higher place to the two greatest enemies of Rome, Pyrrhus and Hannibal. Pyrrhus, as I said before, availed himself of the circumstances of the time for the purpose of gaining the eastern part of Epirus for his country. The sons of Cassander were obliged to cede to him Orestis, Parauaea, Ambracia, and Amphilochia, and the Epirots now, being masters of their country in its full extent, showed themselves as a great and powerful people. But this greatness did not become consolidated, too great demands were made upon the strength of the people, and they lost their best blood in the wars. Still, however, Alexander, the son of Pyrrhus, not only preserved the extent of his kingdom,[94] but added Acarnania to it; and this continued to constitute the kingdom of Epirus for a period of about fifty years. Pyrrhus made Ambracia his capital, and adorned it with splendid temples and palaces; Alexander kept it as such, and he, too, was a very distinguished man. After his death, when the government came into the hands of minors, and his house became extinct by a series of the greatest calamities, the state also broke to pieces. Ambracia, the Amphilochian Argos, and eastern Epirus, were lost, and threw themselves into the arms of the Aetolians. After about A.U.C. 515 we hear of an Epirot republic under strategi; this republic embraced only western Epirus, and was still of considerable extent, but internally it was weak, and was visited by the most fearful misfortunes. The Romans admitted the Epirots as their allies, but I am convinced that they never forgot that Pyrrhus had frightened them, that he had advanced as far as Praeneste, and that after the gates of that town had been thrown open to him, he had seen the towers of Rome. This was the reason why, after their war against Perseus, they treacherously wreaked their hoarded and terrible vengeance upon the unhappy country, just as the English under William III. extirpated in one massacre the clan of the Mac Gregors, the English officers, on a given signal, murdering their hosts and letting in the soldiers. The Roman legions under Aemilius Paullus were quartered upon the Epirots, who had previously been ordered to deliver up all their arms, and their gold and silver, and then, on an appointed day, a fearful massacre was made throughout the country among the Molottians, Thesprotians, Chaonians, etc. From that time Epirus remained under the Romans, who confiscated the country like a conquered domain, and Epirus with its splendid Alps was, like the interior of Sicily, let as pasture land. Hence the fact that Atticus, as is stated by Varro, possessed such large herds at Buthroton. From such a devastation the country was unable to recover, and remained a wilderness. In the middle ages, and perhaps even before, the Illyrians (now Albanese) pushed forward from the north and spread over Epirus, being themselves pressed by Slavonian tribes, so that even now the greater part of the population is Illyrian