47.
When Marcius and Atilius had arrived in Rome, in the Capitol they reported about their embassy, emphasizing nothing as a greater achievement than the deception of the king by the truce and the hope of peace.
[2]
For he had been, they said, so equipped with apparatus for war, while the Romans had made no preparations, that all the commanding places might have been seized by him before an army could be sent over to Greece.
[3]
However, with the time consumed by the truce, the war would be waged on even terms; he would be in no way better prepared, and the Romans would start the war better equipped in everything. Also they had subtly disrupted the Boeotian League, they said, so that the Boeotians could no longer be joined by any common action to the Macedonians.
[4]
These actions a large part of the senate approved as having been done with great wisdom; the older men and those mindful of ancient custom said they did not recognize in this embassy the ways of Rome.1
[5]
“Not by ambushes and battles by night,” they thought, "nor by pretended flight and unexpected return to an enemy off his guard, nor in such a way as to boast of cunning rather than real bravery, did our ancestors wage war; they were accustomed to declare war before they waged it, and even at times to announce a battle and specify the place in which [p. 435]they were going to fight.2
[6]
With the same3 straightforwardness the information was given to King Pyrrhus that his physician was plotting against his life;
[7]
in the same way the betrayer of their children was delivered bound to the Faliscans;4 these are the acts of Roman scrupulousness, not of Carthaginian artfulness5 nor of Greek slyness, since among these peoples it has been more praiseworthy to deceive an enemy than to conquer by force.
[8]
Occasionally a greater advantage is gained for the time being by trickery than by courage, but final and lasting conquest of the spirit overtakes one from whom the admission has been extorted that he has been [p. 437]conquered, not by craft or accident, but by the6 hand-tohand clash of force in a proper and righteous war."
[9]
Thus the older men, who were less well pleased by the new and over-sly wisdom; however, that part of the senate to whom the pursuit of advantage was more important than that of honour, prevailed to the effect that the previous embassy of Marcius should be approved, and he should be sent back again to Greece with . . .7 quinqueremes and instructed to conduct further affairs as might seem best to serve the state.
[10]
Aulus Atilius, too, they sent to hold Larisa in Thessaly, fearing that if the time of the truce should expire, Perseus might send a garrison there and have in his power the capital of Thessaly.
[11]
Atilius was instructed to call on Gnaeus Sicinius for two thousand soldiers to accomplish this mission. Publius Lentulus too —he had returned from Achaea —was
[12]
given three hundred soldiers of Italian stock in order that he should do what he could at Thebes to keep Boeotia under Roman control.
1 Livy's central theme is the old Roman character and its decline and fall (Preface, 9); his patriotism does not blind him to certain lapses from the traditional standard, cf. e.g. IX. xi; cf. also Diodorus XXX. 7.
2 Polybius XIII. 3 tells the same story of Roman warfare, citing it as the one remaining example of the practice formerly adhered to by the Greeks. “The ancients, as we know, were far removed from such malpractices (as treacherous dealings). For so far were they from plotting mischief against their friends, with the purpose of aggrandizing their own power, that they would not even consent to get the better of their enemies by fraud, regarding no success as brilliant or secure unless they crushed the spirit of their adversaries in open battle. For this reason they entered into a convention among themselves to use against each other neither secret missiles nor those discharged from a distance, and considered that it was only a hand-to-hand battle at close quarters which was truly decisive. Hence they preceded war by a declaration and when they intended to do battle gave notice of the fact and of the spot to which they would proceed and array their army. But at the present they say it is a sign of poor generalship to do anything openly in war. Some slight traces, however, of the ancient principles of warfare survive among the Romans. For they make declaration of war, they very seldom use ambuscades, and they fight hand-to-hand at close quarters” (tr. Paton, L.C.L.). Tacitus, Germania, 6. 6 notes that the Germans regarded strategic retreat as honourable. For the early Roman declaration of war, cf. I. xxxii. 5-14, which suggests that the view of Livy's contemporaries that Romans had from the first been warriors is a myth due to the later successes in war. Rome's early expansion was caused by a desire for peace, and an inability to accept border raiding as a sport. Cf. also XXXI. viii. 3 and the note, XXXVI. iii. 12 and the note.
3 B.C. 172
4 Livy's account of the senate's warning to Pyrrhus occurred in the missing book, XIII, cf. the Summary of that book, also Aulus Gellius, III. viii, quoting Valerius Antias and Claudius Quadrigarius; for the story of the treacherous tutor of Falerii, cf. V. xxvii; an allusion to both in XXIV. xlv. 3.
5 Cf. XXI. iv. 9, XXII. vi. 12, xxii. 15. Cf. Diodorus XXX. 7, ὅτι διασαφούντων τῶν ῾πωμαίων ὡς περσέα κατεστρατήγησαν ἄνευ ὅπλων ἐπεχείρησάν τινες τῶν ἐκ τῆς βουλῆς ἐπαινεῖν αὐτούς. οὐ μὴν τοῖς πρεσβυτάτοις ἤρεσκε τὸ γεγενημένον ἀλλ᾽ ἔλεγον μὴ πρέπειν ῾πωμαίοις μιμεῖσθαι φοίνικας, ὥστε δι᾽ ἀπάτης ἀλλ᾽ οὐ δι᾽ ἀρετῆς τῶν πολεμίων περιγίνεσθαι. “When the Romans announced that they had got the better of Perseus without recourse to arms, some of the senators tried to praise them. But what had happened did not please the eldest, but they said that it was not fitting that Romans should imitate Phoenicians, in such a way as to surpass their enemies through deceit and not through valour.”
6 B.C. 172
7 The number is missing.
Livy. Books XL-XLII With An English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1938: published without copyright notice.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.