The History Of Rome, Book III
by
Theodor Mommsen

Part 6 out of 11



nor to join the Achaean league; even the existing monarchical
constitution, and Nabis himself, were left intact. On the other hand
Nabis had to cede his foreign possessions, Argos, Messene, the Cretan
cities, and the whole coast besides; to bind himself neither to
conclude foreign alliances, nor to wage war, nor to keep any other
vessels than two open boats; and lastly to disgorge all his plunder,
to give to the Romans hostages, and to pay to them a war-contribution.
The towns on the Laconian coast were given to the Spartan emigrants,
and this new community, who named themselves the "free Laconians" in
contrast to the monarchically governed Spartans, were directed to
enter the Achaean league. The emigrants did not receive back their
property, as the district assigned to them was regarded as a
compensation for it; it was stipulated, on the other hand, that
their wives and children should not be detained in Sparta against
their will. The Achaeans, although by this arrangement they gained
the accession of the free Laconians as well as Argos, were yet far
from content; they had expected that the dreaded and hated Nabis would
be superseded, that the emigrants would be brought back, and that
the Achaean symmachy would be extended to the whole Peloponnesus.
Unprejudiced persons, however, will not fail to see that Flamininus
managed these difficult affairs as fairly and justly as it was
possible to manage them where two political parties, both chargeable
with unfairness and injustice stood opposed to each other. With the
old and deep hostility subsisting between the Spartans and Achaeans,
the incorporation of Sparta into the Achaean league would have been
equivalent to subjecting Sparta to the Achaeans, a course no less
contrary to equity than to prudence. The restitution of the
emigrants, and the complete restoration of a government that had been
set aside for twenty years, would only have substituted one reign of
terror for another; the expedient adopted by Flamininus was the right
one, just because it failed to satisfy either of the extreme parties.
At length thorough provision appeared to be made that the Spartan
system of robbery by sea and land should cease, and that the
government there, such as it was, should prove troublesome only
to its own subjects. It is possible that Flamininus, who knew
Nabis and could not but be aware how desirable it was that he should
personally be superseded, omitted to take such a step from the mere
desire to have done with the matter and not to mar the clear
impression of his successes by complications that might be prolonged
beyond all calculation; it is possible, moreover, that he sought
to preserve Sparta as a counterpoise to the power of the Achaean
confederacy in the Peloponnesus. But the former objection relates to
a point of secondary importance; and as to the latter view, it is far
from probable that the Romans condescended to fear the Achaeans.

Final Regulation Of Greece

Peace was thus established, externally at least, among the petty Greek
states. But the internal condition of the several communities also
furnished employment to the Roman arbiter. The Boeotians openly
displayed their Macedonian tendencies, even after the expulsion of the
Macedonians from Greece; after Flamininus had at their request allowed
their countrymen who were in the service of Philip to return home,
Brachyllas, the most decided partisan of Macedonia, was elected to the
presidency of the Boeotian confederacy, and Flamininus was otherwise
irritated in every way. He bore it with unparalleled patience; but
the Boeotians friendly to Rome, who knew what awaited them after the
departure of the Romans, determined to put Brachyllas to death, and
Flamininus, whose permission they deemed it necessary to ask, at least
did not forbid them. Brachyllas was accordingly killed; upon which
the Boeotians were not only content with prosecuting the murderers,
but lay in wait for the Roman soldiers passing singly or in small
parties through their territories, and killed about 500 of them.
This was too much to be endured; Flamininus imposed on them a fine
of a talent for every soldier; and when they did not pay it, he
collected the nearest troops and besieged Coronea (558). Now they
betook themselves to entreaty; Flamininus in reality desisted on the
intercession of the Achaeans and Athenians, exacting but a very
moderate fine from those who were guilty; and although the Macedonian
party remained continuously at the helm in the petty province, the
Romans met their puerile opposition simply with the forbearance of
superior power. In the rest of Greece Flamininus contented himself
with exerting his influence, so far as he could do so without
violence, over the internal affairs especially of the newly-freed
communities; with placing the council and the courts in the hands of
the more wealthy and bringing the anti-Macedonian party to the helm;
and with attaching as much as possible the civic commonwealths to the
Roman interest, by adding everything, which in each community should
have fallen by martial law to the Romans, to the common property of
the city concerned. The work was finished in the spring of 560;
Flamininus once more assembled the deputies of all the Greek
communities at Corinth, exhorted them to a rational and moderate use
of the freedom conferred on them, and requested as the only return for
the kindness of the Romans, that they would within thirty days send to
him the Italian captives who had been sold into Greece during the
Hannibalic war. Then he evacuated the last fortresses in which Roman
garrisons were still stationed, Demetrias, Chalcis along with the
smaller forts dependent upon it in Euboea, and Acrocorinthus--thus
practically giving the lie to the assertion of the Aetolians that
Rome had inherited from Philip the "fetters" of Greece--and departed
homeward with all the Roman troops and the liberated captives.

Results

It is only contemptible disingenuousness or weakly sentimentality,
which can fail to perceive that the Romans were entirely in earnest
with the liberation of Greece; and the reason why the plan so nobly
projected resulted in so sorry a structure, is to be sought only in
the complete moral and political disorganization of the Hellenic
nation. It was no small matter, that a mighty nation should have
suddenly with its powerful arm brought the land, which it had been
accustomed to regard as its primitive home and as the shrine of
its intellectual and higher interests, into the possession of
full freedom, and should have conferred on every community in it
deliverance from foreign taxation and foreign garrisons and the
unlimited right of self-government; it is mere paltriness that sees
in this nothing save political calculation. Political calculation
made the liberation of Greece a possibility for the Romans; it was
converted into a reality by the Hellenic sympathies that were at that
time indescribably powerful in Rome, and above all in Flamininus
himself. If the Romans are liable to any reproach, it is that all
of them, and in particular Flamininus who overcame the well-founded
scruples of the senate, were hindered by the magic charm of the
Hellenic name from perceiving in all its extent the wretched character
of the Greek states of that period, and so allowed yet further freedom
for the doings of communities which, owing to the impotent antipathies
that prevailed alike in their internal and their mutual relations,
knew neither how to act nor how to keep quiet. As things stood, it
was really necessary at once to put an end to such a freedom, equally
pitiful and pernicious, by means of a superior power permanently
present on the spot; the feeble policy of sentiment, with all its
apparent humanity, was far more cruel than the sternest occupation
would have been. In Boeotia for instance Rome had, if not to
instigate, at least to permit, a political murder, because the Romans
had resolved to withdraw their troops from Greece and, consequently,
could not prevent the Greeks friendly to Rome from seeking their
remedy in the usual manner of the country. But Rome herself also
suffered from the effects of this indecision. The war with Antiochus
would not have arisen but for the political blunder of liberating
Greece, and it would not have been dangerous but tor the military
blunder of withdrawing the garrisons from the principal fortresses on
the European frontier. History has a Nemesis for every sin--for an
impotent craving after freedom, as well as for an injudicious
generosity.

Notes For Chapter VIII

1. III. III. Acquisition Of Territory In Illyria

2. III. VI. Stagnation Of The War In Italy

3. There are still extant gold staters, with the head of Flamininus
and the inscription "-T. Quincti(us)-," struck in Greece under the
government of the liberator of the Hellenes. The use of the Latin
language is a significant compliment.

4. III. III. Acquisition Of Territory In Illyria




Chapter IX

The War With Antiochus Of Asia

Antiochus The Great

In the kingdom of Asia the diadem of the Seleucidae had been worn since
531 by king Antiochus the Third, the great-great-grandson of the founder
of the dynasty. He had, like Philip, begun to reign at nineteen years
of age, and had displayed sufficient energy and enterprise, especially
in his first campaigns in the east, to warrant his being without too
ludicrous impropriety addressed in courtly style as "the Great." He
had succeeded--more, however, through the negligence of his opponents
and of the Egyptian Philopator in particular, than through any ability
of his own--in restoring in some degree the integrity of the monarchy,
and in reuniting with his crown first the eastern satrapies of Media
and Parthyene, and then the separate state which Achaeus had founded
on this side of the Taurus in Asia Minor. A first attempt to wrest
from the Egyptians the coast of Syria, the loss of which he sorely
felt, had, in the year of the battle of the Trasimene lake, met with a
bloody repulse from Philopator at Raphia; and Antiochus had taken good
care not to resume the contest with Egypt, so long as a man--even
though he were but an indolent one--occupied the Egyptian throne.
But, after Philopator's death (549), the right moment for crushing
Egypt appeared to have arrived; with that view Antiochus entered into
concert with Philip, and had thrown himself upon Coele-Syria, while
Philip attacked the cities of Asia Minor. When the Romans interposed
in that quarter, it seemed for a moment as if Antiochus would make
common cause with Philip against them--the course suggested by the
position of affairs, as well as by the treaty of alliance. But, not
far-seeing enough to repel at once with all his energy any
interference whatever by the Romans in the affairs of the east,
Antiochus thought that his best course was to take advantage of the
subjugation of Philip by the Romans (which might easily be foreseen),
in order to secure the kingdom of Egypt, which he had previously been
willing to share with Philip, for himself alone. Notwithstanding the
close relations of Rome with the court of Alexandria and her royal
ward, the senate by no means intended to be in reality, what it was in
name, his "protector;" firmly resolved to give itself no concern
about Asiatic affairs except in case of extreme necessity, and to
limit the sphere of the Roman power by the Pillars of Hercules and the
Hellespont, it allowed the great-king to take his course. He himself
was not probably in earnest with the conquest of Egypt proper--which
was more easily talked of than achieved--but he contemplated the
subjugation of the foreign possessions of Egypt one after another, and
at once attacked those in Cilicia as well as in Syria and Palestine.
The great victory, which he gained in 556 over the Egyptian general
Scopas at Mount Panium near the sources of the Jordan, not only gave
him complete possession of that region as far as the frontier of Egypt
proper, but so alarmed the Egyptian guardians of the young king that,
to prevent Antiochus from invading Egypt, they submitted to a peace
and sealed it by the betrothal of their ward to Cleopatra the daughter
of Antiochus. When he had thus achieved his first object, he
proceeded in the following year, that of the battle of Cynoscephalae,
with a strong fleet of 100 decked and 100 open vessels to Asia Minor,
to take possession of the districts that formerly belonged to Egypt on
the south and west coasts of Asia Minor--probably the Egyptian
government had ceded these districts, which were -de facto- in the
hands of Philip, to Antiochus under the peace, and had renounced all
their foreign possessions in his favour--and to recover the Greeks of
Asia Minor generally for his empire. At the same time a strong Syrian
land-army assembled in Sardes.

