[12]
Nicomedes returned with large booty and Mithridates sent Pelopidas to the Roman generals and ambassadors. He was not ignorant that they wanted to bring on a war, and that they had incited this attack upon him, but he dissembled in order to procure more and clearer causes for the coming war, for which reason he reminded them of his own and his father's friendship and alliance, in return for which Pelopidas said that Phrygia and Cappadocia had been wrested from him, of which Cappadocia had always belonged to his ancestors and had been left to him by his own father. "Phrygia," he continued, "was given to him by your own general as a reward for his victory over Aristonicus; nevertheless he paid a large sum of money to that same general for it. But now you allow Nicomedes even to close the mouth of the Euxine, and to overrun the country as far as Amastris, and you see him carrying off vast plunder with impunity. My king was not weak, he was not unprepared to defend himself, but he waited in order that you might be eye-witnesses of these transactions. Since you have seen all this, Mithridates, who is your friend and ally, calls upon you as friends and allies (for so the treaty reads) to defend us against the wrong-doing of Nicomedes, or to restrain the wrong-doer."
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Appian. The Foreign Wars. Horace White. New York. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 1899.
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