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Updated: June 6, 2025
When the Achaean diet was urged by the Rhodians and Cretans to grant them the aid of the league, and seriously deliberated as to sending it , it was simply a political farce; the principle which the leader of the party friendly to Rome then laid down that the Achaeans were no longer at liberty to wage war without the permission of the Romans expressed, doubtless with disagreeable precision, the simple truth that the sovereignty of the dependent states was merely a formal one, and that any attempt to give life to the shadow must necessarily lead to the destruction of the shadow itself.
The Athenians afterwards, on their side, entered into a regular war, and proclaimed it by order of the state. For king Attalus and the Rhodians, having come to Aegina in pursuit of Philip, who was retiring to Macedonia, the king crossed over to Piraeus, for the purpose of renewing and confirming his alliance with the Athenians.
The Rhodians, also, whom he long besieged, begged him, when they concluded a peace, to let them have some of his engines, which they might preserve as a memorial at once of his power and of their own brave resistance. The quarrel between him and the Rhodians was on account of their being allies to Ptolemy, and in the siege the greatest of all the engines was planted against their walls.
He was joined also by a powerful naval force; Lucius Quinctius had already come from Leucas, with forty ships; eighteen ships of war had arrived from the Rhodians; and king Eumenes was cruising among the Cyclades, with ten decked ships, thirty barks, and smaller vessels of various sorts.
Lucullus put to sea with six open boats, which he had borrowed from the Rhodians and other small communities; he himself merely by an accident escaped from a piratic squadron, which captured most of his boats; deceiving the enemy by changing his vessels he arrived by way of Crete and Cyrene at Alexandria; but the Egyptian court rejected his request for the support of ships of war with equal courtesy and decision.
He had not only persistently refused |the offers of Antiochus, but had constantly urged the Romans to a war, from which he expected the aggrandizement of his kingdom. The Rhodians and Byzantines likewise joined their old allies. Egypt too took the side of Rome and offered support in supplies and men; which, however, the Romans did not accept. Macedonia
In this case the Rhodians were their chief auxiliaries; they emphatically supported Sinope, for instance, against Mithradates of Pontus.
The Cretans and Aetolians also served for hire, and the Cretans who had joined the Rhodians in founding Gela, thus came to consent to fight for pay against, instead of for, their colonists. There were also some Acarnanians paid to serve, although they came chiefly for love of Demosthenes and out of goodwill to the Athenians whose allies they were.
All of a sudden, shortly before the battle of Pydna, Rhodian envoys appeared at the Roman head-quarters and in the Roman senate, announcing that the Rhodians would no longer tolerate this war which was injurious to their Macedonian traffic and their revenue from port-dues, that they were disposed themselves to declare war against the party which should refuse to make peace, and that with this view they had already concluded an alliance with Crete and with the Asiatic cities.
Under these circumstances, they, in conjunction with Prusias, king of Bythinia, declared war against the Byzantines; and while their ally took Hieron, which seems to have been a great mart of the Byzantines, and the resort of most of the merchants trading to these parts, the Rhodians, with a powerful fleet, ravaged their coasts, and seized all their ships trading to the Euxine.
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