directions
from the court of Pydna. But their success was slight. It was indeed
asserted that the allegiance of the Italians was wavering; but neither
friend nor foe could fail to see that an immediate resumption of the
Samnite wars was not at all probable. The nocturnal conferences
likewise between Macedonian deputies and the Carthaginian senate,
which Massinissa denounced at Rome, could occasion no alarm to serious
and sagacious men, even if they were not, as is very possible, an
utter fiction. The Macedonian court sought to attach the kings of
Syria and Bithynia to its interests by intermarriages; but nothing
further came of it, except that the immortal simplicity of the
diplomacy which seeks to gain political ends by matrimonial means once
more exposed itself to derision. Eumenes, whom it would have been
ridiculous to attempt to gain, the agents of Perseus would have gladly
put out of the way: he was to have been murdered at Delphi on his way
homeward from Rome, where he had been active against Macedonia; but
the pretty project miscarried.

Bastarnae
Genthius

Of greater moment were the efforts made to stir up the northern
barbarians and the Hellenes to rebellion against Rome. Philip had
conceived the project of crushing the old enemies of Macedonia,
the Dardani in what is now Servia, by means of another still more
barbarous horde of Germanic descent brought from the left bank of the
Danube, the Bastarnae, and of then marching in person with these and
with the whole avalanche of peoples thus set in motion by the land-
route to Italy and invading Lombardy, the Alpine passes leading to
which he had already sent spies to reconnoitre--a grand project,
worthy of Hannibal, and doubtless immediately suggested by Hannibal's
passage of the Alps. It is more than probable that this gave occasion
to the founding of the Roman fortress of Aquileia,(2) which was formed
towards the end of the reign of Philip (573), and did not harmonize
with the system followed elsewhere by the Romans in the establishment
of fortresses in Italy. The plan, however, was thwarted by the
desperate resistance of the Dardani and of the adjoining tribes
concerned; the Bastarnae were obliged to retreat, and the whole horde
were drowned in returning home by the giving way of the ice on the
Danube. The king now sought at least to extend his clientship among
the chieftains of the Illyrian land, the modern Dalmatia and northern
Albania. One of t