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Philip Returns To the Peloponnese

And so the first year of this Olympiad was drawing

Midsummer B. C. 217. Dorimachus Aetolian Strategus, Sept. B. C. 119.

to a close. In Aetolia, the time of the elections having come round, Dorimachus was elected Strategus. He was no sooner invested with his office, than, summoning the Aetolian forces, he made an armed foray upon the highlands of Epirus, and began wasting the country with an even stronger passion for destruction than usual; for his object in everything he did was not so much to secure booty for himself, as to damage the

Destroys Dodona.

Epirotes. And having come to Dodona¹ he burnt the colonnades, destroyed the sacred offerings, and even demolished the sacred building; so that we may say that the Aetolians had no regard for the laws of peace or war, but in the one as well as in the other, acted in defiance of the customs and principles of mankind. After those, and other similar achievements, Dorimachus returned home.

But the winter being now considerably advanced, and all

Philip starts again.

idea of the king coming being given up owing to the time of the year, Philip suddenly started from Larisa with an army of three thousand hoplites armed with brass shields, two thousand light-armed, three hundred Cretans, and four hundred horse of the royal guard; and having transported them into Euboea and thence to Cynos he came through Boeotia and the Megarid to Corinth, about the time of the winter solstice; having conducted his arrival with such promptitude and secrecy, that not a single Peloponnesian suspected it.

Dec. B. C. 219.

He at once closed the gates of Corinth and secured the roads by guards; and on the very next day sent for Aratus the elder to come to him from Sicyon, and issued despatches to the Strategus of the Achaean league and the cities, in which he named a time and place for them all to meet him in arms. Having made these arrangements, he again started, and pitched his camp near the temple of the Dioscuri in Phliasia.

1 The position of Dodona, long a subject of doubt, was settled by the discovery of the numerous inscriptions found about seven miles from Jannina, and published by Constantine Caraponos in 1878, Dodon et ses Ruines. See also Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. i. p. 228.

Histories. Polybius. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh. translator. London, New York. Macmillan. 1889. Reprint Bloomington 1962.

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Polybius, Histories