Teuta

Teuta was queen regent of the Ardiaei, an Illyrian kingdom on the eastern Adriatic coast, ruling from 231 BCE on behalf of her young stepson Pinnes after the death of her husband, King Agron. She continued Agron’s policy of raiding shipping and coastal towns along the Adriatic, and ancient Roman sources credit her with defending piracy as a traditional Illyrian practice she would not suppress. Her raids on Roman-allied Greek cities, including an attack connected to the island of Issa, provoked Rome into sending an expeditionary force across the Adriatic for the first time in the Republic’s history, beginning the First Illyrian War in 229 BCE. After her governor Demetrius of Pharos defected and surrendered the city of Corcyra to Rome, Teuta’s position collapsed; she sued for peace in 228 BCE, ceding territory and agreeing to pay tribute. Her fate afterward is uncertain: a later legend holds that she threw herself from a cliff in grief, but no contemporary source confirms this, and some historians consider it as doubtful as the Roman framing of her reign more broadly. The main ancient accounts, by Polybius and later by Appian and Cassius Dio, are generally regarded by historians as colored by Rome’s own justification for the war.