They entered the camp displaying the heads and created such a panic that if the army had been brought up at once the camp might have been taken. [2] Even as it was, there was a general flight, and some thought that envoys ought to be sent to beg for peace. A large number of communities when they heard what had happened made their surrender. They tried to clear themselves by throwing all the blame on the madness of two men who had voluntarily offered themselves for punishment. [3] The praetor pardoned them and immediately set out to visit other cities. [4] Everywhere he found his orders were being carried out and his army was unmolested. The country through which he passed, and which had been so shortly before seething with unrest and turbulence, was now quiet and peaceable. [5] This gentleness on the part of the praetor, who had curbed the temper of a most warlike nation without bloodshed, was all the more welcomed by the senate and the plebs as the war in Greece had been conducted in a most ruthless and rapacious spins both by the consul Licinius and the praetor Lucretius [6??] The tribunes of the plebs were perpetually holding up to odium the absent Lucretius in their speeches, though it was pleaded on his behalf that he was absent in the service of the republic. [7] But people in those days were so ignorant of what was going on in their vicinity that he was actually at that very time residing on his estate at Antium, and was bringing water to that town from the Loracina from his share of the spoils of the war. It is said that this work cost 130,000 ases. [8] He also decorated the shrine of Aesculapius with pictures which had formed part of the plunder.
The general odium and disgrace which Lucretius had incurred were diverted from him to his successor, Hortensius. [9] A deputation from Abdera arrived in Rome, and stood weeping in the porch of the senate-house and protesting that their town had been stormed and sacked by Hortensius. He had ordered them to supply 100,000 denarii and 50,000 modii of wheat, and they asked for time to send to the consul Hostilius and to Rome. [10] Hardly had they reached the consul when they heard that their town had been taken by storm, their leaders beheaded and the rest of the population sold into slavery. [11] The senate regarded this as a disgraceful proceeding and they made the same decree in the case of the Abderites that they had made the previous year in the case of the Coronaeans, with instructions to the praetor to announce the decree to the Assembly. [12] Two commissioners, C. Sempronius Blaesus and Sextius Julius Caesar, were sent to restore the Abderites to freedom, and to inform Hostilius [13??] and Hortensius that the senate considered the attack upon Abdera as utterly unjustifiable, and demanded that search should be made for all who were enslaved in order that they might be set free.
