17. Æmilius, although he himself had been driven off from Ephesus by a storm, and had returned to Samos without effecting any thing, after he knew that the expedition to Lycia was dropped, and that Livius had gone to Italy, having thought it disgraceful that Patara should be attacked in vain, resolved to go thither and attack the city with his utmost force. Having sailed past Miletus, and the rest of the coast of the allies, he made a descent in the bay of Bargyllæ, with the design of reducing Jassus. A garrison of the king’s troops held the city, and the Romans made hostile depredations on all the country round. He then sent persons to confer with the magistrates and principal inhabitants, and sound their dispositions. After they answered that nothing was in their power, he advanced to lay siege to the city. There were, with the Romans, some exiles from Jassus, who, in a body, earnestly importuned the Rhodians “not to suffer an unoffending city, which was as well a neighbouring one as also connected with them in consanguinity, to be ruined. They themselves were banished for no other cause than their faithful attachment to the Romans; and those who remained in the place were held in subjection by the same force by which they had been expelled. The wish of the people of Jassus was one, to escape from a state of slavery under the king.” The Rhodians, moved by their entreaties, and calling in the assistance of king Eumenes, by representing, at the same time, their own connexions with them, and also the unfortunate condition of the city, which was kept in bondage by the king’s garrison, prevailed on Æmilius to drop the siege. Departing hence, and coasting along the shore of Asia, the other places being at peace, they arrived at Loryma, a port opposite to Rhodes. Here, at head-quarters, a private conversation arises first among the tribunes of the soldiers, and afterwards reached the ears of Æmilius, that the fleet was going off to a distance from Ephesus, from the war which concerned themselves; so that the enemy, being left behind, without control, might safely make whatever attempts they pleased against so many states of the allies, in their neighbourhood. These remarks moved Æmilius; and calling the Rhodians to him, he asked them, whether the whole fleet could lie in the harbour of Patara: when they answered that it could not, furnished with an excuse for laying aside the design, he sailed back to Samos.