The History of Rome, Book 44

At the beginning of the spring that followed the winter in which these things were done, the consul Quintus Marcius Philippus set out from Rome and came to Brundisium with the five thousand men he was to take across with him as a reinforcement for the legions. Marcus Popilius, a man of consular rank, and other young men of equal nobility followed the consul as military tribunes into the Macedonian legions. In those same days Gaius Marcius Figulus the praetor, to whom the fleet had fallen as his province, came to Brundisium; and setting out together from Italy they reached Corcyra on the second day, and on the third Actium, the harbor of Acarnania. From there the consul, landing at Ambracia, made for Thessaly by the land route; the praetor, having rounded Leucas and sailed into the Corinthian gulf, left his ships at Creusa and himself made his way overland through the middle of Boeotia—a single day’s march for a man unencumbered—to Chalcis, to his fleet. Aulus Hostilius at that time had his camp in Thessaly about Palaepharsalus; and though he had done nothing memorable in the field, yet he had molded his soldiers from a loose license into the whole of military discipline, and had cultivated the allies faithfully and defended them from every kind of injury. On hearing of his successor’s arrival, when he had inspected with care the arms, the men, and the horses, he went out with his army drawn up to meet the consul as he came. And their first meeting was worthy of themselves and of the Roman name, and so afterward was their conduct of affairs—for he served at the army as proconsul. A few days later the consul held an assembly before the soldiers. Beginning from the parricide committed by Perseus against his brother and meditated against his father, he added the poisonings and murders by which, the kingdom once gotten by crime, he had held it, the attempt upon Eumenes by abominable brigandage, the injuries against the Roman people, the plunderings of allied cities against the treaty. How hateful all these were to the gods too, he would feel in the outcome of his affairs; for the gods favor piety and good faith, through which the Roman people had come to so great a height. Then he compared the strength of the Roman people, now embracing the whole circle of the lands, with the strength of Macedonia, the armies with the armies: by how much greater were the resources of Philip and of Antiochus, and they had been broken with no larger forces. The spirits of the soldiers kindled by exhortation of this kind, he began to deliberate on the sum of the war’s conduct. There Gaius Marcius the praetor came too, having taken over the fleet from Chalcis. It was resolved not to waste more time by lingering in Thessaly, but to move camp at once and press on thence into Macedonia, and that the praetor should take care that at the same time the fleet too be brought against the enemy’s coasts. The praetor dismissed, the consul ordered the soldier to carry a month’s rations with him, and setting out on the tenth day after he had taken over the army, moved camp; and having advanced one day’s march, he summoned the guides of the routes, and when he had bidden each set forth in council the way he meant to lead, then, having removed them, he referred to the council which road he should most preferably take. To some the road by Pythous seemed best, to others that through the Cambunian mountains, by which the year before the consul Hostilius had led, to others the way past the Ascuris marsh. A certain stretch of the road was common to all; and so the deliberation of that question was put off to the time when they would pitch camp near the parting of the routes. He then led into Perrhaebia, and held a fixed camp between Azorus and Doliche, to take counsel again which road he should most preferably take.

During those same days Perseus, since he knew the enemy was drawing near but was ignorant which route he would take, resolved to occupy all the passes with garrisons. To the ridge of the Cambunian mountains—they themselves call it Volustana—he sent ten thousand of the young light-armed with Asclepiodotus as their leader; at the fort which was above the Ascuris marsh—the place is called Lapathus—Hippias was ordered to hold the pass with a garrison of twelve thousand Macedonians. He himself with the rest of his forces at first held a fixed camp about Dium; then from Dium, so that he might seem to have grown numb and helpless of counsel, he would run with light horsemen along the shore now to Heracleum, now to Phila, and back from there in the same course to Dium.

Meanwhile the consul’s resolve held fixed to lead by that pass where, near Ottolobus, we have said the king’s camp was. Yet it was resolved to send ahead four thousand armed men to seize the favorable positions beforehand, over whom were set Marcus Claudius and Quintus Marcius the consul’s son. At once the whole forces followed too. But the road was so steep and rough and broken that the light-armed sent ahead, having with difficulty completed a march of fifteen miles in two days, pitched camp and rested—they call the place they took the Camp of Days. Thence on the next day, having advanced seven miles and seized a hillock not far from the enemy’s camp, they sent a messenger back to the consul that the enemy had been reached, that they had settled themselves in a safe place convenient for everything; and that he should follow up as far as he could stretch his march. To the consul, anxious both because of the difficulty of the route he had entered upon and on account of those few whom he had sent ahead among the midst of the enemy’s garrisons, the messenger met him at the Ascuris marsh. Confidence was therefore added to him too, and joining his forces he leaned his camp against the hillock which was held, where it was most fitted to the nature of the ground. Not the enemy’s camp only, which was a little more than a mile away, but the whole region as far as Dium and Phila and the broadly open shore of the sea was set beneath the eyes in a prospect from so lofty a ridge. This thing kindled the soldiers’ spirits, after they beheld from so close at hand the whole burden of the war and all the royal forces and the enemy’s land. And so, when, eager, they urged the consul to lead them straight to the enemy’s camp, one day was given for rest to men wearied by the toil of the march. On the third day, a part of the forces left to guard the camp, the consul led against the enemy.

Hippias had lately been sent by the king to guard the pass; he, from the moment he beheld the Roman camp on the hillock, the spirits of his men being made ready for the contest, came to meet the consul’s advancing column. Both the Romans had gone out stripped for the fight, and the enemy were light-armed, a kind most ready to provoke a contest. Having met, therefore, they at once threw their missiles. Many wounds on both sides were taken and given in the rash onset; few of either party fell. Their spirits provoked for the next day, with larger forces and more fiercely the clash for the sum of the war would have been made, had the ground been sufficient to deploy a line. The mountain ridge, narrowed into a wedge-shaped spine, scarcely opened in front to three ranks of armed men. And so, while few fought, the rest of the multitude, especially those of the heavy arms, stood as spectators of the fight. The light-armed could even run out through the windings of the ridge and engage the light-armed on the flanks in battle over ground both fair and unfair. More being wounded that day than killed, the battle was broken off by night. On the third day the Roman commander was in want of counsel; for he could neither remain on the barren ridge nor retreat without disgrace and even peril, should the enemy press a yielding force from the higher ground; nor did anything else remain than to correct by stubborn audacity—which is sometimes, in the outcome, prudent—what had been boldly undertaken. Indeed it had come to such a point that, had the consul had an enemy like the ancient kings of the Macedonians, a great disaster could have been suffered. But while the king roamed with his cavalry along the shores near Dium, and from twelve miles off heard almost the shout and din of the fighters, he neither increased his forces by sending fresh men in relief of the weary, nor was he himself present at the contest—which mattered most—while the Roman commander, more than sixty years old and very heavy of body, performed all the soldier’s duties briskly in his own person. Admirably to the last he persevered in what he had boldly undertaken; and leaving Popilius to guard the ridge, about to cross by trackless ground, having sent ahead men to clear the road, he ordered Attalus and Misagenes, each with the auxiliaries of his own nation, to be a protection to those opening the pass; he himself, keeping the cavalry and the baggage before him, brought up the rear of the column with the legions.

Indescribable was the toil of those descending, with the crashing fall of pack-animals and packs. Having advanced scarcely four miles, there was nothing more to be wished than to return by the way they had come, if they could. The elephant-war/">elephants caused an almost hostile uproar to the column; for when they came to trackless places, their drivers thrown off, with a horrible shrieking they struck enormous terror especially into the horses, until a method of bringing them across was devised. Down the slope, the incline being taken, two long stout beams were fixed into the ground from the lower part, standing apart from one another a little more than the breadth of the beast; upon these, with a crossbeam thirty feet long laid across, planks were joined so as to be a bridge, and earth was thrown on top. Then at a moderate interval below, a second like bridge, then a third and more in order, were made where the rocks were sheer. The elephant proceeded onto the bridge from solid ground; and before it advanced to the far end, the beams being cut away, the bridge collapsed and gently forced it to slide down as far as the beginning of the next bridge. Some elephants slid down standing on their feet, others sinking on their haunches. When the level of the next bridge received them, they were carried down again by a like collapse of the lower bridge, until the more even valley was reached. A little more than seven miles the Romans advanced that day. The least part of the route was completed on foot; for the most part they rolled themselves down together with their arms and other burdens, with every kind of distress, so that not even the leader and author of the route denied that the whole army could have been destroyed by a small band. By night they reached a moderate level; nor, hemmed in on every side, was there space to look about how dangerous the place was—they had scarcely at last, beyond hope, found a firm spot to stand on. On the next day too it was necessary, in so hollow a valley, to wait for Popilius and the forces left with him; and these too, though no enemy had terrified them on any side, the harshness of the ground harried as an enemy would. On the third day, the forces joined, they go through the pass which the inhabitants call Callipeuce. On the fourth day thence, by ground equally trackless but more expertly traversed from practice and with better hope—because neither did the enemy appear anywhere, and they were drawing near the sea—they descended into the plains and pitched camp between Heracleum and Libethrum. The infantry, the greater part of whom held the hillocks, there embraced within a rampart a part of the plain too, where the cavalry might encamp.

To the king, while he was bathing, it is said the news was brought that the enemy was at hand. At this news, when he had leapt up terrified from his tub, crying out that he was beaten without a battle, he rushed forth; and presently, trembling through one panic-stricken counsel and command after another, he recalled from their garrisons two of his friends—one to Pella, that the money which had been deposited at Phacus might be brought off—and laid open all the approaches to the war. He himself, all the gilded statues at Dium being carried off lest they be plunder for the enemy, compelled the inhabitants of that place to migrate to Pydna; and what might have seemed the rashness of the consul, that he had advanced to a place whence he could not retreat against an unwilling enemy, this the king made into no ill-considered audacity. For the Romans had two passes by which they could escape thence: one through Tempe into Thessaly, the other into Macedonia past Dium; both of which were held by the royal garrisons. And so, had a fearless leader sustained for ten days the first show of the approaching terror, neither would the retreat through Tempe into Thessaly have lain open to the Romans, nor the road for bringing supplies that way. For Tempe is a pass difficult of passage even if it be not made hostile by war. For besides the narrows over five miles, where there is a scant track for a loaded animal, the rocks on either side are so sheer that one can scarcely look down without a kind of dizziness at once of the eyes and the mind. The sound too terrifies, and the depth of the river Peneus flowing through the middle of the valley. This place, so hostile by its own nature, was beset in four separate spots by royal garrisons. One was at the first approach, near Gonnus; the second at Condylus, an impregnable fort; the third about Lapathus, which they call Charax; the fourth set upon the road itself, where the valley is both midmost and narrowest, which even ten armed men can easily defend. The approach through Tempe being thus cut off both for supplies and for their own retreat, the mountains by which they had descended were to be sought again. But this, as they had eluded by stealth, so openly, with the enemy holding the upper summits, they could not; and the experienced difficulty would have cut off all hope. Nothing else remained in the rash undertaking than to escape through the midst of the enemy into Macedonia toward Dium; which, had not the gods taken away the king’s wits, was itself a thing of enormous difficulty. For though the roots of Mount Olympus leave a little more than a mile of space to the sea, half of which the broadly overflowing mouth of the river Baphyrus occupies, and part of the plain either the temple of Jupiter or the town holds, the very small remainder could have been closed with a modest ditch and rampart, and there was so much of stones at hand and of woodland timber that even a wall could have been set up and towers raised. But when his mind, blinded by sudden terror, had discerned none of these things, all the garrisons stripped bare and laid open to the war, he fled back to Pydna.

