she was in no one’s tutelage, having sought a guardian from the tribunes and the praetor, when she made her will she named Aebutius her sole heir. Since these were the pledges of their love, and neither had any secret from the other, the young man in jest bade her not wonder if for several nights he slept apart: for religion’s sake, that he might be freed of a vow made for his health, he wished to be initiated to Bacchus. When the woman heard this, dismayed, she cried, “The gods send better!”—it were better for both her and him to die than that he should do it—and she called down curses and perils on the heads of those who had advised it. The young man, wondering both at her words and at so great a perturbation, bade her spare her execrations: his mother had commanded it, his stepfather assenting. “Your stepfather, then,” she said—“for to accuse your mother is perhaps not lawful—hastens by this deed to make away with your chastity, your repute, your hope, your life.” To him, the more wondering and asking what the matter was, having prayed for the peace and pardon of the gods and goddesses if, compelled by her love for him, she uttered what should be kept silent, she said that, as a maidservant, she had entered that shrine as the companion of her mistress; that, as a free woman, she had never gone near it: that she knew it to be the workshop of corruptions of every kind, and that it was now established for two years past that no one above twenty years of age had been initiated there. As each was brought in, he was handed over to the priests like a victim; they led him into a place that resounded all about with howlings and the song of the consort and the beat of cymbals and drums, that the voice of him crying out, when by force the outrage was done, might not be heard. Then she begged and besought him to break off that matter by whatever means, and not to hurl himself into a place where first all unspeakable things must be suffered, then done; nor did she let him go before the young man pledged his word that he would keep from those rites. After he came home, and his mother made mention of what was to be done that day and thereafter on the other days that pertained to the rites, he said that he would do none of them, and that it was not in his mind to be initiated. The stepfather was present at the talk. At once the woman cried out that he could not do without the embrace of Hispala for ten nights; that, steeped in the blandishments and poisons of that viper, he had no reverence for parent or stepfather or gods. Wrangling, on this side the mother, on that the stepfather, drove him from the house with four slaves. The young man thereupon betook himself to his aunt Aebutia, and told her the cause why he had been cast out by his mother; then, on her advice, the next day he laid the matter before the consul Postumius, with no witnesses by. The consul dismissed him, bidding him return on the third day; he himself questioned Sulpicia, a grave woman, his mother-in-law, whether she knew any old woman Aebutia from the Aventine. When she answered that she knew her, an upright woman and of the old fashion, he said he had need to confer with her: let her send a message to her to come. Aebutia, summoned, came to Sulpicia, and the consul a little after, as though he had chanced to come in, brought up talk of Aebutius, her brother’s son. Tears welled up in the woman, and she began to lament the young man’s lot, who, robbed of his fortunes by those who least ought, was then with her, cast out by his mother because—the gods be gracious—the upright youth would not, as the report was, be initiated into obscene rites.

The consul, reckoning that he had explored enough concerning Aebutius to know him no idle authority, dismissed Aebutia and asked his mother-in-law to summon to her, from the same Aventine, the freedwoman Hispala, not unknown to the neighborhood: there was something he wished to ask her too. At whose message Hispala was dismayed, because she was summoned, ignorant of the cause, to so noble and grave a woman; and after she saw the lictors in the vestibule, and the consul’s throng, and the consul himself, she was almost lifeless. Led into the inner part of the house, her mother-in-law being at hand, the consul said that she need not be perturbed, if she could bring herself to speak the truth; let her take a pledge either from Sulpicia, such a woman, or from himself; let her set forth to him what was wont to be done at the Bacchanalia in the grove of Stimula in the nocturnal rite. When she heard this, so great a terror and trembling of all her limbs seized the woman that for a long while she could not open her lips. At last, recovering herself, she said that, quite a girl, she had been initiated as a maidservant with her mistress; that for some years, since she was manumitted, she knew nothing of what was done there. Already the consul praised this, that she did not deny she had been initiated; but let her set forth the rest too with the same good faith. When she denied that she knew anything further, he said that, if she were convicted by another, there would not be the same pardon or favor as for one confessing of herself: that the man who had heard it from her had set everything before him. The woman, thinking beyond doubt—as was the case—that Aebutius was the betrayer of the secret, fell at Sulpicia’s feet and began at first to beg her not to wish a freedwoman’s talk with her lover to be turned into a matter not merely serious but even capital: she had spoken those things to frighten him, not because she knew anything. At this Postumius, kindled with anger, said that even then she thought she was bantering with her lover Aebutius, and not speaking in the house of a most grave woman and with a consul; and Sulpicia raised her as she trembled, and at once encouraged her and soothed her son-in-law’s anger. At last, recovering, after much upbraiding of the perfidy of Aebutius, who had returned such thanks to one who had deserved the very best of him in that very matter, she said that great was her fear of the gods, whose secret rites she was disclosing, but much greater her fear of men, who would tear the informer in pieces with their own hands. And so she begged this of Sulpicia, this of the consul, that they send her away somewhere outside Italy, where she might pass the rest of her life in safety. The consul bade her be of good cheer, and said it would be his care that she should dwell safely at Rome. Then Hispala set forth the origin of the rites: at first that shrine had been of women, nor was any man wont to be admitted to it; they had three fixed days in the year, on which by day they were initiated to Bacchus, and it was the custom for matrons to be made priestesses in turn. Paculla Annia, a Campanian, as priestess, had changed everything, as though by the gods’ admonition: for she first had initiated men, her own sons, Minius and Herennius Cerrinius; had made the rite nocturnal instead of by day, and, instead of three days in the year, five days of initiation in each month. From the time that the rites were promiscuous, and men were mingled with women, and the license of night was added, no crime, no outrage had been left undone there. There were more debaucheries of men among themselves than of women. If any were less patient of disgrace and more sluggish to crime, they were sacrificed as victims. To count nothing impious—this was the very height of religion among them. Men, as though with mind possessed, prophesied with fanatic tossings of the body; matrons, in the garb of Bacchae, with hair disheveled, ran down to the Tiber with blazing torches, and, plunging the torches into the water—because they held live sulphur with lime—drew them out with the flame whole. Men were said to be snatched away by the gods, whom machines, bound to them, carried off out of sight into hidden caverns: these were they who had refused either to conspire, or to join in the crimes, or to suffer outrage. The number was huge, by now almost a second people; among them certain noble men and women. Within the last two years it had been ordained that none above twenty years of age be initiated: ages were sought out fit for error and for outrage. The information done, falling again at the consul’s knees she repeated the same prayers, that he send her away. The consul asked his mother-in-law to make vacant some part of the house, whither Hispala might move. An upper room above the house was given, its stairs leading to the street being barred, the approach turned toward the inner house. All Faecenia’s belongings were at once moved over, and her household summoned; and Aebutius was bidden to move to the house of a client of the consul.

So, with both informers now in his power, Postumius laid the matter before the Senate, setting forth everything in order—what had first been reported, and what he had thereafter himself uncovered. A great fear seized the fathers, both on the public account—lest those conspiracies and nocturnal gatherings should bring some hidden treachery or peril—and privately, each on his own people’s behalf, lest some kinsman be implicated in that guilt. The Senate, moreover, resolved that thanks be given to the consul, because he had investigated the matter both with singular care and without any uproar. Then they entrusted to the consuls, as an extraordinary commission, the inquiry into the Bacchanalia and the nocturnal rites; they bade them see to it that the matter bring no harm to the informers Aebutius and Faecenia, and to draw other informers on with rewards; that the priests of those rites, whether men or women, be sought out not at Rome only but throughout all the market-towns and places of assembly, so that they might be in the consuls’ power; that, besides, proclamation be made in the city of Rome and edicts sent throughout all Italy, that no one who had been initiated to Bacchus should seek to assemble or come together for the sake of the rites, nor perform any such act of worship; above all, that inquiry be held into those who had gathered or conspired to bring about debauchery or outrage. These things the Senate decreed. The consuls charged the curule aediles to seek out all the priests of that rite, and to keep those arrested in free custody for the inquiry; the plebeian aediles were to see that no rites were performed in secret. To the triumviri capitales—the three commissioners of capital cases—it was committed to post watches throughout the city and to ensure that no nocturnal gatherings took place, and that precaution be taken against fires; and that, as their aides, the quinqueviri should each take charge of the buildings of his own district on this side of the Tiber. The magistrates having been dismissed to these duties, the consuls mounted the Rostra, and, an assembly being called, when the consul had performed the solemn formula of prayer which the magistrates are wont to pronounce before they address the people, he began thus: "Never, Quirites, to any assembly has this solemn supplication of the gods been not only so fitting but even so necessary—to remind you that these are the gods whom your forefathers appointed you to worship, to revere, and to pray to; not those who drive minds, once captured by depraved and foreign cults, as though by maddening goads, to every crime and to every lust. For my part, I can find neither what to keep silent nor how far to speak out. If you remain ignorant of anything, I fear I may leave room for negligence; if I lay all bare, that I may beat too much terror into you. Whatever I shall say, know that it is said as less than the atrocity and the magnitude of the matter deserve; that it be enough to put you on your guard, we shall take pains. That the Bacchanalia have long been spread over all Italy, and now exist even within the city in many places, you have learned, I am certain, not by report alone but by the nocturnal crashings and howlings that resound through the whole city; yet what the thing is, you do not know. Some believe it to be some worship of the gods, others a permitted sport and wantonness, and that, whatever it be, it concerns but a few. As to their number, if I tell you that there are many thousands of them, you must at once be terrified, unless I add who and what they are. First, then, the greater part are women, and this was the source of this evil; next, males most like women, defiled and defilers, fanatics, dazed by sleepless nights, by wine, by din and nocturnal shoutings. The conspiracy as yet has no strength, but it has a huge increase of strength, in that day by day they grow more. Your forefathers would not have even you assemble by chance and at random, save when either the standard had been set on the citadel and the army led out for the elections, or the tribunes had proclaimed a council of the plebs, or some one of the magistrates had summoned an assembly; and wherever there was a multitude, there too they judged a lawful director of the multitude ought to be. Of what sort do you believe gatherings to be that are first nocturnal, and then promiscuous of women and men? If you knew at what ages the males are initiated, you would not only pity them but be ashamed for them. Do you judge, Quirites, that young men initiated by this oath are to be made soldiers? Are arms to be entrusted to men led forth from that obscene shrine? Shall these, befouled with debaucheries their own and others’, do battle with the sword for the chastity of your wives and your children? Yet it would be a lesser thing, had they only been unmanned by outrages—that disgrace would in great part have been their own—if they had but kept their hands from crimes and their minds from frauds. Never has there been so great an evil in the commonwealth, nor one reaching to more persons or to more things. Whatever in these years has been sinned through lust, whatever through fraud, whatever through crime, know that it has sprung from that one shrine. Nor have they yet brought to fulfillment all the crimes for which they have conspired. As yet the impious conspiracy confines itself to private mischief, because there is not yet settled strength enough to crush the commonwealth. The evil grows and creeps on daily. Already it is greater than a private fortune can contain; it looks toward the highest interest of the state. Unless you take precaution, Quirites, a nocturnal assembly may soon be able to match this daytime one, lawfully summoned by a consul. Now they, one by one, fear you assembled all together; but presently, when you have dispersed to your homes and to your country places, they will have come together, and will take counsel about their own safety and at the same time about your destruction; then they, all together, must be feared by you one by one. Each one of you, therefore, ought to pray that all his own have kept a sound mind. If lust, if frenzy, has swept any man into that whirlpool, let him judge that man to belong to those with whom he has conspired for every outrage and crime, and not to be his own. I am not even free of anxiety lest some among you too slip through error. For nothing in appearance is more deceptive than religion perverted. When the divine power of the gods is held up as a screen for crimes, a fear steals upon the mind, lest in punishing human frauds we violate something of divine law mingled in with them. From this scruple innumerable decrees of the pontiffs, decrees of the Senate, and finally the responses of the haruspices set you free. How often, in the age of our fathers and grandfathers, was this charge given to the magistrates—to forbid foreign rites, to bar petty sacrificers and seers from the forum, the circus, the city, to seek out and burn the books of prophecy, to abolish every system of sacrifice save after the Roman manner! For those men, most learned in all law human and divine, judged that nothing so dissolved religion as sacrifice made not by the ancestral but by a foreign rite. These things I have thought must be foretold to you, lest any superstition trouble your minds when you see us pulling down the Bacchic shrines and breaking up those abominable gatherings. All this we shall do with the gods favorable and willing; who, because they brooked it ill that their divinity should be defiled with crimes and lusts, have dragged these things out of their hidden darkness into the light, and have willed them uncovered not that they should go unpunished, but that they should be punished and crushed. The Senate has committed to me and to my colleague an extraordinary inquiry into the matter. We shall press on energetically with what we ourselves must do; the care of the nocturnal watches throughout the city we have committed to the lesser magistrates; and it is fair that you too, in whatever post each shall be placed, energetically discharge what are your duties, perform whatever shall be ordered, and take pains that no danger or disturbance arise from the treachery of the guilty."

Then they ordered the decrees of the Senate to be read out, and held out a reward to any informer who should bring a man before them or report the name of one absent: that for one who, being named, had fled, they would fix a certain day, by which, unless he answered the summons, he should be condemned in his absence; and that, if any of those who were then outside the land of Italy were named, they would grant him a more liberal day, should he wish to come to plead his cause. Then they proclaimed that no one should seek to sell or to buy anything for the sake of flight; that no one should receive, conceal, or aid by any help those who fled.

When the assembly had been dismissed there was great terror through the whole city; nor did it keep within the walls of the city or the Roman borders alone, but everywhere through all Italy, as letters from guest-friends about the Senate’s decree, the assembly, and the consuls’ edict were received, men began to take alarm. Many, on the night that followed the day on which the matter was made public in the assembly, were caught fleeing by the triumviri—watches having been posted about the gates—and brought back; the names of many were lodged. Certain of them, men and women, took their own lives. More than seven thousand men and women were said to have conspired. The heads of the conspiracy, it was established, were Marcus and Gaius Atinius, of the Roman plebs, the Faliscan Lucius Opiternius, and Minius Cerrinius the Campanian: from these had sprung all the crimes and outrages; they were the chief priests and founders of that rite. Pains were taken that they be arrested at the earliest possible moment. Brought before the consuls, and confessing about themselves, they made no delay in giving information. But so great a flight from the city had taken place that, because lawsuits and property were being lost to many, the praetors Titus Maenius and Marcus Licinius were forced, with the Senate’s authority, to put off legal business to the thirtieth day, until the inquiries should be completed by the consuls. The same emptiness—since those whose names had been lodged neither answered at Rome nor could be found—compelled the consuls to go about the market-towns and there investigate and hold the trials. Those who had only been initiated and, the priest leading the words from the sacred formula, had made the prayers in which the unspeakable conspiracy to every crime and lust was contained, but had committed against themselves or others none of the deeds to which they had bound themselves by oath—these they left in chains; those who had been defiled with debaucheries or murders, who were polluted with false testimonies, counterfeit seals, the substitution of wills, and other frauds—these they punished with death. More were put to death than were cast into chains. In both cases there was a great number of men and women. The condemned women they handed over to their kinsmen, or to those in whose hand they were, that these might punish them in private; if there was no suitable exactor of the penalty, punishment was inflicted in public. Then the task was given to the consuls to destroy all the Bacchic shrines, first at Rome, then throughout all Italy, except where there was some ancient altar or consecrated image. For the future, it was further provided by decree of the Senate that there be no Bacchanalia at Rome or in Italy; that if anyone held such a rite to be solemn and necessary, and that he could not omit it without scruple and the need of expiation, he should declare it before the urban praetor, and the praetor should consult the Senate; that, if it were permitted him, with not fewer than a hundred present in the Senate, he might perform that rite, provided not more than five took part in the sacrifice, and that there be no common fund, no master of the rites, and no priest.

Then another decree of the Senate, joined to this, was passed, the consul Quintus Marcius moving it: that concerning those whom the consuls had treated as informers, the whole matter be brought before the Senate when Spurius Postumius, the inquiries finished, should have returned to Rome. They resolved that Minius Cerrinius the Campanian be sent in chains to Ardea, and that the magistrates of the Ardeates be charged to keep him under closer guard, not only that he might not escape, but that he might have no opportunity of making away with himself. Spurius Postumius came to Rome somewhat later; and on his motion, concerning a reward for Publius Aebutius and Hispala Faecenia, because by their service the Bacchanalia had been disclosed, a decree of the Senate was passed that the city quaestors should give to each of them a hundred thousand asses from the treasury; that the consul should treat with the tribunes of the plebs, that they bring before the plebs at the earliest time, that for Publius Aebutius his military service be reckoned complete, that he should not serve against his will, and that no censor should assign him a public horse; that to Faecenia Hispala there should belong the right of conveying away property, of passing out of her clan, of marrying outside it, and the choice of her own guardian, just as if a husband had granted these to her by will; that it be lawful for her to marry a freeborn man, and that this be no detriment or disgrace to him who should marry her; that the consuls and praetors, those then in office and those who should be hereafter, take care that no wrong be done to that woman, and that she be in safety. This the Senate willed and judged it fair that so it be done. All these were brought before the plebs and enacted in accordance with the decree of the Senate; and concerning the impunity and rewards of the other informers, discretion was granted to the consuls.

And now Quintus Marcius, the inquiries of his district finished, was preparing to set out for his province among the Ligurians, having received as reinforcement three thousand Roman foot, a hundred and fifty horse, and five thousand foot of the Latin name with two hundred horse. The same province, the same number of foot and horse, had been decreed to his colleague. They took over the armies which in the previous year the consuls Gaius Flaminius and Marcus Aemilius had held. Besides, they were ordered by decree of the Senate to enroll two new legions, and they levied upon the allies and the Latin name twenty thousand foot and eight hundred horse, and three thousand Roman foot and two hundred horse. It was resolved that this whole force, apart from the legions, be led to Spain as reinforcement for the army there. And so the consuls, while they themselves were hindered by the inquiries, set Titus Maenius in charge of holding the levy. The inquiries finished, Quintus Marcius first set out against the Apuan Ligurians. While he pursued them deep into the hidden forest passes, which had always been their lurking-places and refuges, he was surrounded on unfavorable ground in defiles seized before him. Four thousand soldiers were lost; three standards of the second legion and eleven banners of the allies of the Latin name came into the enemy’s power, and much weaponry, which, because it hindered the men fleeing along the woodland paths, was flung away on every side. The Ligurians made an end of pursuing sooner than the Romans of flight. The consul, as soon as he had escaped from the enemy’s territory, that it might not appear how much his forces had been diminished, disbanded his army through pacified districts. Yet he could not blot out the report of the ill-managed affair; for the pass from which the Ligurians had routed him was called the Marcian.

Hard upon this news, spread abroad from the Ligurian country, letters from Spain were read out, bringing a sadness mingled with joy. Gaius Atinius, who two years before had set out as praetor for that province, fought a pitched battle with the Lusitanians in the territory of Hasta; about six thousand of the enemy were slain, the rest routed, put to flight, and stripped of their camp. Then he led his legions to assault the town of Hasta; this too he took with no much greater struggle than the camp, but, while he approached the walls too incautiously, he was struck, and died of the wound a few days later. When the letters about the death of the propraetor had been read, the Senate resolved that someone be sent to overtake the praetor Gaius Calpurnius at the port of Luna and announce that the Senate judged it fair, lest the province be without a commander, that he hasten his setting out. On the fourth day the man who had been sent reached Luna; Calpurnius had departed a few days before. And in Hither Spain, Lucius Manlius Acidinus, who had gone to his province at the same time as Gaius Atinius, clashed in battle line with the Celtiberians. They parted with the victory undecided, save that the Celtiberians moved their camp away the following night, and the Romans were given the chance both of burying their own and of gathering spoils from the enemy. A few days later, a larger army having been mustered, the Celtiberians of their own accord challenged the Romans to battle at the town of Calagurris. Nothing is handed down as to what cause made them weaker though greater in number. They were overcome in the battle; about twelve thousand men were slain, more than two thousand captured, and the Roman took possession of the camp; and had not the successor by his arrival checked the victor’s onset, the Celtiberians would have been subdued. Both the new praetors led their armies into winter quarters.

During those days on which this news came from Spain, the Taurian Games were held for two days for religion’s sake. Then Marcus Fulvius held for ten days the elaborate games which he had vowed in the Aetolian war. Many performers came from Greece for the honor of the occasion. A contest of athletes too was then for the first time a spectacle for the Romans, and a hunt of lions and panthers was given, and the show was celebrated with an abundance and variety almost of the present age. Then a nine-day rite was observed, because in Picenum it had rained stones for three days, and fires from heaven, breaking out in many quarters, were said to have scorched the garments of a good many by a light breath of flame. A supplication of one day besides was added by decree of the pontiffs, because the temple of Ops on the Capitol had been struck from the sky. The consuls made expiation with full-grown victims and purified the city. About the same time it was reported from Umbria too that a half-male, about twelve years old, had been found. Abhorring this prodigy, they ordered it kept from Roman soil and put to death as soon as possible.

In the same year Transalpine Gauls, having crossed into Venetia without ravaging or war, took, not far from where Aquileia now stands, a site for founding a town. To the Roman envoys sent across the Alps about the matter the answer was given that they had not set out by authority of their nation, and that they did not know what they were doing in Italy.

Lucius Scipio at that time held for ten days the games which he said he had vowed in the war with Antiochus, out of money contributed for the purpose by kings and cities. That after his condemnation and the sale of his goods he was sent as envoy into Asia to settle the disputes between the kings Antiochus and Eumenes, Valerius Antias is the authority; that then the moneys were contributed to him and performers gathered from throughout Asia, and that of those games—of which, after the war in which he claimed to have vowed them, he had made no mention—only after the embassy was the matter at last raised in the Senate.

