your reigning
kings; and that some of them have not been subject to the dominion of
Philip, some to that of Ptolemy; and that others have not, for many
years, maintained themselves in a state of independence, no one
calling it in question? For, if the circumstance of their having been
once subject to a foreigner, when crushed under the severity of the
times, conveys a right to enforce that subjection again after a lapse
of so many generations, what can be said of our having delivered
Greece from Philip, but that nothing was accomplished by us; and that
his successors may reclaim Corinth, Chalcis, Demetrias, and the whole
nation of Thessaly? But why do I plead the cause of those states,
which it would be fitter that both we and the king should hear pleaded
by themselves?"

17. He then desired, that the deputies of those states should be
called, for they had been prepared beforehand, and kept in readiness
by Eumenes, who reckoned, that every share of strength that should
be taken away from Antiochus, would become an accession to his own
kingdom. Many of them were introduced; and, while each enforced
his own complaints, and sometimes demands, and blended together the
reasonable with the unreasonable, they changed the debate into a mere
altercation. The ambassadors, therefore, without conceding or carrying
any one point, returned to Rome just as they had come, leaving every
thing in an undecided state. On their departure the king held a
council, on the subject of a war with Rome, in which each spoke more
violently than his predecessor; for every one thought, that the more
bitterly he inveighed against the Romans, the greater share of favour
he might expect to obtain. One animadverted upon the insolence of
their demands, in which they presume to impose terms on Antiochus,
the greatest king in Asia, as they would on the vanquished Nabis.
"Although to Nabis they left absolute power over his own country,
and its capital, Lacedaemon, yet it seems to them a matter for
indignation, that Smyrna and Lampsacus should yield obedience to
Antiochus."--Others said, that "to so great a monarch, those cities
were but a trivial ground of war, scarcely worth mention; but, that
the beginning of unjust impositions was always made in the case of
matters of little consequence; unless, indeed, it could be supposed,
that the Persians, when they demanded earth and water from the
Lacedaemonians, stood in need of a scrap of the land or a draught of