The consul, discerning the most of his protection and his hope in the folly and sloth of the enemy, sent back a messenger to Spurius Lucretius at Larisa to seize the forts abandoned by the enemy around Tempe, and sending Popilius ahead to explore the passages around Dium, after he perceived that everything lay open in every direction, by a second day’s march reached Dium and ordered the camp to be measured out right beneath the temple, lest anything in the sacred place be violated. He himself, entering the city—not large, yet adorned in its public places and with a multitude of statues, and excellently fortified—could scarcely sufficiently believe that, with such great things left without cause, some trick did not underlie. Having delayed one day to explore everything around, he moved camp; and believing well enough that there would be a supply of grain in Pieria, that day he advanced to a river named Mitys. On the next day, advancing, he received the city of Agassae as they delivered themselves up; and, to conciliate to himself the spirits of the rest of the Macedonians, content with hostages, he promised to leave them the city without a garrison and that they should live free and under their own laws. Advancing thence a day’s march, he pitched camp at the river Ascordus; and, the further he advanced from Thessaly, feeling thereby the greater scarcity of everything, he returned to Dium, all doubt being removed for everyone as to what one would have had to suffer if cut off from Thessaly, for whom it was not safe to withdraw far from it. Perseus, all his forces gathered into one place with their leaders, began to upbraid the prefects of the garrisons, before all Asclepiodotus and Hippias; from these, he said, the bolts of Macedonia had been handed over to the Romans—a fault of which no one had more justly been guilty than himself. To the consul, after the fleet sighted from the deep gave hope that the ships were coming with supplies—for there was a vast dearness of corn and almost a famine—he heard from those who had already entered the harbor that the cargo ships had been left at Magnesia. Uncertain then what should be done—so utterly, without any aid of an enemy to aggravate it, must he fight with the very difficulty of things—very opportunely a letter was brought from Spurius Lucretius that he held all the forts which were above Tempe and around Phila, and had found in them an abundance of grain and of other things for use.

Greatly glad at this, the consul led from Dium to Phila, both to strengthen its garrison and to distribute to the soldier the grain whose conveyance was slow. That departure had a report by no means favorable. For some gave out that he had withdrawn from the enemy in fear, because, if he remained in Pieria, he would have to fight a battle; others, that, ignorant of what the day-by-day fortune of war was changing, he had let slip from his hands, as if waiting upon events, things that soon could not be recovered. For at the same moment that he yielded possession of Dium, he roused the enemy to feel, then at last, that what before had been lost through fault must be recovered. For on hearing of the consul’s departure, [Perseus] returned to Dium and restored what had been thrown down and devastated by the Romans; he replaced the battlements of the walls that had been struck off, strengthened the walls on every side, then five miles from the city pitched camp on the near bank of the river Elpeus, meaning to have the river itself, very difficult of passage, for a fortification. It flows from the valley of Mount Olympus, scant in summer; the same, swollen by the winter rains, both above makes huge whirlpools over the rocks, and below, by rolling into the sea the earth it has torn away, very deep chasms, and, the channel hollowed in the middle, banks steep on either side. Believing the enemy’s route hemmed in by this river, he had it in mind to draw out the remaining time of summer.

Amid these things the consul sends Popilius from Phila with two thousand armed men to Heracleum. It is about five miles distant from Phila, set in the middle region between Dium and Tempe on a rock overhanging the river. Popilius, before he brought the armed men up to the walls, sent men to advise the magistrates and chief men that they should rather make trial of the good faith and clemency of the Romans than of their force. These counsels moved them nothing, because fires appeared at the Elpeus from the king’s camp. Then by land and sea—the fleet too, brought up, stood off the shore—they began to be assaulted at once with arms, at once with works and engines.

Certain young Romans even turned a circus game to the use of war and took the lowest part of the wall. The custom then was—this lavishness not yet introduced, of filling the circus with the beasts of all nations—to seek out various kinds of spectacles; for once with four-horse chariots, once with a vaulting rider sent out, each course scarcely filled the time of a single hour. Among other things, about sixty young men, and sometimes more at more elaborate games, were led in armed. Their leading-in was partly an image of an army upon maneuver, partly of an art more elegant than the military and nearer to the use of gladiatorial arms. When they had displayed various movements in their maneuver, a square formation made, with shields packed close over their heads—the first rank standing, the second lower, the third more so and the fourth, the last even kneeling on the ground—they made a sloping testudo, as the roofs of buildings are. From this, two armed men, about fifty feet apart, would run out, and, threatening one another, when they had climbed from the bottom to the top of the testudo over the packed shields, now as though defending along the edges of the outermost testudo, now running together against each other in the middle, they would skip about no otherwise than upon solid ground. A testudo like this was brought up to the lowest part of the wall. When the armed men standing upon it had come up, they were made equal in height to the defenders at the crest of the wall; and these driven off, the soldiers of two maniples crossed over into the city. The one difference was that those at the front and on the flanks did not hold their shields raised over their heads, lest they bare their bodies, but held them out before them in the manner of men fighting. Thus neither did the missiles thrown from the wall hurt them as they came up, and those cast onto the testudo, in the manner of rain, slid down harmless to the bottom over the slippery slope.

And the consul, Heracleum now taken, advanced his camp there, as though about to go on—the king removed—to Dium and from there into Pieria as well. But, now preparing his winter quarters, he ordered roads to be built for bringing up supplies from Thessaly, and suitable places for granaries to be chosen and roofed buildings to be erected, where those bringing the supplies might lodge.

Perseus at last, his spirit recovered from the panic by which he had been stunned, would have preferred that his commands had not been obeyed: for, in his trembling, he had ordered the treasure to be flung into the sea at Pella, and the dockyards at Thessalonica to be burned. Andronicus, sent to Thessalonica, had drawn out the time, leaving room for the very repentance that befell. Less cautious was Nicias at Pella in throwing away part of the money which had been at Phacus; but he seemed to have slipped in a thing that could be mended, because nearly all of it was drawn up by divers. And so great was the king’s shame at his own panic that he ordered the divers secretly killed, then Andronicus too and Nicias, that no one might be left privy to so mad a command.

Amid these things Gaius Marcius, setting out with the fleet from Heracleum to Thessalonica, both laid waste the country far and wide, armed men landed in many places along the shores, and in several successful battles drove those running out from the city, panic-stricken, within the walls. And now he was a terror to the city itself, when, with engines of every kind disposed, not only those wandering about the walls and rashly approaching, but even those who were on the ships, were struck by stones shooting from the engine. The soldiers therefore recalled to the ships and the assault of Thessalonica given up, they make for Aenia thence. That city is fifteen miles distant, set opposite Pydna, with fertile land. Its borders thoroughly ravaged, skirting the coast they come to Antigonea. There, landing first, they both ravaged the fields here and there and carried off a fair amount of booty to the ships. Then the Macedonians, foot and horse mingled, attacking them as they straggled, pursued them in headlong flight to the sea and killed about five hundred and took no fewer. Nothing but the last necessity—when they were prevented from withdrawing safely to the ships—roused the spirits of the Roman soldiers, at once by despair of any other safety, at once by the indignity. The battle was renewed on the shore; those who were on the ships helped. There about two hundred of the Macedonians were slain, an equal number taken.

From Antigonea the fleet, setting out, made a landing in the Pallenian territory to plunder. That land was of the Cassandreans, by far the most fertile of all the coast past which they had sailed. There King Eumenes, having set out from Elaea with twenty decked ships, met them, and five decked ships sent by King Prusias. By this accession of strength the praetor’s spirit grew, so that he assaulted Cassandrea. It was founded by King Cassander in the very jaws which join the Pallenian territory to the rest of Macedonia, hedged on this side by the Toronaic, on that by the Macedonian sea. For the tongue of land on which it is set juts out into the deep, and runs out no less than Mount Athos, famed for its size, facing the region of Magnesia with two unequal promontories, of which the larger has the name Posideum, the smaller Canastraeum. Their parts divided, they set to the assault. The Roman led fortifications—abattis also set in the way to block the road—from the Macedonian to the Toronaic sea, at the place they call Clitae. On the other part is a channel; thence Eumenes assaulted. The Romans had the most labor in filling the ditch which Perseus had lately thrown up against them. When the praetor asked there—since nowhere did mounds appear whither the earth dug from the ditch had been carried back—arches were pointed out to him: built not to the same thickness as the old wall, but with a single course of bricks. He took, therefore, the plan of opening a way into the city by digging through the wall. And he could so deceive them, if, attacking the walls on another part with ladders and casting a tumult upon them, he turned the city’s defenders to the guard of that place. There were in the garrison of Cassandrea, besides the not-to-be-despised youth of the townsmen, eight hundred Agrianes and two thousand Penestae of the Illyrians, sent thence by Pleuratus, both warlike races. While these guarded the walls, when the Romans strove to come up with the utmost force, in a moment of time the dug-through walls of the arches laid the city open. And had those who broke in been armed, they would have taken it at once. When it was announced to the soldiers that this work was finished, eager with joy they suddenly raised a shout, others about to burst into the city on another part. First astonishment seized the enemy, what the sudden shout could mean. After the prefects of the garrison, Pytho and Philippus, learned that the city lay open, thinking the work had been done in favor of whoever should first attack, with a strong band of Agrianes and Illyrians they sally out and rout the Romans—who, gathering and being called together from various quarters to bring the standards into the city, were in disorder and disarray—and pursue them to the ditch, into which, driven headlong, they heap them in a collapse. About six hundred were killed there, and almost all who were caught between wall and ditch were wounded. Thus the praetor, struck down by his own attempt, was made the slower to other counsels. And to Eumenes too, assaulting at once from the sea and from the land, nothing proceeded well enough. It pleased both, therefore—the guards strengthened, lest any garrison could be let in from Macedonia—since open force had not succeeded, to assault the walls with siege-works. While they were preparing these, ten royal galleys sent from Thessalonica with picked Gallic auxiliaries, when they had spied the enemy’s ships standing in the open sea, themselves in the dark night, in single file, keeping as close to the shore as they could, entered the city. The fame of this new garrison forced at once the Romans and the king to desist from the assault. Rounding the promontory, they put in their fleet at Torone. Setting to assault that too, when they noticed it was defended by a strong band, their attempt frustrated, they make for Demetrias. There, when on approaching they saw the walls filled with armed men, sailing past they put in at Iolcos, intending thence, the country devastated, to attack Demetrias also.

