The Macedonians were followed, at the instance of the Romans, by the Athenians, who after the shocking way they had been treated, had every justification for protesting against Philip's barbarous cruelty. [2] They mourned over the piteous devastation and pillaging of their fields, but it was not because they had suffered hostile treatment from an enemy that they complained. There were certain rights of war which could be justly exercised and therefore must be justly submitted to; [3] the burning of crops, the destruction of dwellings, the carrying off of men and cattle as plunder, cause suffering to those who endure them, but are not felt to be an indignity. [4] What they did complain of was that the man who called the Romans foreigners and barbarians had so completely outraged all law, human and divine, that in his first ravages he made impious war upon the infernal deities, and in his subsequent ones he defied the powers above. All the sepulchres and monuments within their borders were destroyed, the dead in all their graves laid bare, their bones no longer covered by the earth. [5] There were shrines which their ancestors in the day when they dwelt in separate [6??] demes had consecrated in their little fortified posts and villages, and which even when they had been enrolled as citizens of one city they did not abandon or neglect. All these temples Philip had enveloped in sacrilegious flames, the images of their gods, blackened, burnt, mutilated, were lying among the prostrate pillars of their temples. [7] What he had made the land of Attica, once so fair in its beauty and its wealth, such, if he were allowed, would he make Aetolia and the whole of Greece. [8] Even Athens itself would have been similarly disfigured if the Romans had not come to the rescue, for the [9??] same impious rage was driving him to attack the gods who dwell in the city, Minerva the protectress of the citadel, the Ceres of Eleusis and the Jupiter and Minerva of the Piraeus. [10] But he had been repulsed by force of arms, not only from their temples, but even from the walls of the city, and had turned his savage fury against those shrines whose sanctity was their only protection. They closed with an earnest appeal to the Aetolians that they would out of compassion to the Athenians take part in [11??] the war, under the leadership of the immortal gods and of the Romans who next to the gods possessed the greatest power and might.
Livy. History of Rome. English Translation by. Rev. Canon Roberts. New York, New York. E. P. Dutton and Co. 1912. 1. Livy. History of Rome. English Translation. Rev. Canon Roberts. New York, New York. E. P. Dutton and Co. 1912. 2.
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