Difficulties With Rome

This enterprise had an indirect bearing on the Romans who from the
first had laid it down as a condition for Philip that he should
withdraw his garrisons from Asia Minor and should leave to the
Rhodians and Pergamenes their territory and to the free cities their
former constitution unimpaired, and who had now to look on while
Antiochus took possession of them in Philip's place. Attalus and the
Rhodians found themselves now directly threatened by Antiochus with
precisely the same danger as had driven them a few years before into
the war with Philip; and they naturally sought to involve the Romans
in this war as well as in that which had just terminated. Already in
555-6 Attalus had requested from the Romans military aid against
Antiochus, who had occupied his territory while the troops of Attalus
were employed in the Roman war. The more energetic Rhodians even
declared to king Antiochus, when in the spring of 557 his fleet
appeared off the coast of Asia Minor, that they would regard its
passing beyond the Chelidonian islands (off the Lycian coast) as a
declaration of war; and, when Antiochus did not regard the threat,
they, emboldened by the accounts that had just arrived of the battle
at Cynoscephalae, had immediately begun the war and had actually
protected from the king the most important of the Carian cities,
Caunus, Halicarnassus, and Myndus, and the island of Samos. Most of
the half-free cities had submitted to Antiochus, but some of them,
more especially the important cities of Smyrna, Alexandria Troas, and
Lampsacus, had, on learning the discomfiture of Philip, likewise taken
courage to resist the Syrian; and their urgent entreaties were
combined with those of the Rhodians.

It admits of no doubt, that Antiochus, so far as he was at all capable
of forming a resolution and adhering to it, had already made up his
mind not only to attach to his empire the Egyptian possessions in
Asia, but also to make conquests on his own behalf in Europe and, if
not to seek on that account a war with Rome, at any rate to risk it
The Romans had thus every reason to comply with that request of their
allies, and to interfere directly in Asia; but they showed little
inclination to do so. They not only delayed as long as the Macedonian
war lasted, and gave to Attalus nothing but the protection of
diplomatic intercession, which, we may add, proved in the first
instance effective; but even after the victory, while they doubtless
spoke as though the cities which had been in the hands of Ptolemy and
Philip ought not to be taken possession of by Antiochus, and while the
freedom of the Asiatic cities, Myrina, Abydus, Lampsacus,(1) and Cius,
figured in Roman documents, they took not the smallest step to give
effect to it, and allowed king Antiochus to employ the favourable
opportunity presented by the withdrawal of the Macedonian garrisons to
introduce his own. In fact, they even went so far as to submit to his
landing in Europe in the spring of 558 and invading the Thracian
Chersonese, where he occupied Sestus and Madytus and spent a
considerable time in the chastisement of the Thracian barbarians and
the restoration of the destroyed Lysimachia, which he had selected as
his chief place of arms and as the capital of the newly-instituted
satrapy of Thrace. Flamininus indeed, who was entrusted with the
conduct of these affairs, sent to the king at Lysimachia envoys, who
talked of the integrity of the Egyptian territory and of the freedom
of all the Hellenes; but nothing came out of it. The king talked in
turn of his undoubted legal title to the ancient kingdom of Lysimachus
conquered by his ancestor Seleucus, explained that he was employed not
in making territorial acquisitions but only in preserving the
integrity of his hereditary dominions, and declined the intervention
of the Romans in his disputes with the cities subject to him in Asia
Minor. With justice he could add that peace had already been
concluded with Egypt, and that the Romans were thus far deprived of
any formal pretext for interfering.(2) The sudden return of the king
to Asia occasioned by a false report of the death of the young king of
Egypt, and the projects which it suggested of a landing in Cyprus or
even at Alexandria, led to the breaking off of the conferences without
coming to any conclusion, still less producing any result. In the
following year, 559, Antiochus returned to Lysimachia with his fleet
and army reinforced, and employed himself in organizing the new
satrapy which he destined for his son Seleucus. Hannibal, who had
been obliged to flee from Carthage, came to him at Ephesus; and the
singularly honourable reception accorded to the exile was virtually a
declaration of war against Rome. Nevertheless Flamininus in the
spring of 560 withdrew all the Roman garrisons from Greece. This was
under the existing circumstances at least a mischievous error, if not
a criminal acting in opposition to his own better knowledge; for we
cannot dismiss the idea that Flamininus, in order to carry home with
him the undiminished glory of having wholly terminated the war and
liberated Hellas, contented himself with superficially covering up for
the moment the smouldering embers of revolt and war. The Roman
statesman might perhaps be right, when he pronounced any attempt to
bring Greece directly under the dominion of the Romans, and any
intervention of the Romans in Asiatic affairs, to be a political
blunder; but the opposition fermenting in Greece, the feeble arrogance
of the Asiatic king, the residence, at the Syrian head-quarters, of
the bitter enemy of the Romans who had already raised the west in arms
against Rome--all these were clear signs of the approach of a fresh
rising in arms on the part of the Hellenic east, which could not but
have for its aim at least to transfer Greece from the clientship of
Rome to that of the states opposed to Rome, and, if this object should
be attained, would immediately extend the circle of its operations.
It is plain that Rome could not allow this to take place. When
Flamininus, ignoring all these sure indications of war, withdrew the
garrisons from Greece, and yet at the same time made demands on the
king of Asia which he had no intention of employing his army to
support, he overdid his part in words as much as he fell short in
action, and forgot his duty as a general and as a citizen in the
indulgence of his personal vanity--a vanity, which wished to confer,
and imagined that it had conferred, peace on Rome and freedom
on the Greeks of both continents.

Preparations Of Antiochus For War With Rome

Antiochus employed the unexpected respite in strengthening his
position at home and his relations with his neighbours before
beginning the war, on which for his part he was resolved, and became
all the more so, the more the enemy appeared to procrastinate. He now
(561) gave his daughter Cleopatra, previously betrothed, in marriage
to the young king of Egypt. That he at the same time promised to
restore the provinces wrested from his son-in-law, was afterwards
affirmed on the part of Egypt, but probably without warrant; at any
rate the land remained actually attached to the Syrian kingdom.(3)
He offered to restore to Eumenes, who had in 557 succeeded his father
Attalus on the throne of Pergamus, the towns taken from him, and to
give him also one of his daughters in marriage, if he would abandon
the Roman alliance. In like manner he bestowed a daughter on
Ariarathes, king of Cappadocia, and gained the Galatians by presents,
while he reduced by arms the Pisidians who were constantly in revolt,
and other small tribes. Extensive privileges were granted to the
Byzantines; respecting the cities in Asia Minor, the king declared
that he would permit the independence of the old free cities such as
Rhodes and Cyzicus, and would be content in the case of the others
with a mere formal recognition of his sovereignty; he even gave them
to understand that he was ready to submit to the arbitration of the
Rhodians. In European Greece he could safely count on the Aetolians,
and he hoped to induce Philip again to take up arms. In fact, a plan
of Hannibal obtained the royal approval, according to which he was to
receive from Antiochus a fleet of 100 sail and a land army of 10,000
infantry and 1000 cavalry, and was to employ them in kindling first
a third Punic war in Carthage, and then a second Hannibalic war in
Italy; Tyrian emissaries proceeded to Carthage to pave the way for a
rising in arms there(4) Finally, good results were anticipated from
the Spanish insurrection, which, at the time when Hannibal left
Carthage, was at its height.(5)

