depriving the prudent and considerate Eumenes
of his privileged position, and allowing him to fall into disfavour.
All at once, about the time when the Romans were encamped at
Heracleum, strange reports were circulated regarding him--that he was
in secret intercourse with Perseus; that his fleet had been suddenly,
as it were, wafted away; that 500 talents had been offered for his
non-participation in the campaign and 1500 for his mediation to
procure peace, and that the agreement had only broken down through the
avarice of Perseus. As to the Pergamene fleet, the king, after having
paid his respects to the consul, went home with it at the same time
that the Roman fleet went into winter quarters. The story about
corruption was as certainly a fable as any newspaper canard of the
present day; for that the rich, cunning, and consistent Attalid, who
had primarily occasioned the breach between Rome and Macedonia by
his journey in 582 and had been on that account wellnigh assassinated
by the banditti of Perseus, should--at the moment when the real
difficulties of a war, of whose final issue, moreover, he could never
have had any serious doubt, were overcome--have sold to the instigator
of the murder his share in the spoil for a few talents, and should
have perilled the work of long years for so pitiful a consideration,
may be set down not merely as a fabrication, but as a very silly one.
That no proof was found either in the papers of Perseus or elsewhere,
is sufficiently certain; for even the Romans did not venture to
express those suspicions aloud, But they gained their object. Their
wishes appeared in the behaviour of the Roman grandees towards
Attalus, the brother of Eumenes, who had commanded the Pergamene
auxiliary troops in Greece. Their brave and faithful comrade was
received in Rome with open arms and invited to ask not for his
brother, but for himself--the senate would be glad to give him a
kingdom of his own. Attalus asked nothing but Aenus and Maronea. The
senate thought that this was only a preliminary request, and granted
it with great politeness. But when he took his departure without
having made any further demands, and the senate came to perceive that
the reigning family in Pergamus did not live on such terms with each
other as were customary in princely houses, Aenus and Maronea were
declared free cities. The Pergamenes obtained not a foot's breadth
of territory out of the spoil of Macedonia; if after