31.30
The
Macedonians were followed, at the instance of the Romans, by the
Athenians, who after the shocking way they had been treated, had every
justification for protesting against Philip's barbarous cruelty. They mourned
over the piteous devastation and pillaging of their fields, but it was not
because they had suffered hostile treatment from an enemy that they
complained. There were certain rights of war which could be justly exercised
and therefore must be justly submitted to; the burning of crops, the
destruction of dwellings, the carrying off of men and cattle as plunder, cause
suffering to those who endure them, but are not felt to be an indignity. What
they did complain of was that the man who called the Romans foreigners and
barbarians had so completely outraged all law, human and divine, that in his
first ravages he made impious war upon the infernal deities, and in his
subsequent ones he defied the powers above. All the sepulchres and
monuments within their borders were destroyed, the dead in all their graves
laid bare, their bones no longer covered by the earth. There were shrines
which their ancestors in the day when they dwelt in separate demes had
consecrated in their little fortified posts and villages, and which even when
they had been enrolled as citizens of one city they did not abandon or
neglect. All these temples Philip had enveloped in sacrilegious flames, the
images of their gods, blackened, burnt, mutilated, were lying among the
prostrate pillars of their temples. What he had made the land of Attica, once
so fair in its beauty and its wealth, such, if he were allowed, would he make
Aetolia and the whole of Greece. Even Athens itself would have been
similarly disfigured if the Romans had not come to the rescue, for the same
impious rage was driving him to attack the gods who dwell in the city,
Minerva the protectress of the citadel, the Ceres of Eleusis and the Jupiter
and Minerva of the Piraeus. But he had been repulsed by force of arms, not
only from their temples, but even from the walls of the city, and had turned
his savage fury against those shrines whose sanctity was their only
protection. They closed with an earnest appeal to the Aetolians that they
would out of compassion to the Athenians take part in the war, under the
leadership of the immortal gods and of the Romans who next to the gods
possessed the greatest power and might.