Aetolian Intrigues Against Rome

While the storm was thus gathering from far and wide against Rome, it
was on this, as on all occasions, the Hellenes implicated in the
enterprise, who were of the least moment, and yet took action of the
greatest importance and with the utmost impatience. The exasperated
and arrogant Aetolians began by degrees to persuade themselves that
Philip had been vanquished by them and not by the Romans, and could
not even wait till Antiochus should advance into Greece. Their policy
is characteristically expressed in the reply, which their -strategus-
gave soon afterwards to Flamininus, when he requested a copy of the
declaration of war against Rome: that he would deliver it to him in
person, when the Aetolian army should encamp on the Tiber. The
Aetolians acted as the agents of the Syrian king in Greece and
deceived both parties, by representing to the king that all the
Hellenes were waiting with open arms to receive him as their true
deliverer, and by telling those in Greece who were disposed to listen
to them that the landing of the king was nearer than it was in
reality. Thus they actually succeeded in inducing the simple
obstinacy of Nabis to break loose and to rekindle in Greece the flame
of war two years after Flamininus's departure, in the spring of 562;
but in doing so they missed their aim. Nabis attacked Gythium, one of
the towns of the free Laconians that by the last treaty had been
annexed to the Achaean league, and took it; but the experienced
-strategus- of the Achaeans, Philopoemen, defeated him at the
Barbosthenian mountains, and the tyrant brought back barely a fourth
part of his army to his capital, in which Philopoemen shut him up. As
such a commencement was no sufficient inducement for Antiochus to come
to Europe, the Aetolians resolved to possess themselves of Sparta,
Chalcis, and Demetrias, and by gaining these important towns to
prevail upon the king to embark. In the first place they thought to
become masters of Sparta, by arranging that the Aetolian Alexamenus
should march with 1000 men into the town under pretext of bringing a
contingent in terms of the alliance, and should embrace the
opportunity of making away with Nabis and of occupying the town. This
was done, and Nabis was killed at a review of the troops; but, when
the Aetolians dispersed to plunder the town, the Lacedaemonians found
time to rally and slew them to the last man. The city was then
induced by Philopoemen to join the Achaean league. After this
laudable project of the Aetolians had thus not only deservedly failed,
but had had precisely the opposite effect of uniting almost the whole
Peloponnesus in the hands of the other party, it fared little better
with them at Chalcis, for the Roman party there called in the citizens
of Eretria and Carystus in Euboea, who were favourable to Rome, to
render seasonable aid against the Aetolians and the Chalcidian exiles.
On the other hand the occupation of Demetrias was successful, for the
Magnetes to whom the city had been assigned were, not without reason,
apprehensive that it had been promised by the Romans to Philip as a
prize in return for his aid against Antiochus; several squadrons of
Aetolian horse moreover managed to steal into the town under the
pretext of forming an escort for Eurylochus, the recalled head of the
opposition to Rome. Thus the Magnetes passed over, partly of their
own accord, partly by compulsion, to the side of the Aetolians, and
the latter did not fail to make use of the fact at the court of the
Seleucid.

Rupture Between Antiochus And The Romans

Antiochus took his resolution. A rupture with Rome, in spite of
endeavours to postpone it by the diplomatic palliative of embassies,
could no longer be avoided. As early as the spring of 561 Flamininus,
who continued to have the decisive voice in the senate as to eastern
affairs, had expressed the Roman ultimatum to the envoys of the king,
Menippus and Hegesianax; viz. that he should either evacuate Europe
and dispose of Asia at his pleasure, or retain Thrace and submit to
the Roman protectorate over Smyrna, Lampsacus, and Alexandria Troas.
These demands had been again discussed at Ephesus, the chief place of
arms and fixed quarters of the king in Asia Minor, in the spring of
562, between Antiochus and the envoys of the senate, Publius Sulpicius
and Publius Villius; and they had separated with the conviction on
both sides thata peaceful settlement was no longer possible.
Thenceforth war was resolved on in Rome. In that very summer of 562
a Roman fleet of 30 sail, with 3000 soldiers on board, under Aulus
Atilius Serranus, appeared off Gythium, where their arrival
accelerated the conclusion of the treaty between the Achaeans
and Spartans; the eastern coasts of Sicily and Italy were strongly
garrisoned, so as to be secure against any attempts at a landing; a
land army was expected in Greece in the autumn. Since the spring of
562 Flamininus, by direction of the senate, had journeyed through
Greece to thwart the intrigues of the opposite party, and to
counteract as far as possible the evil effects of the ill-timed
evacuation of the country. The Aetolians had already gone so far as
formally to declare war in their diet against Rome. But Flamininus
succeeded In saving Chalcis for the Romans by throwing into it a
garrison of 500 Achaeans and 500 Pergamenes. He made an attempt also
to recover Demetrias; and the Magnetes wavered. Though some towns in
Asia Minor, which Antiochus had proposed to subdue before beginning
the great war, still held out, he could now no longer delay his
landing, unless he was willing to let the Romans recover all the
advantages which they had surrendered two years before by withdrawing
their garrisons from Greece. He collected the vessels and troops
which were at hand--he had but 40 decked vessels and 10,000 infantry,
along with 500 horse and 6 elephants--and started from the Thracian
Chersonese for Greece, where he landed in the autumn of 562 at
Pteleum on the Pagasaean gulf, and immediately occupied the adjoining
Demetrias. Nearly about the same time a Roman army of some 25,000 men
under the praetor Marcus Baebius landed at Apollonia. The war was
thus begun on both sides.

Attitude Of The Minor Powers
Carthage And Hannibal

Everything depended on the extent to which that comprehensively-
planned coalition against Rome, of which Antiochus came forward as the
head, might be realized. As to the plan, first of all, of stirring
up enemies to the Romans in Carthage and Italy, it was the fate of
Hannibal at the court of Ephesus, as through his whole career, to have
projected his noble and high-spirited plans for the behoof of people
pedantic and mean. Nothing was done towards their execution, except
that some Carthaginian patriots were compromised; no choice was left
to the Carthaginians but to show unconditional submission to Rome.
The camarilla would have nothing to do with Hannibal--such a man was
too inconveniently great for court cabals; and, after having tried all
sorts of absurd expedients, such as accusing the general, with whose
name the Romans frightened their children, of concert with the Roman
envoys, they succeeded in persuading Antiochus the Great, who like all
insignificant monarchs plumed himself greatly on his independence and
was influenced by nothing so easily as by the fear of being ruled,
into the wise belief that he ought not to allow himself to be thrown
into the shade by so celebrated a man. Accordingly it was in solemn
council resolved that the Phoenician should be employed in future
only for subordinate enterprises and for giving advice--with the
reservation, of course, that the advice should never be followed.
Hannibal revenged himself on the rabble, by accepting every commission
and brilliantly executing all.

States Of Asia Minor

In Asia Cappadocia adhered to the great-king; Prusias of Bithynia on
the other hand took, as always, the side of the stronger. King
Eumenes remained faithful to the old policy of his house, which was
now at length to yield to him its true fruit. He had not only
persistently refused |the offers of Antiochus, but had constantly
urged the Romans to a war, from which he expected the aggrandizement
of his kingdom. The Rhodians and Byzantines likewise joined their
old allies. Egypt too took the side of Rome and offered support in
supplies and men; which, however, the Romans did not accept.

Macedonia

In Europe the result mainly depended on the position which Philip of
Macedonia would take up. It would have been perhaps the right policy
for him, notwithstanding all the injuries or shortcomings of the past,
to unite with Antiochus. But Philip was ordinarily influenced not by
such considerations, but by his likings and dislikings; and his hatred
was naturally directed much more against the faithless ally, who had
left him to contend alone with the common enemy, had sought merely to
seize his own share in the spoil, and had become a burdensome
neighbour to him in Thrace, than against the conqueror, who had
treated him respectfully and honourably. Antiochus had, moreover,
given deep offence to the hot temper of Philip by the setting up of
absurd pretenders to the Macedonian crown, and by the ostentatious
burial of the Macedonian bones bleaching at Cynoscephalae. Philip
therefore placed his whole force with cordial zeal at the disposal
of the Romans.

The Lesser Greek States

The second power of Greece, the Achaean league, adhered no less
decidedly than the first to the alliance with Rome. Of the smaller
powers, the Thessalians and the Athenians held by Rome; among the
latter an Achaean garrison introduced by Flamininus into the citadel
brought the patriotic party, which was pretty strong, to reason. The
Epirots exerted themselves to keep on good terms, if possible, with
both parties. Thus, in addition to the Aetolians and the Magnetes who
were joined by a portion of the neighbouring Perrhaebians, Antiochus
was supported only by Amynander, the weak king of the Athamanes, who
allowed himself to be dazzled by foolish designs on the Macedonian
crown; by the Boeotians, among whom the party opposed to Rome was
still at the helm; and in the Peloponnesus by the Eleans and
Messenians, who were in the habit of taking part with the Aetolians
against the Achaeans. This was indeed a hopeful beginning; and the
title of commander-in-chief with absolute power, which the Aetolians
decreed to the great-king, seemed insult added to injury. There had
been, just as usual, deception on both sides. Instead of the
countless hordes of Asia, the king brought up a force scarcely half as
strong as an ordinary consular army; and instead of the open arms with
which all the Hellenes were to welcome their deliverer from the Roman
yoke, one or two bands of klephts and some dissolute civic communities
offered to the king brotherhood in arms.

Antiochus In Greece

For the moment, indeed, Antiochus had anticipated the Romans in Greece
proper. Chalcis was garrisoned by the Greek allies of the Romans, and
refused the first summons but the fortress surrendered when Antiochus
advanced with all his force; and a Roman division, which arrived too
late to occupy it, was annihilated by Antiochus at Deliurn. Euboea
was thus lost to the Romans. Antiochus still made even in winter
an attempt, in concert with the Aetolians and Athamanes, to gain
Thessaly; Thermopylae was occupied, Pherae and other towns were taken,
but Appius Claudius came up with 2000 men from Apollonia, relieved
Larisa, and took up his position there. Antiochus, tired of the
winter campaign, preferred to return to his pleasant quarters at
Chalcis, where the time was spent merrily, and the king even, in spite
of his fifty years and his warlike schemes, wedded a fair Chalcidian.
So the winter of 562-3 passed, without Antiochus doing much more than
sending letters hither and thither through Greece: he waged the war
--a Roman officer remarked--by means of pen and ink.

