[16]
Antiochus marched against the Thessalians and came to Cynoscephalæ, where the Macedonians had been defeated by the Romans, and finding the remains of the dead still unburied, gave them a magnificent funeral. Thus he curried favor with the Macedonians and accused Philip before them of leaving unburied those who had fallen in his service. Until now Philip had been wavering and in doubt which side he should espouse, but when he heard of this he joined the Romans at once. He invited Bæbius, their nearest general, to a rendezvous and gave pledges anew of faithful alliance against Antiochus. Bæbius praised him for this, and felt emboldened to send Appius Claudius straightway with 2000 foot through Macedonia into Thessaly. When Appius arrived at Tempe and from that point saw Antiochus besieging Larissa, he kindled a large number of fires to conceal the smallness of his force. Antiochus thought that Bæbius and Philip had arrived, and became panic-stricken, abandoned the siege on a pretext of bad weather, and retreated to Chalcis. There he fell in love with a pretty girl, and, although he was above fifty years of age and was supporting the burden of so great a war, he celebrated his nuptials with her, gave a public festival, and allowed his army to spend the whole winter in idleness and luxury. When spring came he made a descent upon Acarnania, where he perceived that idleness had unfitted his army for every kind of duty. Then he repented himself Of his marriage and his public festival. Nevertheless he reduced a part of Acarnania and was besieging the rest of its strongholds when he learned that the Romans were making a passage of the Adriatic. Then at once he returned to Chalcis.
Appian. The Foreign Wars. Horace White. New York. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 1899.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a medium level of accuracy.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.