erae and other towns were taken,
but Appius Claudius came up with 2000 men from Apollonia, relieved
Larisa, and took up his position there. Antiochus, tired of the
winter campaign, preferred to return to his pleasant quarters at
Chalcis, where the time was spent merrily, and the king even, in spite
of his fifty years and his warlike schemes, wedded a fair Chalcidian.
So the winter of 562-3 passed, without Antiochus doing much more than
sending letters hither and thither through Greece: he waged the war
--a Roman officer remarked--by means of pen and ink.

Landing of the Romans

In the beginning of spring 563 the Roman staff arrived at Apollonia.
The commander-in-chief was Manius Acilius Glabrio, a man of humble
origin, but an able general feared both by his soldiers and by the
enemy; the admiral was Gaius Livius; and among the military tribunes
were Marcus Porcius Cato, the conqueror of Spain, and Lucius Valerius
Flaccus, who after the old Roman wont did not disdain, although they
had been consuls, to re-enter the army as simple war-tribunes. They
brought with them reinforcements in ships and men, including Numidian
cavalry and Libyan elephants sent by Massinissa, and the permission
of the senate to accept auxiliary troops to the number of 5000 from
the extra-Italian allies, so that the whole number of the Roman forces
was raised to about 40,000 men. The king, who in the beginning of
spring had gone to the Aetolians and had thence made an aimless
expedition to Acarnania, on the news of Glabrio's landing returned to
his head-quarters to begin the campaign in earnest. But incom
prehensibly, through his own negligence and that of his lieutenants in
Asia, reinforcements had wholly failed to reach him, so that he had
nothing but the weak army--now further decimated by sickness and
desertion in its dissolute winter-quarters--with which he had landed
at Pteleum in the autumn of the previous year. The Aetolians too, who
had professed to send such enormous numbers into the field, now, when
their support was of moment, brought to their commander-in-chief no
more than 4000 men. The Roman troops had already begun operations in
Thessaly, where the vanguard in concert with the Macedonian army drove
the garrisons of Antiochus out of the Thessalian towns and occupied
the territory of the Athamanes. The consul with the main army
followed; the whole force of the Romans assembled at Larisa.

Battle at Thermopylae
Greece Occupie