3.
At the first meeting of the senate, when all the members insisted that no business should have precedence over the question of Philip and the allies' complaints, the matter was at once taken
[2]
up for consideration and a motion passed in a full [p. 11]session, that Publius Aelius the consul should send1 a suitable person of his own selection, vested with military authority,2 to take over the fleet which Gnaeus Octavius was bringing from Sicily, and then cross over to Macedonia.3
[3]
Marcus Valerius Laevinus4 was sent with the rank of propraetor, and receiving thirty-eight ships from Gnaeus Octavius in the neighbourhood of Vibo, he took them across to Macedonia.
[4]
There Marcus Aurelius5 the commissioner6 met him and informed him what mighty armies, what a great number of
[5]
ships the king had assembled, and in what fashion he was rousing men to armed revolt, not only in all the cities of the mainland but in the islands as well, partly by visiting them in person, partly through his agents;
[6]
and the two agreed that the Romans must undertake the war with greater vigour, lest while they delayed Philip should venture to do what Pyrrhus7 before him had done, with a considerably less powerful empire, and that Aurelius should forward this information in writing to the consuls and senate.
1 B.C. 201
2 The imperium was that aspect of official authority which conferred the right of life and death and the right of exercising military command. At this period ordinary magistrates within the city of Rome could not possess imperium, and so their attendants carried the fasces without the axe which symbolized this power.
3 This fleet had been on guard in Sicilian waters during the war with Hannibal (XXX. xli. 7).
4 Laevinus had served in Greece for a long time during the recent war (XXIII. xxiv. 4, etc.), but was at this time a private citizen.
5 Marcus Aurelius Cotta had been sent on an embassy to Philip in 203 B.C. (XXX. xxvi. 4). Macedonian ambassadors at the peace conference in 201 B.C. complained of his conduct, alleging that he had attacked Philip in contravention of the treaty (XXX. xlii. 3).
6 Legati were either commissioners sent out by the senate to conduct diplomatic negotiations, to deliver messages to independent states, to determine the form of government of a new province, etc., or military assistants to commanders in the field. Aurelius belonged to the former class, but had either assumed or been assigned military duties as well.
7 King Pyrrhus of Epirus had been summoned to aid Tarentum during the war between that city and Rome (281- 272 B.C.) and had invaded Italy.
Livy. Books XXXI-XXXIV with an English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1935: no copyright notice.
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