As the year was now at its close, Quintus Marcius was about to lay down his magistracy while absent; Spurius Postumius, the inquiries completed with the utmost good faith and care, held the elections. The consuls elected were Appius Claudius Pulcher and Marcus Sempronius Tuditanus. On the next day the praetors made were Publius Cornelius Cethegus, Aulus Postumius Albinus, Gaius Afranius Stellio, Gaius Atilius Serranus, Lucius Postumius Tempsanus, and Marcus Claudius Marcellus. At the close of the year, because the consul Spurius Postumius had reported that, in traversing both coasts of Italy on account of the inquiries, he had found the colonies deserted—Sipontum on the upper sea, Buxentum on the lower—three commissioners for enrolling colonists thither were appointed, by decree of the Senate, by Titus Maenius the urban praetor: Lucius Scribonius Libo, Marcus Tuccius, and Gnaeus Baebius Tamphilus.

The war that was impending with King Perseus and the Macedonians took its causes neither from where most suppose, nor from Perseus himself: its beginnings were set in motion by Philip, and he himself, had he lived longer, would have waged that war. One thing, when terms were being imposed upon him in defeat, vexed him most: that the right of taking vengeance on those Macedonians who had deserted him in the war had been taken from him by the Senate—though, because Quinctius had left the matter open among the conditions of peace, he had not despaired of being able to obtain it. Then, when King Antiochus had been overcome in the war at Thermopylae, the spheres being divided, and when during those same days the consul Acilius had assaulted Heraclea and Philip Lamia, after Heraclea was taken—because he was ordered to withdraw from the walls of Lamia, and the town was surrendered to the Romans—he had borne the matter ill. The consul soothed his anger, in that, while himself hastening to Naupactus, whither the Aetolians had betaken themselves in flight, he permitted Philip to make war on Athamania and Amynander, and to add to his kingdom the cities which the Aetolians had taken from the Thessalians. With no great struggle he both drove Amynander out of Athamania and recovered several cities. Demetrias too, a strong city and conveniently placed for every purpose, and the nation of the Magnetes, he brought under his sway. Thereafter in Thrace also he seized certain cities, disturbed by the fault of a new and unaccustomed liberty through the factions of their leading men, by attaching himself to whichever party was being worsted in the domestic struggle. By these things the king’s anger against the Romans was for the present allayed. Yet he never relaxed his mind from gathering strength in peace, to use for war whenever fortune should grant the chance. The revenues of the kingdom he increased not only by the produce of the fields and by maritime customs, but he also reopened old mines that had been abandoned and established new ones in many places. And to restore the former multitude of men, which had been lost through the disasters of war, he was preparing not only a new generation of stock, by compelling all to beget and rear children, but had also transferred a great multitude of Thracians into Macedonia; and, quiet for some while from wars, had bent all his care upon increasing the resources of his kingdom. Then there returned causes to stir his anger against the Romans afresh. The complaints of the Thessalians and Perrhaebians about their cities held by him, and those of the envoys of King Eumenes about the Thracian towns seized by force and the multitude transferred into Macedonia, had been so heard that it was plain enough they were not being disregarded. What had moved the Senate most was that they had heard the possession of Aenus and Maronea was now being aimed at; for the Thessalians they cared less. Envoys of the Athamanians too had come, complaining not of a part lost nor of any loss of territory, but that all Athamania had come under the king’s jurisdiction and judgment; and exiles of the Maronites had come, driven out by the royal garrison because they had defended the cause of liberty: these reported that not Maronea only but Aenus too was in Philip’s power. Envoys had come from Philip as well, to clear him of these charges, who affirmed that nothing had been done except by leave of the Roman commanders: that the states of the Thessalians, the Perrhaebians, and the Magnetes, and the nation of the Athamanians under Amynander, had been in the same case as the Aetolians; that, King Antiochus being driven out, the consul, busied in assaulting the Aetolian cities, had sent Philip to recover those states; and that they obeyed as men subdued by arms. The Senate, that it might determine nothing in the king’s absence, sent envoys to arbitrate those disputes: Quintus Caecilius Metellus, Marcus Baebius Tamphilus, and Tiberius Sempronius. At whose coming a council was proclaimed at Thessalian Tempe for all those states which had a dispute with the king.

There, when the Roman envoys had taken their seats in the place of arbiters, the Thessalians, Perrhaebians, and Athamanians as undoubted accusers, and Philip as it were a defendant to hear the charges, each of the chief men of the embassies, according to his temper and his favor toward Philip or his hatred, pressed his case more harshly or more gently. Into dispute came Philippopolis, Tricca, Phaloria, and Eurymenae and the other towns around them: whether they were of Thessalian right, since they had been taken by force and held by the Aetolians—for it was agreed that Philip had taken them from the Aetolians—or whether those towns had anciently been Aetolian; for Acilius had granted them to the king on this condition: if they had been the Aetolians’, and if of their own will, not if constrained by force and arms to be on the Aetolian side. Of the same formula was the dispute over the towns of the Perrhaebians and the Magnetes: for the Aetolians, by seizing them as occasions offered, had confounded the rights of all. To these matters of arbitration were added the complaints of the Thessalians: that those towns, if they were now restored to them, he would restore plundered and deserted; for besides those lost by the chances of war, he had carried off five hundred of the leading youth into Macedonia and was abusing their labor in servile tasks, and whatever he had restored to the Thessalians under compulsion he had taken care to restore useless. Thebes in Phthiotis had once been the one maritime emporium of the Thessalians, profitable and fruitful; there, having got together merchant ships to steer their course past Thebes to Demetrias, the king had diverted thither all maritime trade. Now he refrained not even from violating envoys, who by the law of nations are inviolable: an ambush had been laid for men going to Titus Quinctius. And so all the Thessalians had been cast into such fear that no one dared open his mouth, neither in their own states nor in the common councils of the nation: for the Romans, the authors of their liberty, were far off, while at their side clung a heavy master, forbidding them to use the benefits of the Roman people. But what is free, if the voice be not free? Now, by the confidence and protection of the envoys, they were groaning rather than speaking. Unless the Romans should provide some means by which both the fear of the Greeks who dwell beside Macedonia and the boldness of Philip might be lessened, in vain had he been conquered and they set free. Like a stubborn horse that will not obey, he must be chastised with sharper reins. These things the last speakers said bitterly, whereas the earlier ones had gently soothed his anger, begging him to pardon men speaking for liberty, and that, laying aside the harshness of a master, he accustom himself to show himself an ally and friend, and imitate the Roman people, who chose to bind allies to themselves by affection rather than by fear. The Thessalians heard, the Perrhaebians urged that Gonnocondylum—which Philip had named Olympias—had been of Perrhaebia, and that it be restored to them; and concerning Malloea and Ericinium the demand was the same. The Athamanians sought back their liberty and the forts Athenaeum and Poetneum.

Philip, that he might wear the look of an accuser rather than of a defendant, himself too began with complaints, and protested that the Thessalians had stormed by force of arms Menelais in Dolopia, which had been part of his kingdom, and likewise that Petra in Pieria had been seized by the same Thessalians and the Perrhaebians; that Xyniae, beyond doubt an Aetolian town, they had annexed to themselves, and that Paracheloïs, which lay under Athamania, had by no right been brought into the Thessalian jurisdiction. For as to the charges brought against him concerning ambushes of envoys and harbors made busy or deserted, the one was ridiculous—that he should render account of what harbors merchants or sailors made for—and the other his character rejected. So many years had passed in which envoys had never ceased to carry charges against him, now to the Roman commanders, now to the Senate at Rome: whom had he ever harmed by so much as a word? Once it was said an ambush had been laid for men going to Quinctius, but what had befallen them was not added. Such charges belonged to men who, having nothing true, sought what they might falsely lay against him. The Thessalians, he said, were abusing the indulgence of the Roman people insolently and beyond measure, like men who, after a long thirst, drink down liberty too greedily and unmixed; and so, after the manner of slaves unexpectedly and suddenly set free, they were trying out the license of voice and tongue, and showing off by railing at and reviling their masters. Then, carried away by anger, he added that the sun of all his days had not yet set. This, spoken menacingly, not the Thessalians only but the Romans too took as aimed at themselves. And when a murmur, arising after that utterance, had at length been stilled, he answered the envoys of the Perrhaebians and Athamanians that the case of the cities they pleaded for was the same: the consul Acilius and the Romans had given them to him when they belonged to enemies; if those who had given them wished to take away their own gift, he knew he must yield; but they would be doing a wrong to a better and more faithful friend for the sake of fickle and useless allies. For of nothing was gratitude less lasting than for liberty, especially among those who would corrupt it by using it ill. The case heard, the commissioners pronounced their pleasure: that the Macedonian garrisons be withdrawn from those cities, and the kingdom be bounded by the ancient frontiers of Macedonia; and that, concerning the wrongs which they complained had been done on both sides, a formula of law be established for settling matters between those nations and the Macedonians.

Then, the king being gravely offended, they set out for Thessalonica to inquire about the cities of Thrace. There the envoys of Eumenes said that, if the Romans wished Aenus and Maronea to be free, their own modesty forbade them to say more than to advise that the Romans leave them free in deed, not in word, and not suffer their gift to be intercepted by another; but that, if there were less care for the cities set in Thrace, it was far more just that what had been under Antiochus, as the prizes of war, should be held by Eumenes than by Philip—whether for the services of his father Attalus in the war which the Roman people waged against Philip himself, or for his own, in that during the war with Antiochus he had shared by land and sea in all the labors and dangers. He had besides, on this matter, the prior judgment of the ten commissioners, who, when they had given the Chersonese and Lysimachia, had surely given Maronea and Aenus too, which, by the very nearness of the region, were as it were appendages of the greater gift. For by what desert toward the Roman people, or by what right of dominion, had Philip set garrisons in these cities, distant as they were so far from the frontiers of Macedonia? Let them order the Maronites to be summoned; from them they would learn all things more certainly about the condition of those cities. The envoys of the Maronites, when summoned, said that the royal garrison was not in one place of the city only, as in other states, but in several at once, and that Maronea was full of Macedonians. And so the king’s flatterers lorded it; to these alone was it allowed to speak both in the council and in the assemblies; they both took all offices themselves and gave them to others. All the best men, who cared for liberty and for the laws, were either driven from their country into exile, or, unhonored and subject to baser men, kept silent. Concerning the law of the boundaries too they added a few words: that Quintus Fabius Labeo, when he had been in that region, had drawn as Philip’s boundary the old royal road which runs up to the Thracian Parorea, nowhere bending toward the sea; but that Philip had afterward turned aside a new road, by which he embraced the cities and lands of the Maronites.

To this Philip, entering on a far different way of arguing than he had lately taken against the Thessalians and Perrhaebians, said: "My dispute is not with the Maronites or with Eumenes, but now with you, Romans, from whom I have long perceived that I can obtain nothing fair. I thought it fair that the Macedonian cities which had revolted from me during the truce should be restored to me—not because they would be a great addition to my kingdom, for they are small towns and set on the farthest borders, but because the example mattered much for keeping the rest of the Macedonians in check. It was refused me. In the Aetolian war, bidden by the consul Manius Acilius to assault Lamia, when I had long been worn out there with siege-works and battles, the consul called me back as I was already climbing the walls, the city all but taken, and forced me to withdraw my forces thence. As a solace for that wrong, I was permitted to recover certain strongholds—forts rather than cities—of Thessaly, Perrhaebia, and the Athamanians. These very things too you, Quintus Caecilius, have taken from me a few days ago. A little while ago the envoys of Eumenes were taking it as beyond doubt—God help us—that it was juster for Eumenes than for me to hold what had been Antiochus’s. I judge it far otherwise. For Eumenes could have remained in his kingdom not unless the Romans had conquered, but unless they had waged the war at all. And so he is in your debt, not you in his; whereas so far was any part of my kingdom from being in jeopardy that I spurned Antiochus when of his own accord he promised me three thousand talents, fifty decked ships, and all the cities of Greece that I had formerly held, as the wages of an alliance; and I chose to be his enemy even before Manius Acilius brought an army across into Greece. And with that consul I waged whatever part of the war he assigned me; and to the next consul, Lucius Scipio, when he had resolved to lead his army by land to the Hellespont, I gave not only a passage through our kingdom but built roads, made bridges, and furnished supplies—and not through Macedonia only, but through Thrace too, where, among the rest, peace also had to be secured from the barbarians. In return for this zeal of mine toward you—not to call it a service—ought you, Romans, to add something and enlarge and increase my kingdom by your munificence, or to snatch away what I held either by my own right or by your gift, which is what you are now doing? The Macedonian cities, which you confess were part of my kingdom, are not restored. Eumenes comes to despoil me as though I were Antiochus, and—God help us—holds up the decree of the ten commissioners as a screen for a most shameless quibble, by which above all he can be refuted and convicted; for it is written in it most eloquently and most plainly that the Chersonese and Lysimachia are given to Eumenes. Where, pray, are Aenus and Maronea and the cities of Thrace set down? What he did not even dare to demand of them, shall he obtain from you, as though he had won it from them? It matters in what rank you wish me to stand with you. If your purpose is to harry me as a foe and an enemy, go on doing as you have begun; but if there is any regard for me as an allied and friendly king, I beg you not to judge me deserving of so great a wrong." The king’s speech moved the commissioners somewhat. And so by a middle answer they left the matter in suspense: if those cities had been given to Eumenes by the decree of the ten commissioners, they would change nothing; if Philip had taken them in war, he would hold them as the prize of victory by the law of war; if neither were the case, it was their pleasure that the inquiry be reserved for the Senate, and that, so that everything might remain untouched, the garrisons in those cities be withdrawn. These causes most of all estranged Philip’s mind from the Romans, so that the war might seem not to have been set in motion by his son Perseus on new grounds, but bequeathed by the father to the son on these. At Rome there was no suspicion of a Macedonian war.

Lucius Manlius the proconsul had returned from Spain. As he sought a triumph from the Senate in the temple of Bellona, the magnitude of his exploits made it obtainable, but precedent stood in the way—established by the custom of our ancestors—that no one who had not brought back his army should triumph, unless he had handed over the province thoroughly subdued and pacified to his successor. A middle honor, however, was paid to Manlius: that he enter the city in ovation. He carried fifty-two golden crowns, besides a hundred and thirty-two pounds of gold and sixteen thousand three hundred of silver, and he announced in the Senate that the quaestor Quintus Fabius was bringing ten thousand pounds of silver and eighty of gold; this too he would pay into the treasury.

There was a great slave rising that year in Apulia. Lucius Postumius the praetor held Tarentum as his province. He conducted a stern inquiry into a conspiracy of herdsmen, who had made the roads unsafe with brigandage and infested the public pastures. He condemned about seven thousand men; many fled, of many the penalty was exacted. The consuls, long kept at the city by the levies, at last set out for their provinces.

The same year in Spain the praetors Gaius Calpurnius and Lucius Quinctius, when at the first of spring they had led their forces out of winter quarters and joined them in Baeturia, advanced into Carpetania, where the enemy’s camp was, prepared to conduct the campaign with common purpose and counsel. Not far from the towns of Dipo and Toletum a fight arose among the foragers, and, as reinforcements came to them from the camps on both sides, little by little all the forces were drawn out into line. In that disorderly engagement both the ground, which was their own, and the manner of fighting favored the enemy. The two Roman armies were routed and driven back into camp. The enemy did not press the dismayed. The Roman praetors, lest on the next day their camp be assaulted, in the silence of the following night, by a silent signal, led the army away. At first light the Spaniards, their line drawn up, approached the rampart, and, entering the camp—empty beyond their expectation—plundered what had been left amid the nocturnal alarm, and, returning to their own camp, remained quiet for a few days in their fixed position. Of Romans and allies about five thousand were slain in the battle and the flight, with whose spoils the enemy armed themselves. Thence they set out for the river Tagus. The Roman praetors meanwhile spent all that time in drawing together auxiliaries from the allied states of the Spaniards and in restoring the soldiers’ spirits from the terror of the unsuccessful battle. When their strength satisfied them, and the soldier too was now demanding the enemy to wipe out the former disgrace, they set out and pitched camp twelve miles from the river Tagus. Thence, at the third watch, the standards taken up, in a square column, at the beginning of light they reached the bank of the Tagus. Across the river, on a hill, was the enemy’s camp. At once, where in two places the river bared its fords, on the right Calpurnius and on the left Quinctius led their armies across, the enemy keeping still—while he wondered at the sudden coming and took counsel, who might have thrown the crossing forces into confusion in the very passage of the river. Meanwhile the Romans, all the baggage too brought across and gathered into one place, because they now saw the enemy moving and there was no time to fortify a camp, drew up their line. In the center were placed the fifth legion of Calpurnius and the eighth of Quinctius; that was the strength of the whole army. They had an open plain all the way to the enemy’s camp, free from fear of ambush. The Spaniards, when they saw the two Roman columns on the nearer bank, that they might fall upon them before they could join and form, poured suddenly out of their camp and made for battle at a run. Fierce at the outset was the battle, with the Spaniards emboldened by their recent victory, and the Roman soldier kindled by an unaccustomed disgrace. Most keenly fought the center of the line, the two bravest legions; and when the enemy saw that these could not otherwise be moved from their ground, he set to fighting in a wedge, and pressed the center with ever more and more closely packed men. There, when the praetor Calpurnius saw the line in distress, he quickly sent the legates Titus Quinctilius Varus and Lucius Juventius Thalna to encourage the legions one by one; he bade them teach and warn that in those legions lay all hope of victory and of keeping Spain: if they gave ground, no man of that army would ever see, not Italy only, but not even the farther bank of the Tagus. He himself, riding round a little with the cavalry of the two legions, charged on the flank into the wedge of the enemy that was pressing the center. Quinctius with his own cavalry attacked the enemy’s other flank. But far more fiercely fought Calpurnius’s cavalry, and the praetor before the rest: for he both struck the first blow at the enemy and so plunged into the thick of them that it could scarcely be told to which side he belonged; and the cavalry were fired by the praetor’s surpassing valor, and the foot by the cavalry’s. Shame stirred the chief centurions, who saw their praetor amid the enemy’s weapons. And so each for himself urged on the standard-bearers, bade them carry the standards forward, and the soldiers follow at once. The shout was renewed by all, and the charge made as though from higher ground. And so, no otherwise than in the manner of a torrent, they routed and laid low the dismayed, nor could the foe, hurling themselves on one after another, be withstood. The cavalry pursued them as they fled to the camp, and, mingled with the throng of the enemy, penetrated within the rampart, where the battle was renewed by those left to guard the camp; and the Roman cavalry were forced to dismount. As they fought, the fifth legion came up, then, as each had been able, the forces flowed in. The Spaniards were cut down everywhere throughout the camp, and no more than four thousand men escaped. Of these about three thousand, who had kept their arms, seized a neighboring mountain; a thousand, mostly half-armed, were scattered over the fields. There had been above thirty-five thousand of the enemy, of whom so small a part survived the battle. A hundred and thirty-two standards were taken. Of Romans and allies a little more than six hundred fell, and of the provincial auxiliaries about a hundred and fifty. The loss of five military tribunes and a few Roman knights gave this very bloody victory its character. They passed the night in the enemy’s camp, because there had been no time to fortify their own. Before the assembly the next day the cavalry were praised and presented by Gaius Calpurnius with trappings, and he declared that chiefly by their work the enemy had been routed and the camp taken and stormed. Quinctius, the other praetor, presented his own cavalry with chains and brooches. Very many centurions too, from each army, were rewarded, especially those who had held the center of the line.

The consuls, having finished the levies and the other matters that had to be done at Rome, led their army into the province of the Ligurians. Sempronius, setting out from Pisae against the Apuan Ligurians, by laying waste their fields and burning their villages and strongholds, opened up the forest country as far as the river Macra and the port of Luna. The enemy seized a mountain, the ancient seat of their forefathers, and from there, the unfavorable ground overcome, they were dislodged in battle. And Appius Claudius matched his colleague’s fortune and valor among the Ingaunian Ligurians in several successful battles. He stormed six towns of theirs besides, took many thousands of men in them, and beheaded forty-three of the instigators of the war.

Now the time of the elections was drawing near. Yet Claudius came to Rome sooner than Sempronius, to whom by lot the holding of the elections had fallen, because his brother Publius Claudius was a candidate for the consulship. He had as patrician rivals Lucius Aemilius, Quintus Fabius, and Servius Sulpicius Galba—old candidates, who after their rebuffs were seeking the office the more as their due, because at first it had been denied them. And because more than one of the patricians could not be elected, the canvass was the tighter for the four candidates. Men of influence among the plebeians were candidates too—Lucius Porcius, Quintus Terentius Culleo, and Gnaeus Baebius Tamphilus—and these too, after their rebuffs, had been put off to the hope of obtaining the office at last some day. Of them all Claudius alone was a new candidate. In men’s expectation Quintus Fabius Labeo and Lucius Porcius Licinus were beyond doubt marked out. But the consul Claudius, flitting about the whole forum without his lictors, together with his brother—though his adversaries and the greater part of the Senate cried out that he ought to remember he was consul of the Roman people before he was the brother of Publius Claudius, and asked why he did not, seated before his tribunal, present himself either as an arbiter or as a silent spectator of the elections—could not, for all that, be restrained from his unbridled zeal. By great contests of the tribunes of the plebs too, who fought either against the consul or for his partisanship, the elections were several times thrown into confusion, until Appius prevailed, so that, Fabius being thrown out, he dragged his brother through. Publius Claudius Pulcher was elected, beyond his own hope and that of the rest. Lucius Porcius Licinus kept his place, because among the plebeians the contest was waged with moderate partisanship, not with Claudian violence. Then the elections of praetors were held: Gaius Decimius Flavus, Publius Sempronius Longus, Publius Cornelius Cethegus, Quintus Naevius Matho, Gaius Sempronius Blaesus, and Aulus Terentius Varro were made praetors. These things were done at home and in the field in the year in which Appius Claudius and Marcus Sempronius were consuls.

