shown by the remarkable offer which after the end
of the war with Carthage they made to king Ptolemy III. Euergetes,
to support him in the war which he waged with Seleucus II. Callinicus
of Syria (who reigned 507-529) on account of the murder of Berenice,
and in which Macedonia had probably taken part with the latter.
Generally, the relations of Rome with the Hellenistic states became
closer; the senate already negotiated even with Syria, and interceded
with the Seleucus just mentioned on behalf of the Ilians with whom
the Romans claimed affinity.

For a direct interference of the Romans in the affairs of
the eastern powers there was no immediate need. The Achaean league,
the prosperity of which was arrested by the narrow-minded coterie-
policy of Aratus, the Aetolian republic of military adventurers, and
the decayed Macedonian empire kept each other in check; and the Romans
of that time avoided rather than sought transmarine acquisitions.
When the Acarnanians, appealing to the ground that they alone of all
the Greeks had taken no part in the destruction of Ilion, besought
the descendants of Aeneas to help them against the Aetolians, the
senate did indeed attempt a diplomatic mediation; but when the
Aetolians returned an answer drawn up in their own saucy fashion,
the antiquarian interest of the Roman senators by no means provoked
them into undertaking a war by which they would have freed the
Macedonians from their hereditary foe (about 515).

Illyrian Piracy
Expedition against Scodra

Even the evil of piracy, which was naturally in such a state of
matters the only trade that flourished on the Adriatic coast, and
from which the commerce of Italy suffered greatly, was submitted to by
the Romans with an undue measure of patience, --a patience intimately
connected with their radical aversion to maritime war and their
wretched marine. But at length it became too flagrant. Favoured by
Macedonia, which no longer found occasion to continue its old function
of protecting Hellenic commerce from the corsairs of the Adriatic for
the benefit of its foes, the rulers of Scodra had induced the Illyrian
tribes--nearly corresponding to the Dalmatians, Montenegrins, and
northern Albanians of the present day--to unite for joint piratical
expeditions on a great scale.

With whole squadrons of their swift-sailing biremes, the veil-known
"Liburnian" cutters, the Illyrians waged war by sea and along the
coasts against all and sundr