Please note that Mommsen uses the AUC chronology (Ab Urbe Condita), i.e. from the founding of the City of Rome. You can use this reference table to have the B.C. dates
Such a society of pirates was a political power; and as a political
power it gave itself out and was accepted from the time
when the Syrian king Tryphon first employed it as such and rested
his throne on its support.(4)
We find the pirates as allies of king
Mithradates of Pontus as well as of the Roman democratic emigrants;
we find them giving battle to the fleets of Sulla in the eastern
and in the western waters; we find individual pirate princes ruling
over a series of considerable coast towns. We cannot tell how far
the internal political development of this floating state had
already advanced; but its arrangements undeniably contained
the germ of a sea-kingdom, which was already beginning to establish
itself, and out of which, under favourable circumstances,
a permanent state might have been developed.