At the beginning of the following year the consuls Publius Claudius and Lucius Porcius, when Quintus Caecilius, Marcus Baebius, and Tiberius Sempronius—who had been sent to arbitrate between the kings Philip and Eumenes and the states of the Thessalians—had reported on their embassy, introduced into the Senate the envoys also of those kings and states. The same things were repeated on both sides that had been said before the commissioners in Greece; then the fathers decreed a new embassy, of which Appius Claudius was the head, into Greece and Macedonia, to see whether the cities had been restored to the Thessalians and Perrhaebians. To the same men it was committed that the garrisons be withdrawn from Aenus and Maronea, and that all the maritime coast of Thrace be freed from Philip and the Macedonians. They were ordered to visit the Peloponnese too, from which the former embassy had departed leaving affairs in a more uncertain state than if they had not come: for, among the rest, they had even been dismissed without an answer, and the council of the Achaeans had not been granted them, though they sought it. On this matter, while Quintus Caecilius complained gravely, and at the same time the Lacedaemonians bewailed their walls torn down, their commons carried off into Achaea and sold, and the laws of Lycurgus—by which to that day their state had stood—taken from them, the Achaeans excused above all the charge of the council refused by reciting a law which forbade a council to be summoned except for the cause of war or peace, and when envoys came from the Senate with letters or written instructions. That this might not be an excuse hereafter, the Senate made plain that it ought to be their care that Roman envoys should always have the power of approaching the council of the nation, just as the Senate was granted to them as often as they wished.

These embassies dismissed, Philip, informed by his own people that he must yield the cities and withdraw his garrisons, hostile to all, poured out his anger upon the Maronites. He charged Onomastus, who was in command of the maritime coast, to kill the leaders of the opposing party. He, through a certain Casander, one of the king’s men long resident at Maronea, let Thracians in by night and made a slaughter, as if the city had been taken in war. Then, when the Roman envoys complained that so cruel a thing had been done against the innocent Maronites, and so insolent a thing against the Roman people—that those to whom the Senate had decreed liberty should be restored were butchered like enemies—he denied that any of it concerned himself or any of his people: the fighting had been by faction among themselves, as some drew the state toward him, others toward Eumenes; this they would easily learn, if they questioned the Maronites themselves—being in no doubt that, all stricken with terror at so recent a slaughter, no one would dare open his mouth against him. Appius said that a thing so evident was not to be inquired into as doubtful; if he wished to remove the blame from himself, let him send to Rome Onomastus and Casander, by whom the deed was said to have been done, so that the Senate might question them. At first that demand so disturbed the king that neither his color nor his countenance held steady; then, his spirit at last collected, he said he would send Casander, who had been at Maronea, if they altogether wished it; but what had the matter to do with Onomastus, who had been not only not at Maronea, but not even in the neighboring region? And he both spared Onomastus the more, the more honored friend, and feared him as an informer not a little more, because he had himself held converse with him and had him as agent and confidant of many such deeds. Casander too, men being sent to escort him through Epirus to the sea, lest any disclosure should leak out, is believed to have been made away with by poison. And the envoys departed from their conference with Philip so as to make plain that none of it pleased them, and Philip in no way doubting that he must renew the war. Yet because his strength for it was not yet ripe, to interpose delay he resolved to send his younger son Demetrius to Rome, both to clear away the charges and to deprecate the Senate’s anger, believing well enough that the youth himself, because at Rome as a hostage he had given proof of a royal disposition, would carry some weight. Meanwhile, under the appearance of bringing aid to the Byzantines, but in fact setting out to strike terror into the chieftains of the Thracians, having broken them in a single battle and captured their leader Amadocus, he returned into Macedonia, after sending men to stir up the barbarians dwelling along the river Hister to break into Italy.

In the Peloponnese too the coming of the Roman envoys, who had been ordered to go from Macedonia into Achaea, was awaited; and that they might have their counsels prepared to meet them, the praetor Lycortas proclaimed a council. There the matter of the Lacedaemonians was discussed: that from enemies they had become accusers, and that there was danger lest the conquered prove more to be feared than they had been at war. For in the war the Achaeans had had the Romans as allies; now those same Romans were fairer to the Lacedaemonians than to the Achaeans, seeing that Areus too and Alcibiades, both exiles restored by the Achaeans’ own kindness, had undertaken an embassy to Rome against the Achaean nation that had so deserved of them, and had used so hostile a speech that they seemed to have been driven from their country, not restored to it. A shout arose on every side, that he put the question about them by name; and, since everything was managed by anger, not by counsel, they were condemned to death. A few days later the Roman envoys came. To these a council was granted at Clitor in Arcadia. Before they did anything, terror had been struck into the Achaeans, and the thought of how unequal the discussion would be, because they saw Areus and Alcibiades—condemned to death by them in the last council—together with the envoys; and no one dared open his mouth. Appius made plain that the things of which the Lacedaemonians had complained before the Senate were displeasing to the Senate: first, the slaughter made at Compasium of those who had come, summoned by Philopoemen to plead their cause; then, when men had been so cruelly used, that their cruelty might fall short in no part, the walls of a most noble city torn down, its most ancient laws abrogated, and the discipline of Lycurgus, famous among the nations, abolished. When Appius had said this, Lycortas—both because he was praetor and because he belonged to the party of Philopoemen, the author of all that had been done at Lacedaemon—answered thus:

"Harder is our speaking, Appius Claudius, before you than it lately was at Rome before the Senate. For then we had to answer the Lacedaemonians as accusers; now we are accused by you yourselves, before whom our cause must be pleaded. And this unfairness of condition we submit to in the hope that you will hear us with the mind of a judge, laying aside the contentiousness with which you spoke a little while ago. I at least, since the things of which the Lacedaemonians complained both here before, in the presence of Quintus Caecilius, and afterward at Rome, have been set forth by you a little while ago, shall believe that I am answering, before you, not you, but them. You charge us with the slaughter of those who, summoned by the praetor Philopoemen to plead their cause, were killed. This charge I judge ought not to have been brought against us, not only by you, Romans, but not even before you. Why so? Because it was in your treaty that the Lacedaemonians should keep away from the maritime cities. At the time when, taking up arms, they seized by a night attack the cities from which they had been ordered to abstain—had Titus Quinctius, had a Roman army, as before, been in the Peloponnese, to them, doubtless, the captured and oppressed would have fled for refuge; but since you were far off, to whom else but to us, your allies—whom they had before seen bringing aid to Gythium, whom they had seen assaulting Lacedaemon along with you for a like cause—should they flee? On your behalf, therefore, we undertook a just and righteous war. And since others praise it, and not even the Lacedaemonians can blame it, and the gods themselves have approved it, who gave us the victory, how then do the things done by the law of war come into dispute? Yet the greatest part of them concerns us not at all. Ours is the act of having summoned to plead their cause those who had roused the multitude to arms, who had stormed the maritime towns, who had plundered, who had made slaughter of the leading men; but that they were killed as they came into the camp is your doing, Areus and Alcibiades—who now, God help us, accuse us—not ours. The exiles of the Lacedaemonians, among whose number these two also were, were both then with us, and—because they had chosen the maritime towns for their dwelling, believing themselves the men aimed at—made an attack upon those by whose doing, banished from their country, they were indignant that they could not grow old even in a safe exile. Lacedaemonians, therefore, killed Lacedaemonians, not the Achaeans; nor does it matter to argue whether they were slain by right or by wrong."

"But those things at least are surely yours, Achaeans—that you abolished the laws and the most ancient discipline of Lycurgus, that you tore down the walls. Yet how can both of these be laid against the same men, since the walls of Lacedaemon were built not by Lycurgus, but a few years ago, to dissolve the discipline of Lycurgus? For the tyrants lately made them a citadel and a stronghold for themselves, not for the state; and if Lycurgus should rise today from the dead, he would rejoice in their ruins and say that now he recognized his fatherland and the ancient Sparta. Not Philopoemen nor the Achaeans should you have waited for; you yourselves, Lacedaemonians, with your own hands ought to have removed and demolished every trace of the tyranny. For those were, as it were, the ugly brands of your servitude; and, though without walls you had been free for nearly eight hundred years, and sometimes even the foremost of Greece, when girt with walls as with fetters you were enslaved for a hundred years. As for the laws taken away, I judge that the tyrants took the ancient laws from the Lacedaemonians; we did not take away their own, which they did not have, but gave them our laws; and we did not consult ill for the state, when we made it part of our council and mingled it with ourselves, that there might be one body and one council of the whole Peloponnese. Then, I suppose, if we ourselves were living under other laws, and had imposed others upon them, they might complain that they were under unequal law, and be indignant. I know, Appius Claudius, that this speech, which I have used thus far, is the speech neither of allies among allies nor of a free nation, but truly of men pleading sternly before masters. For if that proclamation of the herald was not empty, by which you ordered the Achaeans to be the first of all to be free, if the treaty is valid, if the alliance and friendship are observed on equal terms, why do I not ask what you Romans did when Capua was taken, while you demand a reckoning of what we Achaeans did to the Lacedaemonians, conquered in war? Some were killed; suppose by us; what then? Did you not behead the Campanian senators? We tore down walls; you took away not the walls only, but the city and the lands. The treaty, you say, is equal in appearance; it is. I perceive it, Appius, and, if it ought not to be otherwise, I am not indignant; but I beg you—however much there be between Romans and Achaeans—only let not your enemies and ours stand with you on a level with us, your allies; nay, let them not be on a better footing, for that they should be on a level we ourselves brought about, when we gave them our laws, when we brought it to pass that they should belong to the Achaean council. Too little for the conquered is what suffices the conquerors; the enemies demand more than the allies have. What has been hallowed and consecrated to eternal memory by an oath, and by records of letters carved in stone, these things they prepare to abolish, with our perjury added. We do indeed reverence you, Romans, and, if you so wish, we even fear you; but more do we both reverence and fear the immortal gods."

He was heard with the assent of the greatest part, and all judged that he had spoken in keeping with the majesty of his office, so that it readily appeared that the Romans could not maintain their dignity by acting gently. Then Appius said that he strongly advised the Achaeans, while it was still allowed them to act of their own will, to earn favor thereby, lest soon they do unwilling and constrained what they might now do freely. This utterance was heard, indeed, with the groan of all, but it struck into them a fear of refusing what was commanded; they asked only this: that the Romans should change what they thought fit concerning the Lacedaemonians, and not bind the Achaeans by a religious scruple to make void what they had ratified by oath. Only the condemnation of Areus and Alcibiades, which had lately been passed, was annulled.

