1Our ancestors often waged wars because our merchants or shipowners had been treated rather unjustly; 1what spirit, then, ought you to have, when so many thousands of Roman citizens have been killed by a single message and at a single moment? 1Because their envoys had been addressed rather arrogantly, your fathers wanted Corinth, the light of all Greece, to be extinguished; 1will you allow that king to go unpunished who killed an envoy of the Roman people, a man of consular rank, after torturing him with chains and scourges and every kind of torment? 1They would not tolerate the freedom of Roman citizens being curtailed; 1will you disregard their lives being snatched away?
1They avenged the rights of an embassy violated by a word; 1will you let pass an envoy put to death with every torment? 12Take care that, just as it was most glorious for them to hand down to you so great a glory of empire, it may not be most shameful for you to be unable to protect and preserve what you have received. 12What then? 12when the safety of allies is summoned into the gravest peril and crisis, with what spirit ought you to bear it? 12King Ariobarzanes, an ally and friend of the Roman people, has been driven from his kingdom; 12two kings are threatening the whole of Asia, most hostile not only to you but also to your allies and friends; 12and all the cities throughout Asia and Greece are forced by the size of the danger to look to you for help; 12they neither dare to demand a particular commander from you, especially since you have sent another, nor think they can do so without the greatest danger.
13For they see and feel the same thing as you do, that there is one man in whom all qualities are at their highest, and that he is close at hand, which makes them feel his absence the more keenly; 13and they realise that by his very arrival and name, although he came for the war at sea, the attacks of the enemy have been checked and slowed. 13These men, since they may not speak freely, silently ask you to think them also worthy of having their safety entrusted to such a man, and all the more because, whereas into the other provinces we send men with military command of such a kind that, even if they defend them from the enemy, their own arrivals in the cities of the allies differ little from a hostile storming, this man they used to hear of before and now see in person as one of such restraint, such gentleness, such humanity that those with whom he stays longest seem the happiest of all.