previous next

Ariarathes Arrives in Rome

King Ariarathes arrived in Rome in the course of the
B. C. 157. Coss. Sext. Julius Caesar, L. Aurelius Orestes.
summer.1 And when Sextus Julius Caesar and his colleague had entered on their consulship, the king visited them privately, presenting in his personal appearance a striking picture of the dangers with which he was surrounded.

Ambassadors also arrived from Demetrius, headed by Miltiades, prepared to act in two capacities—to defend the conduct of Demetrius in regard to Ariarathes, and to accuse that king with the utmost bitterness. Orophernes also had sent Timotheus and Diogenes to represent him, conveying a crown for Rome, and charged to renew the friendship and alliance of Cappadocia with the Romans; but, above all, to confront Ariarathes, and both to answer his accusations and bring their own against him. In these private interviews Diogenes and Miltiades and their colleagues made a better show, because they were many to one in the controversy; besides their personal appearance was better than that of Ariarathes, for they were at present on the winning side and he had failed. They had also the advantage of him, in making their statement of the case, that they were entirely unscrupulous, and cared nothing whatever about the truth of their words; and what they said could not be confuted, because there was no one to take the other side. So their lying statements easily prevailed, and they thought everything was going as they wished. . . .

1 Ariarathes arrived in the summer of B.C. 158.

Histories. Polybius. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh. translator. London, New York. Macmillan. 1889. Reprint Bloomington 1962.

Robert B. Strassler provided support for entering this text.

This text was converted to electronic form by professional data entry, Running heads in Walbank's reprint have been converted to chapter titles, and titles have been added, usually from the marginal notes, for chapters without them. Some pages have notes of the form "line X: A should read B," which I believe are Walbank's; they have "resp=fww". Summaries of missing sections are encoded as inline notes with "resp=ess." A very few unidentified quotations are marked in notes with "resp=aem" (the markup editor) Citations are marked using Perseus abbreviations. and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.

Creative Commons License
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.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
158 BC (1)
hide References (3 total)
  • Cross-references to this page (3):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: