Part 20

The Rhodians stood quite free: having entered into no league with the Romans, they might, if they chose, ally themselves with Perseus. The latter married a Syrian princess, daughter of Antiochus Epiphanes, a crazy tyrant, but who displayed no common energy: (he is very correctly described in the book of the Maccabees, and in the fragments of Polybius.) Perseus’ sister was married to Prusias. He also went on with the negociations with the Bastarnians, and even entered into new ones with the Illyrians. But Eumenes became suspicious of these connexions of Perseus with Rhodes, Antiochus, and Prusias; for he saw fast enough, that he could not but fall a victim, if Perseus should be successful against the Romans: Perseus held out as a bait to the other powers the kingdom of Pergamus, which would be the natural prey for them to share. Eumenes therefore complained to the Romans; and these listened to him, and took up all sorts of other grievances against Perseus and the Rhodians, which had been set forth against the former by the Thracian petty princes, and against the latter by the Carians and Lycians, who had rather be independent than have to pay heavy taxes to the Rhodians. To these ambassadors they gave the most encouraging answers, without, however, committing themselves by any thing positive. In this way, they irritated the Rhodians, but did not break with them: their policy at that time was truly Macchiavellian. The peace-party, although indeed very weak in Rhodes, had yet sufficiently the upperhand to prevent their fellow citizens from declaring against the Romans. Eumenes himself came to Rome and got a splendid reception, the Romans wishing even by this very means to display their hostile dispositions. Perseus, however, kept quiet: he was acknowledged by the Romans, having been termed the friend and ally of the Roman people, and his ambassadors were received and rewarded.

On his return from Rome, Eumenes was attacked by assassins in Delphi. This plot may have been laid by Perseus; it was very like him, although he positively disavowed it: perhaps also it was a farce of Eumenes himself, intended to give the Romans a handle for war; yet it would, after all, have been too bad. The demand of the Romans, that Perseus should deliver up persons who stood highest in his estimation, because they were accused of having been the instigators of that attack, met with a flat refusal, and thence arose the war, which lasted until the fourth year, from 581-584. This war took a different turn from what the Romans had expected. They had hoped to be able to bring it to an end, like the second Macedonian one and that against Antiochus, in one campaign; besides which, they wished to crush Macedon, and to reconstruct the whole state of things in the eastern countries. But Perseus began the struggle with extraordinary resources: Macedon, for the first time, had enjoyed a twenty-five years’ peace, and it was thriving; so that besides his auxiliaries and four thousand horse, he had an army of forty thousand foot. The last books of Livy are mutilated, and thus we are without any clear view of part of the operations. The duration of the war, considering the disproportion between the two powers, is very great; but indeed the Roman generals carried it on at first in the worst way that could be, and strategical talent seems to have very much fallen off just then among the Romans. P. Licinius Crassus appeared in Thessaly, where Perseus advanced to meet him, and gained a pretty considerable advantage over his cavalry: the Romans had many killed and taken prisoners. The king, in waging the war, did it with the wish to obtain a favourable peace; and he believed that by showing himself resolute, he would get it on better terms. Yet this was contrary to the settled maxim of the Romans; in fact, it was exactly a case in which they felt that they must humble him. Perseus immediately began to negociate; but it was answered, that he was to make his submission, and to await the decision of the senate. This led to the battle in Thessaly, the result of which was favourable to the king. This victory threw such lustre on the arms of Perseus, that the whole of Greece was ready to go over to him. Yet the Romans had a vast advantage in their fleet, which was a dreadful scourge to the Greek sea-port towns; and though indeed it was now opposed by a Macedonian squadron, which did more than any one expected, they had still the best of it. Only some few party-leaders in Greece, such as Charops in Epirus (who had been brought up in Rome, and made it his boast that he was able to speak Latin), Lyciscus in Ætolia, and Callicrates in Achaia, were for the Romans: the public opinion was altogether against them. Whilst men like Polybius, who certainly hated the Romans as bitterly as his father Lycortas did,--but this was a different hatred from that of the common herd,--and like Philopœmen, now saw plainly that Perseus would not be able to stand his ground against the Romans, and only supported him with pious wishes and prayers, the many dreamt that he could not fail to be victorious. They egregiously exaggerated trifling successes, such as the battle in Thessaly, and were guilty of the worst outrages and insolence against the Romans; just as was done in Germany, when the French were at the height of their power. Such men also as Polybius had a very strong feeling against the Romans: it was not till afterwards, when he was living among them, that he became aware of the good that was in them. The state of affairs at that time is clearly shown by the fragments of his history. The Romans now also, on their side, everywhere looked upon the Greeks as enemies; and this gave rise to the most cruel deeds, for which the prætor Lucretius was

