6.
The consul had learned through Charopus the Epirote what passes the king had occupied with his army, and after wintering in Corcyra he crossed to the mainland at the coming of spring and began to lead his army against the enemy.
[2]
When he was about five miles from the king's camp, after fortifying the place and leaving behind the legions, he himself went forward to reconnoitre with some light troops, and on the next day held a council, whether he should try to force
[3]
a passage through the valley which was held by the enemy, although great labour and danger were involved, or should follow the same circuitous route by which Sulpicius had entered Macedonia the previous year.
[4]
While he was spending many days in discussing this question, word came to him that Titus Quinctius had been elected consul, had obtained from the lots the province of Macedonia, had hastened his journey, and had already arrived at Corcyra.1
[5]
Valerius Antias writes that Villius, because he could not use the direct road, since the whole country was held by the king, entered the defile, followed the valley through the midst of which the river Aous flows, and, hastily throwing a bridge over the
[6]
[p. 169]river to the bank on which the king's camp lay, -2 crossed and engaged the enemy; that he defeated the king and put him to flight and expelled him from his camp;
[7]
that he killed twelve thousand of the enemy in that battle and captured- two thousand two hundred, together with one hundred thirty-two standards and two hundred thirty horses; and that he vowed a temple to Jupiter in this battle, if success attended him.
[8]
The other Greek and Latin writers, at least those whose annals I have consulted, report that Villius did nothing worthy of remark, but handed over to the next consul, Titus Quinctius, the war in the same state that he had received it.
1 There is no real confusion in Livy's chronology. The source which Livy follows in sects. 1-4 represents Villius, the consul of 199 B.C., as reaching Greece too late to take the field in the autumn of that year (I am drawing this inference from the silence of Livy), as wintering in Corcyra, and as carrying on, in the spring of 198 B.C., before the arrival of his successor, the campaign just described. Then, in sects. 5-7, Livy quotes from Valerius Antias an entirely different story of the spring campaign of 198 B.C. This variant Livy, at least by implication, rejects. He reports, in sect. 4 and again in sect. 8, at the end of each of the conflicting narratives, the arrival of Quinctius in Greece, although he does not mention the election of Quinctius as consul for 198 B.C. until vii. 12 below.
2 B.C. 199
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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