Polybius, Histories

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War With the Dalmatians

When the envoys under Fannius returned from Illyria,

Fannius and his colleagues roughly treated by the Dalmatians, B. C. 157.

and reported that, so far from the Dalmatians making any restitution to those who asserted that they were being continually wronged by them, they refused even to listen to the commissioners at all, saying that they had nothing to do with the Romans. Besides, they reported that no lodging or entertainment of any sort had been supplied to them; but that the very horses, which they had procured from another city, the Dalmatians had forcibly taken from them; and would have laid violent hands upon themselves, if they had not yielded to necessity and retired as quietly as they could.

The Senate decide on declaring war with the Dalmatians.

The Senate listened attentively to the report; they were exceedingly angry at the disobedience and rudeness of the Dalmatians, but their prevailing feeling was that the present time was a suitable one for declaring war against this people for more reasons than one. For, in the first place, the coasts of Illyria towards Italy had been entirely neglected by them ever since they had expelled Demetrius of Pharos; and, in the next place, they did not wish their own citizens to become enervated by a long-continued peace; for it was now the twelfth year since the war with Perseus and the campaigns in Macedonia.

B. C. 168-157.

They therefore planned that, by declaring war against the Dalmatians, they would at once renew as it were the warlike spirit and enterprise of their own people, and terrify the Illyrians into obedience to their injunctions. Such were the motives of the Romans for going to war with the Dalmatians. But to the world at large they gave out that they had determined on war owing to the insults offered to their legates. . . .