The enemy's army was both more numerous, and composed of very superior men; for they were Macedonians, Thracians, and Illyrians,--all nations of the fiercest spirit; your present opponents are Syrians, and Asiatic Greeks, the most unsteady of men, and born for slavery.

The commander, there, was a king of extraordinary warlike abilities, improved by practice from his early youth, in wars against his neighbours, the Thracians and Illyrians, and all the adjoining nations.

But this man is one who (to say nothing of his former life) after coming over from Asia into Europe to make war on the Roman people, has, during the whole length of the winter, accomplished no more memorable exploit, than the taking a wife, for passion's sake, out of a private house, and a family obscure even among its neighbours; and now as a newly married man, surfeited as it were with nuptial feasts, comes out to fight.

His chief reliance and strength was in the Aetolians,--a nation of all others the most faithless and ungrateful, as you have formerly experienced, and as Antiochus now experiences; for they neither joined him with numbers, nor could they be kept in the camp; and, besides, they are now in a state of dissension among themselves.

Although they requested permission to defend Hypata and Heraclea, yet they defended neither; but one half of them fled to the tops of the mountains, while the others shut themselves up in Heraclea.