Amid these things the consul too, lest he sit idle merely in the enemy’s country, sends Marcus Popilius with five thousand soldiers to assault the city of Meliboea. It is set at the roots of Mount Ossa, on the side that slopes toward Thessaly, conveniently overhanging Demetrias. The enemy’s first arrival struck the inhabitants of the place; then, their spirits collected from the unexpected panic, the armed run about to the gates and walls where the approaches were suspect, and at once cut off the hope that the place could be taken at the first onset. A siege therefore was prepared, and works for the assault began to be made. Perseus, when he had heard at once that Meliboea was being assaulted by the consul’s army, and that the fleet stood at Iolcos to attack Demetrias from there, sends a certain Euphranor, one of his leaders, with two thousand picked men to Meliboea. The same was commanded, if he had driven the Romans off from Meliboea, to enter Demetrias by a secret route before the Romans should move camp from Iolcos to the city. And by the besiegers of Meliboea, when he had suddenly appeared on the higher ground, the works were abandoned in much trepidation and fire thrown upon them. Thus they withdrew from Meliboea. Euphranor, the siege of the one city lifted, at once leads to Demetrias. By night [the townsmen] trusted that they could protect not the walls only, but the fields too from ravaging; and sallies against the wandering plunderers were made, not without wounds to the enemy. The praetor and the king nonetheless rode round the walls, contemplating the site of the city, whether at any part they could attempt it by works or by force. There was a report that, through Cydas the Cretan and Antimachus, who commanded Demetrias, conditions of friendship were being negotiated between Eumenes and Perseus. From Demetrias at any rate they withdrew. Eumenes sails to the consul; having congratulated him that he had prosperously entered Macedonia, he departs to his kingdom at Pergamum. Marcius Figulus the praetor, part of the fleet sent into winter quarters at Sciathos, with the rest of the ships makes for Oreus in Euboea, judging that city most suitable whence supplies could be sent to the armies that were in Macedonia and in Thessaly. About King Eumenes they hand down far different things. If you would believe Valerius Antias, he reports that neither was the praetor aided by him with the fleet, though he had often summoned him by letters, nor did he depart into Asia with the consul’s goodwill, indignant that he had not been permitted to encamp in the same camp; nor could it even be obtained from him that he leave behind the Gallic horsemen he had brought with him. Attalus his brother both remained with the consul, and his loyalty was sincere and of even tenor, and his service excellent in that war.

While the war is waged in Macedonia, transalpine envoys came to Rome from a princeling of the Gauls—Balanos is handed down as his own name; the nation from which he was, is not handed down—promising auxiliaries for the Macedonian war. Thanks were rendered by the Senate and gifts sent: a golden torque of two pounds and golden bowls of four pounds, a caparisoned horse and cavalry arms. After the Gauls, Pamphylian envoys brought into the Senate house a golden crown made of twenty thousand Philippei; and when they asked that it be permitted to place that gift in the shrine of Jupiter Best and Greatest and to sacrifice on the Capitol, it was permitted, and to the envoys, wishing kindly to renew the friendship, answer was made, and a gift of two thousand asses each was sent. Then from King Prusias, and a little later from the Rhodians, envoys discoursing about the same matter in a far different manner were heard. Both embassies treated of reconciling peace with King Perseus. Prusias’s were entreaties rather than a demand, professing that up to that time he had stood with the Romans and would stand as long as there was war; but since envoys had come to him from Perseus about ending the war with the Romans, he had promised to be his intercessor before the Senate; he asked, if they could bring it into their minds, that they make an end of their wrath, and that they set him too among the credit of a reconciled peace. So the king’s envoys. The Rhodians, their own merits toward the Roman people, and almost the greater part of the victory—especially that over King Antiochus—being claimed for themselves, arrogantly recounted, then added: when there was peace between the Macedonians and the Romans, a friendship with King Perseus had been begun by them; this, against their will, with no merit of his toward them, since so it had seemed good to the Romans to drag them into a partnership of the war, they had broken off. Now in the third year they were feeling many of the war’s disadvantages, the sea meanwhile cut off; the island was needy unless it were aided by maritime supplies for its tillage. Since they could endure this no longer, they had sent other envoys to Perseus in Macedonia to give him notice that it was the Rhodians’ pleasure that he compose peace with the Romans; that they had been sent to Rome to announce the same. As to those through whom it should have stood that an end was not made to the war, what they themselves ought to do against such, the Rhodians would consider. Not even now, I hold for certain, can these things be read or heard without indignation. From that it can be judged what the disposition of the fathers’ minds was as they heard them. Claudius is authority that nothing was answered, only a decree of the Senate read out, by which the Roman people ordered the Carians and Lycians to be free, and that a letter announcing the decree of the Senate be sent at once to both nations; on hearing which the chief of the embassy, whose grandiloquence the Senate house had a little before scarcely held, collapsed. Others hand down that it was answered: the Roman people, even at the beginning of that war, had learned from no idle authorities that the Rhodians had entered into secret counsels with King Perseus against its commonwealth, and that, if it had before been doubtful, the words of the envoys a little before had reduced it to a certainty—and that for the most part fraud, even if at first more cautious, betrays itself. The Rhodians were now exercising in the world the arbitration of war and of peace; at the Rhodians’ nod the Romans would take up arms and lay them down. Now they would have, not the gods, as witnesses of treaties, but the Rhodians. Was it so, then? Unless they were obeyed and the armies were carried off from Macedonia, they would see what they ought to do? What the Rhodians would see, they themselves knew; the Roman people, certainly, Perseus conquered—which they hoped would soon be—would see to it that it rendered to each state a gratitude worthy of its deserts in that war. A gift nonetheless was sent to the envoys, two thousand asses each, which they did not accept.

Then a letter of the consul Quintus Marcius was read out, in what manner, the pass crossed, he had passed over into Macedonia: there he both had supplies provided against the winter from other places, and had taken from the Epirotes twenty thousand measures of wheat and ten thousand of barley, so that money for that grain might be furnished to their envoys at Rome. Clothing must be sent to the soldiers from Rome; there was need of about two hundred horses, especially Numidian, and he had no supply of these in those parts. A decree of the Senate was made that all these things be done according to the consul’s letter. Gaius Sulpicius the praetor let out the contract for six thousand togas, thirty thousand tunics, and two hundred horses to be transported into Macedonia and furnished at the consul’s discretion, and paid the Epirote envoys the money for the grain, and brought into the Senate Onesimus son of Pytho, a noble Macedonian. He had always been to the king an advocate of peace, and had advised that—just as his father Philip had kept up, to the last day of his life, the practice of reading through daily, twice a day, the treaty struck with the Romans—he should observe that custom, if not always, yet often. After he could not deter him from war, he began first to withdraw himself by one cause and another, lest he be present at the things he did not approve; at last, when he saw that he was suspect and at times charged with the crime of treason, he deserted to the Romans and was of great use to the consul. He, introduced into the Senate house, when he had recounted these things, the Senate ordered to be entered on the roll of allies, and lodging and entertainment to be furnished him, and two hundred iugera of the Tarentine land—which was public land of the Roman people—to be given, and a house at Tarentum to be bought. To see to these things was entrusted to Gaius Decimius the praetor.

They held census/">the census on the Ides of December more severely than before: from many the horse was taken, among them Publius Rutilius, who as plebs/">tribune of the plebs had violently accused them; he was also moved from his tribe and made an aerarian. When, by decree of the Senate, half of that year’s revenues had been assigned to the censors by the quaestors for the making of public works, Tiberius Sempronius, out of that money which had been assigned to himself, bought for the public the house of Publius Africanus behind the Old Shops at the statue of Vortumnus, and the butcher-shops and the shops adjoining, and saw to the building of a basilica, which afterward was called the Sempronia.

It was now at the end of the year, and on account of the care especially of the Macedonian war men had it on their tongues whom they should create as consuls for the year to bring that war at last to an end. And so a decree of the Senate was made that Gnaeus Servilius come at the earliest time to hold the elections. Sulpicius the praetor sent the decree of the Senate to the consul, and a few days later read out a letter received from the consul, by which he was to come into the city before the day. And the consul made haste, and the elections were completed on the day that had been named. The consuls created were Lucius Aemilius Paulus for the second time—in the fourteenth year after he had first been consul—and Gaius Licinius Crassus. The praetors made on the next day were Gnaeus Baebius Tamphilus, Lucius Anicius Gallus, Gnaeus Octavius, Publius Fonteius Balbus, Marcus Aebutius Helva, Gaius Papirius Carbo. That everything might be done the more promptly, the care of the Macedonian war spurred them. And so it pleased them that the designates at once draw lots for the provinces, so that, when it was known to which consul Macedonia and to which praetor the fleet had fallen, they might from that moment think out and prepare what would be of use for the war, and consult the Senate, if there were anything on which deliberation was needed. It pleased them that the Latin festival, once they had entered office, be held—so far as religious scruple permitted—at the earliest time, lest anything detain the consul who had to go into Macedonia. These things decreed, to the consuls Italy and Macedonia, and to the praetors, besides the two jurisdictions in the city, the fleet and Spain and Sicily and Sardinia were named as provinces. Of the consuls, Macedonia fell to Aemilius, Italy to Licinius. Among the praetors, Gnaeus Baebius drew the urban jurisdiction, Lucius Anicius the foreign—and, if the Senate should so decree, Illyricum—Gnaeus Octavius the fleet, Publius Fonteius Spain, Marcus Aebutius Sicily, Gaius Papirius Sardinia.

At once it appeared to all that Lucius Aemilius would wage that war not slothfully, both because he was in other respects a man of mark, and because day and night, intent, he turned over in his mind those things alone which pertained to that war. First of all he asked of the Senate that they send legates into Macedonia to inspect the armies and the fleet and to report what was ascertained—what was needed for the land or naval forces; besides, that they explore the royal forces as far as they could, and which province was ours, which the enemy’s; whether the Romans held their camp within the passes, or whether by now all the narrows had been surmounted and they had come into level ground; who were faithful allies to us, who doubtful and of a loyalty hanging on fortune, who seemed certain enemies; how much in supplies was prepared, and whence it was brought up by the land route, whence by ships; what had been done that summer by land and sea: from these things well ascertained, sure counsels could be taken for the future. The Senate gave the business to the consul Gnaeus Servilius, that he send into Macedonia three men, whomever seemed good to Lucius Aemilius. The legates set out two days later: Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, Aulus Licinius Nerva, Lucius Baebius. In the Roman territory once, in the Veientine once—twice a nine-day rite was performed. The priests who died that year were flamen/">Publius Quinctilius Varus, the flamen of Mars, and Marcus Claudius Marcellus the decemvir, in whose place Gnaeus Octavius was substituted. And now, magnificence increasing, it was noted that at the circus games of Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica and Publius Lentulus, the curule aediles, sixty-three African panthers and forty bears and elephant-war/">elephants performed.

