[84]
And at last you did not even put him to death
according to the custom of our ancestors, when that miserable man was
willing to place his neck beneath the axe of his hereditary friend, but you
ordered the physician whom you had brought with you to open his veins. After
that, you added to the murder of Plator, that of Pleuratus, his companion,
whom you put to death by scourging, being a man of extreme old age. After
that, you are put to death by the hand of the executioner, Rabocentus, a
prince of the Bessic tribe, having sold yourself to do this to king Cottus,
for three hundred talents. And you did not murder him alone, but all the
other ambassadors also who had come with him, all whose lives you sold to
king Cottus. You waged a wicked and cruel war against the Denseletae, a
nation which has at all times been obedient to this empire, and which even
at the time of that general defection of all the barbarians, preserved
Macedonia for us, when Caius
Sentius was praetor. And though you might have had that people for your most
faithful allies, you preferred to treat them as our most bitter enemies.
Thereby you made those who might have been the perpetual defenders of
Macedonia, desirous to harass
and destroy it. They have thrown our revenues into confusion, they have
taken our cities, laid waste our lands, led away cur allies into slavery,
carried off whole families, driven off our cattle, and compelled the people
of Thessalonica, as they despaired
of saving their town, to fortify their citadel.
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.