Landing Of The Romans

In the beginning of spring 563 the Roman staff arrived at Apollonia.
The commander-in-chief was Manius Acilius Glabrio, a man of humble
origin, but an able general feared both by his soldiers and by the
enemy; the admiral was Gaius Livius; and among the military tribunes
were Marcus Porcius Cato, the conqueror of Spain, and Lucius Valerius
Flaccus, who after the old Roman wont did not disdain, although they
had been consuls, to re-enter the army as simple war-tribunes. They
brought with them reinforcements in ships and men, including Numidian
cavalry and Libyan elephants sent by Massinissa, and the permission
of the senate to accept auxiliary troops to the number of 5000 from
the extra-Italian allies, so that the whole number of the Roman forces
was raised to about 40,000 men. The king, who in the beginning of
spring had gone to the Aetolians and had thence made an aimless
expedition to Acarnania, on the news of Glabrio's landing returned to
his head-quarters to begin the campaign in earnest. But incom
prehensibly, through his own negligence and that of his lieutenants in
Asia, reinforcements had wholly failed to reach him, so that he had
nothing but the weak army--now further decimated by sickness and
desertion in its dissolute winter-quarters--with which he had landed
at Pteleum in the autumn of the previous year. The Aetolians too, who
had professed to send such enormous numbers into the field, now, when
their support was of moment, brought to their commander-in-chief no
more than 4000 men. The Roman troops had already begun operations in
Thessaly, where the vanguard in concert with the Macedonian army drove
the garrisons of Antiochus out of the Thessalian towns and occupied
the territory of the Athamanes. The consul with the main army
followed; the whole force of the Romans assembled at Larisa.

Battle At Thermopylae
Greece Occupied By The Romans
Resistance Of The Aetolians

Instead of returning with all speed to Asia and evacuating the field
before an enemy in every respect superior, Antiochus resolved to
entrench himself at Thermopylae, which he had occupied, and there to
await the arrival of the great army from Asia. He himself took up a
position in the chief pass, and commanded the Aetolians to occupy the
mountain-path, by which Xerxes had formerly succeeded in turning the
Spartans. But only half of the Aetolian contingent was pleased to
comply with this order of the commander-in-chief; the other 2000 men
threw themselves into the neighbouring town of Heraclea, where they
took no other part in the battle than that of attempting during its
progress to surprise and plunder the Roman camp. Even the Aetolians
posted on the heights discharged their duty of watching with
remissness and reluctance; their post on the Callidromus allowed
itself to be surprised by Cato, and the Asiatic phalanx, which the
consul had meanwhile assailed in front, dispersed, when the Romans
hastening down the mountain fell upon its flank. As Antiochus had
made no provision for any case and had not thought of retreat, the
army was destroyed partly on the field of battle, partly during its
flight; with difficulty a small band reached Demetrias, and the king
himself escaped to Chalcis with 500 men. He embarked in haste for
Ephesus; Europe was lost to him all but his possessions in Thrace, and
even the fortresses could be no longer defended Chalcis surrendered to
the Romans, and Demetrias to Philip, who received permission--as a
compensation for the conquest of the town of Lamia in Achaia
Phthiotis, which he was on the point of accomplishing and had then
abandoned by orders of the consul--to make himself master of all the
communities that had gone over to Antiochus in Thessaly proper, and
even of the territories bordering on Aetolia, the districts of Dolopia
and Aperantia. All the Greeks that had pronounced in favour of
Antiochus hastened to make their peace; the Epirots humbly besought
pardon for their ambiguous conduct, the Boeotians surrendered at
discretion, the Eleans and Messenians, the latter after some struggle,
submitted to the Achaeans. The prediction of Hannibal to the king was
fulfilled, that no dependence at all could be placed upon the Greeks,
who would submit to any conqueror. Even the Aetolians, when their
corps shut up in Heraclea had been compelled after obstinate
resistance to capitulate, attempted to make their peace with the
sorely provoked Romans; but the stringent demands of the Roman consul,
and a consignment of money seasonably arriving from Antiochus,
emboldened them once more to break off the negotiations and to sustain
for two whole months a siege in Naupactus. The town was already
reduced to extremities, and its capture or capitulation could not have
been long delayed, when Flamininus, constantly striving to save every
Hellenic community from the worst consequences of its own folly and
from the severity of his ruder colleagues, interposed and arranged in
the first instance an armistice on tolerable terms. This terminated,
at least for the moment, armed resistance in Greece.

Maritime War, And Preparations For Crossing To Asia
Polyxenidas and Pausistratus
Engagement Off Aspendus
Battle Of Myonnesus

A more serious war was impending in Asia--a war which appeared of a
very hazardous character on account not so much of the enemy as of the
great distance and the insecurity of the communications with home,
while yet, owing to the short-sighted obstinacy of Antiochus, the
struggle could not well be terminated otherwise than by an attack on
the enemy in his own country. The first object was to secure the sea.
The Roman fleet, which during the campaign in Greece was charged with
the task of interrupting the communication between Greece and Asia
Minor, and which had been successful about the time of the battle at
Thermopylae in seizing a strong Asiatic transport fleet near Andros,
was thenceforth employed in making preparations for the crossing of
the Romans to Asia next year and first of all in driving the enemy's
fleet out of the Aegean Sea. It lay in the harbour of Cyssus on the
southern shore of the tongue of land that projects from Ionia towards
Chios; thither in search of it the Roman fleet proceeded, consisting
of 75 Roman, 24 Pergamene, and 6 Carthaginian, decked vessels under
the command of Gaius Livius. The Syrian admiral, Polyxenidas, a
Rhodian emigrant, had only 70 decked vessels to oppose to it; but, as
the Roman fleet still expected the ships of Rhodes, and as Polyxenidas
relied on the superior seaworthiness of his vessels, those of Tyre and
Sidon in particular, he immediately accepted battle. At the outset
the Asiatics succeeded in sinking one of the Carthaginian vessels;
but, when they came to grapple, Roman valour prevailed, and it was
owing solely to the swiftness of their rowing and sailing that the
enemy lost no more than 23 ships. During the pursuit the Roman fleet
was joined by 25 ships from Rhodes, and the superiority of the Romans
in those waters was now doubly assured. The enemy's fleet thenceforth
kept the shelter of the harbour of Ephesus, and, as it could not be
induced to risk a second battle, the fleet of the Romans and allies
broke up for the winter; the Roman ships of war proceeded to the
harbour of Cane in the neighbourhood of Pergamus. Both parties were
busy during the winter in preparing for the next campaign. The Romans
sought to gain over the Greeks of Asia Minor; Smyrna, which had
perseveringly resisted all the attempts of the king to get possession
of the city, received the Romans with open arms, and the Roman party
gained the ascendency in Samos, Chios, Erythrae, Clazomenae, Phocaea,
Cyme, and elsewhere. Antiochus was resolved, if possible, to prevent
the Romans from crossing to Asia, and with that view he made zealous
naval preparations--employing Polyxenidas to fit out and augment the
fleet stationed at Ephesus, and Hannibal to equip a new fleet in
Lycia, Syria, and Phoenicia; while he further collected in Asia Minor
a powerful land army from all regions of his extensive empire. Early
next year (564) the Roman fleet resumed its operations. Gaius Livius
left the Rhodian fleet--which had appeared in good time this year,
numbering 36 sail--to observe that of the enemy in the offing of
Ephesus, and went with the greater portion of the Roman and Pergamene
vessels to the Hellespont in accordance with his instructions, to
pave the way for the passage of the land army by the capture of the
fortresses there. Sestus was already occupied and Abydus reduced to
extremities, when the news of the defeat of the Rhodian fleet recalled
him. The Rhodian admiral Pausistratus, lulled into security by the
representations of his countryman that he wished to desert from
Antiochus, had allowed himself to be surprised in the harbour of
Samos; he himself fell, and all his vessels were destroyed except five
Rhodian and two Coan ships; Samos, Phocaea, and Cyme on hearing the
news went over to Seleucus, who held the chief command by land in
those provinces for his father.

But when the Roman fleet arrived partly from Cane, partly from the
Hellespont, and was after some time joined by twenty new ships of the
Rhodians at Samos, Polyxenidas was once more compelled to shut himself
up in the harbour of Ephesus. As he declined the offered naval
battle, and as, owing to the small numbers of the Roman force, an
attack by land was not to be thought of, nothing remained for the
Roman fleet but to take up its position in like manner at Samos. A
division meanwhile proceeded to Patara on the Lycian coast, partly to
relieve the Rhodians from the very troublesome attacks that were
directed against them from that quarter, partly and chiefly to prevent
the hostile fleet, which Hannibal was expected to bring up, from
entering the Aegean Sea. When the squadron sent against Patara
achieved nothing, the new admiral Lucius Aemilius Regillus, who had
arrived with 20 war-vessels from Rome and had relieved Gaius Livius at
Samos, was so indignant that he proceeded thither with the whole
fleet; his officers with difficulty succeeded, while they were on
their voyage, in making him understand that the primary object was not
the conquest of Patara but the command of the Aegean Sea, and in
inducing him to return to Samos. On the mainland of Asia Minor
Seleucus had in the meanwhile begun the siege of Pergamus, while
Antiochus with his chief army ravaged the Pergamene territory and the
possessions of the Mytilenaeans on the mainland; they hoped to crush
the hated Attalids, before Roman aid appeared. The Roman fleet went
to Elaea and the port of Adramytium to help their ally; but, as the
admiral wanted troops, he accomplished nothing. Pergamus seemed lost;
but the laxity and negligence with which the siege was conducted
allowed Eumenes to throw into the city Achaean auxiliaries under
Diophanes, whose bold and successful sallies compelled the Gallic
mercenaries, whom Antiochus had entrusted with the siege, to raise it.

