17.
Such were the decrees at Leucas. This was the capital of Acarnania, and thither all the peoples were wont to come to council.
[2]
Accordingly, when this sudden change was reported to the lieutenant Flamininus at Corcyra, he at once set out with his fleet to Leucas and anchored in the harbour called Heraeum.
[3]
He approached the walls with all kinds of artillery and equipment with which cities are assaulted, thinking that their minds would turn towards peace at the first alarm.
[4]
But when they showed no signs of a peaceful disposition then he began to erect sheds and towers and to move the battering-ram towards the walls.
[5]
Acarnania as a whole lies between Aetolia and Epirus, facing the west and the Sicilian sea.
[6]
Leucadia is now an island, cut off from Acarnania by a shallow channel dug by hand; then it was a peninsula,1 joined to Acarnania by a narrow neck of land on its western side; this neck of land was about five hundred paces long and not more than one hundred twenty paces wide.
[7]
In this constricted place lay Leucas, [p. 323]clinging to a hill facing the east and Acarnania; the2 lower parts of the town were flat, lying along the sea which separates Leucadia from Acarnania.3
[8]
On that side it is vulnerable by land and sea, for the shallows are more like a pool than a sea and the whole country is flat and favourable for siege-works. So the walls in many places were either undermined or thrown down by the battering-ram.
[9]
But as the city itself was exposed to attack, just so were the minds of the enemy invincible.
[10]
By day and night they laboured to rebuild the shattered walls, to close the ways laid open by their fall, to enter battle courageously, and to defend the walls with weapons rather than themselves with walls.
[11]
They would have prolonged the siege beyond Roman expectations had not certain exiles of the Italian race, living in Leucas, come down from the citadel and admitted the soldiers.
[12]
The Leucadians, nevertheless, rushing down from the higher ground with loud shouts and drawing up their array in the forum, resisted for a time in pitched battle. Meanwhile the fortifications in many places were taken by escalade, and entrance to the city was
[13]
gained over piles of stones and fallen buildings, and now the lieutenant himself with a strong force had surrounded the defenders.
[14]
Part fell in the mellay, some threw down their arms and surrendered to the victor. And a few days later, when news came of the battle which had been fought at Cynoscephalae,
[15]
all the states of Acarnania submitted to the control of the lieutenant.
1 Whether or not Leucas was in remote antiquity an island, a peninsula, or a tract of land separated from or joined to the mainland by something resembling a sand-bar or a tidal flat, Livy is here in accord with the usual ancient tradition, which represents it as an island made out of a peninsula by an artificial channel (Strabo I. iii. 18; X. ii. 8; Thucydides III. 81; IV. 8, etc.). The question naturally interlocks with the controversy over the identification of Leucas with the Homeric Ithaca (conveniently summarized by Buerchner in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. Leucas, by Jones in the Appendix to Vol. V of his Strabo in this series, and, most recently but very briefly, by Hennig, Die Geographie des Homerischen Epos, Neue Wege zur Antike, I. Reihe, Heft 10, Leipzig, 1934, 85-101).
2 B.C. 197
3 The acropolis of Leucas was on a hill; the lower town extended eastward from its base.
Livy. Books XXXI-XXXIV with an English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1935: no copyright notice.
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