Illyrian Wars (1.5-1.6)

Such was the punishment which the god visited upon the Illyrians and the Celts for their impiety. But they did not desist from temple robbing, for again, in conjunction with the Celts, certain Illyrian tribes, especially the Scordisci, the Mædi, and the Dardani again invaded Macedonia and Greece together, and plundered many temples, including that of Delphi, but losing many men this time also. The Romans, thirty-two years after their first encounter with the Celts, having fought with them at intervals since that time, now, under the leadership of Lucius Scipio, made war against the Illyrians, on account of this temple-robbery, as they [the Romans] now held sway over the Greeks and the Macedonians. It is said that the neighboring tribes, remembering the calamity that befell all the Illyrians on account of the crime of the Autarienses, would not give aid to the temple-robbers, but abandoned them to Scipio, who destroyed the greater part of the Scordisci, the remainder fleeing to the Danube and settling in the islands of that river. He made peace with the Mædi and Dardani, accepting from them part of the gold belonging to the temple. One of the Roman writers says that this was the chief cause of the numerous civil wars of the Romans after Lucius Scipio's time till the establishment of the empire. So much by way of preface concerning the peoples whom the Greeks called Illyrians.

These peoples, and also the Pannonians, the Rhærtians, the Noricans, the Mysians of Europe, and the other neighboring tribes who inhabited the right bank of the Danube, the Romans distinguished from one another just as the various Greek peoples are distinguished from each other, and they call each by its own name, but they consider the whole of Illyria as embraced under a common designation. Whence this idea took its start I have not been able to find out, but it continues to this day, for they farm the tax of all the nations from the source of the Danube to the Euxine Sea under one head, and call it the Illyrian tax. Why the Romans subjugated them, and what were the real causes or pretexts of the wars, I acknowledged, when writing of Crete, that I had not discovered, and I exhorted those who were able to tell more, to do so. I shall write down only what I know.