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Tamoskaro-2 Directory 13
Page 10
Perseus was at the head of a numerous and well-appointed army, but of all his allies, only Cotys, king of the Odrysians, ventured to support him against so formidable a foe. Yet the war was protracted three years without any decisive result; nay, the balance of success seemed on the whole to incline in favor of Perseus, and many states, which before were wavering, now showed a disposition to join his cause. But his ill-timed parsimony restrained him from taking advantage of their offers, and in B.C. 168 the arrival of the Consul L. AEmilius Paullus completely changed the aspect of affairs. Perseus was driven from a strong position which he had taken up on the banks of the Enipeus, forced to retreat to Pydna, and, finally, to accept an engagement near that town. At first the serried ranks of the phalanx seemed to promise superiority; but its order having been broken by the inequalities of the ground, the Roman legionaries penetrated the disordered mass, and committed fearful carnage, to the extent, it is said, of 20,000 men. Perseus fled first to Pella, then to Amphipolis, and finally to the sanctuary of the sacred island of Samothrace, but was at length obliged to surrender himself to a Roman squadron. He was treated with courtesy, but was reserved to adorn the triumph of his conqueror. Such was the end of the Macedonian empire. The Senate decreed that Macedonia should be divided into four districts, each under the jurisdiction of an oligarchical council.
It was probably during this time that he introduced the various changes into the organization of the Roman army which are usually attributed to him. Notwithstanding the sternness and severity with which he punished the least breach of discipline, he was a favorite with his new soldiers, who learned to place implicit confidence in their general, and were delighted with the strict impartiality with which he visited the offenses of the officers as well as of the privates. As the enemy still continued in Spain, Marius was elected Consul a third time for the year B.C. 103, and also a fourth time for the following year, with Q. Lutatius Catulus as his colleague. It was in this year (B.C. 102) that the long-expected barbarians arrived. The Cimbri, who had returned from Spain, united their forces with the Teutones. Marius first took up his position in a fortified camp upon the Rhone, probably in the vicinity of the modern Arles; and as the entrance of the river was nearly blocked up by mud and sand, he employed his soldiers in digging a canal from the Rhone to the Mediterranean, that he might the more easily obtain his supplies from the sea.
What, again, is one to make of Dickens, with his love of private theatricals, his florid waistcoats and watch-chains, his sentimental radicalism, his kindly, convivial, gregarious life? He, again, did his work in a rapture of solitary creation, and seemed to have no taste for discussing his ideas or methods. Then, too, Dickens's later desertion of his work in favour of public readings and money-making is curious to note. He was like Shakespeare in this, that the passion of his later life seemed to be to realise an ideal of bourgeois prosperity. Dickens seems to have regarded his art partly as a means of social reform, and partly as a method of making money. The latter aim is to a great extent accounted for by the miserable and humiliating circumstances of his early life, which bit very deep into him. Yet his art was hardly an end in itself, but something through which he made his way to other aims.
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