43.4
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. 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. The praetor pardoned them and
immediately set out to visit other cities. 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. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. Two commissioners, C. Sempronius Blaesus and
Sextius Julius Caesar, were sent to restore the Abderites to freedom, and to
inform Hostilius 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.
