And so first Egypt and a part of Africa and Arabia came to Ptolemy by lot. Bordering on this province, Syria fell to Laomedon of Mitylene, Cilicia to Philotas, Illyria to Philo. Over Greater Media was set Atropates, over Lesser the father-in-law of Perdiccas. The Susiana people to Scynus, Greater Phrygia is assigned to Antigonus, son of Philip. Lycia and Pamphylia are allotted to Nearchus, Caria to Cassander, Lydia to Menander. Leonnatus receives Lesser Phrygia. Thrace and the regions of the Pontic sea to Lysimachus; Cappadocia with Paphlagonia is given to Eumenes. The supreme command of the camp fell to Seleucus, son of Antiochus; over the king's attendants and bodyguards Cassander, son of Antipater, is set.
In Bactria beyond and in the regions of India, the former prefects, who had begun to be there under Alexander, remained. The Seres, set between the two rivers Hydaspes and Indus, Taxiles held. Into the colonies founded among the Indians, Python, son of Agenor, is sent. The Parapameni at the edge of Mount Caucasus Oxyarches received. The Arachosii and Gedrosii are decreed to Sibyrtius. The Drancae and Arei are allotted to Stasanor, the Bactrians to Amyntas, the Sogdiani to Scythaeus, the Parthians to Stasanor, the Hyrcani to Philippus, the Armenians to Phrataphernes, the Persians to Tleptolemus, the Babylonians to Peucestes; Archon obtained the Pelasgi, Archelaus Mesopotamia.
Therefore the cause and origin of the wars was a letter of King Alexander, by which he ordered all exiles to be restored to their fatherland and liberty; for the powerful men of the cities of Greece, fearing lest the exiles, their liberty recovered, should plot revenge, revolted from the kingdom of the Macedonians. First the Athenians, having mustered an army of thirty thousand and two hundred ships, wage war with Antipater, to whom Greece had fallen by lot, and through the orator Demosthenes they also join to themselves as allies Sicyon, Argos, Corinth, and the other cities, and surround Antipater with a siege. There their leader Leosthenes, run through by a missile hurled from the walls, is killed. The Athenians meet Leonnatus, who was bringing aid to Antipater, and, his forces being shattered, kill him.
Perdiccas, however, made war on Ariarathes, king of the Cappadocians, and conquered him. In which victory he gained nothing but wounds and dangers, for all the inhabitants, before the breaking into their city, having set fire to their houses, burned up themselves and all their possessions. After this, war arises between Antigonus and Perdiccas, with many provinces and islands most grievously torn apart on account of aid either denied or rendered; it was long debated whether the war should be transferred into Macedonia or waged in Asia: at last Perdiccas himself made for Egypt with a huge army. Thus Macedonia, with its leaders running apart into two parties, is armed against its own vitals. Ptolemy, equipped with the forces of Egypt and the troops of Cyrene, prepares to meet Perdiccas in war.
Meanwhile Neoptolemus and Eumenes fought it out between themselves in a most bloody battle. Neoptolemus, conquered, fled to Antipater: whom he urges on to overwhelm Eumenes by surprise. Eumenes, reckoning this would happen, catches the plotters in their own plots. In that war Polyperchon is killed; Neoptolemus and Eumenes, pierced by mutual wounds — but Neoptolemus perished, Eumenes escaped victor. Perdiccas, having engaged Ptolemy in a most bitter war, lost his forces and was himself also killed. Eumenes, Python, Illyrius, and Alcetas, brother of Perdiccas, are declared enemies by the Macedonians, and war against them is decreed to Antigonus. And so Eumenes and Antigonus, having brought the greatest forces together against each other, clashed.
Eumenes, defeated, fled into a certain most strongly fortified stronghold, whence through legates he demanded auxiliaries of Antipater, then most powerful: terrified by which message, Antigonus departed from the siege. But not even thus was Eumenes' hope firm or his safety certain. Wherefore, as a last counsel, he asks for aid the argyraspides — so called from their silvered arms, that is, the soldiers who had served under Alexander: who, hearing their leader disdainfully in the ordering of the war, were conquered by Antigonus and deprived of their camp, and lost both their wives and children and at the same time all the things they had acquired under Alexander. These afterward, basely, through legates beg the victor that what they had lost be restored to them. Antigonus promises he will restore it, if they would drag Eumenes to him in chains.
