40.
To this Antiochus replied that he was surprised that the Romans were making such diligent inquiry into what King Antiochus should do or how far he should advance by land or sea,
[2]
and that they [p. 385]did not see that Asia was no concern of theirs, and1 that they had no more right to ask what Antiochus was doing in Asia than Antiochus had to ask what the Roman people was doing in Italy.
[3]
So far as Ptolemy was concerned, the loss of whose cities was a subject of complaint, he already had a treaty of friendship with Ptolemy and was taking steps which would soon lead to a tie of relationship as well.2
[4]
He had not even taken advantage of Philip's ill fortune to seize and plunder, nor had he entered Europe to threaten the Romans; but all the country which had once been the kingdom of Lysimachus,3 and which, on his defeat, had passed with his other possessions into the hands of Seleucus by right of conquest, he considered his own.
[5]
While his forefathers were busy with the disposition of other matters, possession of some of these towns had been seized, first by Ptolemy,4 then by Philip,5 usurping the property-rights of others.6
[6]
Who could doubt that Lysimachus had been lord of the Chersonesus and the neighbouring parts of Thrace which are around Lysimachia? He himself had come only to recover his ancient possessions and to found anew Lysimachia, [p. 387]destroyed by the attack of the Thracians, that his son7 Seleucus might make it the capital of his kingdom.
1 B.C. 196
2 In 193 B.C. (XXXV. xiii. 4) Ptolemy married the daughter of Antiochus: preliminary arrangements for this may have been under way at this time. It may be noted that just as Antiochus silenced the Rhodian ambassadors by quoting to them the complimentary speeches of Rome (see xx. 8 above), so he now silences the Romans by quoting to them a treaty of which they, apparently, knew nothing before and which weakened their case a good deal. Open covenants would have saved the free-speaking Romans a good deal of embarrassment in the east.
3 One of Alexander's generals, who had carved out a kingdom for himself in this region. He was defeated by Seleucus, founder of the Seleucid dynasty, to which Antiochus belonged, in 281 B.C. (XXXIV. lviii. 5; Justin XVII. 1).
4 See xxxviii. 1 above.
5 See XXXI. xvi. 4. Antiochus had apparently suffered along with Ptolemy from the depredations committed by Philip under the authority of the treaty which he had made with Antiochus to plunder the young Ptolemy (see the Introductory Note).
6 In XXXV. xvi. the argument turns on the Roman legal doctrine of possessio (the unchallenged occupancy of a piece of property for a specified period), which under certain conditions could confer a valid title. Antiochus means that Ptolemy and Philip had violently interrupted his own possessio and had thus robbed him of property which he was trying to recover. The propriety of attributing to Antiochus this much acquaintance with Roman law might be questioned.
7 B.C. 196
Livy. Books XXXI-XXXIV with an English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1935: no copyright notice.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
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.