The complaints of Italian mariners, the appeals for aid of their old allies the Apolloniates, and the urgent entreaties of the besieged Issaeans at length compelled the Roman senate to send at least ambassadors to Scodra.

The brothers Gaius and Lucius Coruncanius went thither to demand that king Agron should put an end to the disorder.

The king answered that according to the national law of the Illyrians piracy was a lawful trade, and that the government had no right to put a stop to privateering; whereupon Lucius Coruncanius replied, that in that case Rome would make it her business to introduce a better law among the Illyrians.

For this certainly not very diplomatic reply one of the envoys was--by the king's orders, as the Romans asserted--murdered on the way home, and the surrender of the murderers was refused.

The senate had now no choice left to it.
In the spring of 525 a fleet of 200 ships of the line, with a landing- army on board, appeared off Apollonia; the corsair-vessels were scattered before the former, while the latter demolished the piratic strongholds; the queen Teuta, who after the death of her husband Agron conducted the government during the minority of her son Pinnes, besieged in her last retreat, was obliged to accept the conditions dictated by Rome.