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156 /ETOLIA AFER barbarians except when it was for his own in- terest to defend her, and then the ease with which he conquered them showed what he might have done had he been honest. Nomi- nally a Christian, he brought up one of his sons, Carpileo, in a heathen court, as a heathen, and destined him to wear the crown of a hea- then nation ; while the other, Gaudentius, he proposed to invest, after himself, with the pur- ple of the western empire. Gibbon says that during the decay of the military spirit, the Roman armies were commanded by two gene- rals, Aetius and Boniface, who may be de- servedly called the last of the Romans. JSTOLIA, a western division of the mam- land of Greece, on the N. shore of the gulf of Corinth or of Lepanto, W. of Doris and Lo- cris, and E. of Acarnania, and divided by the narrow strait between Rhium and Anti- Rhium from Achaia. It is bounded W. by the Achelous, now the Aspropotamo, and N. by Thessaly and Epirus. Its chief city in antiquity was Thermus, in the interior, on the river Evenus, now Fidhari. yEtolia is said to have been originally settled in the ante-heroic times by the Curetes, who were conquered by the hero yEtolus, son of Endymion, with a band of followers from Elis, in the Peloponnesus. During the mythic and heroic ages /Etolia was distinguished as the seat of many of the richest and most poetical of the legends of early Greece. In the days of Thucydides, however, the yEtolians were still a barbarous and un- couth tribe. During the Peloponnesian war they played no considerable part, nor do they appear prominently in Greek history until nearly a century later. On the death of Philip of Macedon and the accession of Alex- ander (336 B. C.), the yEtolians displayed such hostility to the latter as drew down his signal vengeance. According to Pausa- nias, Greece owed much to the yEtolians for their energy in beating back the Gallic hordes. With this exception, the yEtolians seem to have fought on any side to which the hope of plun- der allured them. With Alexander of Epirus, the son of Pyrrhus, they formed a coalition for the sake of dismembering Acarnania for their own advantage; and again they banded themselves with Cleomenes III. of Sparta, hoping to overthrow the Achaean league. After the death of Antigonus Doson of Mace- don (220), they carried their arms into the Peloponnesus in a series of predatory incur- sions, for which they were severely chastised by Philip V., the successor of Antigonus, who sacked and destroyed their capital, Thermus. In the latter years of the second Punic war the Romans were hard set to avert the conse- quences of the alliance between Hannibal and Philip V. of Macedon ; the . Kt < >li:m>. with their allies, attached themselves to the Romans, and enabled them, by the employment of a small naval squadron, and a trifling body of forces un- der the praator Lrovinus, to neutralize all the preparations of Philip, until they had rid them- selves of their principal opponent on the field of Zama (202). At the battle of Cynoscephalaj (197) their cavalry greatly distinguished itself, charging home ten times against the Mace- donians, who were at first victorious, and giv- ing the consul Flamininus time to bring up his reserves and- convert a half-lost day into a com- plete victory. For this they expected to reap their reward in the dismemberment of Philip's dominions ; but it was denied to them by the Romans. The yEtolians now attempted an al- liance against their late allies with Antiochus the Great of Syria, who had been prompted to hostilities against Rome by Hannibal ; but after a single defeat by the Roman consul Glabrio in the pass of Thermopylae (191), the latter re- treated into Asia, leaving his Greek confederates to the mercy of the enemy. The polity of the ^Etolians from this time, and indeed before, consisted of a federal government similar to the Achaean league, at one time embracing a num- ber of neighboring territories ; but being swal- lowed up with the rest of Greece in the univer- sal empire of Rome (146), yEtolia followed her fortunes, and afterward shared the reverses of the eastern empire. Possessed on the irrup- tion of the barbarians by Slavic hordes, yEtolia was reconquered and partially civilized, together with the Illyrians and Dalmatians, by the Venetians during the middle ages, and sub- sequently became, like the Morea, the scene of deadly conflict against the victorious Turks. In later times it fell under the power of Ali Pasha of Albania, and it was the scene of some of the most important events of the Greek rev- olution. The principal seaport town of modern yEtolia is Missolonghi. The climate is deli- cious, but along the seacoast and the swampy river shores the autumnal season is marked by fevers. The plains are rich and fertile in maize, wine, silk, and fruits ; the mountain scenery is magnificent. (See ACABNANIA.) AFMAS1EFF, Alexander ftikolaieviteh, a Russian author, born in Moscow in 1826, died in Oc- tober, 1871. He studied at the university of Moscow, and was secretary to the council of ma- gistrates in that city. He is the author of Narodniya Ruskiya skazki (" Russian Pop- ular Tales," 4 vols., completed in 1863), a series of stories taken down from the mouths of Rus- sian peasants, with critical notes. His other great work, Poetitche*kiya vozzryeniya, Slav- yan no, prirodu (" Poetic Views of Nature entertained by the ancient Slavs," 3 vols., completed in 1869), is a mine of wealth on the subject of Slavic legends and popular con- ceptions in respect to the spiritual and material world. He was also a frequent contributor to the Russian press of articles bearing on Slavic history, literature, and archaeology. AFEK, Doinitiiis. a celebrated orator, the teacher of Quintilian, born at Nimes in the reign of Tiberius, died in the reign of Nero, A. D. 60. His pupil speaks highly of his plead- ings, and mentions several of his works, none of which have come down to us.