## particularly notorious. A number of Greek towns on the sea-coast were

taken and utterly destroyed, under the command of this Lucretius and of Hostilius, and the inhabitants were led away as slaves: in Bœotia, Haliartus and Coronea were burned to ashes. If Perseus had taken advantage of these circumstances, and had pressed the consul hard, the whole country on the other side of the Adriatic would have risen in revolt: but he was irresolute and narrow-minded; he had made out for himself a petty plan, within the range of which alone he could do any thing, and of those great enterprises, which would have been needed to overthrow the Roman empire, he was utterly incapable. Thus he listened to the delusive offers of the Roman consul to make a lasting peace; and in the meanwhile Crassus got himself out of his wretched plight, and the negociations were, of course, broken off. In the same way, when Marcius Philippus subsequently opposed Perseus again with insufficient means, he was allowed to offer the king a truce, which, it was given out, was to lead to a peace, whereas the Romans merely availed themselves of it to send the consul the reinforcements which he wanted. In the second and third years of the war, Perseus was very successful; he even drove back the Romans out of Macedon into Illyria, and also gained time to protect his empire against the attacks of the savage Dardanians.

In the third year of the war, Perseus had withdrawn from Thessaly; but he kept Magnesia, his army held Tempe, and thus he lay safely in winter-quarters in Pieria. Here Q. Marcius Philippus undertook a bold piece of daring. He stood at the entrance of Tempe, and as he was not able to force the pass, he endeavoured with an immense effort to cross the huge heights of Olympus, so as to turn the army of the Macedonians, who did not dream of the enemy having thus gone round them. Yet this enterprise of the Romans ought only to be blamed; for their army got into a position, in which, if Perseus had only had common presence of mind and attacked them, they might have been cut off to a man. Perseus abandoned Dium, having set fire to part of the town; evacuated Pieria, that narrow strip of beautiful land along the coast, extending from Olympus to the Thermaic gulf; and retired to Pydna. The Roman general himself, finding his own situation to be a very dangerous one, retreated, and the Macedonians, in their turn, advanced again. This undertaking, however, ended in the Macedonians evacuating Tempe.

The state of opinion with regard to the issue of the war shifted more and more, though the Romans were slowly creeping on. It was thought that a formidable coalition would be made; and that fortune would turn against the Romans, as Rome had reached the crowning height of her power, and now must needs sink down, as all the Greek states had done. The Rhodians believed that they might now set up an independent system, as they hoped, if the wars ended unfavourably for Rome, to consolidate their own rule over Caria and Lycia: they too allowed themselves to be beguiled by their wishes. The connexion of Perseus with Prusias and Antiochus became more active; Antiochus, however, entered with less spirit into these affairs, as he wished first of all to take advantage of the crisis to gain Egypt. Since he therefore no longer threatened Asia Minor, even old Eumenes changed his policy, and likewise espoused the interests of Perseus; so that not only was he backward in supporting the Romans, but he even entered into secret negociations with Perseus: these, however, could not be kept altogether concealed, and for this the Romans afterwards bore him a bitter grudge. The Bastarnians also were stirring again; and there was likewise a closer alliance with Genthius, king of Illyricum, of whose kingdom and descent we have no distinct accounts, though this we know for certain, that Scutari (Scodra) was his residence; (his country seems to have very nearly comprised what is now Upper Albania.) He was not a great prince, yet, if he took a determined part, a dangerous neighbour to the Romans. But the Illyrians and Bastarnians reckoned upon getting subsidies from Perseus: his not granting them to the Bastarnians was downright madness; he ought at any price to have induced them to invade Italy. The three hundred talents which he had agreed upon for Genthius, he kept back, after having drawn him in to commit an outrage against the Roman ambassadors at his court; for he thought that he had thus bound him fast to himself by a tie which could not be broken. This was a pitiful trick!

