Kitap 31
18
When the Roman commissioners (see ch. 12) arrived in Syria, and began carrying out their orders, by burning the ships and killing the elephants, the popular fury could not be restrained; and Gnaeus Octavius was assassinated in the gymnasium at Laodicea by a man named Leptines. Lysias did his best to appease the anger of the Romans, by giving Octavius honourable burial, and by sending an embassy to Rome to protest his innocence. Appian, Syr. 46.
19
News having come to Rome of the disaster by which B. C. 162. The Senate pay little attention to Lysias’s excuses. Gnaeus Octavius lost his life, ambassadors also arrived from king Antiochus, sent by Lysias, who vehemently protested that the king’s friends had had no part in the crime. But the Senate showed scant attention to the envoys, not wishing to make any open declaration on the subject or to allow their opinion to become public in any way.
