criminally tried at Rome; and the Molossians in Epirus were forced
by false suspicions into actual revolt. The allied states had war-
contributions imposed upon them as if they had been conquered, and if
they appealed to the Roman senate, their citizens were executed or
sold into slavery: this was done, for instance, at Abdera, and similar
outrages were committed at Chalcis. The senate interfered very
earnestly:(4) it enjoined the liberation of the unfortunate Coroneans
and Abderites, and forbade the Roman magistrates to ask contributions
from the allies without its leave. Gaius Lucretius was unanimously
condemned by the burgesses. But such steps could not alter the fact,
that the military result of these first two campaigns had been null,
while the political result had been a foul stain on the Romans, whose
extraordinary successes in the east were based in no small degree on
their reputation for moral purity and solidity as compared with the
scandals of Hellenic administration. Had Philip commanded instead of
Perseus, the war would presumably have begun with the destruction of
the Roman army and the defection of most of the Hellenes; but Rome
was fortunate enough to be constantly outstripped in blunders by her
antagonists. Perseus was content with entrenching himself in
Macedonia--which towards the south and west is a true mountain-
fortress--as in a beleaguered town.

Marcius Enters Macedonia through the Pass of Tempe
The Armies on the Elpius

The third commander-in-chief also, whom Rome sent to Macedonia in 585,
Quintus Marcius Philippus, that already-mentioned upright guest-friend
of the king, was not at all equal to his far from easy task. He was
ambitious and enterprising, but a bad officer. His hazardous venture
of crossing Olympus by the pass of Lapathus westward of Tempe, leaving
behind one division to face the garrison of the pass, and making his
way with his main force through impracticable denies to Heracleum, is
not excused by the fact of its success. Not only might a handful of
resolute men have blocked the route, in which case retreat was out of
the question; but even after the passage, when he stood with the
Macedonian main force in front and the strongly-fortified mountain-
fortresses of Tempe and Lapathus behind him, wedged into a narrow
plain on the shore and without supplies or the possibility of foraging
for them, his position was no less desperate than when, in his first
consulate, he h