In the southern waters too the projects of Antiochus were frustrated.
The fleet equipped and led by Hannibal, after having been long
detained by the constant westerly winds, attempted at length to reach
the Aegean; but at the mouth of the Eurymedon, off Aspendus in
Pamphylia, it encountered a Rhodian squadron under Eudamus; and in the
battle, which ensued between the two fleets, the excellence of the
Rhodian ships and naval officers carried the victory over Hannibal's
tactics and his numerical superiority. It was the first naval battle,
and the last battle against Rome, fought by the great Carthaginian.
The victorious Rhodian fleet then took its station at Patara, and
there prevented the intended junction of the two Asiatic fleets. In
the Aegean Sea the Romano-Rhodian fleet at Samos, after being weakened
by detaching the Pergamene ships to the Hellespont to support the land
army which had arrived there, was in its turn attacked by that of
Polyxenidas, who now numbered nine sail more than his opponents. On
December 23 of the uncorrected calendar, according to the corrected
calendar about the end of August, in 564, a battle took place at the
promontory of Myonnesus between Teos and Colophon; the Romans broke
through the line of the enemy, and totally surrounded the left wing,
so that they took or sank 42 ships. An inscription in Saturnian verse
over the temple of the Lares Permarini, which was built in the Campus
Martius in memory of this victory, for many centuries thereafter
proclaimed to the Romans how the fleet of the Asiatics had been
defeated before the eyes of king Antiochus and of all his land army,
and how the Romans thus "settled the mighty strife and subdued the
kings." Thenceforth the enemy's ships no longer ventured to show
themselves on the open sea, and made no further attempt to obstruct
the crossing of the Roman land army.

Expedition To Asia

The conqueror of Zama had been selected at Rome to conduct the war on
the Asiatic continent; he practically exercised the supreme command
for the nominal commander-in-chief, his brother Lucius Scipio, whose
intellect was insignificant, and who had no military capacity. The
reserve hitherto stationed in Lower Italy was destined for Greece, the
army of Glabrio for Asia: when it became known who was to command it,
5000 veterans from the Hannibalic war voluntarily enrolled, to fight
once more under their beloved leader. In the Roman July, but
according to the true time in March, the Scipios arrived at the army
to commence the Asiatic campaign; but they were disagreeably surprised
to find themselves instead involved, in the first instance, in an
endless struggle with the desperate Aetolians. The senate, finding
that Flamininus pushed his boundless consideration for the Hellenes
too far, had left the Aetolians to choose between paying an utterly
exorbitant war contribution and unconditional surrender, and thus had
driven them anew to arms; none could tell when this warfare among
mountains and strongholds would come to an end. Scipio got rid
of the inconvenient obstacle by concerting a six-months' armistice,
and then entered on his march to Asia. As the one fleet of the enemy
was only blockaded in the Aegean Sea, and the other, which was coming
up from the south, might daily arrive there in spite of the squadron
charged to intercept it, it seemed advisable to take the land route
through Macedonia and Thrace and to cross the Hellespont. In that
direction no real obstacles were to be anticipated; for Philip of
Macedonia might be entirely depended on, Prusias king of Bithynia was
in alliance with the Romans, and the Roman fleet could easily
establish itself in the straits. The long and weary march along the
coast of Macedonia and Thrace was accomplished without material loss;
Philip made provision on the one hand for supplying their wants, on
the other for their friendly reception by the Thracian barbarians.
They had lost so much time however, partly with the Aetolians, partly
on the march, that the army only reached the Thracian Chersonese about
the time of the battle of Myonnesus. But the marvellous good fortune
of Scipio now in Asia, as formerly in Spain and Africa, cleared his
path of all difficulties.

Passage Of The Hellespont By The Romans

On the news of the battle at Myonnesus Antiochus so completely lost
his judgment, that in Europe he caused the strongly-garrisoned and
well-provisioned fortress of Lysimachia to be evacuated by the
garrison and by the inhabitants who were faithfully devoted to the
restorer of their city, and withal even forgot to withdraw in like
manner the garrisons or to destroy the rich magazines at Aenus and
Maronea; and on the Asiatic coast he opposed not the slightest
resistance to the landing of the Romans, but on the contrary, while
it was taking place, spent his time at Sardes in upbraiding destiny.
It is scarcely doubtful that, had he but provided for the defence of
Lysimachia down to the no longer distant close of the summer, and
moved forward his great army to the Hellespont, Scipio would have
been compelled to take up winter quarters on the European shore,
in a position far from being, in a military or political point
of view, secure.

While the Romans, after disembarking on the Asiatic shore, paused for
some days to refresh themselves and to await their leader who was
detained behind by religious duties, ambassadors from the great-king
arrived in their camp to negotiate for peace. Antiochus offered half
the expenses of the war, and the cession of his European possessions
as well as of all the Greek cities in Asia Minor that had gone over to
Rome; but Scipio demanded the whole costs of the war and the surrender
of all Asia Minor. The former terms, he declared, might have been
accepted, had the army still been before Lysimachia, or even on the
European side of the Hellespont; but they did not suffice now, when
the steed felt the bit and knew its rider. The attempts of the great-
king to purchase peace from his antagonist after the Oriental manner
by sums of money--he offered the half of his year's revenues!--failed
as they deserved; the proud burgess, in return for the gratuitous
restoration of his son who had fallen a captive, rewarded the great-
king with the friendly advice to make peace on any terms. This was
not in reality necessary: had the king possessed the resolution to
prolong the war and to draw the enemy after him by retreating into the
interior, a favourable issue was still by no means impossible. But
Antiochus, irritated by the presumably intentional arrogance of his
antagonist, and too indolent for any persevering and consistent
warfare, hastened with the utmost eagerness to expose his unwieldy,
but unequal, and undisciplined mass of an army to the shock of the
Roman legions.

Battle Of Magnesia

In the valley of the Hermus, near Magnesia at the foot of Mount
Sipylus not far from Smyrna, the Roman troops fell in with the enemy
late in the autumn of 564. The force of Antiochus numbered close on
80,000 men, of whom 12,000 were cavalry; the Romans--who had along
with them about 5000 Achaeans, Pergamenes, and Macedonian volunteers
--had not nearly half that number, but they were so sure of victory,
that they did not even wait for the recovery of their general who had
remained behind sick at Elaea; Gnaeus Domitius took the command in his
stead. Antiochus, in order to be able even to place his immense mass
of troops, formed two divisions. In the first were placed the mass of
the light troops, the peltasts, bowmen, slingers, the mounted archers
of Mysians, Dahae, and Elymaeans, the Arabs on their dromedaries, and
the scythe-chariots. In the second division the heavy cavalry (the
Cataphractae, a sort of cuirassiers) were stationed on the flanks;
next to these, in the intermediate division, the Gallic and
Cappadocian infantry; and in the very centre the phalanx armed after
the Macedonian fashion, 16,000 strong, the flower of the army, which,
however, had not room in the narrow space and had to be drawn up in
double files 32 deep. In the space between the two divisions were
placed 54 elephants, distributed between the bands of the phalanx and
of the heavy cavalry. The Romans stationed but a few squadrons on the
left wing, where the river gave protection; the mass of the cavalry
and all the light armed were placed on the right, which was led by
Eumenes; the legions stood in the centre. Eumenes began the battle by
despatching his archers and slingers against the scythe-chariots with
orders to shoot at the teams; in a short time not only were these
thrown into disorder, but the camel-riders stationed next to them were
also carried away, and even in the second division the left wing of
heavy cavalry placed behind fell into confusion. Eumenes now threw
himself with all the Roman cavalry, numbering 3000 horse, on the
mercenary infantry, which was placed in the second division between
the phalanx and the left wing of heavy cavalry, and, when these gave
way, the cuirassiers who had already fallen into disorder also fled.
The phalanx, which had just allowed the light troops to pass through
and was preparing to advance against the Roman legions, was hampered
by the attack of the cavalry in flank, and compelled to stand still
and to form front on both sides--a movement which the depth of its
disposition favoured. Had the heavy Asiatic cavalry been at hand, the
battle might have been restored; but the left wing was shattered, and
the right, led by Antiochus in person, had driven before it the little
division of Roman cavalry opposed to it, and had reached the Roman
camp, which was with great difficulty defended from its attack. In
this way the cavalry were at the decisive moment absent from the scene
of action. The Romans were careful not to assail the phalanx with
their legions, but sent against it the archers and slingers, not one
of whose missiles failed to take effect on the densely-crowded mass.
The phalanx nevertheless retired slowly and in good order, till the
elephants stationed in the interstices became frightened and broke the
ranks. Then the whole army dispersed in tumultuous flight; an attempt
to hold the camp failed, and only increased the number of the dead and
the prisoners. The estimate of the loss of Antiochus at 50,000 men
is, considering the infinite confusion, not incredible; the legions of
the Romans had never been engaged, and the victory, which gave them a
third continent, cost them 24 horsemen and 300 foot soldiers. Asia
Minor submitted; including even Ephesus, whence the admiral had
hastily to withdraw his fleet, and Sardes the residence of the court.

Conclusion Of Peace
Expedition Against The Celts Of Asia Minor
Regulation Of The Affairs Of Asia Minor

The king sued for peace and consented to the terms proposed by the
Romans, which, as usual, were just the same as those offered before
the battle and consequently included the cession of Asia Minor. Till
they were ratified, the army remained in Asia Minor at the expense of
the king; which came to cost him not less than 3000 talents (730,000
pounds). Antiochus himself in his careless fashion soon consoled
himself for the loss of half his kingdom; it was in keeping with his
character, that he declared himself grateful to the Romans for saving
him the trouble of governing too large an empire. But with the day of
Magnesia Asia was erased from the list of great states; and never
perhaps did a great power fall so rapidly, so thoroughly, and so
ignominiously as the kingdom of the Seleucidae under this Antiochus
the Great. He himself was soon afterwards (567) slain by the
indignant inhabitants of Elymais at the head of the Persian gulf, on
occasion of pillaging the temple of Bel, with the treasures of which
he had sought to replenish his empty coffers.

