16.
The assassins might have made a short detour around the end of the wall and have run down to kill the wounded man, but, as if their task was completed, they fled toward the ridge of Parnassus with such speed that when one of them, finding it difficult to keep up with the others on the pathless and difficult ground, was delaying their escape, they
[2??]
in order that no information might be got from him in case he were caught, killed him, their companion.
[3]
First the king's friends, then his courtiers and slaves, gathered around his body; lifting him up, still stunned by the blow and unconscious, they nevertheless, from the warmth and the breath which remained in his chest, perceived that he was alive; there was slight hope —almost no hope at all —that he would recover.
[4]
Some of the courtiers, following [p. 339]the trail of the murderers, when, wearying themselves1 in vain, they had reached the ridge of Parnassus, returned without accomplishing anything.
[5]
The Macedonians, although they planned their crime not injudiciously and boldly, yet abandoned their undertaking injudiciously and cravenly.
[6]
The next day the king, having recovered consciousness, was carried aboard ship by his friends; thence they proceeded to Corinth and from Corinth, the ships having been drawn over the ridge of the Isthmus,2 to Aegina.
[7]
There his treatment was conducted so secretly, no one being admitted to his presence, that the rumour reached Asia that he was dead.
[8]
Even Attalus believed it more readily than was worthy of their fraternal harmony; for he conferred with his brother's wife and with the commander of the citadel as if he were now beyond doubt heir to the throne.
[9]
Later on this did not escape the knowledge of Eumenes; and although he decided to ignore it and pass over it in silence and to endure it, he yet at their first meeting did not refrain from reproaching his brother for his excessive haste to woo his wife.3 To Rome also the report of the death of Eumenes spread.
1 B.C. 172
2 Ships were hauled across the Isthmus on a roadway.
3 Stratonice had been childless for over sixteen years; she now became pregnant and in due course bore a son, whom Eumenes, according to Polybius (XXX. 27), had not acknowledged at least five years later, but who subsequently succeeded his legal uncle, Attalus II, as Attalus III. (W. S. Ferguson).
Livy. Books XL-XLII With An English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1938: published without copyright notice.
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