Thus they, enticed by the hope of recovery, by a most shameful betrayal led their own leader — whose standards they had but a little before followed — themselves captives, captive and chained; and soon, with most foul ignominy, they were scattered through the army of Antigonus. Meanwhile Eurydice, wife of Arridaeus king of the Macedonians, did many wicked things under the name of her husband, through Cassander, whom — shamefully known to her — she had advanced to the highest pinnacle through all the grades of honors: who, out of the lust of the woman, afflicted many cities of Greece.
Then Olympias, mother of King Alexander, at the urging of Polyperchon — who was accompanying her from Epirus into Macedonia, king Aeacides of the Molossi coming with her — when she was being barred from the borders by Eurydice, with the Macedonians lending their support, ordered King Arridaeus and Eurydice to be killed. Yet Olympias herself straightway paid the deserved penalties of her cruelty: for when with womanish audacity she carried out many slaughters of the chief men, on hearing of the arrival of Cassander, distrusting the Macedonians, she withdrew with Roxana her daughter-in-law and her grandson Hercules into the city of Pydna: where straightway she was taken and killed by Cassander. The son of Alexander the Great, together with his mother, was sent to be kept under guard in the citadel of Amphipolis.
With Perdiccas, Alcetas, Polyperchon, and the rest of the leaders of the opposing party — whom it would be long to mention — being slain, the wars among the successors of Alexander seemed to be finished, when Antigonus, burning with the lust of domination, pretends that Hercules, the king's son, must be freed by war from his confinement. These things being learned, Ptolemy and Cassander, having entered into alliance with Lysimachus and Seleucus, strenuously prepare war by land and sea. Antigonus in that war, together with his son Demetrius, is defeated. Cassander, having become Ptolemy's partner in victory, while he was returning to Apollonia, fell upon the Aviniates: who, on account of an intolerable multitude of frogs and mice, leaving their native soil and ancient dwellings and migrating, were seeking new abodes under a peace meanwhile offered.
But Cassander, recognizing both the valor and the multitude of the nation, lest, driven by necessity, they should shake and invade Macedonia with war, received them into alliance and settled them in the farthest borders of Macedonia. Then, when Hercules, son of Alexander, was now fourteen years old, fearing lest all should prefer him as the legitimate king, he secretly arranged for him to be killed together with his mother. Ptolemy again clashed with Demetrius in a naval battle, and, when he had lost almost his whole fleet and army, fled vanquished into Egypt. Elated by this victory, Antigonus orders himself, together with his son Demetrius, to be called king: which example all followed, and took for themselves the royal name and dignity.
Therefore Ptolemy and Cassander and the other leaders of the other faction, when they saw that they were being deceived by Antigonus one by one, confirming one another through letters, agree upon a time and place for coming together into one, and prepare war against Antigonus with their combined forces. Cassander, entangled in wars with his neighbors, sent in his place Lysimachus, the most illustrious leader among them all, with a huge band to the aid of his allies. Seleucus too, descending from Greater Asia, came as a new enemy to Antigonus. This Seleucus indeed waged very many wars throughout the East among the partners of the Macedonian kingdom. At the outset he stormed and captured Babylon in war. He thoroughly subdued the Bactrians rising in fresh disturbances. He then made his crossing into India:
which, after the death of Alexander, as though the yoke had been drawn off and shaken from its neck, had killed his prefects, with a certain Androcottus as leader for vindicating its liberty. Who afterward, acting cruelly toward his own citizens, oppressed with servitude the very ones whom he had defended from foreign domination. With this Androcottus, then, Seleucus, although he had waged many and grievous wars, at last departed, the terms of the kingdom being settled and peace agreed upon. And so, the forces of Ptolemy and his allies being united, battle is joined: of which, the more powerful the array, the heavier the ruin was, for in it then the strength of almost the whole Macedonian kingdom fell. In the battle itself Antigonus was killed; but the end of this war was the beginning of another:
for when the victors could not agree about the spoil, they are again divided into two factions: Seleucus joins Demetrius, Ptolemy joins Lysimachus; Cassander having died, his son Philippus succeeds. Thus, as it were anew, fresh wars of Macedonia are born. Antipater ran his own mother Thessalonice, wife of Cassander, through with his own hand, although she pleaded pitifully for her life. His brother Alexander, while preparing war against his brother to avenge their mother, was circumvented and killed by Demetrius, whose aid he had sought. Lysimachus, being hard pressed by a most hostile war with Dorus, king of the Thracians, could not fight against Demetrius. Demetrius, elated by the increase of Greece and of all Macedonia, plans to cross into Asia.
