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Updated: June 4, 2025
As their answer to these suggestions showed nothing like a pacific disposition, and it was evident that the business must be determined by force of arms, and that, notwithstanding the defeat of the king, the war of Aetolia was as far from a conclusion as ever, Acilius removed his camp from Thermopylae to Heraclea; and on the same day rode on horseback entirely round the walls, in order to acquaint himself with the localities of the city.
The Aetolians, who had not yet learned to reconcile themselves to their insignificance, had, after the armistice concluded with Scipio in the spring of 564, rendered intercourse between Greece and Italy difficult and unsafe by means of their Cephallenian corsairs; and not only so, but even perhaps while the armistice yet lasted, they, deceived by false reports as to the state of things in Asia, had the folly to place Amynander once more on his Athamanian throne, and to carry on a desultory warfare with Philip in the districts occupied by him on the borders of Aetolia and Thessaly, in the course of which Philip suffered several discomfitures.
In his passage thither, he encountered two violent storms, the first between the promontories of Peloponnesus and Aetolia, and the other about the Ceraunian mountains; in both which a part of his Liburnian squadron was sunk, the spars and rigging of his own ship carried away, and the rudder broken in pieces.
The western army under Appius Claudius, whose headquarters were at Lychnidus in the territory of the Dassaretae, sustained one defeat after another: after an expedition to Macedonia had been utterly unsuccessful, the king in turn towards the beginning of winter assumed the aggressive with the troops which were no longer needed on the south frontier in consequence of the deep snow blocking up all the passes, took from Appius numerous townships and a multitude of prisoners, and entered into connections with king Genthius; he was able in fact to attempt an invasion of Aetolia, while Appius allowed himself to be once more defeated in Epirus by the garrison of a fortress which he had vainly besieged.
The Roman gods, the ritual, military, and juristic terms of the Romans, present a strange appearance amid the Greek world; Roman -aediles- and -tresviri- are grotesquely mingled with -agoranomi- and -demarchi-; pieces whose scene is laid in Aetolia or Epidamnus send the spectator without scruple to the Velabrum and the Capitol.
After bivouacking with the army in the precinct of Nemean Zeus, in which the poet Hesiod is said to have been killed by the people of the country, according to an oracle which had foretold that he should die in Nemea, Demosthenes set out at daybreak to invade Aetolia.
This man, after finishing the business of his embassy, set out on his return to Aetolia; and on the twelfth day after he embarked, reached Phalara, on the Malian bay. Having conveyed thence to Lamia the money that he had brought, he, with a few light troops, directed, in the evening, his course toward Hypata, by known paths, through the country which lay between the Roman and Macedonian camps.
Parties indeed fermented there as before; but, after the withdrawal of the extraordinary man who had wellnigh changed the destinies of the world, the patriot party was not of much more importance in Carthage than in Aetolia or Achaia.
It was a public law in Aetolia, that an Aetolian might serve as a mercenary against any state, even against a state in alliance with his own country; and, when the other Greeks urgently besought them to redress this scandal, the Aetolian diet declared that Aetolia might sooner be removed from its place than this principle from their national code.
Thus Philip, having checked the proceedings of those two nations by these well-timed expeditions, gained reparation for the damages sustained from the operations of the Romans; the enterprise being as spirited as the issue was successful. An occurrence which accidentally happened to him lessened the number of his enemies on the side of Aetolia.
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