ll him,
Nicias), the king's servant, who in a secret conference offered to
poison Pyrrhus, at that time desolating Italy with cruel wars, and wrote
to the king, bidding him beware of his immediate attendants: such great
reverence in the first ages of antiquity was there for the rights of
hospitality even when claimed by an enemy.

23. But this modern, strange, and shameful act was excused by the
precedent afforded by the death of Sertorius; though the emperor's
flatterers were perhaps ignorant that, as Demosthenes--the everlasting
glory of Greece--affirms, an unlawful and wicked action cannot be
defended by its resemblance to another crime, or by the fact that that
crime met with impunity.

II.

Sec. 1. These are the transactions which especially attracted notice in
Armenia; but Sapor, after the last defeat which his troops had
experienced, having heard of the death of Para, whom he had been
earnestly labouring to win to his own alliance, was terribly grieved;
and, as the activity of our army increased his apprehensions, he began
to dread still greater disasters to himself.

2. He therefore sent Arsaces as his ambassador to the emperor, to advise
him utterly to destroy Armenia as a perpetual cause of trouble; or, if
that plan should be decided against, asking that an end might be put to
the division of Hiberia into two provinces, that the Roman garrison
might be withdrawn, and that Aspacuras, whom he himself had made the
sovereign of the nation, might be permitted to reign with undivided
authority.

3. To this proposal, Valens replied, that he could not change the
resolutions which had been agreed to by both of them; and, indeed, that
he should maintain them with zealous care. Towards the end of the
winter, letters were received from the king of a tenor very contrary to
this noble determination of Valens, full of vain and arrogant boasting.
For in them Sapor affirmed that it was impossible for the seeds of
discord to be radically extirpated, unless those who had been witnesses
of the peace which had been made with Julian were all collected, some of
whom he knew to be already dead.

4. After this, the matter becoming a source of greater anxiety, the
emperor, who was more skilful in choosing between different plans than
in devising them himself, thinking that it would be beneficial to the
state in general, ordered Victor, the commander of the cavalry, and
Urbicius, the Duke of Mesopotamia, to march with all spee