Ptolemy, Seleucus, and Lysimachus, having learned in their earlier struggle how great the strength of concord can be, again made a pact of alliance and, uniting their armies, carried the war over into Europe against Demetrius. To these Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, joined himself as a companion and ally in the war, hoping that Demetrius could be driven out of Macedonia. Nor was his hope in vain: for when Demetrius' army had been corrupted and the man himself put to flight, Pyrrhus seized the kingdom of Macedonia. Then Lysimachus killed his son-in-law Antipater, who was plotting against him, and, hating his own son Agathocles with a hatred beyond human measure, put him to death. In those very days the city of Lysimachia, overturned by a most terrifying earthquake, became a cruel sepulchre for its own people who were crushed beneath it.
All his allies deserted Lysimachus as he stained himself with continual murders of his kin, and going over to Seleucus they urged on the king—already inclined by rivalry for the throne—to make war upon Lysimachus. It was a most disgraceful spectacle: two kings, of whom Lysimachus was seventy-four years old and Seleucus seventy-seven, clashing to wrest each the other's kingdom away, standing in the battle-line, bearing arms. This was indeed the last war among the comrades-in-arms of Alexander, but one reserved as an example of human misery: for although they alone possessed the whole world, now that the thirty-four generals of Alexander had been wiped out, and although they did not look to the very narrow limits of their old age and of their lives, they reckoned the bounds of the whole world too narrow for their dominion.
In that war Lysimachus, having already lost fifteen children—whether dead or slain—before this battle, was himself slain last of all. Thus Lysimachus was the dissolution of the Macedonian conflict. Yet not even Seleucus rejoiced unpunished in so great a victory: for he himself, after seventy-seven years, did not find the rest of a natural death, but ended a life unhappily wrested from him by what was, as it were, an untimely death; for at the instigation of Ptolemy, whose sister Lysimachus had taken in marriage, he was surrounded by treachery and killed. Such are the dealings of kinship and fellowship among parents, sons, brothers, and allies. So highly was divine and human religion weighed among them.
Let those indeed blush at the recollection of past things who now, merely by the intervention of the Christian faith and only through the bond of an oath, know that they live among their enemies and suffer nothing hostile; by whom it is most indubitably proved that men do not now, as those did before, ratify treaties by the slaughter of a sow, but that now, between barbarians and Romans, calling their Creator and Lord to witness, they keep a faith pledged upon the Gospels as great as nature could not then preserve even between parents and sons. Now, however, let the end of the Macedonian war be also the end of this book, especially since from this point the wars of Pyrrhus now begin and the Punic wars soon follow.
Virgil relates that Aeneas said, when after his perils and the shipwrecks of his men he was struggling to console the few comrades that remained, 'Perhaps one day it will be a delight to remember even these things.' This sentiment, once aptly framed, ever exerts its threefold force with most diverse effects: for things past are held the more pleasing in words the more grievous they are reported in the deeds; things future, while they become objects of desire through disgust at the present, are ever believed to be better; but to the present things themselves, for this very reason, no just comparison in any portion of miseries can be applied, because, however trifling these present things may be, they afflict with far greater annoyance than those things which—whether past or to come—even if they are called great, are meanwhile for the time being utterly not in existence at all.
