Aemilius Paulus

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;

this people thought it unendurable that they should be compelled to contend with Perseus as though he were an even match for Rome, when for a long time already he had carried on his war against them with the poor remains of his father’s routed army;

for they were not aware that after his defeat Philip had made the Macedonian armies far more vigorous and warlike than before. This situation I will briefly explain from the beginning.