29.
The speech of the king affected the commissioners profoundly. Therefore they left the question unsettled by an indecisive answer: if by the decree of the ten commissioners these cities had been assigned to Eumenes, they were making no change;
[
2]
if Philip had captured them in war, he should
[p. 309]hold them as the prize of victory under the law of
1 war; if neither of these was true, it was their pleasure that the decision should be reserved for the senate and, in order that everything might remain in its original state, that the garrisons which were in these cities should be withdrawn.
2
[
3]
These were the principal causes which had turned the thoughts of Philip away from the Romans, so that the war can appear, not as begun for new reasons by his son Perseus, but as a heritage from the father to the son.
[
4]
At Rome there was no suspicion of a Macedonian war. Lucius Manlius the proconsul had returned from Spain; when he demanded from the senate, meeting in the temple of Bellona, a triumph for his achievements, their importance made the request reasonable;
[
5]
precedent stood in the way, because it had been so arranged by the custom of their forefathers that a general who had not brought back his army should not triumph unless he had handed over to his successor a province thoroughly conquered and pacified.
3
[
6]
Nevertheless, the intermediate distinction, of entering the City in ovation, was granted to Manlius.
[
7]
He carried in his procession fifty-two golden crowns, in addition to one hundred and thirty-two pounds of gold and sixteen thousand three hundred of silver, and he declared in the senate that his quaestor Quintus Fabius was bringing ten thousand pounds of silver and eighty of gold: this too he would put into the treasury.
[
8]
There was a serious slave insurrection that year in Apulia.
[
9]
Lucius Postumius the praetor had Tarentum as his province. He conducted a strict
[p. 311]investigation into a conspiracy of shepherds who had
4 endangered the highways and the public pasturelands by their brigandage. He condemned about seven thousand men: many of them escaped, many were executed.
[
10]
The consuls, long delayed in the City by the levies, at length set out for their provinces.