For instance, if someone tickled by nocturnal fleas, and made anxious by wakefulness on that account, should happen to recall other vigils which he once endured for a long time from the most burning fevers, he would without doubt bear the disquiet of these present ones more impatiently than the recollection of those past. But although this may so appear in everyone's perception according to the grasp of the moment, will there nevertheless be anyone who, even in that very anxiety, would declare that fleas are more grievous than fevers? Or who would take it more bitterly that he, being healthy, must lie awake, than that he, doomed to die, was unable to sleep?
Since these things are so, I in any case grant to these dainty and querulous people of ours that the things by which we are now sometimes admonished—because it so serves the purpose—they may, in their feeling, account grievous; yet I do not connive at their even asserting them, by comparison, to be more grievous. Just as if someone, going out in the morning from the softest of beds and a most comfortable bedroom, should observe that, from the night's frost, the ridges of the pools had stiffened and the grasses had turned white, and, prompted by the unexpected sight, should say 'It is cold today': this man would seem to me in no way to be reprehended, because he would have spoken either by common usage or by his own sensation.
But if, trembling and running back into his bedroom and covering himself with the bedclothes—or rather hiding himself—he should cry out that the cold was altogether as great as never once existed even on the Apennines, when Hannibal, shut in and overwhelmed by the snows, lost his elephants, his horses, and the greatest part of his army:
this man, sickening with childish license, I would not only refuse to endure as he says such things, but I would even drag him from those very beds—the witnesses of his ease—out into the people and the public square; and, having brought him forth out of doors, I would show him children playing and rejoicing and sweating in that frost and amid it, so that this wordy triviality, corrupted by dainty nourishment, might be taught that what exists is not violence in the season but slothfulness in itself, and that, in the judging of things by comparison, it might be proved not that greater men endured small hardships, but that he himself is not even equal to enduring small ones. This I shall prove more evidently by recalling to their very memory the disasters of the past, with the war of Pyrrhus first set forth, as the order requires. Its cause and origin were these.
In the four hundred and sixty-fourth year from the founding of the City, the Tarentines, catching sight from the spectacle of their theatre of a Roman fleet that happened to be passing by, attacked it in hostile fashion, only five ships barely escaping by flight; the rest of the fleet was dragged back into the harbour and destroyed; the prefects of the ships were butchered, all who were useful for war were slain, and the rest were sold for a price. Forthwith envoys were sent by the Romans to Tarentum to complain of the injuries inflicted; beaten by those same men, they brought back report of injuries increased besides. For these causes a mighty war arose. Measuring how many and how great were the enemies who roared about them, the utmost necessity compelled the Romans to force even the proletarii into arms—that is, to enrol for military service those who in the City had always been exempt for the sake of producing offspring:
for there is vain concern about offspring unless provision is made for present affairs. And so the Roman army, with the consul Aemilius, rushed into all the territory of the Tarentines, laid everything waste with fire and sword, took very many towns by storm, and cruelly avenged the injury insolently received. Forthwith Pyrrhus above all distressed the Romans, the Tarentines being supported by very many garrisons of their neighbours; he too, on account of the greatness of his forces and counsels, transferred to himself the supreme command and name of the war. For, intending to vindicate Tarentum—founded by the Lacedaemonians and a city kindred to Greece—with the whole forces of Epirus, Thessaly, and Macedonia, he was the first to bring into Italy elephants, twenty in number, hitherto unseen by the Romans:
terrible by land and sea, by men and horses, by arms and beasts, and at last by his own strength and stratagems—save that, ensnared by the ambiguous response of that most vain breath of Delphi and most lying impostor, whom they themselves call a great seer, he brought about the destruction of the man who had not consulted it. And so at Heraclea, a city of Campania, and the river Liris, the first battle was joined between King Pyrrhus and the consul Laevinus. The day was consumed in a most grievous struggle, with all on both sides bent on dying and not knowing how to flee. But when the Romans saw the elephants brought in among the clashing battle-lines—ghastly in form, foul in odour, terrible in bulk—being surrounded and terrified by this new manner of fighting, with their horses chiefly panicking, they scattered in flight.
But after Minucius, the first hastatus of the fourth legion, with his sword cut off the trunk of a beast stretched out toward him, and forced the beast—thrown into confusion by the pain of its wound—to turn from the battle and rage against its own side, and when by its unrestrained running they began to be thrown into disorder and confounded, an end was put to the battle, partly by the kindness of night. That the Romans had been defeated, their disgraceful flight betrayed: of whom there are then reported to have fallen 14,880 foot, 1,310 captured; of cavalry slain 246, captured 802; standards lost 22.