At Rome, at the beginning of that year, when the provinces of the consuls and praetors were dealt with, the Ligurians were decreed to the consuls, because there was war nowhere else. Of the praetors, Gaius Decimius Flavus drew by lot the city jurisdiction, Publius Cornelius Cethegus that between citizens and foreigners, Gaius Sempronius Blaesus Sicily, Quintus Naevius Matho Sardinia—and that the same man should hold an inquiry into poisonings—Aulus Terentius Varro Hither Spain, Publius Sempronius Longus Further Spain. About that time the legates Lucius Juventius Thalna and Titus Quinctilius Varus came from those two provinces, who, having informed the Senate how far the war in Spain was now finished, demanded at the same time both that honor be paid to the immortal gods for matters so prosperously achieved, and that the praetors be allowed to bring their army home. A supplication of two days was decreed; concerning the bringing home of the legions, they ordered that the matter be referred entire when the armies of the consuls and praetors should be under discussion. A few days later two legions each were decreed to the consuls for the Ligurians, those which Appius Claudius and Marcus Sempronius had held. Concerning the armies in Spain there was a great contention between the new praetors and the friends of the absent men, Calpurnius and Quinctius. Each side had tribunes of the plebs, each side a consul. The one party gave notice that they would veto the decree of the Senate, if it should resolve that the armies be brought home; the other, that, if this veto were interposed, they would suffer nothing else to be decreed. In the end the favor toward the absent men was overcome, and a decree of the Senate was passed that the praetors should enroll four thousand Roman foot, three hundred horse, and five thousand foot of the allies of the Latin name, with five hundred horse, to carry with them into Spain. When they had distributed these into four legions, whatever exceeded five thousand foot and three hundred horse in each legion they should discharge—first those who had completed their service, then in proportion as each had given the bravest service to Calpurnius and Quinctius in battle.

This contention quieted, another straightway arose from the death of the praetor Gaius Decimius. Gnaeus Sicinius and Lucius Pupius, who had been aediles the year before, and Gaius Valerius the flamen Dialis, and Quintus Fulvius Flaccus—who, because he was aedile-curule-designate, canvassed without the white toga, yet with the greatest exertion of them all—were candidates; and his contest was with the flamen. And after he seemed first to equal, then even to surpass, part of the tribunes of the plebs denied that his candidacy ought to be accepted, because one man could neither hold nor administer two magistracies at once, especially curule ones; part judged it fair that he be released from the laws, so that the people might have the power of electing whom they would as praetor. The consul Lucius Porcius was at first of the mind not to accept his name; then, that he might do the same by the Senate’s authority, having called the fathers together, he said that he referred it to them, since by no right nor by any precedent tolerable to a free state did an aedile-curule-designate seek the praetorship; for his own part, unless they thought otherwise, it was his intention to hold the elections according to the law. To the consul, treating with him by the Senate’s decree, Flaccus answered that he would do nothing unworthy of himself. By this middle answer he had given to those who interpreted it according to their wish the hope that he would yield to the Senate’s authority; but at the elections he canvassed even more keenly than before, charging that the people’s gift was being wrested from him by consul and Senate, and that odium was being stirred over a doubled office—as though it were not plain that, once he was praetor-designate, he would at once resign the aedileship. The consul, when he saw both the candidate’s stubbornness growing and the people’s favor leaning more and more toward him, dismissed the assembly and called the Senate. In full numbers they resolved that, since the authority of the fathers had not at all moved Flaccus, the matter should be dealt with before the people, with Flaccus. An assembly being called, when the consul had spoken, Flaccus—not even then moved from his purpose—gave thanks to the Roman people, because with so great zeal, as often as the power of declaring their will had been given, they had wished to make him praetor; it was not in his mind to abandon this goodwill of his fellow citizens. But this so obstinate utterance kindled such favor for him that he would beyond doubt have been praetor, had the consul been willing to accept his name. There was a huge contest among the tribunes both with one another and with the consul, until the Senate was held by the consul, and it was decreed that, since the stubbornness of Quintus Flaccus and the perverse partisanship of men were hindering the elections for choosing a praetor from being held according to the laws, the Senate judged that there were praetors enough; that Publius Cornelius should hold both jurisdictions in the city and conduct the games of Apollo.

These elections being done away with by the wisdom and resolve of the Senate, others arose of a greater contest, both over a greater matter and among more and mightier men. The censorship was sought with the utmost exertion by Lucius Valerius Flaccus, Publius and Lucius Scipio, Gnaeus Manlius Vulso, and Lucius Furius Purpurio, patricians; and, among the plebeians, by Marcus Porcius Cato, Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, and the two Sempronii, Tiberius and Marcus, Longus and Tuditanus. But Marcus Porcius far outstripped all the rest, patricians and plebeians of the noblest families alike. In this man there was so great a force of spirit and of genius that, in whatever station he had been born, he would seem to have been bound to make his own fortune for himself. No skill, of conducting either private or public affairs, was wanting to him; he was equally versed in the things of the city and of the country. To the highest honors knowledge of the law has advanced some, eloquence others, the glory of arms others; but this man’s versatile genius was so equally fitted to all things that you would say he was born for that one thing, whatever he was doing: in war most valiant of hand, and famous for many notable fights; the same, after he had come to great honors, a supreme commander; the same in peace, if you consulted the law, most learned, if a case had to be pleaded, most eloquent—and not one whose tongue flourished only while he lived, with no monument of his eloquence surviving; nay, his eloquence lives and flourishes still, consecrated in writings of every kind. His speeches are many, both for himself and for others and against others: for he wore out his enemies not only by accusing but also by pleading his own defense. Feuds, far too many, both vexed him and he himself kept alive; nor could you easily say whether the nobility pressed him the harder, or he harassed the nobility. He was, beyond doubt, of a harsh temper and a bitter and immoderately free tongue, but of a spirit unconquered by appetites, of rigid integrity, a despiser of favor and of riches. In frugality, in endurance of toil and danger, he was of a body and spirit almost of iron, which not even old age, that loosens all things, could break—who in his eighty-sixth year pleaded a case, himself spoke and wrote in his own defense, and in his ninetieth year brought Servius Galba before the judgment of the people. Him, as throughout all his life, so now too, as he canvassed, the nobility pressed hard; and all the candidates except Lucius Flaccus, who had been his colleague in the consulship, had banded together to thrust him from the office—not only that they might rather obtain it themselves, nor because they were indignant to see a new man censor, but also because they looked for a stern censorship, perilous to the reputations of many, from a man wronged by most and eager to wound. For even then he canvassed with threats, charging that those who feared a free and bold censorship were opposing him. And at the same time he was backing Lucius Valerius: with him alone as colleague, he said, he could chastise the new vices and recall the ancient ways. Kindled by these words, the people, against the nobility, not only made Marcus Porcius censor, but gave him as colleague Lucius Valerius Flaccus.

After the censorial elections, the consuls and praetors set out for their provinces, except Quintus Naevius, whom the inquiries into poisoning detained no fewer than four months before he went to Sardinia—the greater part of which he held outside the city, through the municipia and the places of assembly, because it had seemed more fitting so. If one cares to believe Valerius of Antium, he condemned about two thousand men. And the praetor Lucius Postumius, to whom Tarentum had fallen as his province, punished great conspiracies of herdsmen, and carried out with care the remnants of the Bacchanalian inquiry. Many who had either not appeared when summoned or had forsaken their sureties, lurking in that region of Italy, he in part judged guilty, in part, having arrested them, sent to the Senate at Rome. They were all cast into prison by Publius Cornelius.

In Further Spain, the Lusitanians being broken in the recent war, things had been quiet; in Hither Spain, Aulus Terentius, among the Suessetani, stormed the town of Corbio with mantlets and siege-works, and sold the captives; then the nearer province too kept quiet winter quarters. The former praetors, Gaius Calpurnius Piso and Lucius Quinctius, returned to Rome. To each a triumph was decreed by the great consent of the fathers. First Gaius Calpurnius triumphed over the Lusitanians and Celtiberians; he carried eighty-three golden crowns and twelve thousand pounds of silver. A few days later Lucius Quinctius Crispinus triumphed over the same Lusitanians and Celtiberians; just as much gold and silver was carried in that triumph. The censors Marcus Porcius and Lucius Valerius revised the roll of the Senate amid an expectation mingled with fear; they removed seven from the Senate, among them one conspicuous both for nobility and for offices, Lucius Quinctius Flamininus, of consular rank. It is said to have been established within our fathers’ memory that censors should set down marks of censure against those removed from the Senate. Other bitter speeches of Cato survive against those whom he either removed from their senatorial place or from whom he took away their horses; by far the gravest is the speech against Lucius Quinctius, which, had he used it as an accuser before the censure rather than as censor after the censure, not even his brother Titus Quinctius, had he then been censor, could have kept Lucius Quinctius in the Senate. Among other things he charged him with having lured Philip the Carthaginian, a dear and noted catamite, from Rome into the province of Gaul by the hope of huge gifts. This boy, jesting in his wantonness, was very often wont to reproach the consul, because he had been carried off from Rome just before a gladiatorial show, that he might sell his compliance to his lover. It chanced, as they were feasting and had now grown warm with wine, that word was brought at the banquet that a noble Boian had come as a deserter with his children; he wished to meet the consul, that he might receive a pledge of protection from him in person. Brought into the tent, he began through an interpreter to address the consul. In the midst of his speech Quinctius said to the catamite, "Would you like, since you missed the gladiatorial show, to see this Gaul now dying?" And when the boy had scarcely nodded in earnest, at the catamite’s nod the consul, drawing the sword that hung above his head, first struck the head of the Gaul as he spoke, then, as he fled and implored the protection of the Roman people and of those present, ran him through the side. Valerius Antias, as one who had neither read Cato’s speech and had believed only a tale put about without an author, gives a different version, like it nevertheless in both lust and cruelty. He writes that at Placentia an infamous woman, with love of whom he was desperately smitten, was summoned to the banquet. There, boasting himself to the harlot, he related, among other things, how keenly he had conducted his inquiries, and how many men condemned to death he held in chains, whom he was going to behead. Then she, reclining below him, said she had never seen anyone struck with the axe, and that she greatly wished to see it. Hereupon the indulgent lover ordered one of those wretches to be dragged in and struck him with the axe. The deed, whether done in the way the censor charged, or as Valerius relates, was savage and atrocious: amid the cups and the feast, where it is the custom to pour libations of the banquet to the gods and to pray for good fortune, for the entertainment of a wanton harlot reclining in the consul’s lap, a human victim was slaughtered and the table sprinkled with blood! At the end of Cato’s speech a challenge is offered to Quinctius: that, if he denied that deed and the rest of what he had charged, he should defend himself by a wager; but if he confessed it, did he suppose that anyone would grieve at his disgrace, when he himself, out of his senses with wine and lust, had made sport with a man’s blood at a banquet?

