praetor Marcus Antonius.
But at the very outset they had made an utter mistake in the choice
of the leader; or rather those, who had carried this measure
so appropriate in itself, had not taken into account that in the senate
all personal questions were decided by the influence of Cethegus(21)
and similar coterie-considerations. They had moreover
neglected to furnish the admiral of their choice with money
and ships in a manner befitting his comprehensive task,
so that with his enormous requisitions he was almost as burdensome
to the provincials whom he befriended as were the corsairs.

Defeat of Antonius off Cydonia

The results were corresponding. In the Campanian waters the fleet
of Antonius captured a number of piratical vessels. But an engagement
took place with the Cretans, who had entered into friendship
and alliance with the pirates and abruptly rejected his demand
that they should desist from such fellowship; and the chains,
with which the foresight of Antonius had provided his vessels
for the purpose of placing the captive buccaneers in irons,
served to fasten the quaestor and the other Roman prisoners
to the masts of the captured Roman ships, when the Cretan generals
Lasthenes and Panares steered back in triumph to Cydonia
from the naval combat in which they had engaged the Romans
off their island. Antonius, after having squandered immense sums
and accomplished not the slightest result by his inconsiderate mode
of warfare, died in 683 at Crete. The ill success of his expedition,
the costliness of building a fleet, and the repugnance of the oligarchy
to confer any powers of a more comprehensive kind on the magistrates,
led them, after the practical termination of this enterprise
by Antonius' death, to make no farther nomination of an admiral-in-chief,
and to revert to the old system of leaving each governor to look
after the suppression of piracy in his own province: the fleet equipped
by Lucullus for instance(22) was actively employed for this purpose
in the Aegean sea.

Cretan War

So far however as the Cretans were concerned, a disgrace
like that endured off Cydonia seemed even to the degenerate Romans
of this age as if it could be answered only by a declaration of war.
Yet the Cretan envoys, who in the year 684 appeared in Rome
with the request that the prisoners might be taken back and the old
alliance reestablished, had almost obtained a favourable decree
of the senate; what the whole corpora