History of Rome

​This event increased the spirits of the Romans. To the Macedonians and their king, it brought no small terror.

​And at first he attempted to suppress the rumor of this matter in secret, by sending men to forbid Pantauchus, who was coming from there, to approach the camp.

​But already some boys had been seen by their own people, led among the Illyrian hostages, and the more carefully each thing is hidden, the more easily it leaks out through the talkativeness of the royal servants.

​Around the same time, the Rhodian envoys came to the camp with the same instructions regarding peace that had excited the great wrath of the senators in Rome. They were heard with much more hostile minds by the camp council.

​Therefore, while some thought the envoys should be thrown into chains, and others that they should be driven headlong from the camp without a response, the consul announced that he would give his reply after fifteen days.

​Meanwhile, so that it might appear how little the authority of the peacemaking Rhodians had availed, he began to consult on the plan of conducting the war. It pleased some, and especially the younger ones, to force their way through the bank of the Elpeus and its fortifications:

​they argued that the Macedonians could not resist those making an attack in close formation and in a single column, since they had been dislodged the previous year from so many forts, somewhat higher and more fortified, which they had occupied with strong garrisons.

​To others, it was pleasing that Octavius with the fleet should head for Thessalonica and distract the royal forces by devastating the coastal shore, so that, with another war showing itself from the rear, the king, turned about to protect the interior part of his kingdom, would be forced to leave some part of the crossings of the Elpeus undefended. To the consul himself, the bank seemed insurmountable by nature and by fortifications, ​and besides the fact that artillery was arranged everywhere, he had heard that the enemy also used missiles better and with a surer strike.

​The whole mind of the general was looking elsewhere; and having dismissed the council, he secretly summoned the Perrhaebian merchants Coenus and Menophilus, men already known to him for both their loyalty and prudence, and inquired what kind of crossings there were to Perrhaebia.

​When they said that the places were not unfavorable, but were blocked by royal garrisons, he conceived the hope that if he attacked the unsuspecting enemy by night with a strong force unexpectedly, the garrisons could be dislodged:

​for he reasoned that javelins, arrows, and other missiles are useless in the dark, where what is being aimed at cannot be foreseen from afar, and that in a confused crowd the business is conducted at close quarters with the sword, in which the Roman soldier is victorious.

​Intending to use them as guides, he summoned the praetor Octavius, and having explained what he was preparing, ordered him to head for Heracleum with the fleet and to have ten days’ cooked provisions for a thousand men.

​He himself sent Publius Scipio Nasica and Quintus Fabius Maximus, his own son, with five thousand chosen soldiers to Heracleum, as if they were about to embark on the fleet to devastate the coastal shore of interior Macedonia, which had been discussed in the council.

​It was secretly indicated to them that provisions had been prepared for them at the fleet, so that nothing would delay them. From there, the guides of the march were ordered to divide the route in such a way that they could attack Pythoum at the fourth watch on the third day.

​He himself, on the following day, in order to keep the king from observing other matters, joined battle at dawn in the middle of the riverbed with the outposts of the enemy; and the battle was fought on both sides by the light-armed troops. Nor could they fight with heavier weapons in such an uneven riverbed.

​The descent of each bank into the riverbed was about three hundred paces; the middle space of the torrent, hollowed out differently in different places, lay open a little more than a thousand paces.

​There, in the middle, the battle was fought while the king from his side and the consul from his side watched with their legions from the rampart of the camp.

​At a distance, the royal auxiliaries fought better with missiles; at close quarters, the Roman was steadier and safer with either his round shield or the Ligurian shield.

​Around noon, the consul ordered the retreat to be sounded for his men. Thus the battle was broken off on that day, with not a few killed on both sides.

​On the following day, at sunrise, with their minds provoked by the combat, they clashed even more fiercely. But the Romans were wounded not only by those with whom they had joined battle, but much more by that multitude which stood arranged on the towers, with every kind of missile weapons and especially with stones.

​When they had come closer to the enemy’s bank, those things discharged by the artillery even reached the rearmost. Having lost far more men on that day, the consul withdrew his forces a little later.

​On the third day, he abstained from battle, going down to the lowest part of the camp, as if about to attempt a crossing through the rampart sloping toward the sea.

​Perseus, because what was before his eyes [was watched by him].