In the review of the cavalry, the horse was taken from Lucius Scipio Asiagenus. In the taking of the census too, the censorship was severe and harsh against all the orders. Women’s ornaments and dress, and carriages, that were worth more than fifteen thousand asses, the assessors were ordered to enter on the census-roll at ten times their value; likewise slaves under twenty years of age that, since the last lustrum, had been sold for ten thousand asses or more, that these too be reckoned at ten times as much as they were worth; and that upon all these things a tax of three asses in the thousand be levied. All public water flowing into a private building or field they cut off, and what private men held built or constructed upon public ground they demolished within thirty days. Then, from money decreed for the purpose, they let out the works to be made—basins to be paved with stone, sewers to be cleansed where there was need, and, on the Aventine and in other quarters where they did not yet exist, to be built. And separately Flaccus contracted for a causeway at the Neptunian waters, that there might be a passage for the people, and a road over the Formian mountain; Cato bought for the public two halls, the Maenian and the Titian, in the quarry quarter, and four shops, and there built a basilica, which was called the Porcian. And the public revenues they let out at the highest prices, the public contracts at the lowest. When the Senate, overcome by the prayers and tears of the tax-farmers, had ordered these lettings cancelled and let anew, the censors, by edict barring from the auction those who had made a mockery of the former letting, let out all the same things at prices a little reduced. It was a famous censorship, and full of feuds, which harassed Marcus Porcius—to whom that severity was attributed—throughout all his life.

In the same year two colonies were planted: Potentia in Picenum, Pisaurum in Gallic territory. Six iugera were given to each man. The same three commissioners divided the land and planted the colonies: Quintus Fabius Labeo and the two Fulvii, Marcus and Quintus, Flaccus and Nobilior. The consuls of that year did nothing memorable, either at home or in the field. For the following year they elected as consuls Marcus Claudius Marcellus and Quintus Fabius Labeo.

Marcus Claudius and Quintus Fabius, on the Ides of March, the day on which they entered upon the consulship, brought forward the matter of their own provinces and those of the praetors. The praetors elected were Gaius Valerius the flamen Dialis, who had stood the year before too, and Spurius Postumius Albinus, Publius Cornelius Sisenna, Lucius Pupius, Lucius Julius, and Gnaeus Sicinius. To the consuls the Ligurians were decreed as their province, with the same armies which Publius Claudius and Lucius Porcius had held. The Spains were reserved, outside the lot, for the previous year’s praetors with their armies. The praetors were ordered so to cast lots that one of the two jurisdictions at Rome should in any case fall to the flamen Dialis; he drew the foreign jurisdiction. To Cornelius Sisenna fell the city jurisdiction, to Spurius Postumius Sicily, to Lucius Pupius Apulia, to Lucius Julius Gaul, to Gnaeus Sicinius Sardinia. Lucius Julius was ordered to make haste. Transalpine Gauls, having crossed into Italy through the passes of a road before unknown, as was said earlier, were building a town in the territory which is now that of Aquileia. It was committed to the praetor to prevent this, so far as he could without war; if they had to be prevented by arms, he should inform the consuls; of whom it was resolved that one should lead the legions against the Gauls.

At the close of the previous year an election had been held to choose an augur in the place of the deceased Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus; Spurius Postumius Albinus had been chosen. At the beginning of this year Publius Licinius Crassus, the pontifex maximus, died; in his place Marcus Sempronius Tuditanus was co-opted as pontiff, and Gaius Servilius Geminus was made pontifex maximus. For the funeral of Publius Licinius a distribution of meat was given, a hundred and twenty gladiators fought, funeral games were held for three days, and after the games a public banquet. At this, when couches had been spread throughout the whole forum, a storm arising with great squalls forced most to set up tents in the forum; and these, a little after, when it had cleared on every side, were taken down; and people commonly said that they had discharged what the seers had sung among the things of fate, that it was necessary for tents to be set up in the forum. Freed from this scruple, another was laid upon them, because it had rained blood for two days in the precinct of Vulcan; and through the decemvirs a supplication had been proclaimed to expiate that prodigy.

Before the consuls set out for their provinces, they introduced the embassies from overseas into the Senate. Never before had there been so many men of that region at Rome. For from the time that the report had spread among the nations that border on Macedonia, that charges and complaints against Philip were heard by the Romans not negligently, it had been worth many men’s while to complain; and the several states and nations on their own behalf, and individuals even privately—for he was a heavy neighbor to all—came to Rome, either in hope of relief from wrong or for the solace of bewailing it. And from King Eumenes an embassy came, with his brother Athenaeus, to complain both that the garrisons were not being withdrawn from Thrace, and that aid had been sent into Bithynia to Prusias, who was waging war against Eumenes. It fell to Demetrius, then quite a youth, to answer to all this. Since it was not easy to embrace in memory either the things that were charged or what had to be said against them—for they were not only many but also for the most part exceedingly trivial: about disputes of boundaries, about men carried off and cattle driven away, about justice either pronounced at caprice or not pronounced at all, about cases decided by force or by favor—and since the Senate saw that Demetrius could neither set forth any of these clearly nor itself learn them with sufficient clearness from him, and was moved at the same time by the youth’s inexperience and confusion, it ordered him to be asked whether he had received any memorandum from his father about these matters. When he answered that he had, nothing seemed better or more to the purpose than to take the king’s own answers on the several points. They at once called for the book, then permitted him to read it himself. Now the pleas on each point were compressed into brief form: that some things he had done according to the decrees of the commissioners; that, as to others, it had not been through him that they were left undone, but through those very men who were the accusers. He had inserted too complaints about the unfairness of the decrees, and how unequally the case had been argued before Caecilius, and how unworthily, and by no desert of his own, he had been insulted by all. These marks of his irritated temper the Senate noted; but, the youth excusing some things and undertaking that others should be as the Senate most wished, it was resolved to answer that his father had done nothing more right, nor more in accord with the Senate’s will, than that, however those things had been done, he had wished satisfaction to be made to the Romans through his son Demetrius. The Senate could overlook and forget and endure many things past, and could even believe that Demetrius was to be believed: for, though it had given back his body to his father, it held his mind as a hostage, and knew that, so far as he could without breach of duty to his father, he was a friend of the Roman people; and that, for his honor’s sake, they would send envoys into Macedonia, so that, if anything had been done less than it ought, then too it might be set right without penalty for the things omitted. They wished Philip also to feel that all stood unimpaired between him and the Roman people through the good service of his son Demetrius. These things, which had been done to increase his distinction, turned at once to his unpopularity, and soon even to the ruin of the young man.

Then the Lacedaemonians were introduced. Many petty disputes were bandied about; but the chief points were these: whether those whom the Achaeans had condemned should be restored or not; whether they had killed by right or by wrong those whom they had killed; and whether the Lacedaemonians should remain in the Achaean council, or whether, as before, the right of that one state in the Peloponnese should be separate. It was resolved that they be restored and the judgments passed annulled; that Lacedaemon remain in the Achaean council; and that this decree be written down and sealed by the Lacedaemonians and the Achaeans.

Quintus Marcius was sent as envoy into Macedonia, ordered also to look into the affairs of the allies in the Peloponnese. For there too disturbances were left over from the old discords, and Messene had revolted from the Achaean council. If I should wish to set out the causes and course of that war, I should be forgetful of my plan, by which I resolved not to touch on foreign affairs further than as they were bound up with Roman matters: the outcome is memorable, in that, though the Achaeans had the upper hand in the war, their praetor Philopoemen was captured—having set out to seize beforehand Corone, which the enemy were making for, and there, in an unfavorable valley, overpowered with a few horsemen. He himself, they relate, could have escaped by the help of the Thracian and Cretan auxiliaries; but shame at abandoning the horsemen, the noblest of the nation, lately chosen by himself, held him back. While, by himself bringing up the rear, he gave them room to escape the defiles, holding off the enemy’s charges, his horse stumbled, and by his own fall and by the weight of the horse crashing down upon him he came not far from being killed—being now seventy years old, and with his strength much wasted by a long illness from which he was then but first recovering. As he lay, the enemy poured over him and overpowered him; and, recognized at first, out of respect and the memory of his deserts they raised and revived him just as if he were their own general, and carried him from the remote valley to the road, scarcely believing their own eyes for unlooked-for joy; part sent messengers ahead to Messene, that the war was ended, that Philopoemen was being brought in a captive. At first the thing seemed so incredible that the messenger was heard not only as a liar but scarcely as a sane man. Then, as one after another came, all affirming the same, belief was at last won; and before they fully knew that he was approaching the city, all together—free and slave, boys too with the women—poured out to the sight. And so the crowd had blocked the gate, since each man, unless he had trusted his own eyes, seemed scarcely about to hold so great a thing for certain. Hardly, thrusting aside those who met them, could the men who were bringing in Philopoemen enter the gate. An equally packed crowd had blocked the rest of the way; and, since the greatest part had been shut out from the spectacle, they suddenly filled the theater, which was near the road, and with one voice all demanded that he be brought there into the people’s sight. The magistrates and leading men, fearing lest the pity of so great a man present should stir some commotion—since the awe of his former majesty set against his present fortune would move some, the memory of his vast deserts others—set him at a distance, in view, and then hurriedly drew him from men’s eyes, the praetor Dinocrates saying that there were matters bearing on the conduct of the war which the magistrates wished to ask him. Then, he being led off into the council-house and the senate summoned, they began to deliberate. It was now growing dark, and they could settle not only nothing else, but not even where he might be guarded safely enough for the coming night. They were dumbfounded at the greatness of his former fortune and valor, and neither dared themselves to take him into their house to guard, nor trusted his keeping sufficiently to any one man. Then certain men reminded them that there was a public treasury underground, walled with squared stone. Into it he was let down in chains, and a huge stone, with which it was covered, was set over it by a machine. So, thinking his keeping was to be trusted to a place rather than to any man, they awaited the following day. The next day the multitude indeed, untainted, mindful of his former deserts toward the state, judged that he should be spared and that through him remedies for present ills should be sought; but the authors of the revolt, in whose hands the state was, taking counsel in secret, all agreed upon his death, though it was debated whether to hasten or to defer it. The party more greedy for the penalty prevailed; and one was sent to bring poison. Having taken the cup, they relate that he said nothing else but asked whether Lycortas—he was the other commander of the Achaeans—and the horsemen had escaped safe. When he was told they were safe, "It is well," he said, and, draining the cup undismayed, not long after breathed his last. The joy at his death was not lasting for the authors of the cruelty. For Messene, conquered in war, surrendered the guilty at the Achaeans’ demand, and the bones of Philopoemen were given back, and he was buried by the whole Achaean council, with all human honors so heaped upon him that not even divine ones were withheld. By the writers of history, Greek and Latin alike, so much is attributed to this man that by some of them it has been set down to memory, as a notable mark of this year, that three famous commanders died in that year—Philopoemen, Hannibal, and Publius Scipio. So far did they set him on a level with the supreme commanders of the two mightiest nations.

