Aemilius Paulus

And the father, unless some public business prevented, would always be present at their studies and exercises, for he was now become the fondest parent in Rome.

As to public affairs, that was the period when the Romans were at war with Perseus,[*](171-168 B.C.) the king of Macedonia, and were taking their generals to task because their inexperience and cowardice led them to conduct their campaigns ridiculously and disgracefully, and to suffer more harm than they inflicted.

For the people which had just forced Antiochus, surnamed the Great, to retire from the rest of Asia, driven him over the Taurus mountains, and shut him up in Syria, where he had been content to buy terms with a payment of fifteen thousand talents;

which had a little while before set the Greeks free from Macedonia by crushing Philip in Thessaly; and which had utterly subdued Hannibal, to whom no king was comparable for power or boldness;