In 584, the Romans chose L. Æmilius Paullus, the son of the general who was killed at Cannæ, to be consul for the second time; and as they saw that considerable efforts were needed to finish the war, they furnished him with every possible means for it. The Rhodians, most unfortunately for themselves, had wished to act as mediators: the war interfered with their trade, and they by no means wanted the Romans to conquer, as they owed their own independence to the balance of the different states. They came forward, using violent language, and engaged to get Perseus to make peace; but the Romans, though hard pressed by the war, did not desire peace, and the speech of the Rhodians even offended them. At home, and among their neighbours, the Rhodians felt strong, and there by their weight they could turn the scales, which indeed they had done in the war of Antiochus by means of their fleet; but they forgot the immense disproportion between the power of the Romans and their own. Perseus opened the campaign without any further increase of force, except that Genthius declared himself for him. The king had taken up his winter-quarters in Macedonia, and when the Romans broke up theirs, he retreated behind the Cambunian hills and Olympus, the lofty ridge of mountains which separates Thessaly from the Macedonian coast, a country which is one of the most beautiful on earth. Yet this time also the Romans succeeded in going round the mountains. Between the Peneus and Pieria, there is the high and broad range of Olympus, the peaks of which are almost all covered with everlasting snow. The chief pass was through Tempe, which was fortified; besides this, there were several ways across Olympus, and these also were most of them so well secured, that Æmilius did not expect any good from an attack. But he discovered a road, just over one of the most towering summits of the mountains, which, inasmuch as it seemed to be inaccessible, was less strongly guarded. Thither he sent the son-in-law of Scipio Africanus, young Scipio Nasica, with eight thousand men, so as to go round the camp. This enterprise could not have succeeded, had Perseus been a great general; the aggressor, however, has always an advantage. The impassable mountain was got over; the Macedonian army saw the Roman detachment in its rear; the vanguard was defeated by Scipio Nasica, and Perseus was obliged to change his position. He now took up another at the back of Pydna, behind a deep torrent: for in this narrow strip of coast, in which a number of deep mountain streams run down alongside of each other from Olympus to the sea, lines were thrown up behind every one of these, so that a stand might be made at every point successively, in case the enemy should force the pass at Tempe. But now that the Romans had crossed the mountains on the extreme left wing of the Macedonians, these entrenchments were useless; and the Macedonians had then to retreat behind the last of them near Pydna. Thus the Romans were in Pieria, the country of Orpheus, which was a great advance. Yet the Macedonian power was still unshaken. Near Pydna, the final battle was fought, in which the Macedonian monarchy ingloriously fell; it was decided in one hour, and with it the fate of Macedon: the infantry was cut to pieces, the cavalry saved itself without much loss, but with disgrace. The loss of the Romans was trifling: according to some, it was only ninety-one, according to others, one hundred men; and moreover the former of these estimates is that of a man, who was no friend of the Romans, namely Posidonius,--not the celebrated one, but a writer who lived at the time of this war, and who wished to justify Perseus.[49] The king had no hope of a rising; for he had drained the resources of the country to the utmost, and the great fault of the Macedonians was want of faithfulness to their princes in the day of need: he fled, and, escorted by some Cretans, tried to escape with what treasures he had left, as if there had been a place where they were safe from the Romans. Part of these he therefore offered to give up to his followers; yet when he had taken breath at Amphipolis, with the madness of avarice, he repented of his promise, and cheated them of their due. He ought to have gone to Thrace where he had allies, and from thence to some Greek town on the Black sea, as these would not have delivered him up; but he was utterly blinded, and betook himself to Samothrace, where there was an inviolable temple, which he may have looked upon as so much safer an asylum, as indeed the worship of the _penates_ at Lavinium, and that of the Samothracian gods, were akin. He would doubtless have been safe in that island as a private person; but it could not possibly have been expected, that the Romans would let him alone there in his present capacity. His chief motive was certainly the thought, that he might then also have saved his money; yet he soon found out that he could not trust those who were about him, and he even went so far as to have one of them put to death, on which the others treacherously left him. He now wished to embark for Crete, or, according to others, to go to Cotys in Thrace; but the master of the ship, whom he had paid beforehand, deceived him, and all that he could do was to take away his own life, as the Roman prætor had already made his appearance, either to seize or to starve him. From a cowardly love of life, he was led to surrender himself to the Roman admiral Cn. Octavius; and he was kept as a prisoner for the triumph of Æmilius Paullus, as was also the case with Genthius.[50]

