he kept back, after having drawn him in to commit an outrage against the Roman ambassadors at his court; for he thought that he had thus bound him fast to himself by a tie which could not be broken. This was a pitiful trick! In 584, the Romans chose L. Æmilius Paullus, the son of the general who was killed at Cannæ, to be consul for the second time; and as they saw that considerable efforts were needed to finish the war, they furnished him with every possible means for it. The Rhodians, most unfortunately for themselves, had wished to act as mediators: the war interfered with their trade, and they by no means wanted the Romans to conquer, as they owed their own independence to the balance of the different states. They came forward, using violent language, and engaged to get Perseus to make peace; but the Romans, though hard pressed by the war, did not desire peace, and the speech of the Rhodians even offended them. At home, and among their neighbours, the Rhodians felt strong, and there by their weight they could turn the scales, which indeed they had done in the war of Antiochus by means of their fleet; but they forgot the immense disproportion between the power of the Romans and their own. Perseus opened the campaign without any further increase of force, except that Genthius declared himself for him. The king had taken up his winter-quarters in Macedonia, and when the Romans broke up theirs, he retreated behind the Cambunian hills and Olympus, the lofty ridge of mountains which separates Thessaly from the Macedonian coast, a country which is one of the most beautiful on earth. Yet this time also the Romans succeeded in going round the mountains. Between the Peneus and Pieria, there is the high and broad range of Olympus, the peaks of which are almost all covered with everlasting snow. The chief pass was through Tempe, which was fortified; besides this, there were several ways across Olympus, and these also were most of them so well secured, that Æmilius did not expect any good from an attack. But he discovered a road, just over one of the most towering summits of the mountains, which, inasmuch as it seemed to be inaccessible, was less strongly guarded. Thither he sent the son-in-law of Scipio Africanus, young Scipio Nasica, with eight thousand men, so as to go round the camp. This enterprise could not have succeeded, had Perseus been a great general; the aggressor, however, has always an advantage. The impassable mountain was got over; the Macedonian army saw the Roman detachment in its rear; the vanguard was defeated by Scipio Nasica, and Perseus was obliged to change his position. He now took up another at the back of Pydna, behind a deep torrent: for in this narrow strip of coast, in which a number of deep mountain streams run down alongside of each other from Olympus to the sea, lines were thrown up behind every one of these, so that a stand might be made at every point successively, in case the enemy should force the pass at Tempe.