33.
In the beginning of the following year, Publius Claudius and Lucius Porcius, the consuls, when Quintus Caecilius, [p. 1828]Marcus Baebius, and Tiberius Sempronius, who had been sent to adjust the matters in dispute between the kings, Philip and Eumenes, and the states of the Thessalians, had given an account of
[2??]
their embassy, introduced to the senate ambassadors from those kings and states.
[3]
On this occasion, the same arguments were repeated by all parties, which had been urged before the ambassadors in Greece. The senate then decreed that a new embassy, the principal man of which was Appius Claudius, should be sent into Macedonia and Greece, to know whether the several states had been restored to the Rhodians, Thessalians, and Perrhaebians.
[4]
Instructions were given to the same, that the garrisons should be withdrawn from Aenus and Maronea, and that all the sea-coast of Thrace should be made free and independent of Philip and the Macedonians. They were ordered also to go to Peloponnesus, from which the former ambassadors had departed, leaving affairs in a more unsettled state than they would have been if they had not come thither.
[5]
For besides other matters, they were even sent away without an answer by the Achaean council, nor was an audience of that body granted to them at their request.
[6]
When Quintus Caecilius made a heavy complaint on this subject, and at the same time the Lacedaemonians deplored the demolition of their walls, the carrying off their poor people into Achaia, the selling of them there, and the depriving them of the laws of Lycurgus, by which the nation had been supported unto that time, the
[7??]
Achaians laboured principally to excuse their having refused a meeting of the council by quoting a law which enacted, that a council should not be summoned, except on business of peace or war, or when ambassadors should come from the senate with letters or written instructions.
[8]
That this kind of excuse should not be made in future, the senate observed to them, that they ought to take care that Roman ambassadors should at all times have an opportunity of applying to their council, in like manner as an audience of the senate was always given to them, at any time when they wished it.
Livy. History of Rome by Titus Livius, books thirty-seven to the end, with the epitomes and fragments of the lost books. literally translated, with notes and illustrations, by. William A. McDevitte. York Street, Covent Garden, London. Henry G. Bohn. John Child and son, printers, Bungay. 1850. 4.
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