In the consulship of Lucius Aemilius Paulus and Gaius Licinius, on the Ides of March, at the beginning of the year that followed, when the fathers had been in expectation chiefly of what the consul, whose province it was, would refer about Macedonia, Paulus said that he had nothing to refer, since the legates had not yet returned from there. But that the legates were now at Brundisium, twice driven back from their course to Dyrrachium. When he had learned what it was to the purpose to know first, he would refer; that would be within very few days. And, lest anything hold back his own departure, the day before the Ides of April had been appointed for the Latin festival. The sacrifice duly performed, both he and Gnaeus Octavius, as soon as the Senate should decree, would set out; Gaius Licinius his colleague would have it in charge, in his absence, that if anything needed to be prepared or sent for that war, it be prepared and sent. Meanwhile the embassies of foreign nations could be heard.

First the Alexandrian envoys from the kings Ptolemy and Cleopatra were called. In mourning garb, with beard and hair grown long, with branches of olive, they entered the Senate house and prostrated themselves; and their speech was more pitiable than their appearance. Antiochus, king of Syria, who had been a hostage at Rome, waging war—under the honorable pretext of restoring the elder Ptolemy to the kingdom—with his younger brother, who then held Alexandria, had both been the superior in a naval battle at Pelusium, and, a bridge made over the Nile by hasty work, having crossed with his army, was terrifying Alexandria itself by siege, and seemed not far from possessing a kingdom most opulent. The envoys, complaining of these things, begged the Senate to bring aid to a kingdom and to kings, friends of the empire. Such, they said, were the Roman people’s services toward Antiochus, and such its authority among all kings and nations, that if they sent envoys to declare that it did not please the Senate that war be made upon allied kings, he would at once withdraw from the walls of Alexandria and lead his army back into Syria. But if they delayed to do this, soon Ptolemy and Cleopatra, exiles from their kingdom, would come to Rome, to some shame of the Roman people, that it had brought no aid in the last crisis of their fortunes. The fathers, moved by the prayers of the Alexandrians, at once sent Gaius Popilius Laenas and Gaius Decimius and Gaius Hostilius as legates to make an end of the war between the kings. They were ordered to approach Antiochus first, then Ptolemy, and to announce that, unless the war was given up, whichever was the cause of its standing, him they would hold neither as a friend nor as an ally.

These having set out within three days, together with the Alexandrian envoys, the legates from Macedonia came on the last day of the Quinquatrus, so awaited that, had it not been evening, the consuls would have summoned the Senate at once. On the next day there was a Senate, and the legates were heard. They report that the army had been led through trackless passes into Macedonia with greater peril than profit. The king held Pieria, whither he had advanced; the camps had been brought together almost so closely that they were kept apart only by the river Elpeus thrown between. Neither did the king grant the chance of fighting, nor had our men the force to compel him. Winter, besides, had intervened upon the conduct of affairs. The soldier was being fed in idleness, and had not more than six days’ grain. The Macedonians were said to be thirty thousand armed men. If Appius Claudius around Lychnidus had had a sufficiently strong army, the king could have been kept divided by a war on two fronts; as it was, both Appius and what garrison was with him were in the utmost peril, unless either a proper army were promptly sent there, or those men were withdrawn from there. From the camp they had set out to the fleet; they had heard that part of the naval allies had been carried off by disease, part—especially those who were from Sicily—had gone off to their homes, and that men were lacking to the ships; and that those who remained had neither received pay nor had clothing. Eumenes and his fleet, like ships brought by the wind, had both come and gone without cause, nor did the spirit of that king seem sufficiently constant. As all things about Eumenes were doubtful, so they reported the loyalty of Attalus to be remarkably constant.

The legates heard, Lucius Aemilius then said that he would refer about the war. The Senate decreed that into eight legions the consuls and the people should create an equal number of tribunes; but that no one be created that year except one who had held office. Then, out of all the military tribunes, that Lucius Aemilius should choose for the two legions in Macedonia whomever of them he wished, and that, the solemnity of the Latin festival completed, Lucius Aemilius the consul and Gnaeus Octavius the praetor, to whom the fleet had fallen, should set out for the province. A third was added to these, Lucius Anicius the praetor, whose jurisdiction was among foreigners; it pleased them that he succeed Appius Claudius in the province of Illyricum around Lychnidus. The care of the levy was laid upon Gaius Licinius the consul. He was ordered to enroll seven thousand Roman citizens and two hundred horsemen, and to require of the allies of the Latin name seven thousand foot and four hundred horse, and to send a letter to Gnaeus Servilius, who held the province of Gaul, that he enroll six hundred horse. This army he was ordered to send to his colleague in Macedonia at the earliest time; and that in that province there be not more than two legions; that these be filled up so that they should have six thousand foot and three hundred horse each; the rest of the foot and horse to be disposed in garrisons; those of them not fit for soldiering to be discharged. Ten thousand foot besides were required of the allies, and eight hundred horse. This was added to Anicius as a garrison, besides the two legions which he was ordered to carry into Macedonia, having five thousand foot and two hundred each, three hundred horse. And into the fleet five thousand naval allies were enrolled. Licinius the consul was ordered to hold his province with two legions, and to add to these of the allies ten thousand foot and six hundred horse.

The decrees of the Senate completed, Lucius Aemilius the consul went forth from the Senate house into the assembly and delivered a speech of this kind. “I seem to have noticed, Quirites, that a greater congratulation was offered me when I drew Macedonia as my province by lot than when I was hailed as consul, or on the day I entered my magistracy; and that for no other cause than because you judged that a worthy end—an end befitting the majesty of the Roman people—could be imposed by me upon the war in Macedonia, which is dragging on so long. I hope that the gods too have favored this lot, and that the same will be present in the conduct of affairs. These things I can partly forebode, partly hope; this I dare affirm as certain, that I will strive with all my power that you not have conceived this hope of me in vain. The things the war requires the Senate has decreed; and, since it is resolved that I set out at once, and I am no cause of delay, my colleague Gaius Licinius, an excellent man, will prepare them as eagerly as though he himself were to wage that war. As for the things that I shall write to the Senate or to you, see that you do not by your credulity feed rumors of which no author will appear. For now indeed—a thing that is commonly done, and that in this war I have especially observed—no one is so contemptuous of fame that his spirit cannot be enfeebled by it. In all the circles, and even, if the gods please, at the dinner-tables, there are men who lead armies into Macedonia, who know where the camp should be placed, what positions to occupy with garrisons, when and by what pass Macedonia should be entered, where granaries should be set up, by what route, by land or by sea, supplies should be brought up, when hands should be joined with the enemy, when it is better to keep quiet. And not only do they settle what ought to be done, but whatever is done otherwise than they themselves have decreed, they arraign the consul as though on an appointed day of trial. These are great hindrances to those conducting affairs; for not all can be of so firm and constant a mind against adverse rumor as Quintus Fabius was, who preferred that his command be diminished through the people’s vanity rather than that he manage the commonwealth ill with a good repute. I am not one who thinks that generals ought not to be advised; nay, I judge the man who manages everything by his own single opinion to be proud rather than wise. What, then, is the truth? Commanders should be advised, first, by the prudent and by those properly skilled in military matters and taught by experience; then by those who are present at the conduct of affairs, who see the ground, who see the enemy, who see the opportunity of the moment, who are partners in the peril as though in the same ship. And so, if there is anyone who is confident that he can advise me, in this war I am about to wage, on what is for the public good, let him not refuse his service to the commonwealth and let him come with me into Macedonia. By ship, by horse, by tent, and even by travel-money he shall be aided by me; if it irks anyone to do this, and he prefers urban leisure to the labors of campaign, let him not steer the ship from the land. The city itself furnishes talk enough; let him confine his loquacity to it; let him know that we shall be content with counsels taken in camp.” From this assembly, the Latin festival being the day before the Kalends of April, the sacrifice on the mount duly performed, straightway from there both the consul and the praetor Gnaeus Octavius set out for Macedonia. It is handed down to memory that the consul was attended by a greater throng of escorts than was usual, and that men foreboded, with an almost sure hope, that the end of the Macedonian war was at hand and that the consul’s swift return with a remarkable triumph would be.

While these things are done in Italy, Perseus—because what he had already begun he could not bring himself to finish, since an outlay of money had to be made, namely to join to himself Gentius the king of the Illyrians—this, after he perceived that the Romans had entered the pass and that the last crisis of the war was at hand, judging it must be deferred no longer, when through the legate Hippias he had agreed on three hundred talents of silver, on the terms that hostages be given on both sides, sent Pantauchus, of his most faithful friends, to accomplish these things. At Meteon in the Labeatid land Pantauchus met the Illyrian king; there he both received the oath from the king and hostages. And a legate was sent by Gentius too, Olympio by name, to exact the oath from Perseus and hostages. With the same were sent men to receive the money; and, on Pantauchus’s advice, Parmenio and Morcus were appointed to go to Rhodes as legates with the Macedonians. They were charged that, the oath and hostages and money received, then only should they set out for Rhodes: that the Rhodians could be incited to the Roman war in the name of two kings at once. With such a state joined to them—in whose hands alone then lay the glory of naval power—they would leave the Romans hope neither by land nor by sea. To the Illyrians as they came, Perseus, setting out from his camp at the river Elpeus with all his cavalry, came to meet them at Dium. There the things which had been agreed were done, with the column of cavalry poured around—whom the king wished present at the treaty of the alliance ratified with Gentius, thinking that this thing would add somewhat to their spirits. And the hostages were given and received in the sight of all, and men were sent to Pella to the royal treasuries to receive the money, and those who were to go to Rhodes with the Illyrian legates were ordered to embark at Thessalonica. There was Metrodorus, who had lately come from Rhodes and, on the authority of Dinon and Polyaratus, the chief men of that state, affirmed that the Rhodians were ready for war. He was set as chief of the joint embassy with the Illyrians.

At the same time, to Eumenes and to Antiochus went common instructions, such as the condition of affairs could suggest: that by nature a free state and a king are enemies to one another. The Roman people attacked them one by one and—what is the more unworthy—assailed kings by the strength of kings. By Attalus’s help his own father had been crushed; with Eumenes aiding, and in some part his father Philip too, Antiochus had been attacked; now both Eumenes and Prusias were in arms against himself. If the kingdom of Macedonia were taken away, the nearest would be Asia, which they had already in part made their own under the show of liberating cities, then Syria. Already Prusias was preferred to Eumenes in honor; already Antiochus the victor was barred from Egypt, the prize of his war. Considering these things, he bade [Eumenes] to see to it either that he compel the Romans to make peace with him, or that, if they persevered in an unjust war, he hold them the common enemies of all kings. To Antiochus the instructions were open; to Eumenes a legate had been sent under the show of ransoming captives; but in truth certain more hidden things were being transacted, which for the present made Eumenes—already, indeed, hated and suspected by the Romans—the more gravely so by false charges; for he was held a traitor and almost an enemy, while the two kings, grasping at one another with fraud and avarice, strove together. Cydas was a Cretan, of Eumenes’s intimates. He had first conferred, near Amphipolis, with one Chimarus, a countryman of his serving with Perseus; then later at Demetrias, once with one Menecrates, again with Antimachus, royal officers, beneath the very walls of the city. Herophon too, who was then sent, had before performed two embassies to the same Eumenes. These secret conferences and these embassies were indeed of ill repute, but what had been done, or what had been agreed between the kings, was unknown. The matter, however, stood thus.

