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Updated: June 8, 2025
A prophet now declared to the Thebans that the gods were against them, and advised them to surrender the city. This they did, flying themselves, with their wives and children, to the country of the Illyrians, and leaving their city empty to the triumphant foe.
The Albanians even, descendants of the ancient Illyrians, were affected by the supremacy of the Latin language, from which no less than a quarter of their own meagre vocabulary is derived; though driven southwards by the Romans and northwards by the Greeks, they have remained in their mountain fastnesses to this day, impervious to any of the civilizations to which they have been exposed.
The emperor of the East commanded a disciplined and veteran army of above seventy thousand men; and Licinius, who had collected about thirty thousand Illyrians, was at first oppressed by the superiority of numbers. His military skill, and the firmness of his troops, restored the day, and obtained a decisive victory.
Their orders were to keep their ground, and not engage till from the other wing, where the king fought in person, they should see a red coat lifted up on the point of a spear. The Achaeans obeyed their order, and stood fast; but the Illyrians were led on by their commanders to the attack.
Seventy years before, when the Illyrians had in a similar way laid hands on Roman envoys, the senate of that day had erected a monument to the victim in the market-place, and had with an army and fleet called the murderers to account.
To the south of them is the large but little-known Province of Albania, inhabited by the descendants of the ancient Illyrians, with admixtures of Greeks in the south, Bulgarians in the east, and Servians in the north-east.
When voting ceased and silence was obtained, Marcus Servilius, a man of consular rank, who had challenged and slain twenty-three enemies in single combat, spoke as follows: "What a commander Aemilius Paulus must be, you are now best able to judge, seeing with what a disobedient and worthless army he has succeeded in such great exploits; but I am surprised at the people's being proud of the triumphs over the Illyrians and Ligurians, and begrudging itself the sight of the king of Macedon brought alive, and all the glories of Philip and Alexander carried captive to the arms of Rome.
While the Romans adopted the arts of Greece, the Thracians and Illyrians continued to behold them with indifference. Those arts were, during one period, confined to the Greek colonies, and during another, to the Roman. Even where they were spread by a visible intercourse, they were still received by independent nations with the slowness of invention.
The constant annoyances, which the Illyrians inflicted on the neighbours by their corsairs, were in this way put an end to, at least for a lengthened period. Cotys Cotys in Thrace, who was difficult to be reached and might conveniently be used against Eumenes, obtained pardon and received back his captive son.
The king answered that according to the national law of the Illyrians piracy was a lawful trade, and that the government had no right to put a stop to privateering; whereupon Lucius Coruncanius replied, that in that case Rome would make it her business to introduce a better law among the Illyrians.
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