The Roman government, after having achieved the victory, had to
arrange the affairs of Asia Minor and of Greece. If the Roman rule
was here to be erected on a firm foundation, it was by no means enough
that Antiochus should have renounced the supremacy in the west of Asia
Minor. The circumstances of the political situation there have been
set forth above.(6) The Greek free cities on the Ionian and Aeolian
coast, as well as the kingdom of Pergamus of a substantially similar
nature, were certainly the natural pillars of the new Roman supreme
power, which here too came forward essentially as protector of the
Hellenes kindred in race. But the dynasts in the interior of Asia
Minor and on the north coast of the Black Sea had hardly yielded for
long any serious obedience to the kings of Asia, and the treaty with
Antiochus alone gave to the Romans no power over the interior. It was
indispensable to draw a certain line within which the Roman influence
was henceforth to exercise control. Here the element of chief
importance was the relation of the Asiatic Hellenes to the Celts who
had been for a century settled there. These had formally apportioned
among them the regions of Asia Minor, and each one of the three
cantons raised its fixed tribute from the territory laid under
contribution. Doubtless the burgesses of Pergamus, under the vigorous
guidance of their presidents who had thereby become hereditary
princes, had rid themselves of the unworthy yoke; and the fair
afterbloom of Hellenic art, which had recently emerged afresh from the
soil, had grown out of these last Hellenic wars sustained by a
national public spirit. But it was a vigorous counterblow, not a
decisive success; again and again the Pergamenes had to defend with
arms their urban peace against the raids of the wild hordes from the
eastern mountains, and the great majority of the other Greek cities
probably remained in their old state of dependence.(7)

If the protectorate of Rome over the Hellenes was to be in Asia more
than a name, an end had to be put to this tributary obligation of
their new clients; and, as the Roman policy at this time declined,
much more even in Asia than on the Graeco-Macedonian peninsula, the
possession of the country on its own behalf and the permanent
occupation therewith connected, there was no course in fact left but
to carry the arms of Rome up to the limit which was to be staked off
for the domain of Rome's power, and effectively to inaugurate the new
supremacy among the inhabitants of Asia Minor generally, and above all
in the Celtic cantons.

This was done by the new Roman commander-in-chief, Gnaeus Manlius
Volso, who relieved Lucius Scipio in Asia Minor. He was subjected
to severe reproach on this score; the men in the senate who were
averse to the new turn of policy failed to see either the aim, or
the pretext, for such a war. There is no warrant for the former
objection, as directed against this movement in particular; it
was on the contrary, after the Roman state had once interfered
in Hellenic affairs as it had done, a necessary consequence of this
policy. Whether it was the right course for Rome to undertake the
protectorate over the Hellenes collectively, may certainly be called
in question; but regarded from the point of view which Flamininus
and the majority led by him had now taken up, the overthrow of the
Galatians was in fact a duty of prudence as well as of honour. Better
founded was the objection that there was not at the time a proper
ground of war against them; for they had not been, strictly speaking,
in alliance with Antiochus, but had only according to their wont
allowed him to levy hired troops in their country. But on the other
side there fell the decisive consideration, that the sending of a
Roman military force to Asia could only be demanded of the Roman
burgesses under circumstances altogether extraordinary, and, if once
such an expedition was necessary, everything told in favour of
carrying it out at once and with the victorious army that was now
stationed in Asia. So, doubtless under the influence of Flamininus
and of those who shared his views in the senate, the campaign into
the interior of Asia Minor was undertaken in the spring of 565. The
consul started from Ephesus, levied contributions from the towns and
princes on the upper Maeander and in Pamphylia without measure, and
then turned northwards against the Celts. Their western canton, the
Tolistoagii, had retired with their belongings to Mount Olympus, and
the middle canton, the Tectosages, to Mount Magaba, in the hope that
they would be able there to defend themselves till the winter should
compel the strangers to withdraw. But the missiles of the Roman
slingers and archers--which so often turned the scale against the
Celts unacquainted with such weapons, almost as in more recent times
firearms have turned the scale against savage tribes--forced the
heights, and the Celts succumbed in a battle, such as had often its
parallels before and after on the Po and on the Seine, but here
appears as singular as the whole phenomenon of this northern race
emerging amidst the Greek and Phrygian nations. The number of the
slain was at both places enormous, and still greater that of the
captives. The survivors escaped over the Halys to the third Celtic
canton of the Trocmi, which the consul did not attack. That river was
the limit at which the leaders of Roman policy at that time had
resolved to halt. Phrygia, Bithynia, and Paphlagonia were to
become dependent on Rome; the regions lying farther to the east
were left to themselves.

The affairs of Asia Minor were regulated partly by the peace with
Antiochus (565), partly by the ordinances of a Roman commission
presided over by the consul Volso. Antiochus had to furnish hostages,
one of whom was his younger son of the same name, and to pay a war-
contribution--proportional in amount to the treasures of Asia--of
15,000 Euboic talents (3,600,000 pounds), a fifth of which was to be
paid at once, and the remainder in twelve yearly instalments. He was
called, moreover, to cede all the lands which he possessed in Europe
and, in Asia Minor, all his possessions and claims of right to the
north of the range of the Taurus and to the west of the mouth of the
Cestrus between Aspendus and Perga in Pamphylia, so that he retained
nothing in Asia Minor but eastern Pamphylia and Cilicia. His
protectorate over its kingdoms and principalities of course ceased.
Asia, or, as the kingdom of the Seleucids was thenceforth usually and
more appropriately named, Syria, lost the right of waging aggressive
wars against the western states, and in the event of a defensive war,
of acquiring territory from them on the conclusion of peace; lost,
moreover, the right of navigating the sea to the west of the mouth of
the Calycadnus in Cilicia with vessels of war, except for the
conveyance of envoys, hostages, or tribute; was further prevented from
keeping more than ten decked vessels in all, except in the case of a
defensive war, from taming war-elephants, and lastly from the levying
of mercenaries in the western states, or receiving political refugees
and deserters from them at court. The war vessels which he possessed
beyond the prescribed number, the elephants, and the political
refugees who had sought shelter with him, he delivered up. By way of
compensation the great-king received the title of a friend of the
Roman commonwealth. The state of Syria was thus by land and sea
completely and for ever dislodged from the west; it is a significant
indication of the feeble and loose organization of the kingdom of the
Seleucidae, that it alone, of all the great states conquered by Rome
never after the first conquest desired a second appeal to the decision
of arms.

Armenia

The two Armenias, hitherto at least nominally Asiatic satrapies,
became transformed, if not exactly in pursuance with the Roman treaty
of peace, yet under its influence into independent kingdoms; and their
holders, Artaxias and Zariadris, became founders of new dynasties.

Cappadocia

Ariarathes, king of Cappadocia, whose land lay beyond the boundary
laid down by the Romans for their protectorate, escaped with a money-
fine of 600 talents (146,000 pounds); which was afterwards, on the
intercession of his son-in-law Eumenes, abated to half that sum.

Bithynia

Prusias, king of Bithynia, retained his territory as it stood, and so
did the Celts; but they were obliged to promise that they would no
longer send armed bands beyond their bounds, and the disgraceful
payments of tribute by the cities of Asia Minor came to an end. The
Asiatic Greeks did not fail to repay the benefit--which was certainly
felt as a general and permanent one--with golden chaplets and
transcendental panegyrics.

The Free Greek Cities

In the western portion of Asia Minor the regulation of the territorial
arrangements was not without difficulty, especially as the dynastic
policy of Eumenes there came into collision with that of the Greek
Hansa. At last an understanding was arrived at to the following
effect. All the Greek cities, which were free and had joined the
Romans on the day of the battle of Magnesia, had their liberties
confirmed, and all of them, excepting those previously tributary to
Eumenes, were relieved from the payment of tribute to the different
dynasts for the future. In this way the towns of Dardanus and Ilium,
whose ancient affinity with the Romans was traced to the times of
Aeneas, became free, along with Cyme, Smyrna, Clazomenae, Erythrae,
Chios, Colophon, Miletus, and other names of old renown. Phocaea
also, which in spite of its capitulation had been plundered by
the soldiers of the Roman fleet--although it did not fall under
the category designated in the treaty--received back by way of
compensation its territory and its freedom. Most of the cities of
the Graeco-Asiatic Hansa acquired additions of territory and other
advantages. Rhodes of course received most consideration; it obtained
Lycia exclusive of Telmissus, and the greater part of Caria south of
the Maeander; besides, Antiochus guaranteed the property and the
claims of the Rhodians within his kingdom, as well as the exemption
from customs-dues which they had hitherto enjoyed.

