34.
Philip, thinking that he would do something to secure the affection of his people and increase their readiness to encounter danger on his behalf
[2]
if he undertook the burial of the cavalrymen who had fallen on the expedition, ordered their bodies brought into camp, that the funeral honour might be seen by all.
[3]
Nothing is so uncertain or so unpredictable as the mental reaction of a crowd. What he thought would make them more ready to enter any conflict caused, instead, reluctance and fear;
[4]
for men who had seen the wounds dealt by javelins and arrows and occasionally by lances, since they were used to fighting with the Greeks and Illyrians, when they had seen bodies chopped to pieces by the Spanish sword,1 arms torn away, shoulders and all, or heads separated from bodies, with the necks completely severed, or vitals laid open, and the other fearful wounds, realized in a general panic with what weapons and what men they had to fight.
[5]
Fear seized the king as well, who had never met the Romans in ordered combat.
[6]
So, recalling his son [p. 103]and the guard which was at the passes to Pelagonia, -2 that he might increase his own strength with these forces, he opened to Pleuratus and the Dardani the road into Macedonia.
[7]
Using deserters as guides, he himself marched towards the enemy with twenty thousand infantry and two thousand cavalry, and fortified with a wall and ditch a hill near Athacus, a little more than a mile from the Roman camp, and seeing the Roman camp which lay at his feet, it is said
[8]
that he admired its whole arrangement and each section allotted its own place, with the rows of tents and also the well-spaced streets between, and that he remarked that no one could believe that that camp belonged to barbarians.
[9]
For two days the consul and the king remained in camp, each waiting for the other to assume the offensive; on the third day the Roman led out all his forces to the battleground.
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