previous next
41. The most popular of the festivals, the famous spectacle of the Nemean Games, which had been omitted at the usual time because of the misfortunes of war, was now, on the arrival of the Roman army and commander, proclaimed by the joyful citizens, who had chosen the general himself to preside at the games. [2] There were many things which added to their joy: those of their countrymen had been brought back from Lacedaemon, who had been taken there by Pythagoras recently and by Nabis earlier; [3] the men had come back who had escaped after the discovery of the conspiracy1 by Pythagoras and after the executions had begun; they saw liberty recovered after a long interval,2 and they beheld the authors of that liberty, —the Romans, whose cause for warring with the tyrant they had themselves been. [4] Moreover, the freedom of the Argives was proclaimed by the voice of the herald on the very day of the Nemean Games. As regards the Achaeans, whatever joy the restoration of Argos to the common council of Achaea brought to them was rendered incomplete to the same degree by the fact that Lacedaemon was left enslaved, with the tyrant close at hand; [5] the Aetolians, too, attacked the position of affairs at all their meetings: with Philip, they said, there had been no cessation from war until he had evacuated all the cities of Greece; [6] Sparta was abandoned to the tyrant, and its legal king, though [p. 527]in the Roman camp, and other citizens of the highest3 station, would live in exile; the Roman army had become the ready agent of Nabis' despotism. [7] From Argos Quinctius led his troops back to Elatia, whence he had set out to the Spartan war.

[8] There are some4 who say that the tyrant fought the war, not by making sallies from the town, [9] but by placing his camp face to face with the Roman, and that after long delay, because he was waiting for aid from the Aetolians, he was in the end compelled to fight in battle array when the Romans attacked his foragers; [10] defeated in that battle and expelled from his camp, he asked for peace, after fourteen thousand of his men had been killed and more than four thousand captured.

1 See xxv. 7-12 above.

2 Argos had come under the control of Philip in 198 B.C. (XXXII. xxv. 11) and Livy exaggerates somewhat, as he frequently does.

3 B.C. 195

4 These are obviously the Roman annalists, whose variant account Livy prefixes to the narrative of western affairs which follows. His source for the war with Nabis was a portion of Polybius which is now lost.

Creative Commons License
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.

load focus Notes (1881)
load focus Notes (W. Weissenborn, H. J. Müller, 1883)
load focus Summary (Latin, W. Weissenborn, H. J. Müller, 1911)
load focus Summary (English, Evan T. Sage, Ph.D. Professor of Latin and Head of the Department of Classics in the University of Pittsburgh, 1935)
load focus Summary (Latin, Evan T. Sage, Ph.D. Professor of Latin and Head of the Department of Classics in the University of Pittsburgh, 1935)
load focus English (Rev. Canon Roberts, 1912)
load focus Latin (W. Weissenborn, H. J. Müller, 1883)
load focus English (Cyrus Evans, 1850)
load focus Latin (W. Weissenborn, H. J. Müller, 1911)
load focus Latin (Evan T. Sage, Ph.D. Professor of Latin and Head of the Department of Classics in the University of Pittsburgh, 1935)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
198 BC (1)
hide References (17 total)
  • Commentary references to this page (6):
    • Titus Livius (Livy), Ab urbe condita libri, erklärt von M. Weissenborn, books 33-34, commentary, 33.10
    • Titus Livius (Livy), Ab urbe condita libri, erklärt von M. Weissenborn, books 35-38, commentary, 35.12
    • Titus Livius (Livy), Ab urbe condita libri, erklärt von M. Weissenborn, books 35-38, commentary, 35.12
    • Titus Livius (Livy), Ab urbe condita libri, erklärt von M. Weissenborn, books 35-38, commentary, 38.54
    • Titus Livius (Livy), Ab urbe condita libri, erklärt von M. Weissenborn, books 39-40, commentary, 39.25
    • Titus Livius (Livy), Ab urbe condita libri, erklärt von M. Weissenborn, books 41-42, commentary, 41.6
  • Cross-references to this page (4):
    • Titus Livius (Livy), Ab urbe condita, Index, Nemea
    • Titus Livius (Livy), Ab urbe condita, Index, T. Quinctius Flamininus
    • Titus Livius (Livy), Ab urbe condita, Index, Argi
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), NE´MEA
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (7):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: