Читать книгу The Roman Republic - Michael Crawford - Страница 12

ROMAN POLITICAL involvement east of the Adriatic began with the First Illyrian War in 229, an event as crucial to our understanding of Roman expansion as to that of Polybius, with his Hellenocentric view of the ‘world’ conquered by the Romans. According to Polybius, the Illyrians (Map 3), long in the habit of molesting ships sailing from Italy, did so even more when in the course of the reign of Queen Teuta of Illyria they seized control of Phoenice; a Roman protest led to the murder of L. Coruncanius, one of the Roman ambassadors, on his way home and war was declared. Roman distaste for a queen who could not or would not control her subjects’ piracy is intelligible enough and one can compare the Roman punishment of their troops who seized Rhegium in 280; but the strategic threat posed by Illyria with its capital at Rhizon on the bay of Kotor should not be underestimated. ‘Whoever holds Kotor, I hold him to be master of the Adriatic and to have it within his power to make a descent on Italy and thereby surround it by land and sea’ remarked Saint-Gouard in 1572. Of the power of Illyria after the seizure of Phoenice Rome had tangible evidence in the shape of the pleas of those who suffered.