History of Rome

​Philip was indeed grieving and anxious, because, although he himself had gone in haste to every place, he had nevertheless met with no opportunity in time, and fortune, snatching everything from his eyes, had mocked his speed.

​In the council, however, concealing his grief, he spoke with high spirits, calling gods and men to witness that he had not been wanting to any place or time, but that, wherever the clash of enemy arms had been heard, he had hastened thither with the greatest possible speed;

​but that it could scarcely be calculated whether the war was being waged more boldly by himself or more fleetingly by the enemy: thus Attalus from Opus, thus Sulpicius from Chalcis, thus in those very days Machanidas had slipped from his hands.

​Yet flight was not always successful, nor should that war be held as difficult, in which, if only you have joined battle with the enemy, you will have conquered.

​First of all, he had the confession of the enemy that they were by no means equal to him; in a short time he would also have an indubitable victory, and they would fight with him with no better outcome than hope.

​The allies heard the king with joy. Then he restored Heraea and Triphylia to the Achaeans; Aliphera, moreover, he restored to the Megalopolitans, because they sufficiently proved that it had belonged to their territory.

​Then, having received ships from the Achaeans — there were three quadriremes and as many biremes — he crossed over to Anticyra.

​Setting out thence with seven quinqueremes and more than twenty light vessels, which he had sent into the Corinthian Gulf to join the Carthaginian fleet, he made a landing at Erythrae of the Aetolians, which is near Eupalium.

​It did not escape the Aetolians; for whatever population was either in the fields or in the neighboring strongholds of Potidania and Apollonia fled into the woods and mountains;

​the cattle, which in the haste could not be driven away, were plundered and driven onto the ships.

​Having sent these and the rest of the plunder to Aegium with Nicias, the praetor of the Achaeans, when he had headed for Corinth, he ordered the land forces to be led thence by land through Boeotia. He himself, sailing from Cenchreae along the Attic coast and over Sunium, arrived at Chalcis, passing almost through the middle of the enemy’s fleets; thence, having praised their loyalty and courage, ​because neither fear nor hope had turned their minds, and having exhorted them to remain in the alliance with the same constancy in the future, if they preferred their own fortune to that of the Oritans and Opuntians, he sailed from Chalcis to Oreus; and having entrusted the chief authority and the custody of the city to those of the leading men ​who had preferred to flee when the city was captured rather than surrender themselves to the Romans, he himself crossed over from Euboea to Demetrias, whence he had first set out to bring aid to the allies.

​Then, having laid down the keels of a hundred warships at Cassandrea and assembled a multitude of shipwrights for the completion of that work, because both the departure of Attalus and the aid brought by himself in time to his struggling allies had made affairs in Greece tranquil, he withdrew back into his kingdom to wage war on the Dardanians.