Eumenes neither favored the victory of Perseus nor had it in mind to aid him in the war, not so much because there were paternal enmities between them, kindled too by their own mutual hatreds: not such was the rivalry of kings that Eumenes would, with an even mind, have seen Perseus attain such great resources and such great glory as awaited him with the Romans conquered. He discerned, too, that Perseus, from the very beginning of the war, had tried the hope of peace in every way, and day by day the more, the nearer the terror was brought, did and thought of nothing else; and that the Romans too, because the war was being dragged out longer than their own hope, both their leaders and the Senate, did not shrink from ending a war so inconvenient and difficult. This will of both parties explored—because he believed it could come about even of its own accord, through the weariness of the stronger and the fear of the weaker—in this he desired the rather to peddle his service for the winning of favor. For now he bargained that he should not aid the Romans in war by land and sea, now a price for procuring peace with the Romans: not to take part in the war, a thousand talents; to procure the peace, a thousand five hundred. For both he showed himself ready to give not only his good faith but hostages too. Perseus was most prompt to begin the matter, fear compelling, and dealt about receiving the hostages without delay, and it was agreed that, received, they be sent to Crete. When it came to the mention of money, there he stuck, and said that, at any rate, the one bargain—among kings of such great name—was a shameful and sordid wage, both to the giver and, the more, to the receiver; in the hope of Roman peace he did not refuse the expense, but he would give that money when the matter was accomplished, and meanwhile deposit it in the temple at Samothrace. Since that island was of his own dominion, Eumenes saw that it made no difference whether the money was there or at Pella, and labored to carry off some part of it in hand at present. So, having grasped at one another to no purpose, they brought about nothing but infamy.

Nor was this the only thing let slip through Perseus’s avarice—when, the money paid, he could either have had peace through Eumenes, which was worth redeeming even by a part of his kingdom, or, deceived, have drawn out his enemy laden with the wage and deservedly made the Romans his foes; but both the alliance of King Gentius, prepared before, and then the huge auxiliary force of the Gauls pouring through Illyricum, offered to him, was let go through avarice. There were coming ten thousand horse, an equal number of foot, who matched their pace with the horses and, when the horsemen fell in turn, took the empty horses for the fight. These had bargained for each horseman ten gold pieces in hand, each footman five, a thousand for their leader. As they came, Perseus, setting out from his camp at the Elpeus with half his forces to meet them, began to give notice through the villages and cities near the roads to make ready supplies, that there might be abundance of grain, of wine, of cattle. He himself carried horses and trappings and cloaks as a gift for the chiefs, and a little gold, to divide among a few, believing the multitude could be drawn by hope. He came to the city Almana and pitched camp on the bank of the river Axius. The army of the Gauls had settled around Desudaba in Maedica, awaiting the wage agreed on. Thither he sends Antigonus, one of the courtiers, to bid the multitude of the Gauls move camp to Bylazora—it is a place of Paeonia—and the chiefs to come to him in numbers. They were seventy-five miles from the river Axius and the king’s camp. When Antigonus had brought these orders to them, and had added with how great an abundance of everything, prepared by the king’s care, they would march, and with what gifts of clothing, silver, and horses the king would receive the chiefs on their arrival, they answer that of these things they would learn face to face; but they ask about that which they had bargained for to be in hand, whether he had brought with him the gold which was to be divided among each foot and horse. When nothing was answered to this, Clondicus their princeling said: “Go, then, report to the king that, unless they have received the gold and the hostages, the Gauls will move not a foot’s space further from here.” When these things were reported to the king, the council called, since it was clear what they all would advise, he himself, a better keeper of his money than of his kingdom, set to discoursing on the perfidy and savagery of the Gauls, tried already before by the disasters of many: it was dangerous to receive so great a multitude into Macedonia, lest they have them as graver allies than the Romans for enemies. Five thousand horse were enough, whom they could both use for the war and whose multitude they need not themselves fear. It was clear to all that he feared the wage in the multitude, and nothing else; but since no one dared to advise him as he consulted, Antigonus is sent back to announce that the king would use the service of five thousand horse only, and not detain the rest of the multitude. When the barbarians heard this, there was indeed a murmur of the rest, indignant that they had been roused from their seats in vain; Clondicus again asks whether he would pay even to those five thousand what had been agreed. When he saw that against this too evasions were being mixed, the deceitful messenger left inviolate—a thing he had himself scarcely hoped could befall—they returned back toward the Hister, having thoroughly ravaged Thrace where it was near their road. This band, with the king sitting quiet at the Elpeus over against the Romans, led across the Perrhaebian pass into Thessaly, could not only have laid the fields bare by ravaging, so that the Romans should look for no supplies thence, but could even have destroyed the cities themselves, while Perseus held the Romans at the Elpeus, so that they could not bring aid to the allied cities. The Romans themselves too would have had to take thought for themselves, since they could neither have remained, Thessaly lost, whence the army was fed, nor have advanced, with the camp of the Macedonians over against them. Those who had hung upon that hope it weakened in no moderate degree. By the same avarice he alienated King Gentius from himself. For when he had counted out three hundred talents at Pella to the men sent by Gentius, he allowed them to seal the money; thence ten talents were sent to Pantauchus, and he ordered these to be given to the king at once; the rest of the money, sealed with the Illyrians’ seal, he charged his own men carrying it to convey by short marches, then, when they had come to the border of Macedonia, to halt there and await messengers from him. Gentius, a scant part of the money received, when he was continually goaded by Pantauchus to provoke the Romans by some hostile deed, threw into custody the legates Marcus Perpenna and Lucius Petilius, who then by chance had come to him. Hearing this, Perseus, thinking that he had now contracted the necessity of warring with the Romans in any case, sent to recall the man who was carrying the money, as though doing nothing else than that as great a booty as possible be reserved, from himself conquered, for the Romans. And from Eumenes, Herophon returned, the world ignorant of what had been secretly done. About the captives the dealing had been—both they themselves had divulged it, and Eumenes, to avoid suspicion, informed the consul.

Perseus, after the return of Herophon from Eumenes, cast down from his hope, sends Antenor and Callippus, prefects of the fleet, with forty galleys—five pristes had been added to this number—to Tenedos, that from there they might protect the ships scattered through the Cyclades islands as they made for Macedonia with grain. The ships brought down at Cassandrea into the harbors first which are under Mount Athos, thence, when they had crossed over a calm sea to Tenedos, they let go the Rhodian open ships standing in the harbor, and Eudamus their prefect, unharmed and even kindly addressed. Then, learning that on the other side fifty cargo ships of their own were shut in by the beaked ships of Eumenes standing at the mouth of the harbor, over which Damius was in command, sailing round in haste and removing the enemy’s ships by terror, he sends the cargo ships into Macedonia, ten galleys given to escort them, so that, having escorted them into safety, they should return to Tenedos. On the ninth day after, they came back to the fleet now standing at Sigeum. Thence they cross to Subota—an island lying between Elaea and Chios. It chanced that the day after the fleet held Subota, thirty-five ships, which they call horse-transports, set out from Elaea with Gallic horsemen and horses, were making for Phanae, a promontory of the Chians, whence they might cross over into Macedonia. They were being sent to Attalus by Eumenes. When a signal was given to Antenor from a watchtower that these ships were being carried over the deep, setting out from Subota, between the promontory of the Erythraeans and Chios, where the strait is narrowest, he met them. The prefects of Eumenes believed nothing less than that a Macedonian fleet was roaming in that sea: now they thought they were Romans, now Attalus, or some sent back by Attalus from the Roman camp making for Pergamum. But when the shape of the now-approaching galleys was beyond doubt, and the dashing of the oars and the prows directed against them had made plain that the enemy was drawing near, then trepidation was thrown among them. Since there was no hope of resisting, the kind of ships being unhandy and the Gauls scarcely bearing quiet at sea, part of those who were nearer the continental shore swam across to Erythraea, part, the sails set, drove their ships ashore at Chios, and, abandoning the horses, made in headlong flight for the city. But the galleys, having put armed men ashore nearer the city and at a more convenient landing, the Macedonians partly overtook the Gauls fleeing on the road and cut them down, partly caught them shut out before the gate. For the Chians had closed their gates, ignorant who fled or who pursued. About eight hundred of the Gauls were killed, two hundred taken alive; of the horses, part perished in the sea when the ships were wrecked, part the Macedonians hamstrung on the shore. Twenty horses of outstanding beauty, with the captives, Antenor ordered the same ten galleys he had sent before to convey to Thessalonica, and to return to the fleet at the earliest time: he would await them at Phanae. About three days the fleet stood at the city. Then they advanced to Phanae, and, the ten galleys returning sooner than was hoped, they sailed out and crossed over the Aegean sea to Delos.

While these things are done, the Roman legates, Gaius Popilius and Gaius Decimius and Gaius Hostilius, having set out from Chalcis with three quinqueremes, when they had come to Delos, found there forty galleys of the Macedonians and five quinqueremes of King Eumenes. The sanctity of the temple and of the island kept all unharmed. And so, intermingled, Romans and Macedonians and the naval allies of Eumenes consorted even in the temple, the religious awe of the place affording a truce. Antenor, Perseus’s prefect, when it had been signaled from the watchtowers that some cargo ships were being carried over the deep, himself pursuing with part of the galleys, part disposed through the Cyclades, except any that made for Macedonia, either sank or spoiled all the ships. Those he could, Popilius succored with his own or Eumenes’s ships; but the Macedonians, sailing mostly by night with two or three galleys, eluded them. About that time the legates of the Macedonians and of the Illyrians came to Rhodes at one time, to whom authority was added not only by the arrival of the galleys roaming everywhere through the Cyclades and the Aegean sea, but also by the very joining of the kings Perseus and Gentius, and the report of Gauls coming with a great number of foot and horse. And now, the spirits of Dinon and Polyaratus, who were of Perseus’s party, having risen, not only was a kindly answer given to the kings, but it was openly proclaimed that they would impose an end to the war by their own authority: and so the kings themselves too should bring fair minds to the accepting of peace.

Now it was the beginning of spring, and the new commanders had come into their provinces: the consul Aemilius into Macedonia, Octavius to the fleet at Oreus, Anicius into Illyricum, to whom war had to be waged against Gentius. Gentius, born of his father Pleuratus, king of the Illyrians, and his mother Eurydice, had two brothers: Plator, by both parents, and Caravantius, born of the same mother. This last one, less suspected on account of his father’s low birth, he killed Plator and two of his friends, Ettritus and Epicadus, energetic men, that he might reign the more safely. There was a report that he had grudged his brother Etuta, the daughter of Monunus prince of the Dardani, betrothed to Plator, as though by these nuptials he were joining the nation of the Dardani to himself; and he made it very like the truth, that maiden being married after Plator was killed. Then, fear of his brother removed, he began to be grievous to his people, and his innate violence the intemperance of wine inflamed. But, as was said before, incited to the Roman war, he gathered all his forces at Lissus. They were fifteen thousand armed men. Thence, his brother sent with a thousand foot and fifty horse to subdue the nation of the Cavii by force or terror, he himself leads to the city Bassania, five miles from Lissus. They were allies of the Romans; and so, first sounded by messengers sent ahead, they preferred to endure a siege rather than surrender themselves. Caravantius, among the Cavii, the town Durnium received kindly on his arrival; Caravandis, the other city, shut him out; and when he ravaged their fields far and wide, several straggling soldiers were killed by the gathering of the country folk. And now Appius Claudius too, having taken on, besides the army he had, the auxiliaries of the Bullini and Apolloniates and Dyrrachini, having set out from his winter quarters, was holding camp about the river Genusus, inflamed, on hearing of the treaty between Perseus and Gentius, by the wrong of the violated legates, [meaning] without doubt to wage war against him. Anicius the praetor, at that time at Apollonia, having heard what was being done in Illyricum, and having sent a letter ahead to Appius to await him at the Genusus, came himself within three days into the camp; and to the auxiliaries he had, the youth of the Parthini being joined—two thousand foot and two hundred horse, over the foot Epicadus, over the horse Algalsus being in command—he was preparing to lead into Illyricum, chiefly to free the Bassanitae from siege. The report of galleys ravaging the maritime coast held back his onset. There were eighty galleys, sent on Pantauchus’s advice by Gentius to lay waste the lands of the Dyrrachini and the Apolloniates. Then the fleet... they delivered themselves up.

Next the cities of that region did the same, the inclination of their feelings aided by the clemency toward all and the justice of the Roman praetor. Thence they came to Scodra, which was the head of the war—not only because Gentius had taken it for himself as the citadel, as it were, of his whole kingdom, but also because it is by far the most fortified of the Labeatian nation and difficult of approach. Two rivers gird it: the Clausal, flowing past the side of the city which opens to the east, the Barbanna from the western region, rising from the Labeatid marsh. These two streams, flowing together, fall into the river Oriundis, which, risen from Mount Scordus, augmented by many other waters too, is borne into the Hadriatic sea. Mount Scordus, by far the highest of that region, has Dardania lying below it on the east, Macedonia on the south, Illyricum on the west. Although the town was fortified by its natural site, and the whole Illyrian nation and the king himself protected it, yet the Roman praetor, because the first things had gone prosperously, thinking that fortune would follow the beginnings of the whole matter and that a sudden terror would prevail, his army drawn up, comes up to the walls. And if, the gates closed, armed men disposed had defended the walls and the towers of the gates, with a vain attempt they would have driven the Romans back from the walls; as it was, going out the gate they joined battle on level ground with greater spirit than they sustained. For driven and crowded together in flight, when more than two hundred had fallen in the very jaws of the gate, they struck such terror that Gentius at once sent as orators to the praetor Teuticus and Bellus, chiefs of the nation, through whom he sought a truce, that he might deliberate about the state of his affairs. Three days being granted for this, when the Roman camp was about five hundred paces from the city, he boards a ship and sails by the river Barbanna into the Labeatid lake, as though seeking a secret place to consult, but, as it appeared, roused by a false hope that his brother Caravantius was at hand with many thousands of armed men gathered in the region to which he had been sent. When that rumor vanished, on the third day after, he sent the same ship down the river to Scodra; and, having sent messengers ahead that the power of addressing the praetor be granted him, the chance given, he came into the camp. And beginning his speech from an accusation of his own folly, at last pouring out into prayers and tears, falling at the praetor’s knees, he gave himself into his power. Bidden first to have good courage, even invited to dinner, he returned into the city to his own people, and that day dined honorably with the praetor; then he was handed over into the custody of Gaius Cassius the tribune/">military tribune—a king from a king, having received scarcely the equivalent of ten talents of a gladiator’s wage, to fall into such a fortune. Anicius, Scodra recovered, ordered nothing before the legates Petilius and Perpenna to be sought out and led to him. To these their splendor restored, he sends Perpenna at once to seize the king’s friends and kinsmen; who, having set out for Meteon, a city of the Labeatian nation, led Etleva the wife with her two sons, Scerdilaedus and Pleuratus, and Caravantius the brother, to Scodra into the camp. Anicius, the Illyrian war finished within thirty days, sent Perpenna to Rome as the messenger of victory, and a few days later King Gentius himself, with his parent, wife, children, and brother, and the other chiefs of the Illyrians. This one war was heard at Rome to be finished before it was heard to be begun.

In the days these things were being done, Perseus too was in great terror, on account at once of the arrival of the new consul Aemilius, whom he heard was coming with huge threats, and at once of the praetor Octavius. Nor had he less terror from the Roman fleet and the peril of the maritime coast. At Thessalonica Eumenes and Athenagoras were in command, with a small garrison of two thousand peltasts. Thither he sends also Androcles the prefect, ordered to keep his camp right under the dockyards. To Aenea he sent a thousand horse with Creon of Antigonea to guard the maritime coast, so that, on whatever shore they heard the enemy’s ships had put in, they might at once bring aid to the country folk. Five thousand Macedonians were sent to garrison Pythous and Petra, over whom were set Histiaeus and Theogenes and Midon. These having set out, he set about fortifying the bank of the river Elpeus, because it could be crossed with a dry channel. That the whole multitude might be free for this work, the women from the nearby cities brought cooked rations into the camp; the soldier was ordered, from the nearby woods, freely...

... to bring it; finally he ordered the well-diggers to follow him to the sea, which was less than three hundred paces away, and on the shore to dig, some here, some there, at moderate intervals. The mountains of huge height gave hope—the more because they sent forth no open streams—that hidden waters were held within, whose veins, soaking through into the sea, were mingled with the waves. Scarcely was the top sand drawn aside when springs, muddy at first and thin, began to spurt out, then to pour forth clear and abundant water as if by the gift of a god. This thing too added somewhat of fame and authority among the soldiers to the leader. The soldiers then bidden to make ready their arms, he himself, with the tribunes and the first ranks, went forward to contemplate the crossings—where the descent for armed men was easy, where the ascent onto the further bank least unfavorable. These sufficiently explored, he made provision for those things too: first, that everything in the column be done in order and without tumult at the leader’s nod and command. When it was proclaimed to all at once what was to be done, and not all heard it, the command being received uncertain, some, adding from themselves, did more than was ordered, others less; then dissonant shouts arose in every place, and the enemy knew what was being prepared before they themselves did. It pleased him, therefore, that the tribune/">military tribune give the command secretly to the chief centurion of the legion, and he, and then each in turn, tell the centurion next him in the line what needed doing—whether the command was to be carried from the front standards to the rearmost column, or from the last to the first. The sentinels, too, by a new practice, he forbade to carry a shield on watch: for the sentinel does not go to fight, that he may use arms, but to keep watch, so that, when he has sensed the enemy’s approach, he may withdraw and rouse the others to arms. Helmeted, they were to stand with the shield set up before them; then, when weary, leaning on the spear, the head laid over the rim of the shield, to stand dozing, so that with gleaming arms they could be seen from afar by the enemy, while they themselves saw nothing. The practice of the outposts too he changed. All armed, and the horsemen with bridled horses, used to stand the whole day; and when this was done on summer days, the constant sun burning, themselves and their horses wearied by the heat and weariness of so many hours, fresh enemies, often even few against many, would harass them. And so he ordered that from the morning outpost they retire at midday, and that others come on for the afternoon; thus a fresh enemy could never attack the wearied.

When he had proclaimed, an assembly called, that these things were so to be done, he added a speech befitting an urban assembly: that one commander in an army ought to foresee and to take counsel what should be done—now by himself, now with those whom he had called into council; that those who were not called should not, openly or in secret, bandy about their counsels. The soldier ought to attend to these three things: that he keep his body as strong and as nimble as possible, his arms fit, his food ready against sudden commands; for the rest, let him know that his concerns were the care of the immortal gods and of his own commander. In an army where the soldiers deliberate and the commander is whirled about by the rumors of the crowd, there is nothing wholesome. He, for his part, would provide what was the commander’s duty—that he furnish them an occasion of acting well; let them not ask what was to be, but, when the signal had been given, then do their soldierly service. With these precepts he dismissed the assembly, even the veterans commonly confessing that on that day, for the first time, like recruits, they had learned what ought to be done in military matters. And not by these sayings only did they show with how great an assent they had heard the consul’s words, but there was a present effect in deeds. Soon, throughout the whole camp, you might see no one idle: some sharpened swords, some helmets and cheek-pieces, others polished shields, others breastplates, others fitted their arms to the body and tried beneath them the agility of their limbs; some brandished javelins, some flashed their swords and gazed at the point, so that anyone could easily discern that, as soon as the chance of joining hands with the enemy was given, they would end the war either with an outstanding victory or with a memorable death. Perseus too, when, at the consul’s arrival together with the beginning of spring, he saw all things resounding and stirring among the enemy as if at a new war, his camp moved from Phila and set on the opposite bank, now went round to contemplate his own works—the leader without doubt spying out the crossings—now...

... belonged to the Romans; which thing increased the spirits of the Romans, but brought no moderate terror to the Macedonians and their king. And at first he tried to suppress the report of the matter in secret, sending men to forbid Pantauchus, as he came thence, to draw near the camp. But already certain boys had been seen by their own people, led along among the Illyrian hostages; and the more carefully each thing is concealed, the more easily it leaks out through the talkativeness of the royal attendants.

