37.17
Stress
of weather had compelled Aemilius to abandon his station at Ephesus and he
returned, without having effected anything, to Samos. Here he learnt that
Livius had abandoned the Lycian campaign and left for Italy. He looked
upon the failure at Patara as a humiliation and decided to sail thither with his
whole fleet and attack the city with his full strength. Sailing past Miletus and
the other friendly cities on the coast, he landed at Jasus in the bay of
Bargyliae. The city was held by the king's troops; the Romans treated the
country round as hostile and ravaged it. Then they tried to open negotiations
with the magistrates and leading citizens with the view of inducing them to
surrender, but after they assured him that they had no power whatever he
prepared to storm the place. There were with the Romans some refugees
from Jasus. These men went in a body to the Rhodians and implored them
not to allow a city which was a neighbour and of the same nationality as they
were to perish through no fault of its own. They pleaded that they had been
expelled from their native town solely because of their fidelity to Rome, and
those who still remained there were forcibly held down by the king's troops
lust as they had been forcibly expelled. The one desire in the breast of
everyone in Jasus was to escape from their slavery to Antiochus. Moved by
their entreaties and supported by Eumenes, the Rhodians urged upon the
consul their ties of common nationality with the besieged and the wretched
plight of the city, beleaguered by the king's garrison. They succeeded in
persuading him to desist from attacking it. Sailing away from there, as all the
other cities were friendly, the fleet skirted the Asiatic shore and reached
Loryma, a harbour opposite Rhodes. Here remarks were made by the
military tribunes, in their private conversations, which at last reached the ears
of Aemilius, to the effect that the fleet was withdrawn from Ephesus, its
proper theatre of war, so that the enemy, left with full liberty of action, was
able to make attempts on all the cities in his neighbourhood which were
allied with Rome. Aemilius was so far influenced by what he heard that he
summoned the Rhodians and inquired of them whether the whole of the fleet
could find room in the harbour of Patara. On their assuring him that it could
not, he made this a ground for abandoning his project, and took his ships
back to Samos.