Extension Of The Kingdom Of Pergamus

All the rest, forming by far the largest share of the spoil, fell to
the Attalids, whose ancient fidelity to Rome, as well as the hardships
endured by Eumenes in the war and his personal merit in connection
with the issue of the decisive battle, were rewarded by Rome as no
king ever rewarded his ally. Eumenes received, in Europe, the
Chersonese with Lysimachia; in Asia--in addition to Mysia which he
already possessed--the provinces of Phrygia on the Hellespont, Lydia
with Ephesus and Sardes, the northern district of Caria as far as the
Maeander with Tralles and Magnesia, Great Phrygia and Lycaonia along
with a portion of Cilicia, the district of Milyas between Phrygia and
Lycia, and, as a port on the southern sea, the Lycian town Telmissus.
There was a dispute afterwards between Eumenes and Antiochus regarding
Pamphylia, as to how far it lay on this side of or beyond the
prescribed boundary, and accordingly belonged to the former or to the
latter. He further acquired the protectorate over, and the right of
receiving tribute from, those Greek cities which did not receive
absolute freedom; but it was stipulated in this case that the cities
should retain their charters, and that the tribute should not be
heightened. Moreover, Antiochus had to bind himself to pay to Eumenes
the 350 talents (85,000 pounds) which he owed to his father Attalus,
and likewise to pay a compensation of 127 talents (31,000 pounds) for
arrears in the supplies of corn. Lastly, Eumenes obtained the royal
forests and the elephants delivered up by Antiochus, but not the ships
of war, which were burnt: the Romans tolerated no naval power by the
side of their own. By these means the kingdom of the Attalids became
in the east of Europe and Asia what Numidia was in Africa, a powerful
state with an absolute constitution dependent on Rome, destined and
able to keep in check both Macedonia and Syria without needing, except
in extraordinary cases, Roman support. With this creation dictated by
policy the Romans had as far as possible combined the liberation of
the Asiatic Greeks, which was dictated by republican and national
sympathy and by vanity. About the affairs of the more remote east
beyond the Taurus and Halys they were firmly resolved to give
themselves no concern. This is clearly shown by the terms of the
peace with Antiochus, and still more decidedly by the peremptory
refusal of the senate to guarantee to the town of Soli in Cilicia the
freedom which the Rhodians requested for it. With equal fidelity they
adhered to the fixed principle of acquiring no direct transmarine
possessions. After the Roman fleet had made an expedition to Crete
and had accomplished the release of the Romans sold thither into
slavery, the fleet and land army left Asia towards the end of the
summer of 566; on which occasion the land army, which again marched
through Thrace, in consequence of the negligence of the general
suffered greatly on the route from the attacks of the barbarians.
The Romans brought nothing home from the east but honour and gold,
both of which were already at this period usually conjoined in the
practical shape assumed by the address of thanks--the golden chaplet.

Settlement Of Greece
Conflicts And Peace With The Aetolians

European Greece also had been agitated by this Asiatic war, and needed
reorganization. The Aetolians, who had not yet learned to reconcile
themselves to their insignificance, had, after the armistice concluded
with Scipio in the spring of 564, rendered intercourse between Greece
and Italy difficult and unsafe by means of their Cephallenian
corsairs; and not only so, but even perhaps while the armistice yet
lasted, they, deceived by false reports as to the state of things in
Asia, had the folly to place Amynander once more on his Athamanian
throne, and to carry on a desultory warfare with Philip in the
districts occupied by him on the borders of Aetolia and Thessaly, in
the course of which Philip suffered several discomfitures. After
this, as a matter of course, Rome replied to their request for peace
by the landing of the consul Marcus Fulvius Nobilior. He arrived
among the legions in the spring of 565, and after fifteen days' siege
gained possession of Ambracia by a capitulation honourable for the
garrison; while simultaneously the Macedonians, Illyrians, Epirots,
Acarnanians, and Achaeans fell upon the Aetolians. There was no such
thing as resistance in the strict sense; after repeated entreaties of
the Aetolians for peace the Romans at length desisted from the war,
and granted conditions which must be termed reasonable when viewed
with reference to such pitiful and malicious opponents. The Aetolians
lost all cities and territories which were in the hands of their
adversaries, more especially Ambracia which afterwards became free and
independent in consequence of an intrigue concocted in Rome against
Marcus Fulvius, and Oenia which was given to the Acarnanians: they
likewise ceded Cephallenia. They lost the right of making peace and
war, and were in that respect dependent on the foreign relations of
Rome. Lastly, they paid a large sum of money. Cephallenia opposed
this treaty on its own account, and only submitted when Marcus Fulvius
landed on the island. In fact, the inhabitants of Same, who feared
that they would be dispossessed from their well-situated town by a
Roman colony, revolted after their first submission and sustained a
four months' siege; the town, however, was finally taken and the whole
inhabitants were sold into slavery.

Macedonia

In this case also Rome adhered to the principle of confining herself
to Italy and the Italian islands. She took no portion of the spoil
for herself, except the two islands of Cephallenia and Zacynthus,
which formed a desirable supplement to the possession of Corcyra and
other naval stations in the Adriatic. The rest of the territorial
gain went to the allies of Rome. But the two most important of these,
Philip and the Achaeans, were by no means content with the share of
the spoil granted to them. Philip felt himself aggrieved, and not
without reason. He might safely say that the chief difficulties
in the last war--difficulties which arose not from the character
of the enemy, but from the distance and the uncertainty of the
communications--had been overcome mainly by his loyal aid. The senate
recognized this by remitting his arrears of tribute and sending back
his hostages; but he did not receive those additions to his territory
which he expected. He got the territory of the Magnetes, with
Demetrias which he had taken from the Aetolians; besides, there
practically remained in his hands the districts of Dolopia and
Athamania and a part of Thessaly, from which also the Aetolians had
been expelled by him. In Thrace the interior remained under
Macedonian protection, but nothing was fixed as to the coast towns
and the islands of Thasos and Lemnos which were -de facto- in Philip's
hands, while the Chersonese was even expressly given to Eumenes; and
it was not difficult to see that Eumenes received possessions in
Europe, simply that he might in case of need keep not only Asia but
Macedonia in check. The exasperation of the proud and in many
respects chivalrous king was natural; it was not chicane, however,
but an unavoidable political necessity that induced the Romans to take
this course. Macedonia suffered for having once been a power of the
first rank, and for having waged war on equal terms with Rome; there
was much better reason in her case than in that of Carthage for
guarding against the revival of her old powerful position.

The Achaeans

It was otherwise with the Achaeans. They had, in the course of the
war with Antiochus, gratified their long-cherished wish to bring the
whole Peloponnesus into their confederacy; for first Sparta, and then,
after the expulsion of the Asiatics from Greece, Elis and Messene had
more or less reluctantly joined it. The Romans had allowed this to
take place, and had even tolerated the intentional disregard of Rome
which marked their proceedings. When Messene declared that she wished
to submit to the Romans but not to enter the confederacy, and the
latter thereupon employed force, Flamininus had not failed to remind
the Achaeans that such separate arrangements as to the disposal of a
part of the spoil were in themselves unjust, and were, in the relation
in which the Achaeans stood to the Romans, more than unseemly; and yet
in his very impolitic complaisance towards the Hellenes he had
substantially done what the Achaeans willed. But the matter did not
end there. The Achaeans, tormented by their dwarfish thirst for
aggrandizement, would not relax their hold on the town of Pleuron in
Aetolia which they had occupied during the war, but on the contrary
made it an involuntary member of their confederacy; they bought
Zacynthus from Amynander the lieutenant of the last possessor, and
would gladly have acquired Aegina also. It was with reluctance that
they gave up the former island to Rome, and they heard with great
displeasure the good advice of Flamininus that they should content
themselves with their Peloponnesus.

The Achaean Patriots

The Achaeans believed it their duty to display the independence of
their state all the more, the less they really had; they talked of the
rights of war, and of the faithful aid of the Achaeans in the wars of
the Romans; they asked the Roman envoys at the Achaean diet why Rome
should concern herself about Messene when Achaia put no questions as
to Capua; and the spirited patriot, who had thus spoken, was applauded
and was sure of votes at the elections. All this would have been very
right and very dignified, had it not been much more ridiculous. There
was a profound justice and a still more profound melancholy in the
fact, that Rome, however earnestly she endeavoured to establish the
freedom and to earn the thanks of the Hellenes, yet gave them nothing
but anarchy and reaped nothing but ingratitude. Undoubtedly very
generous sentiments lay at the bottom of the Hellenic antipathies to
the protecting power, and the personal bravery of some of the men who
took the lead in the movement was unquestionable; but this Achaean
patriotism remained not the less a folly and a genuine historical
caricature. With all that ambition and all that national
susceptibility the whole nation was, from the highest to the lowest,
pervaded by the most thorough sense of impotence. Every one was
constantly listening to learn the sentiments of Rome, the liberal
man no less than the servile; they thanked heaven, when the dreaded
decree was not issued; they were sulky, when the senate gave them to
understand that they would do well to yield voluntarily in order that
they might not need to be compelled; they did what they were obliged
to do, if possible, in a way offensive to the Romans, "to save forms";
they reported, explained, postponed, evaded, and, when all this would
no longer avail, yielded with a patriotic sigh. Their proceedings
might have claimed indulgence at any rate, if not approval, had their
leaders been resolved to fight, and had they preferred the destruction
of the nation to its bondage; but neither Philopoemen nor Lycortas
thought of any such political suicide--they wished, if possible,
to be free, but they wished above all to live. Besides all this, the
dreaded intervention of Rome in the internal affairs of Greece was not
the arbitrary act of the Romans, but was always invoked by the Greeks
themselves, who, like boys, brought down on their own heads the rod
which they feared. The reproach repeated -ad nauseam- by the erudite
rabble in Hellenic and post-Hellenic times--that the Romans had been
at pains to stir up internal discord in Greece--is one of the most
foolish absurdities which philologues dealing in politics have ever
invented. It was not the Romans that carried strife to Greece--which
in truth would have been "carrying owls to Athens"--but the Greeks
that carried their dissensions to Rome.

