34.
[83]
Do you imagine that we have inquired in only a cursory manner into the
disgraces incurred during your command, and into the losses suffered by the
province? We have investigated them, not tracking your footsteps merely by
scent but marking every wriggle of your body, and every seat where you have
left your print. Everything has been noted by us, both the very first crimes
which you committed on your arrival, when, having received money from the
people of Dyrrachium for the murder
of Plato; who was connected with you by ties of hospitality, you destroyed the house of the man to whose murder you had sold yourself:
when, after you had accepted from him some musical slave and other presents,
he was still alarmed and hesitated a good deal, you assured him with
promises, and desired him to come to Thessalonica on the security of your good faith.
[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.
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