6.
However, when he committed this terrible crime against his pre-eminent remaining friend, who had been tested in so many vicissitudes and had been betrayed because he had not betrayed the king, Perseus turned all hearts against him.
[2]
Each one individually deserted to the Romans.
By fleeing they forced the king too, left almost alone, to adopt some plan of flight; finally he appealed to Oroandes the Cretan, who knew the coast of Thrace from having made trading voyages there, to take him aboard a scout-ship and carry him [p. 265]to Cotys.
[3]
There is a harbour Demetrium on a1 certain headland of Samothrace;2 the scout-ship was anchored there. At sun-down the needful equipment was carried to the shore; all the money that could be brought secretly was also carried down.
[4]
In the middle of the night, the king himself with three companions of his flight went by a back door of the house into a garden next to his bedroom and thence, after scrambling with difficulty over a wall, reached the sea.3
[5]
Oroandes had waited just long enough for the money to be brought down, and in the early darkness had weighed anchor and was sailing directly for Crete.
[6]
When the ship was not found at the harbour, Perseus wandered about for some time on the shore and, finally, fearing the imminent approach of dawn, did not dare to return to the house where he was entertained, but took cover near an out-of-the-way corner on one side of the temple.
[7]
Among the Macedonians there were Royal Pages,4 so-called, sons of the chief men chosen to wait upon the king; this troop, having accompanied the king in his flight had not even then left him, until by order of Gnaeus Octavius, announcement was made by a herald that if the Royal
[8??]
Pages and the other Macedonians who were in Samothrace surrendered to the Romans, they would secure their safety, their freedom, and all their possessions which they either had with them, or had left in Macedonia.
[9]
At this word, they all made their way to the Romans, and reported their names to Gaius Postumius, a military tribune. The king's young children were also handed over to [p. 267]Octavius by Ion of Thessalonica, and no one was left5 with the king except Philip, his oldest son.
[10]
Then Perseus surrendered himself and his son to Octavius, railing at his fortune and the gods in whose temple he was, who had done nothing to aid their suppliant.6
[11]
He was ordered to be placed in the flagship, and what was left of the money was brought there. The fleet immediately sailed back to Amphipolis.
[12]
Thence Octavius sent the king to the consul's camp, sending ahead dispatches to inform the consul that the king was a prisoner and was being brought to him.
1 B.C. 168
2 A temple of Demeter stood there, of. below, sec. 6. The temple is mentioned in I.G. XII. 8. The promontory of Kamariotissa marks the site approximately.
3 Perseus' wife accompanied him, according to Plutarch, Aemilius xxvi, and was one of the causes of delay, being quite unathletic.
4 These pages are also described by Curtius VIII. vi. 2.
5 B.C. 168
6 Diodorus XXIX. 28 points out that he had forfeited his claim on the gods by his disloyalty toward his brother.
Livy. Books XLIII-XLV With An English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1951: 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.