the alliance.  Although they had not furnished Antiochus with any soldiers, yet they were charged with having assisted him with money; and they themselves did not disavow having sent ambassadors to him.  They requested that they might be permitted to continue on the former footing of friendship.  To which the consul answered, that “he did not yet know whether he was to consider them as friends or foes.  The senate must be the judge of that matter.  He would therefore take no step in the business, but leave it to be determined at Rome; and for that purpose he granted them a truce of ninety days.”  When the Epirots, who were sent to Rome, addressed the senate, they rather enumerated hostile acts which they had not committed, than cleared themselves of those laid to their charge; and they received such an answer that they seemed rather to have obtained pardon than proved their innocence.  About the same time ambassadors from king Philip were introduced to the senate, and presented his congratulations on their late successes.  They asked leave to sacrifice in the Capitol, and to deposit an offering of gold in the temple of Jupiter supremely good and great.  This was granted by the senate, and they presented a golden crown of a hundred pounds’ weight.  The senate not only answered the ambassadors with kindness, but gave them Demetrius, Philip’s son, who was at Rome as an hostage, to be conducted home to his father.—­Such was the conclusion of the war waged in Greece by the consul Manius Acilius against Antiochus.

36.  The other consul, Publius Cornelius Scipio, who had obtained by lot the province of Gaul, before he set out to the war which was to be waged against the Boians, demanded of the senate, by a decree, to order him money for the exhibition of games, which, when acting as propraetor in Spain, he had vowed at a critical time of a battle.  His demand was deemed unprecedented and unreasonable, and they therefore voted, that “whatever games he had vowed, on his own single judgment, without consulting the senate, he should celebrate out of the spoils, if he had reserved any for the purpose; otherwise, at his own expense.”  Accordingly, Publius Cornelius exhibited those games through the space of ten days.  About this time the temple of the great Idaean Mother was dedicated; which deity, on her being brought from Asia, in the consulate of Publius Cornelius Scipio, afterwards surnamed Africanus, and Publius Lucinius, the above-mentioned Publius Cornelius had conducted from the sea-side to the Palatine.  In pursuance of a decree of the senate, Marcus Livius and Caius Claudius, censors, in the consulate of Marcus Cornelius and Publius Sempronius, had contracted for the erection of the goddess’s temple; and thirteen years after it had been so contracted for, it was dedicated by Marcus Junius Brutus, and games were celebrated on occasion of its dedication:  in which, according to the account of Valerius Antias, dramatic entertainments were, for the first time, introduced