About the same time the Rhodian envoys came into the camp with the same instructions about peace which at Rome had stirred the fathers’ great wrath. With much more hostile minds they were heard by the council of the camp. And so, when some held they should be driven headlong from the camp without an answer, [the consul] declared that he would give an answer on the fifteenth day. Meanwhile, that it might appear how much the authority of the peace-making Rhodians had availed, he began to take counsel about the manner of conducting the war. To some, and especially the younger men, it seemed good to force a passage along the bank and the fortifications of the Elpeus: the Macedonians, close-packed and acting as one, could not resist, having been the year before dislodged from so many forts, considerably higher and more fortified, which they had held with strong garrisons. To others it seemed good that Octavius with the fleet make for Thessalonica and, by ravaging the maritime coast, draw off the royal forces, so that, with another war showing itself in his rear, the king, turned about to defend the inner part of his kingdom, might be forced to lay bare some part of the Elpeus crossing. To himself the bank seemed insuperable by nature and by works; and, besides that engines were everywhere disposed, he had heard the enemy used missiles too with better and surer aim. The whole mind of the leader looked elsewhere; and, the council dismissed, the Perrhaebian traders Coenus and Menophilus, men of a good faith and prudence already known to him, summoned in secret, he questioned what the crossings into Perrhaebia were like. When they said the places were not unfavorable, but were beset by royal garrisons, he conceived the hope that, if by night, unexpectedly, with a strong band he attacked them off their guard, the garrisons could be dislodged: for javelins and arrows and the other missiles, in the dark, where what is aimed at cannot be foreseen from afar, were useless; with the sword, hand to hand, the matter would be carried on in the mingled throng, in which the Roman soldier conquers. Meaning to use these men as guides, the praetor Octavius summoned and what he was preparing explained, he bids him make for Heracleum with the fleet and have cooked rations for a thousand men for ten days. He himself sends Publius Scipio Nasica and Quintus Fabius Maximus his own son, with five thousand picked soldiers, to Heracleum, as though about to embark on the fleet to ravage the maritime coast of the inner part of Macedonia, which had been discussed in council. It was secretly intimated that rations had been prepared for them at the fleet, lest anything delay them. Then the guides of the route were ordered so to divide the way that at the fourth watch on the third day they might attack Pythous. He himself, on the next day, to keep the king from looking about at other matters, joined battle at first light, in the middle of the channel, with the enemy’s outposts; and it was fought on both sides with light arms—nor could it be fought with heavier arms in so uneven a channel. The descent of either bank into the channel was about three hundred paces; the middle space of the torrent, hollowed differently in different places, lay open a little more than a thousand paces. There, in the middle, with both sides watching from the rampart of the camp—here the king with his men, there the consul with his legions—it was fought. The royal auxiliaries fought better at a distance with missiles; hand to hand the Roman was steadier and safer, with either the round shield or the Ligurian shield. About midday the consul ordered the recall to be sounded for his men. Thus that day the battle was broken off, not a few being slain on both sides. At sunrise the next day, their spirits provoked by the contest, they clashed even more sharply. But the Romans were wounded not only by those with whom the fight had been engaged, but much more by that multitude which stood disposed in the towers, with every kind of missile weapon and especially with stones. When they had come up nearer the enemy’s bank, the things shot from engines reached even the rearmost. That day, with many more lost, the consul recalled his men a little later. On the third day he refrained from battle, having gone down to the lowest part of the camp, as though about to attempt a crossing through the arm of land that slopes into the sea.

It was after the solstice of the year had come round; the hour of the day was now verging toward midday; the march had been made through much dust and with the sun growing hot. Weariness and thirst were already felt, and the more as midday drew on. The enemy then drew near, who soon would appear. The consul resolved not to throw men so affected against a fresh and untouched enemy; but so great was the ardor in their minds to fight, come what might, that the consul had need of no less art to elude his own men than to elude the enemy. Not all being yet drawn up, he kept pressing the military tribunes to hasten the array; he himself went round the ranks, kindling the soldiers’ spirits by exhorting them to battle. At first, eager, they demanded the signal; then, as the heat increased, both their faces grew less vigorous and their voices more sluggish, and some stood leaning on their shields and propped on their spears. Then now openly he orders the first ranks to measure out the front of the camp and set down the baggage. When the soldiers perceived this being done, some rejoiced openly that he had not, wearied as they were by the toil of the march under the most blazing heat, compelled them to fight. The legates were about the commander, and the foreign leaders, among whom Attalus too—all of them approving while they believed the consul would fight, for not even to these had he disclosed his hesitation—then, at the sudden change of plan, while the rest were silent, Nasica alone of all dared to advise the consul not to let slip from his hands, by avoiding the contest, an enemy who had mocked previous commanders by fleeing: he feared that, if he went off by night, he must be followed with the greatest toil and peril into the innermost parts of Macedonia, and that the summer, as with the previous leaders, would be worn away in roaming through the tracks and passes of the Macedonian mountains. He greatly urged that, while the consul had the enemy in the open plain, he attack him and not let go the occasion of conquering that was offered. The consul, in no way offended at the free admonition of so distinguished a young man, said: “I too, Nasica, had that spirit which you now have, and you will have that which I now have. By many a chance of war I have learned when one must fight, when refrain from fighting. It is not worth the while, standing now in the line, to teach for what reasons it is better to keep quiet today. Demand my reasons another time; for now you shall be content with the authority of an old commander.” The young man fell silent: without doubt he saw that the consul saw some hindrances to battle that did not appear to himself. Paulus, after he noticed the camp measured out and the baggage set down, first withdrew from the rearmost line the triarii, then the principes—the hastati standing in the front line, in case the enemy made any move—at last the hastati, drawing off the soldiers of the standards little by little, one company at a time, from the right wing first. Thus the foot, the horsemen and the light-armed set before the line against the enemy, were withdrawn without tumult; nor were the horsemen recalled from their post before the front of the rampart and the ditch had been carried through. The king too, though without shrinking he had been ready to fight that day, content with this, that his men should know the delay of battle had been through the enemy, himself also led his forces back into camp.

The camp thoroughly fortified, Gaius Sulpicius Gallus, tribune/">military tribune of the legion/">second legion, who had been praetor the year before, by the consul’s permission, the soldiers called to an assembly, announced that on the next night—lest anyone take it for a portent—from the second hour to the fourth hour of the night the moon would be eclipsed. Because this happens in the natural order at fixed times, it could both be known beforehand and foretold. And so, just as, because the risings and settings of the sun and moon are fixed, they did not marvel that the moon shone now with full orb, now, waning, with a slender horn, so they ought not to draw it into a prodigy that it should be darkened when it is hidden by the shadow of the earth. On the night which the day before the Nones of September followed, at the announced hour, when the moon was eclipsed, the wisdom of Gallus seemed to the Roman soldiers almost divine; the Macedonians it moved as a gloomy prodigy foretelling the fall of the kingdom and the ruin of the nation—nor did the seer interpret it otherwise. There was shouting and howling in the camp of the Macedonians until the moon emerged into its own light.

On the next day—so great had been the ardor of each army to engage that some both of the king’s men and of the consul’s accused [their leaders] because they had parted without a battle—to the king a ready defense was at hand, not only because the enemy, openly declining battle, had first led his forces back into camp, but also because he had set up his standards in a place where the phalanx, which even a moderate unevenness of ground renders useless, could not be advanced. The consul, both because he seemed the day before to have let slip the chance of fighting and to have given the enemy room, if he wished to go off by night, then too seemed, under the show of sacrificing, to waste time, when at first light he ought to have gone out into line at the signal set up for battle. At the third hour at last, the sacrifice duly performed, he called a council; and there, by talking and consulting unseasonably, he seemed to some to drag out the time that was for action. Amid these talks the consul delivered a speech.

“Publius Nasica, an excellent young man, of all who yesterday wished to fight, alone disclosed his counsel to me; the same afterward, in such a way that he could seem to have passed over to my opinion, kept silent. To certain others it seemed better to carp at their commander in his absence than to advise him to his face. To you, Publius Nasica, and to whoever else felt the same as you, but more covertly, I will not be reluctant to render the reason of the deferred battle. For so far am I from repenting of yesterday’s quiet that I believe the army was saved by that counsel. And, lest any of you believe me to be of this opinion without cause, let him, come now, review with me, if it seem good, how many things were for the enemy and against us. First of all, by how much they surpass us in number, I hold it certain that none of you was either ignorant before, and yesterday, looking at their deployed line, observed it. Out of this scanty number of ours, a fourth part of the soldiers had been left to guard the baggage; nor, you know, is it the most cowardly who are left to the keeping of the packs. But grant we had all been present: is it, then, so small a thing, do we think, that we are to go out into line—out of this camp, in which we have spent this night—today, or at the latest tomorrow, if it shall so seem good, with the gods well aiding us? Is there no difference whether you bid the soldier, whom neither the toil of the road that day nor of work has wearied, rested and fresh in his tent, take up his arms, and lead him out into line full of strength, vigorous in body and mind; or, wearied by a long march and tired with his burden, dripping with sweat, his throat parched with thirst, his mouth and eyes filled with dust, the midday sun scorching, throw him against an enemy fresh, rested, who brings to the battle strength consumed by nothing beforehand? Who, by the good faith of the gods, so matched, even sluggish and unwarlike, would not have conquered the bravest of men? What of this, that the enemy had drawn up their line in the utmost leisure, had prepared their spirits, stood composed each in his own ranks, while we then had to flurry about in drawing up the line, and to charge in disarray? At any rate we should have had a line confused and disordered; but [the enemy] a camp fortified, the watering provided, a safe road to it secured by garrisons set, all around explored—whereas we, having nothing of our own but the bare plain on which to fight? Your ancestors held a fortified camp to be a haven for the army against all chances, whence it might go out to battle, whither, buffeted by the storm of battle, it might have a refuge. Therefore, when they had hedged it with fortifications, they strengthened it also with a strong garrison, because he who had been stripped of his camp, even if he had conquered by fighting in the line, would be held as conquered. The camp is to the victor a place of receipt, to the conquered a refuge. How many armies, to which the fortune of battle was less prosperous, driven within the rampart, in their own time—sometimes a moment after—a sally made, have driven back the victorious enemy! This military seat is a second fatherland; the rampart is in place of walls, and his own tent to each soldier is his home and household gods. Were we to have fought as wanderers, without any seat, whither, as victors, should we have withdrawn? Against these difficulties and hindrances of battle this is set against me: what if the enemy, this night being interposed, had gone off? How much labor again would have had to be exhausted in following him into the innermost of Macedonia! But I hold it certain that he would neither have remained nor have led his forces out into line, had he resolved to withdraw hence. For how much easier was it to go off when we were far away than now, when we are upon his neck, nor can he steal away from us by going off either by day or by night? And what is more to be wished by us than that, men whose camp—secured by the deep bank of a river and hedged besides with a rampart and frequent towers—we had set about assaulting, those very men, abandoning their fortifications, going off in a loose column, we should attack from the rear in the open plains? These were the reasons of the battle deferred from yesterday to today. For it pleases me too to fight; and therefore, because the way to the enemy was hedged by the river Elpeus, I have opened a new way, the enemy’s garrisons dislodged by another pass; nor will I desist before I have made an end of the war.”

