war was carried on more boldly by him or more pusillanimously by the enemy.  Such was the manner in which Attalus had slipped out of his hands from Opus; Sulpicius from Chalcis; and so, within these few days, Machanidas.  That flight, however, was not always successful; and that that should not be esteemed a difficult war in which victory would be certain if the enemy could be brought to a regular engagement.  He had already obtained one very great advantage, which was a confession on the part of the enemy themselves, that they were not a match for him; and in a short time,” he said, “he would be in possession of undoubted victory; for that he would engage with him with a result no better than their expectations.”  The allies listened to the king with great satisfaction.  He then gave up to the Achaeans Heraera and Triphylia.  Aliphera he restored to the Megalopolitans, they having brought satisfactory proof that it belonged to their territories.  Then having received some ships from the Achaeans, three quadriremes and three biremes, he sailed to Anticyra, whence with seven quinqueremes and more than twenty barks, which he had sent to the bay of Corinth to join the Carthaginian fleet, he proceeded to Erythrae, a town of the Aetolians near Eupalium, where he made a descent.  He was not unobserved by the Aetolians; for all who were either in the fields or in the neighbouring forts of Potidania and Apollonia, fled to the woods and mountains.  The cattle which they could not drive off in their haste they seized and put on board.  He sent Nicias, praetor of the Achaeans, to Aegium with these and the other booty; and then going to Corinth, ordered his army to march by land through Boeotia, while he himself, sailing from Cenchreae along the coast of Attica, round the promontory of Sunium, reached Chalcis, having passed almost through the midst of the enemy’s fleet.  After commending in the highest terms their fidelity and bravery, as neither fear nor hope had influenced their minds, and after exhorting them to show the same fidelity in maintaining the alliance, he sailed to Oreum; and having placed such of the chief inhabitants as chose to fly, rather than surrender to the Romans, in the command of the city and the direction of affairs, he sailed over from Euboea to Demetrias, from which place he at first set out to succour his allies.  After this, having laid the keels of one hundred ships of war at Cassandrea, and collected a large number of ship carpenters for the completion of that business, and as both the departure of Attalus and the seasonable assistance he had brought to his allies had tranquillized affairs in Greece, he retired into his own dominions, in order to make war upon the Dardanians.