The results were corresponding.  In the Campanian waters the fleet of Antonius captured a number of piratical vessels.  But an engagement took place with the Cretans, who had entered into friendship and alliance with the pirates and abruptly rejected his demand that they should desist from such fellowship; and the chains, with which the foresight of Antonius had provided his vessels for the purpose of placing the captive buccaneers in irons, served to fasten the quaestor and the other Roman prisoners to the masts of the captured Roman ships, when the Cretan generals Lasthenes and Panares steered back in triumph to Cydonia from the naval combat in which they had engaged the Romans off their island.  Antonius, after having squandered immense sums and accomplished not the slightest result by his inconsiderate mode of warfare, died in 683 at Crete.  The ill success of his expedition, the costliness of building a fleet, and the repugnance of the oligarchy to confer any powers of a more comprehensive kind on the magistrates, led them, after the practical termination of this enterprise by Antonius’ death, to make no farther nomination of an admiral-in-chief, and to revert to the old system of leaving each governor to look after the suppression of piracy in his own province:  the fleet equipped by Lucullus for instance(22) was actively employed for this purpose in the Aegean sea.

Cretan War

So far however as the Cretans were concerned, a disgrace like that endured off Cydonia seemed even to the degenerate Romans of this age as if it could be answered only by a declaration of war.  Yet the Cretan envoys, who in the year 684 appeared in Rome with the request that the prisoners might be taken back and the old alliance reestablished, had almost obtained a favourable decree of the senate; what the whole corporation termed a disgrace, the individual senator was ready to sell for a substantial price.  It was not till a formal resolution of the senate rendered the loans of the Cretan envoys among the Roman bankers non-actionable—­ that is, not until the senate had incapacitated itself for undergoing bribery—­that a decree passed to the effect that the Cretan communities, if they wished to avoid war, should hand over not only the Roman deserters but the authors of the outrage perpetrated off Cydonia—­the leaders Lasthenes and Panares—­to the Romans for befitting punishment, should deliver up all ships and boats of four or more oars, should furnish 400 hostages, and should pay a fine of 4000 talents (975,000 pounds).  When the envoys declared that they were not empowered to enter into such terms, one of the consuls of the next year was appointed to depart on the expiry of his official term for Crete, in order either to receive there what was demanded or to begin the war.

Metellus Subdues Crete