is true, was no war in the proper sense of the term; and, besides, the leader of the Macedonian band, Nicanor, immediately gave orders to his troops to retreat, when the Roman envoys, who were at Athens at the time, used threatening language (in the end of 553).  But it was too late.  An Athenian embassy was sent to Rome to report the attack made by Philip on an ancient ally of the Romans; and, from the way in which the senate received it, Philip saw clearly what awaited him; so that he at once, in the very spring of 554, directed Philocles, his general in Greece, to lay waste the Attic territory and to reduce the city to extremities.

Declaration of War by Rome

The senate now had what they wanted; and in the summer of 554 they were able to propose to the comitia a declaration of war “on account of an attack on a state in alliance with Rome.”  It was rejected on the first occasion almost unanimously:  foolish or evil-disposed tribunes of the people complained of the senate, which would allow the citizens no rest; but the war was necessary and, in strictness, was already begun, so that the senate could not possibly recede.  The burgesses were induced to yield by representations and concessions.  It is remarkable that these concessions were made mainly at the expense of the allies.  The garrisons of Gaul, Lower Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia, amounting in all to 20,000 men, were exclusively taken from the allied contingents that were in active service—­quite contrary to the former principles of the Romans.  All the burgess troops, on the other hand, that had continued under arms from the Hannibalic war, were discharged; volunteers alone, it was alleged, were to be enrolled for the Macedonian war, but they were, as was afterwards found, for the most part forced volunteers—­a fact which in the autumn of 555 called forth a dangerous military revolt in the camp of Apollonia.  Six legions were formed of the men newly called out; of these two remained in Rome and two in Etruria, and only two embarked at Brundisium for Macedonia, led by the consul Publius Sulpicius Galba.

Thus it was once more clearly demonstrated, that the sovereign burgess assemblies, with their shortsighted resolutions dependent often on mere accident, were no longer at all fitted to deal with the complicated and difficult relations into which Rome was drawn by her victories; and that their mischievous intervention in the working of the state machine led to dangerous modifications of the measures which in a military point of were necessary, and to the still more dangerous course of treating the Latin allies as inferiors.

The Roman League