For how great a number of Pyrrhus' allies was destroyed on the other side has not been handed down to memory, chiefly because it is the custom of the ancient writers not to record the number of the slain on the side that has conquered, lest the losses mar the glory of the victory—unless perhaps so few fall that the smallness of the lost increases admiration and terror at their valour, as it was in the first engagement of the Persian war under Alexander the Great: of whom, among nearly four hundred thousand enemies slain, only nine foot-soldiers in his army are reported to have been wanting. But Pyrrhus attested the savagery of the disaster which he had suffered in this war to his gods and to men, fixing an inscription in the temple of Tarentine Jupiter, on which he wrote these words:
'Those men who heretofore were unconquered, O best Father of Olympus, these I conquered in battle, and was conquered by the same.' And when he was rebuked by his allies, why he should call himself conquered who had conquered, he is reported to have answered: 'Truly, if I conquer once more in the same fashion, I shall return to Epirus without a single soldier.' Meanwhile the Roman army, after, being defeated, it had secretly fled from the camp, became aware that the pitiable disaster of the war had been increased and heaped up by graver portents. For foragers who happened to have gone forth were, as it were, caught by a kind of storm that arose, and amid a horrible crash of the sky they were seized and burned up by dreadful thunderbolts. Indeed the same whirlwind laid low thirty-four of them; twenty-two were left half-dead, very many beasts of burden killed and carried off:
so that it may rightly be reckoned to have befallen, not as a sign of future devastation, but as the devastation itself. The second battle between Pyrrhus and the Roman consuls was in the territory of Apulia. There the disaster of war fell to both sides, but most of all to Pyrrhus, while the victory went over to the Romans. For when, with all on both sides long striving stubbornly to rush into mutual slaughter, the outcome of the war hung doubtful, Pyrrhus, wounded with his arm pierced through, was the first to withdraw from the fight. But Fabricius the legate was also wounded then. The elephants, found to be able in the first battle to be wounded and forced into flight, were then, by fires applied beneath their hindquarters and soft parts, driven on; blazing and in their frightened frenzy carrying about the burning siege-engines on their backs, they brought destruction upon their own side.
In that battle five thousand of the Romans were slain, but of Pyrrhus' army twenty thousand were laid low. Of the king's standards 53 were taken, of the Romans eleven were lost. Pyrrhus, broken by the war, upon the death of Agathocles, king of Syracuse, was summoned to Sicily and withdrew to Syracuse to take the command. But the misery of the Romans ceases through no truces; the interval of wars is consumed by the evils of diseases, and, when there is a respite from battle abroad, wrath is wrought inwardly—from heaven. For when Fabius Gurges and Gaius Genucius Clepsina were consuls a second time, a grievous pestilence invaded the City and its territory;
which, seizing all but especially women and cattle, by killing the fetuses in the womb emptied them of future offspring, and through premature deliveries, with peril to the mothers, abortions were forced out and cast away, to such a degree that it was believed the succession of the race would fail and the stock of living creatures would be wanting, the lawful order of the life-giving birth being taken away. Meanwhile the consul Curius received Pyrrhus on his return from Sicily, and this third war was waged against the Epirotes near Lucania in the Arusine plains. And so, when at the first clash Pyrrhus' soldiers began to falter under the Roman pressure and, looking about for flight, sought to give way in the battle, Pyrrhus ordered the elephants to be brought in from the reserves.
The Romans, by now accustomed to fight with the beasts, had prepared firebrands wrapped in tow and smeared with pitch, made clinging besides by barbed hooks, and these, set aflame, they hurled against the backs of the beasts; not with difficulty did they turn the raging and burning beasts back upon the destruction of those whose support they had been. They say the king had eighty thousand foot in that battle, and of cavalry six thousand. Of these, thirty-three thousand are reported slain, and thirteen hundred captured. Pyrrhus, defeated, fled at last from Italy in the fifth year after he had come. After many and most grievous wars which he waged, in Greece, at Argos, a most flourishing city of Achaia, lured by greed for the Spartan kingdom, he was struck by a stone and fell dead.