To King Prusias came Titus Quinctius Flamininus as envoy; whom both the harboring of Hannibal after the flight of Antiochus, and the war set on foot against Eumenes, had made suspect to the Romans. There, whether because Flamininus had among other things cast it up to Prusias that the man most hostile of all the living to the Roman people was with him—who had been, first to his own country, then, when its power was broken, to King Antiochus, the instigator of war against the Roman people—or because Prusias himself, to gratify Flamininus present and the Romans, took of his own accord the resolve to kill him or to deliver him into their power, straightway from the first conference of Flamininus soldiers were sent to guard the house of Hannibal. Hannibal had always foreseen such an end to his life in his mind, both because he saw the implacable hatred of the Romans toward him and because he trusted nothing at all to the faith of kings; and the fickleness of Prusias indeed he had even tried; the coming of Flamininus too he had dreaded as fatal to himself. With all things hostile on every side, that he might always have some way prepared for flight, he had made seven exits from the house, and of these some hidden, lest they be hemmed in by a guard. But the heavy power of kings leaves nothing unsearched that they wish to track down. They surrounded the whole circuit of the house with guards so that no one could slip out from it. Hannibal, after it was announced that the king’s soldiers were in the vestibule, tried to flee by a back door, which was the most out-of-the-way and the most secret of the exits; and when he perceived that this too was blocked by a press of soldiers, and that everything around was shut off by posted guards, he called for the poison which he had long before kept ready for such mishaps. "Let us free," he said, "the Roman people from their long anxiety, since they think it too long to await the death of an old man. Neither a great nor a memorable victory will Flamininus carry off from an unarmed and betrayed man. How much the character of the Roman people has changed, this day at least will be a proof. The fathers of these men forewarned King Pyrrhus, an armed enemy holding an army in Italy, to beware of poison; these have sent an envoy of consular rank to prompt Prusias to the murder of his guest by crime." Then, calling down curses on the head and the kingdom of Prusias, and invoking the gods of hospitality as witnesses of the faith violated by him, he drained the cup. This was the end of Hannibal’s life.

Both Polybius and Rutilius write that Scipio died in this year. I assent neither to these nor to Valerius: not to these, because I find that, in the censorship of Marcus Porcius and Lucius Valerius, Lucius Valerius himself, the censor, was chosen princeps senatus, whereas in the two preceding lustra Africanus had been—and while he lived, unless he had been removed from the Senate (a censure which no one has handed down to memory), no other princeps would have been chosen in his place. The authority of Antias is refuted by the tribune of the plebs Marcus Naevius, against whom a speech of Publius Africanus is entitled. This Naevius, in the books of the magistrates, is tribune of the plebs in the consulship of Publius Claudius and Lucius Porcius, but he entered upon the tribunate in the consulship of Appius Claudius and Marcus Sempronius, on the fourth day before the Ides of December. From there it is three months to the Ides of March, on which Publius Claudius and Lucius Porcius entered upon the consulship. And so it seems that Africanus lived during the tribunate of Naevius, and that a day could be appointed for his trial by him, but that he died before the censorship of Lucius Valerius and Marcus Porcius.

The deaths of three most illustrious men, each of his own nation, seem comparable not so much for the coinciding of their time as because none of them had an end worthy enough of the splendor of his life. First of all, none of them died or was buried on his native soil. Hannibal and Philopoemen were carried off by poison; Hannibal an exile, betrayed by his host; Philopoemen a captive, breathed his last in prison and in chains; Scipio, though neither an exile nor condemned, yet—a day having been appointed for his trial, to which he had not appeared as defendant, and being summoned in his absence—pronounced a voluntary exile not upon himself only, but even upon his funeral.

While those things were being done in the Peloponnese, from which my account has turned aside, the return into Macedonia of Demetrius and of the envoys had affected men’s minds differently in different ways. The common people of the Macedonians, whom the fear of a war threatened by the Romans had terrified, looked upon Demetrius as the author of peace with immense favor, and at the same time, with no uncertain hope, were marking out the kingdom for him after his father’s death. For although he was younger in age than Perseus, this one was sprung from a lawful wife, that one from a concubine; the one, as begotten of a common body, bore no mark of a certain father, while the other displayed a striking likeness to Philip; moreover, the Romans would set Demetrius on his father’s throne, and Perseus had no favor with them. These things were commonly said. And so anxiety grew upon Perseus, lest age alone should avail too little for him, when in all other respects his brother was the superior; and Philip himself, believing that the choice of whom he should leave heir to the kingdom would scarcely be his own, judged his younger son too to be more burdensome to him than he wished. He was offended at times by the flocking of the Macedonians to Demetrius, and was indignant that there was already a second royal court while he yet lived; and the youth himself had returned beyond doubt more puffed up, supported by the Senate’s judgments toward him and by the concessions made to him which had been denied his father; and every mention of the Romans won him as much dignity among the rest of the Macedonians as it won him odium, not with his brother only, but even with his father, especially after other Roman envoys came, and he was compelled to withdraw from Thrace and lead off his garrisons and do other things, either by the decree of the former commissioners or by the new ordinance of the Senate. But, grieving and groaning at all this—the more because he saw his son almost more often with them than with himself—he nevertheless acted obediently toward the Romans, that he might give no cause for the immediate stirring of war. Thinking too that men’s minds must be turned away from the suspicion of such designs, he led his army into the middle of Thrace, against the Odrysae, the Denthelti, and the Bessi; he took the city of Philippopolis, deserted by the flight of its townsmen, who had withdrawn with their households to the nearest mountain ridges, and, having laid waste their fields, received the barbarians of the plain in surrender. Then, leaving a garrison at Philippopolis—which not long after was driven out by the Odrysae—he resolved to found a town in Deuriopus (that region belongs to Paeonia), near the river Erigonus, which, flowing from Illyricum through Paeonia, is discharged into the river Axius, not far from Stobi, an old city; and he ordered the new city to be called Perseïs, that this honor might be paid to his elder son.

While these things were being done in Macedonia, the consuls set out for their provinces. Marcellus sent a messenger ahead to the proconsul Lucius Porcius, that he should bring up his legions to the new town of the Gauls. To the consul on his arrival the Gauls surrendered themselves. They were twelve thousand armed men; most had arms snatched from the fields; these were taken from them—they suffering it ill—and whatever else they had either snatched in plundering the fields or brought with them. To complain of these things they sent envoys to Rome. Introduced into the Senate by the praetor Gaius Valerius, they set forth that, the population in Gaul being in excess, driven by want of land and by poverty to seek a home, they had crossed the Alps, and where they saw lands uncultivated through the wastes, there they had settled without wrong to anyone; they had also begun to build a town, which was a sign that they had come to offer violence to no field and no city. Lately Marcus Claudius had sent a messenger to them, that he would wage war upon them unless they surrendered. Preferring a sure though not a splendid peace to the uncertainties of war, they had surrendered themselves, into the good faith of the Roman people rather than into its power. A few days later, ordered to depart from both town and land, they had had it in mind to go away in silence, wherever in the world they could. Then their arms, and at last everything else that they could carry or drive, were taken from them. They begged the Senate and the Roman people not to rage against them, innocent and surrendered, more harshly than against enemies. To this speech the Senate ordered this answer: that they had not acted rightly, when they had come into Italy and attempted to build a town on another’s land without the leave of any Roman magistrate who governed that province; yet that it was not the Senate’s pleasure that men who had surrendered should be plundered. And so it would send envoys with them to the consul, to order that, if they returned whence they had come, all their goods be restored to them; and these were to go straight across the Alps and give notice to the Gallic peoples to keep their multitudes at home: the Alps lay between as an almost insurmountable boundary; it would assuredly not go better for those who had been the first to make them passable. The envoys sent were Lucius Furius Purpurio, Quintus Minucius, and Lucius Manlius Acidinus. The Gauls, all that they held without wrong to anyone being restored, departed from Italy. To the Roman envoys the Transalpine peoples answered kindly. Their elders rebuked the excessive mildness of the Roman people, because they had let go unpunished men who, setting out without the nation’s bidding, had attempted to seize land of the Roman dominion and to build a town on another’s soil; a heavy price for their rashness ought to have been fixed; but that the Romans had even restored their goods, they feared lest by so great indulgence more men be impelled to dare such things. And they both received and escorted the envoys with gifts.

The consul Marcus Claudius, the Gauls being driven from the province, began to set on foot an Istrian war, sending a letter to the Senate that he be allowed to lead his legions across into Istria. This the Senate approved. They were debating this too, that a colony be planted at Aquileia, and it was not sufficiently agreed whether it should be planted as a Latin colony or one of Roman citizens. At last the fathers resolved that a Latin colony rather should be planted. Three commissioners were appointed: Publius Scipio Nasica, Gaius Flaminius, and Lucius Manlius Acidinus.

In the same year Mutina and Parma were planted as colonies of Roman citizens. Two thousand men each received land in the territory which had lately been the Boii’s, before that the Etruscans’—eight iugera apiece at Parma, five at Mutina. The commissioners who planted them were Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, Titus Aebutius Carus, and Lucius Quinctius Crispinus. And Saturnia, a colony of Roman citizens, was planted in the territory of Caletra. The commissioners who planted it were Quintus Fabius Labeo, Gaius Afranius Stellio, and Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. Ten iugera were given to each man.

In the same year the proconsul Aulus Terentius, not far from the river Hiberus in the territory of the Ausetani, both fought successful battles with the Celtiberians and stormed several towns which they had fortified there. Further Spain was at peace that year, both because the proconsul Publius Sempronius was caught in a long illness, and because, with none to provoke them, the Lusitanians very opportunely kept quiet. Nor was anything memorable done among the Ligurians by the consul Quintus Fabius.

Marcus Marcellus, recalled from Istria, disbanded his army and returned to Rome for the elections. He elected as consuls Gnaeus Baebius Tamphilus and Lucius Aemilius Paullus—who had been curule aedile with Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, from whose consulship it was now the fifth year, when that same Lepidus, after two rebuffs, had been made consul. The praetors then made were Quintus Fulvius Flaccus, Marcus Valerius Laevinus, Publius Manlius (for the second time), Marcus Ogulnius Gallus, Lucius Caecilius Denter, and Gaius Terentius Istra.

There was a supplication at the end of the year on account of prodigies, because they sufficiently believed that it had rained blood for two days in the precinct of Concord, and it had been reported that not far from Sicily a new island, which had not been there before, had risen up out of the sea. Valerius Antias is the authority that Hannibal died in this year, the envoys sent to Prusias for that purpose being, besides Titus Quinctius Flamininus, whose name is famous in the matter, Lucius Scipio Asiaticus and Publius Scipio Nasica.