degree of carelessness, and such a contempt of him, that at length the Romans, mixing with them as they ran back, entered by the gates, and stormed the town. Six other fortresses in Phocis, of little consequence, came into his hands, through fear rather than by force of arms. Elatia shut its gates, and the inhabitants seemed determined not to admit within their walls either the army or the general of the Romans, unless compelled by force. 19. While the consul was employed in the siege of Elatia, a prospect opened to him of effecting a business of much more importance; namely, of drawing away the Achaeans from their alliance with Philip to that of the Romans. Cycliades, the head of the faction that favoured the interest of Philip, they had now banished; and Aristaenus, who wished for a union between his countrymen and the Romans, was praetor. The Roman fleet, with Attalus and the Rhodians, lay at Cenchreae, and were preparing to lay siege to Corinth with their whole combined force. The consul therefore judged it prudent, that, before they entered on that affair, ambassadors should be sent to the Achaean state, with assurances, that if they came over from the king to the side of the Romans, the latter would consign Corinth to them, and annex it to the old confederacy of their nation. Accordingly, by the consul's direction, ambassadors were sent to the Achaeans, by his brother Lucius Quinctius, by Attalus, and by the Rhodians and Athenians--a general assembly being summoned to meet at Sicyon to give them audience. Now, the state of feeling of the Achaeans was by no means uniform. Nabis the Lacedaemonian, their constant and inveterate enemy, was the object of their dread; they dreaded the arms of the Romans; they were under obligations to the Macedonians, for services both of ancient and recent date; but the king himself, on account of his perfidy and cruelty, they looked upon with jealous fear, and not judging from the behaviour which he then assumed for the time, they knew that, on the conclusion of the war, they should find him a more tyrannical master. So that every one of them was not only at a loss what opinion he should support in the senate of his own particular state, or in the general diets of the nation; but, even when they deliberated within themselves, they could not, with any certainty, determine what they ought to wish, or what to prefer. Such was the unsettled state of mind of the members of the assembly, when the ambassadors were introduced and liberty of speaking afforded them. The Roman ambassador, Lucius Calpurnius, spoke first; next the ambassadors of king Attalus; after them those of the Rhodians; and then Philip's. The Athenians were heard the last, that they might refute the discourses of the Macedonians. These inveighed against the king with the greatest acrimony of any, for no others had suffered from him so many and so severe hardships. So great a number of speeches of the