48.
[8]
[7]
Titus Quinctius passed the entire winter season of this year at Elatia, where he had established the winter quarters of his army, in adjusting political arrangements, and reversing the measures which had been introduced in the several states under the arbitrary domination of Philip and his deputies, who crushed the rights and liberties of [p. 1539]others, in order to augment the power of those who formed a faction in their favour.
[2]
Early in the spring he came to Corinth, where he had summoned a general convention. Ambassadors having attended from every one of the states, so as to form a numerous assembly, he addressed them in a long speech, in which, beginning from the first commencement of friendship between the Romans and the nation of the Greeks, he enumerated the proceedings of the commanders who had been in Macedonia before him, and likewise his own.
[3]
His whole narration was heard with the warmest approbation, except when he came to make mention of Nabis; and then they expressed their opinion, that it was utterly inconsistent with the character of the deliverer of Greece to have left seated, in the centre of one of its most respectable states, a tyrant, who was not only insupportable to his own country, but a terror to all the states in his neighbourhood.
[4]
Whereupon Quinctius, not unacquainted with this tendency of their feelings, freely acknowledged, that “if the business could have been accomplished without the entire destruction of Lacedaemon, no mention of pence with the tyrant ought ever to have been listened to;
[5]
but that, when it was not possible to crush him otherwise than by the utter ruin of this most important city, it was judged more eligible to leave the tyrant in a state of debility, stripped of almost every kind of power to do injury to any, than to suffer the city, which must have perished in the very process
[6??]
of its delivery being effectuated, to sink under remedies too violent for it to support.”
Livy. History of Rome by Titus Livius, books twenty-seven to thirty-six. literally translated, with notes and illustrations, by. Cyrus Edmonds. York Street, Covent Garden, London. Henry G. Bohn. John Child and son, printers, Bungay. 1850. 3.
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