Then too among the Romans Sextilia, a Vestal virgin, convicted and condemned of unchastity, was buried alive at the Colline Gate. In the four hundred and seventy-fifth year from the founding of the City, the Tarentines, having learned of Pyrrhus' death, again stirred up new arms against the Romans, and through envoys demanded and received the aid of the Carthaginians. When battle was joined the Romans were victorious; and there even then the Carthaginians, though not yet adjudged enemies, nevertheless perceived that they could be conquered by the Romans. In the following year Roman severity cut down a great part of its own forces. For when Pyrrhus had earlier been approaching, the eighth legion, distrusting Roman hopes, dared a new crime: it killed all the people of Rhegium, to whose protection it had been set, and claimed for itself all the plunder and the town itself.
The punishing of this crime against such wicked deserters was entrusted to the consul Genucius, who, having besieged the city of the Rhegians and captured them all, himself indeed exacted fitting punishments upon the rest of the deserters and brigands, but sent the Roman soldiers of the intact legion to Rome: who, by order of the people, in the middle of the forum were beaten with rods and struck with the axe. Rome then seemed to itself to conquer when it slew its own intact legion, which without doubt would have been conquered if it had lost it in a battle with the enemy. In the four hundred and seventy-eighth year from the founding of the City, obscene and dreadful prodigies were either seen at Rome or reported. The temple of Salus was shattered by a stroke of lightning; a part of the wall beneath the same place was, as they say, struck from heaven.
Three wolves, having entered the city before daybreak, brought in a half-eaten corpse and, scattering it limb by limb in the forum, themselves, frightened by the noise of men, left it. At Formiae the walls were everywhere scorched and dissolved by many strokes of lightning. At the Calenian field, flame suddenly belched forth from the cleft, gaping earth, seething terribly for three days and three nights, and, the juice of fertility being utterly drained, burned up five iugera of land to ashes, so that, it is reported, it consumed not only the crops but even the trees with their deepest roots. In the year after this, the consul Sempronius led an army against the Picentes.
And when both battle-lines had taken their stand drawn up within a javelin's throw, suddenly the earth trembled with so horrendous a crash that, in stupor at the marvel, each terrified army grew faint. Long the peoples on both sides hesitated, thunderstruck, with the conscience of their undertaking forewarned by an omen; at length, with a hurried advance, they entered into the contest. So sad was that war that it may rightly be said that the earth, about to receive so much human blood, then trembled even with a dreadful-sounding groan. The very few Romans who escaped from that battle were the victors. In the four hundred and eightieth year from the founding of the City, among many prodigies, blood was seen to flow from the earth, milk from heaven.
For in very many places gore gushed flowing from the springs, and from the clouds, with milk let down drop by drop in the likeness of rain, dreadful showers—so it seemed to them—watered the earth. At that time the Carthaginians, having given aid against the Romans to the Tarentines, when they were taxed by the senate through envoys, heaped up the most shameful stain of a broken treaty with a deliberate perjury. Then too the Vulsinienses, the most flourishing of the Etruscans, almost perished through luxury. For when, with license prolonged into a habit, they made their slaves free everywhere, admitted them to banquets, and honoured them with marriages: the freedmen, received into a share of power, plotted to usurp its fullness through crime; and the liberated slaves,
once the yoke had been taken off, blazed with the ambition of domination; and those masters whom, while subject, they had loved with even temper, these now, being free, they cursed because they remembered them to have been masters. And so the freedmen, conspiring to a crime—whose band was so great that they took possession of their daring without dispute—seized the city and claimed it for their own kind alone; they usurped through crime the estates and the wives of their masters, and drove the dispossessed masters far off, who, wretched, as exiles and beggars, were carried to Rome: where, their misery being displayed and their complaint bewailed, through the severity of the Romans they were both avenged and restored. In the four hundred and eighty-first year from the founding of the City, a vast pestilence blazed up at Rome, whose atrocity I am content to indicate, because I cannot fully express it in words.