31.29
The
meeting of the Aetolian League which they call the Pan-Aetolium was to be
held on a certain day. The king's envoys hastened their journey in order to be
in time for it and Lucius Furius Purpurio was also present as representing the
consul, as was also a deputation from Athens. The Macedonians were
allowed to speak first, as the treaty with them was the latest that had been
made. They said that as no new circumstances had arisen they had nothing
new to urge in support of the existing treaty. The Aetolians, having learnt by
experience how little they had to gain by alliance with the Romans, had made
peace with Philip, and they were bound to keep it now that it was made.
"Would you prefer," asked one of the envoys, "to copy the unscrupulousness
-or shall I call it the levity? -of the Romans? When your ambassadors were
in Rome, the reply they received was 'Why do you come to us, Aetolians,
after you have made peace with Philip without our consent?' And now the
very same men insist upon your joining them in war against Philip. Formerly
they pretended that they had taken up arms against him on your account and
for your protection, now they forbid you to be at peace with Philip. In the
first Punic war they went to Sicily, ostensibly to help Messana; in the second,
to deliver Syracuse from Carthaginian tyranny and restore her freedom. Now
Messana and Syracuse and in fact the whole of Sicily are tributary to them:
they have reduced the island to a province in which they exercise absolute
power of life and death. You imagine, I suppose, that the Sicilians enjoy the
same rights as you, and that as you hold your council at Naupactus under
your own laws, presided over by magistrates of your own choice, and with
full power of forming alliances or declaring war as you please, so it is with
the councils which meet in the cities of Sicily, in Syracuse or Messana or
Lilybaeum. No: a Roman governor manages their meetings; it is at his
summons that they have to assemble; they see him issuing his edicts from his
lofty tribunal like a despot, and surrounded by his lictors; their backs are
threatened with the rod, their necks with the axe, and every year they have a
different master allotted them. Nor ought they, nor can they wonder at this
when they see the cities of Italy, such as Regium, Tarentum and Capua, lying
prostrate beneath the same tyranny, to say nothing of those close to Rome
out of whose ruin she has grown to greatness.
Capua does indeed survive as the sepulchre and memorial of the
Campanian nation, the people themselves are either dead and buried, or else
cast forth as exiles. It is a headless and limbless city without a senate,
without a plebs, without magistrates, an unnatural portent in the land. To
leave it as a habitation for men was an act of greater cruelty than its utter
destruction would have been. If men of an alien race, separated from you
more widely by language, customs and laws than by intervening sea and
land, obtain a hold here, it is folly and madness to hope that anything will
remain as it is now. You think that Philip's sovereignty is a danger to your
liberty. It was your own doing that he took up arms against you, and his sole
aim was to have a settled peace with you. All that he asks today is that you
will keep that peace unbroken. Once make foreign legions familiar with these
shores and bow your necks to the yoke, then you will seek in vain and too
late for Philip's support as your ally; you will have the Romans for your
masters. Aetolians, Acarnanians, Macedonians are united and disunited by
slight and purely temporary causes; with foreigners and barbarians, all
Greeks ever have been and ever will be at war. For they are our enemies by
nature, and nature is unchanging; their hostility is not due to causes which
vary from day to day. But I will end where I began. Three years ago you
decided on this very spot to make peace with Philip. You are the same men
that you were then, he is the same that he was, the Romans who were
opposed to it then are just those who want to upset it now. Fortune has
altered nothing, I do not see why you should alter your minds."