After this speech there was silence, some won over to his opinion, some fearing to give offense to no purpose in a matter which, however passed over, could not be recalled. And not even on that very day did either the consul or the king wish to fight: the king, because he was not now to attack men wearied, as the day before, from the road, nor trembling in drawing up their line and scarcely yet composed; the consul, because in the new camp neither wood nor fodder had been brought in, to seek which a great part of the soldiers had gone out of camp into the nearby fields. But, neither of the commanders willing it, fortune, which avails more than human counsels, brought on the contest. There was a river, not large, nearer the enemy’s camp, from which both Macedonians and Romans drew water, garrisons set on either bank that they might do so safely. There were on the Roman side two cohorts, the Marrucine and the Paelignian, and two squadrons of Samnite horse, over whom Marcus Sergius Silus the legate was in command; and there was another standing garrison before the camp under Gaius Cluvius the legate, three cohorts—the Firman, the Vestine, the Cremonese—and two squadrons of horse, the Placentine and the Aesernine. When there was quiet at the river, neither side provoking, about the ninth hour a pack-animal, slipped from the hands of its keepers, fled across to the further bank. When three soldiers followed it through the water, about knee-deep, and two Thracians were dragging that animal from the middle of the channel to their own bank, one of them being killed and the animal recovered, they were withdrawing to the post of their own men. There was a garrison of eight hundred Thracians on the enemy’s bank. Of these a few at first, taking it ill that a countryman had been killed in their sight, crossed the river to pursue the slayers, then more, at last all, and with the garrison...

... he leads into battle. The majesty of his command moved men, the glory of the man, before all his age—that, more than sixty years old, he took up the duties of the young in the chief part of the toil and the peril. The legion filled the gap that was between the peltasts and the phalanxes and broke the enemy’s line. The peltasts were at the rear; in front he had the shield-bearers, who were called chalcaspides, the “bronze-shields.” Lucius Albinus, of consular rank, was ordered to lead the second legion against the leucaspis, the “white-shield” phalanx; that was the enemy’s center. On the right wing, where the battle by the river had been joined, he brings up the elephant-war/">elephants and the wings of the allies; and from here first the flight of the Macedonians arose. For as most of mortals’ new contrivances have force in words, but in the trying—when the thing must be done, not expounded how it is to be done—vanish without any effect, so then the elephants of the Macedonians were of no use. The allies of the Latin name followed up the charge of the elephants and drove back the left wing. In the center the second legion, sent in, scattered the phalanx. Nor was there any more evident cause of the victory than that there were many scattered battles, which first shook the wavering phalanx, then broke it apart—the phalanx whose strength, when it is packed close and bristling with leveled spears, is intolerable; but if, by attacking piecemeal, you force them to swing about the spear, immovable by its length and weight, they are entangled in a confused heap; and if from the flank or the rear any tumult clatters, they are thrown into disorder in the manner of a collapse, as then they were forced to face the Romans charging in bands and the line broken in many places; and the Romans, wherever gaps were given, wormed in their own ranks. Had they charged in a whole line against the phalanx drawn up in front—which befell the Paeligni, who at the beginning of the battle had engaged incautiously against the peltasts—they would have impaled themselves on the spears and not withstood the close-packed line. But just as everywhere the slaughter of the foot was being done, except those who, casting away their arms, fled, so the cavalry left the battle almost entire. The first of the flight was the king himself. Already from Pydna with the sacred squadrons of horse he was making for Pella; Cotys and the cavalry of the Odrysians at once followed him. The other squadrons of the Macedonians too went off with their ranks unbroken, because the line of foot thrown between, whose slaughter held the victors, had made them forgetful of pursuing the horsemen. Long was the phalanx cut down from the front, from the flanks, from the rear. At last those who had slipped from the enemy’s hands, fleeing unarmed to the sea, some even entering the water, stretching their hands to those who were in the fleet, suppliantly begged for their lives; and when they saw the skiffs running together from every side from the ships, thinking they came to take them up, to capture rather than to kill, they advanced further into the water, some even swimming. But when they were cut down in hostile fashion from the skiffs, those who could, swimming back and seeking the land again, fell into another and fouler destruction; for the elephants, driven by their drivers to the shore, trampled and crushed those coming out. It is easily agreed that never by the Romans in a single battle were so many Macedonians killed. For there were slain about twenty thousand men; about six thousand who had fled from the line to Pydna came alive into the Romans’ power, and five thousand straggling from the flight were captured. Of the victors there fell not more than a hundred, and of these by far the greater part Paeligni; the wounded were considerably more. But if the battle had been begun earlier, so that enough of the day had been left to the victors for pursuing, all the forces would have been destroyed; as it was, the impending night both covered the fugitives and made the Romans slow to follow over unknown ground.

Perseus fled to the Pierian forest by the military road, with a thronging column of horse and the royal retinue. As soon as they came into the forest, where there were several diverging paths, and night was approaching, he turned aside from the road with a very few, the most faithful. The horsemen, left without a leader, slipped away, some this way, some that, into their own cities; very few of them reached Pella sooner than Perseus himself, because they had gone by the direct, unencumbered road. The king was harassed until about midnight both by his wandering and by the various difficulties of the way. In the palace, gloomy, those who commanded at Pella—Eulaeus and Euctus—and the royal pages were ready for him. But of his friends, who, saved each by one chance or another from the battle, had come to Pella, though often summoned, no one came to him. There were only three companions of his flight: Euander the Cretan, Neo the Boeotian, and Archidamus the Aetolian. With these, now fearing lest those who refused to come to him should soon dare something greater, at the fourth watch he fled. About five hundred Cretans followed him. He was making for Amphipolis; but he had gone out from Pella by night, hastening to cross the river Axius before daylight, thinking that, because of the difficulty of crossing, this would be the end of the Romans’ pursuit. The consul, when as victor he had withdrawn into camp, was not permitted to enjoy unmixed joy: care for his younger son goaded him. This was Publius Scipio, afterward himself called Africanus too, when Carthage was destroyed—the natural son of the consul Paulus, by adoption the grandson of [the elder] Africanus. He, then in his seventeenth year—which itself increased the anxiety—while he pursued the enemy in disorder, had been carried off into another part by the throng; and when he had returned rather late, then at last, his son recovered safe, the consul felt the joy of so great a victory.

When the report of the battle had now reached Amphipolis, and a running-together of the matrons was made into the temple of Diana, whom they call Tauropolos, to implore aid, Diodorus, who was in command of the city, fearing lest the Thracians, of whom two thousand were in garrison, should sack the city in the tumult, received in the middle of the forum a letter from a man suborned by himself, by a trick, in the guise of a courier. Written in it was that a Roman fleet had put in at Emathia and that the lands around were being ravaged; that the prefects of Emathia begged a garrison be sent against the plunderers. Having read these, he urges the Thracians to set out to protect the coast of Emathia: they would make great slaughter and booty of the Romans scattered here and there through the fields. At the same time he made light of the report of the adverse battle: if it were true, one after another would be coming fresh from the flight. By this pretext the Thracians sent away, as soon as he saw them crossed over the Strymon, he closed the gates.

On the third day after the battle was fought, Perseus came to Amphipolis. Thence he sent orators with a herald’s staff to Paulus. Meanwhile Hippias and Midon and Pantauchus, the chief of the king’s friends, having fled from the line to Beroea, set out themselves to the consul and surrendered to the Romans. The same too others, one after another, struck by fear, were preparing to do. The consul, having sent to Rome with a letter the messengers of the victory—Quintus Fabius his son, and Lucius Lentulus, and Quintus Metellus—granted the spoils of the enemy army lying dead to the foot, the booty of the surrounding country to the horse, on condition they be away from camp not more than two nights. He himself moved camp nearer the sea, to Pydna. Beroea first, then Thessalonica and Pella, and thereafter almost all Macedonia, surrendered within two days. The Pydnaeans, who were nearest, had not yet sent envoys; an unformed multitude of several nations at once, and the crowd which had been driven from the line in flight into one place, hindered the counsel and consent of the city; nor were the gates only closed, but even built up. Midon and Pantauchus were sent under the walls to a parley with Solon, who commanded the garrison; through him the military crowd is let out. The town, surrendered, is given to the soldiers to plunder. Perseus, one hope only being tried—of aid from the Bisaltae, to whom he had sent envoys in vain—came forward into an assembly, having his son Philip with him, that both the Amphipolitans themselves and the horse and foot, who either had followed him or had been brought in their flight to the same place, he might confirm in spirit by exhorting them. But several times, beginning to speak, when tears choked him, because he could not himself utter a word, he gave to Euander the Cretan the things he wished to be transacted with the multitude, and came down from the temple. The multitude, just as at the sight of the king and weeping so pitiable it had itself groaned and wept, so spurned the speech of Euander; and some dared from the middle of the assembly to cry out, “Be off from here, lest we, the few who survive, perish on your account.” The ferocity of these closed Euander’s mouth. The king then withdrew home, and his money and gold and silver carried down into the galleys which stood in the Strymon, he himself too went down to the river. The Thracians, not daring to trust themselves to the ships, slipped away to their homes, and the rest of the crowd of the military kind; the Cretans followed in hope of money. And since in the dividing there was more of offense than of favor, fifty talents were set on the bank to be plundered. From this plundering, when in a tumult they boarded the ships, they sank one galley at the mouth of the river, overloaded by the multitude. That day they reach Galepsus, the next Samothrace, which they were making for; about two thousand talents are said to have been carried over thither.

Paulus, through all the surrendered cities sending men to take command, lest any injury be done to the conquered in the new peace, and the king’s herald-bearers kept with him, sent Publius Nasica—ignorant of the king’s flight—to Amphipolis with a moderate band of foot and horse, both to lay waste Sintice and to be a hindrance to all the king’s attempts. Meanwhile Meliboea is captured by Gnaeus Octavius and plundered; at Aeginium, which Gnaeus Anicius the legate had been sent to assault, two hundred were lost by a sally made from the town, the Aeginienses being ignorant that the war was finished. The consul, having set out from Pydna with the whole army, on the second day reached Pella; and when he had pitched camp a mile from it, for several days he held a fixed camp there, looking on every side at the site of the city, which he perceived had not without cause been chosen as the royal seat. It is set on a hillock sloping toward the winter sunset; around it are marshes of a depth insuperable in summer and winter, which the overflow of the waters makes. The citadel Phacus, in the very marsh where it is nearest the city, juts out like an island, set upon a mound of enormous work, which both sustains the wall and is in nothing harmed by the moisture of the marsh poured around. From afar it seems joined to the wall of the city; it is divided by an intervening channel, and joined too by a bridge, so that it has neither an approach on any side for an external assailant, nor, if the king should shut anyone there, any escape save by the bridge, very easily guarded. And the royal treasure was in that place; but then nothing was found there except the three hundred talents which had been sent to King Gentius and then retained. During the days the fixed camp was at Pella, frequent embassies, which had gathered to congratulate, especially from Thessaly, were heard. Then, news being received that Perseus had crossed over to Samothrace, the consul, setting out from Pella, on the fourth camp reached Amphipolis. The whole multitude pouring out to meet him was, to anyone, a proof that it was bereft of no good and just king...