Æmilius now executed the commission of regulating affairs according to the instructions which he had from Rome, and this he did in a way which is shocking to our ideas. The Epirotes were involved in the fate of Perseus: although they were not faithful to the treaties which bound them to Rome, yet the dreadful revenge which the Romans took upon them, can never be justified. The Roman soldiers were quartered upon the Molossians, and the senate determined to reward them with the plundering of the Epirote towns: it was undoubtedly meant to requite them for the calamities which formerly had been brought upon the Romans by Pyrrhus. Æmilius was charged with the business of exterminating the Epirote nation. In seventy places, the Roman army was stationed, and the Epirotes were ordered to gather together and deliver up all their gold and valuables, having already been obliged before that to yield up their arms. When in this manner everything was collected which in a general plunder might have been spoilt and wasted, all the troops on the self-same day turned their arms against the inhabitants. One hundred and fifty thousand Epirotes are said to have been either slain or led away as slaves, and seventy places to have been destroyed. This is horrible; it shows the rank degeneracy of the Roman people, as there is no longer in it any balance of its different elements, but only the dead weight of one promiscuous mass. Slavery strips man of half of his virtue, but absolute liberty to do what one lists creates double vice: as rulers of the world, the Romans thought themselves privileged to do any thing and everything. After such a deed as this, we cannot agree with Plutarch in ranking Æmilius among great and virtuous men. Throughout the whole of Greece, and particularly in Bœotia, things were just as bad: the sword was put into the hands of the partisans of the Romans, and their rage was ruthless. In Ætolia, as in all Greek countries, there were two factions, the one devoted, and the other hostile to the Romans; the Roman party ruled without any one to control it, and the lengths to which it went in its outrages, beggar all belief. Besides other atrocities, it broke into the senate house, and butchered all the senators who were accused of being friendly to the Macedonians. Roman troops were sent thither under the command of A. Bæbius. This frightful state of things extended likewise to the Achæans: there the party of Perseus had not been very strong, but so much the stronger was that which had striven to uphold that dignity, which had been injured by the Romans. These had kept none of the treaties with them, and they had received separate embassies from some of the towns, which they had even encouraged; as in the case of Lacedæmon and Messene, which brought complaints against the Achæans, whilst, according to the treaty, none were to be listened to but those which came from the whole of the Achæan league. It was seen how much the Romans were endeavouring to disturb the peace of the people; they even required that the exiles should be reinstated. There was among the Achæans a traitor, Callicrates, who had entirely sold himself to the Romans, and who was so detested and execrated, that people were loth to go near him, or even to touch his garment: the more he became an object of contempt, the deeper he sank in his infamy. After the victory over Perseus, ten Roman commissioners appeared in Greece, two of whom, C. Claudius and Cn. Domitius, went to the Achæans. They asserted that among the papers of Perseus clear proofs had been discovered of the treachery of many eminent Achæans, and they now demanded that the Achæans should pronounce sentence of death upon all whom the Romans had found guilty. This the senate at once refused to do, declaring most properly, that the names must be given, the evidence produced, and the parties regularly tried; those who were brought in guilty should then be punished without mercy. But the envoys would have nothing to say to this, they wanted to give in the list after the executions only; and when they were urged to mention names, they said, that all those who had been _strategi_ were guilty. Then Xeno, who had formerly been _strategus_, got up, and declared that he was so conscious of his innocence, that he would take his trial before a tribunal in Achaia, and, if this were not sufficient, he would even defend himself at Rome. The Roman commissioners eagerly caught at this, and they had a list drawn up by Callicrates of those who were to be sent to Italy and judged there. There were more than a thousand of these; some of them made their escape, for which they were denounced as convicted offenders, and the punishment of death was inflicted upon them when they were taken. The rest were not brought before a court of justice at all, but were distributed as hostages in the municipal towns: it was only after the lapse of seventeen years, that the three hundred who were still alive, were let go. On this occasion, Polybius also came to Rome: his lot was soon bettered; for he got intimate with several families of high rank, and Æmilius Paullus himself made him the companion of his sons, that he might guide them into Greek learning.

Macedon was nominally declared free; but half the taxes were laid upon it, which had been formerly paid to the kings,--an example, how the Romans still exacted tribute from those countries which they did not convert into Roman provinces. The country was divided into four states. This splitting into cantons of the strangest shape; the taking away of all _connubium_ and _commercium_ between them; and the geographical division of these districts, by which tribes belonging to the same stock were torn asunder, and others which were quite distinct were united, are masterpieces of Macchiavellian policy: those which suited each other were disjoined, and those which clashed were jumbled together, in order that no moral strength and unity might ever grow up in the whole. The consequence of this was, that the power of the Macedonians was completely broken. And yet the Romans were behaving all the time as if they were giving them a republican constitution: to every one of these quarters they granted a _synedrium_, and on pretext of removing those who were dangerous to this new equality, they drove all the men of rank and distinction out of the country. The advantage of this arrangement showed itself afterwards in the rebellion of the pseudo-Philip.