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All of a sudden, shortly before the battle of Pydna, Rhodian envoys appeared at the Roman head-quarters and in the Roman senate, announcing that the Rhodians would no longer tolerate this war which was injurious to their Macedonian traffic and their revenue from port-dues, that they were disposed themselves to declare war against the party which should refuse to make peace, and that with this view they had already concluded an alliance with Crete and with the Asiatic cities.
After the campaign of Pydna and the overthrow of the Macedonian kingdom, Aemilius Paullus, one of the most humane of Romans, sold into slavery, under orders from the senate, 150,000 free inhabitants of communities in Epirus which had sided with Perseus in the war.
On the contrary, she gave him her support, and allied herself to him very closely; and he, on his part, became in subsequent years one of her most devoted adherents and friends. When Olympias was shut up in Pydna by the army of Cassander, as was related in the last chapter, and sent for Æacides to come to her aid, he immediately raised an army and marched to the frontier.
It was the most convenient maritime station in Thrace, and threw open to him all the country east of the Strymon, and especially the gold region near Mount Pangreus. This place henceforward became one of the bulwarks of Macedonia, until the Roman conquest. He deprived her of her hold upon the Thermaic Gulf, conquered Pydna and Potidæa, and conciliated Olynthus.
Marcus Paullus Æmilius, one of the best and bravest of the Romans, was sent to subdue him, and the great battle was fought in 188, at Pydna, near Mount Olympus.
L. PAULUS: this is L. Aemilius Paulus Macedonicus, consul in 182 B.C., and again in 168 when he finished the third Macedonian war by utterly defeating Perseus at Pydna. For his connection with Scipio and Cato see Introd. PATER TUUS: i.e. Scipio; so in 29 avi tui, and in 75 avum tuum, without mention of young Scipio's name, but in 49 patris tui, Scipio; so 77.
The conduct of the Spanish war was now committed to a trustworthy officer, the consul Quintus Fabius Maximus Aemilianus, the second son of the victor of Pydna . But the Romans no longer ventured to send the experienced veterans, who bad just returned from Macedonia and Asia, forth anew tothe detested Spanish war; the two legions, which Maximus brought with him, were new levies and scarcely more to be trusted than the old utterly demoralized Spanish army.
While the public works which can be shown to have been constructed from the battle of Pydna down to the time of Gaius Gracchus were numerous, from the period after 632 there is scarcely mention of any other than the projects of bridges, roads, and drainage which Marcus Aemilius Scaurus organized as censor in 645.
Wherefore, Athenians, we must be exceedingly careful of our future measures, that by amendment therein we may efface the shame of the past. Does any one of you, Athenians, compute or consider the means, by which Philip, originally weak, has become great? Having first taken Amphipolis, then Pydna, Potidaea next, Methone afterward, he invaded Thessaly.
To take a single appalling instance, the 150,000 human beings who were sold into slavery in Epirus by the conqueror of Pydna, or as many of them as were transported out of their own country and these were probably the vast majority, were thereby deprived for the rest of their lives of all social and family life, of their ancestral worship, in fact of everything that could act as a moral tie, as a restraining influence upon vicious instincts.
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