Quarrels Between Achaeans And Spartans

The Achaeans in particular, who, in their eagerness to round their
territory, wholly failed to see how much it would have been for their
own good that Flamininus had not incorporated the towns of Aetolian
sympathies with their league, acquired in Lacedaemon and Messene a
very hydra of intestine strife. Members of these communities were
incessantly at Rome, entreating and beseeching to be released from the
odious connection; and amongst them, characteristically enough, were
even those who were indebted to the Achaeans for their return to their
native land. The Achaean league was incessantly occupied in the work
of reformation and restoration at Sparta and Messene; the wildest
refugees from these quarters determined the measures of the diet.
Four years after the nominal admission of Sparta to the confederacy
matters came even to open war and to an insanely thorough restoration,
in which all the slaves on whom Nabis had conferred citizenship were
once more sold into slavery, and a colonnade was built from the
proceeds in the Achaean city of Megalopolis; the old state of property
in Sparta was re-established, the of Lycurgus were superseded by
Achaean laws, and the walls were pulled down (566). At last the Roman
senate was summoned by all parties to arbitrate on all these doings
--an annoying task, which was the righteous punishment of the
sentimental policy that the senate had pursued. Far from mixing
itself up too much in these affairs, the senate not only bore the
sarcasms of Achaean candour with exemplary composure, but even
manifested a culpable indifference while the worst outrages were
committed. There was cordial rejoicing in Achaia when, after that
restoration, the news arrived from Rome that the senate had found
fault with it, but had not annulled it. Nothing was done for the
Lacedaemonians by Rome, except that the senate, shocked at the
judicial murder of from sixty to eighty Spartans committed by the
Achaeans, deprived the diet of criminal jurisdiction over the
Spartans--truly a heinous interference with the internal affairs of
an independent state! The Roman statesmen gave themselves as little
concern as possible about this tempest in a nut-shell, as is best
shown by the many complaints regarding the superficial, contradictory,
and obscure decisions of the senate; in fact, how could its decisions
be expected to be clear, when there were four parties from Sparta
simultaneously speaking against each other at its bar? Add to this
the personal impression, which most of these Peloponnesian statesmen
produced in Rome; even Flamininus shook his head, when one of them
showed him on the one day how to perform some dance, and on the next
entertained him with affairs of state. Matters went so far, that the
senate at last lost patience and informed the Peloponnesians that it
would no longer listen to them, and that they might do what they chose
(572). This was natural enough, but it was not right; situated as
the Romans were, they were under a moral and political obligation
earnestly and steadfastly to rectify this melancholy state of things.
Callicrates the Achaean, who went to the senate in 575 to enlighten
it as to the state of matters in the Peloponnesus and to demand a
consistent and calm intervention, may have had somewhat less worth as
a man than his countryman Philopoemen who was the main founder of that
patriotic policy; but he was in the right.

Death Of Hannibal

Thus the protectorate of the Roman community now embraced all the
states from the eastern to the western end of the Mediterranean.
There nowhere existed a state that the Romans would have deemed it
worth while to fear. But there still lived a man to whom Rome
accorded this rare honour--the homeless Carthaginian, who had
raised in arms against Rome first all the west and then all the east,
and whose schemes perhaps had been only frustrated by infamous
aristocratic policy in the former case, and by stupid court policy in
the latter. Antiochus had been obliged to bind himself in the treaty
of peace to deliver up Hannibal; but the latter had escaped, first to
Crete, then to Bithynia,(8) and now lived at the court of Prusias king
of Bithynia, employed in aiding the latter in his wars with Eumenes,
and victorious as ever by sea and by land. It is affirmed that he was
desirous of stirring up Prusias also to make war on Rome; a folly,
which, as it is told, sounds very far from credible. It is more
certain that, while the Roman senate deemed it beneath its dignity to
have the old man hunted out in his last asylum--for the tradition
which inculpates the senate appears to deserve no credit--Flamininus,
whose restless vanity sought after new opportunities for great
achievements, undertook on his own part to deliver Rome from Hannibal
as he had delivered the Greeks from their chains, and, if not to
wield--which was not diplomatic--at any rate to whet and to point,
the dagger against the greatest man of his time. Prusias, the most
pitiful among the pitiful princes of Asia, was delighted to grant the
little favour which the Roman envoy in ambiguous terms requested; and,
when Hannibal saw his house beset by assassins, he took poison. He
had long been prepared to do so, adds a Roman, for he knew the Romans
and the word of kings. The year of his death is uncertain; probably
he died in the latter half of the year 571, at the age of sixty-seven.
When he was born, Rome was contending with doubtful success for the
possession of Sicily; he had lived long enough to see the West wholly
subdued, and to fight his own last battle with the Romans against the
vessels of his native city which had itself become Roman; and he was
constrained at last to remain a mere spectator, while Rome overpowered
the East as the tempest overpowers the ship that has no one at the
helm, and to feel that he alone was the pilot that could have
weathered the storm. There was left to him no further hope to be
disappointed, when he died; but he had honestly, through fifty years
of struggle, kept the oath which he had sworn when a boy.

Death Of Scipio

About the same time, probably in the same year, died also the man whom
the Romans were wont to call his conqueror, Publius Scipio. On him
fortune had lavished all the successes which she denied to his
antagonist--successes which did belong to him, and successes which did
not. He had added to the empire Spain, Africa, and Asia; and Rome,
which he had found merely the first community of Italy, was at his
death mistress of the civilized world. He himself had so many titles
of victory, that some of them were made over to his brother and his
cousin.(9) And yet he too spent his last years in bitter vexation,
and died when little more than fifty years of age in voluntary
banishment, leaving orders to his relatives not to bury his remains
in the city for which he had lived and in which his ancestors reposed.
It is not exactly known what drove him from the city. The charges of
corruption and embezzlement, which were directed against him and still
more against his brother Lucius, were beyond doubt empty calumnies,
which do not sufficiently explain such bitterness of feeling; although
it is characteristic of the man, that instead of simply vindicating
himself by means of his account-books, he tore them in pieces in
presence of the people and of his accusers, and summoned the Romans
to accompany him to the temple of Jupiter and to celebrate the
anniversary of his victory at Zama. The people left the accuser on
the spot, and followed Scipio to the Capitol; but this was the last
glorious day of the illustrious man. His proud spirit, his belief
that he was different from, and better than, other men, his very
decided family-policy, which in the person of his brother Lucius
especially brought forward a clumsy man of straw as a hero, gave
offence to many, and not without reason. While genuine pride protects
the heart, arrogance lays it open to every blow and every sarcasm, and
corrodes even an originally noble-minded spirit. It is throughout,
moreover, the distinguishing characteristic of such natures as that of
Scipio--strange mixtures of genuine gold and glittering tinsel--that
they need the good fortune and the brilliance of youth in order
to exercise their charm, and, when this charm begins to fade, it is
the charmer himself that is most painfully conscious of the change.

Notes For Chapter IX

1. According to a recently discovered decree of the town of Lampsacus
(-Mitth, des arch. Inst, in Athen-, vi. 95) the Lampsacenes after the
defeat of Philip sent envoys to the Roman senate with the request that
the town might be embraced in the treaty concluded between Rome and
(Philip) the king (--opos sumperilephthomen [en tais sunthekais] tais
genomenais Pomaiois pros ton [basilea]--), which the senate, at least
according to the view of the petitioners, granted to them and referred
them, as regarded other matters, to Flamininus and the ten envoys.
From the latter they then obtain in Corinth a guarantee of their
constitution and "letters to the kings." Flamininus also gives to them
similar letters; of their contents we learn nothing more particular,
than that in the decree the embassy is described as successful. But
if the senate and Flamininus had formally and positively guaranteed
the autonomy and democracy of the Lampsacenes, the decree would hardly
dwell so much at length on the courteous answers, which the Roman
commanders, who had been appealed to on the way for their intercession
with the senate, gave to the envoys.

Other remarkable points in this document are the "brotherhood" of the
Lampsacenes and the Romans, certainly going back to the Trojan legend,
and the mediation, invoked by the former with success, of the allies
and friends of Rome, the Massiliots, who were connected with the
Lampsacenes through their common mother-city Phocaea.

2. The definite testimony of Hieronymus, who places the betrothal of
the Syrian princess Cleopatra with Ptolemy Epiphanes in 556, taken in
connection with the hints in Liv. xxxiii. 40 and Appian. Syr. 3, and
with the actual accomplishment of the marriage in 561, puts it beyond
a doubt that the interference of the Romans in the affairs of Egypt
was in this case formally uncalled for.

3. For this we have the testimony of Polybius (xxviii. i), which the
sequel of the history of Judaea completely confirms; Eusebius (p. 117,
-Mai-) is mistaken in making Philometor ruler of Syria. We certainly
find that about 567 farmers of the Syrian taxes made their payments at
Alexandria (Joseph, xii. 4, 7); but this doubtless took place without
detriment to the rights of sovereignty, simply because the dowry of
Cleopatra constituted a charge on those revenues; and from this very
circumstance presumably arose the subsequent dispute.

4. II. VII. Submission Of Lower Italy

5. III. VII. The Romans Maintain A Standing Army In Spain

6. III. VIII. The Celts Of Asia Minor ff.

7. From the decree of Lampsacus mentioned at III. IX. Difficulties
With Rome, it appears pretty certain that the Lampsacenes requested
from the Massiliots not merely intercession at Rome, but also
intercession with the Tolistoagii (so the Celts, elsewhere named
Tolistobogi, are designated in this document and in the Pergamene
inscription, C. J. Gr. 3536,--the oldest monuments which mention
them). Accordingly the Lampsacenes were probably still about the
time of the wax with Philip tributary to this canton (comp. Liv.
xxxviii. 16).

8. The story that he went to Armenia and at the request of king
Artaxias built the town of Artaxata on the Araxes (Strabo, xi. p. 528;
Plutarch, Luc. 31), is certainly a fiction; but it is a striking
circumstance that Hannibal should have become mixed up, almost like
Alexander, with Oriental fables.

9. Africanus, Asiagenus, Hispallus.




Chapter X

The Third Macedonian War

Dissatisfactions Of Philip With Rome

Philip of Macedonia was greatly annoyed by the treatment which he
met with from the Romans after the peace with Antiochus; and the
subsequent course of events was not fitted to appease his wrath.
His neighbours in Greece and Thrace, mostly communities that had once
trembled at the Macedonian name not less than now they trembled at
the Roman, made it their business, as was natural, to retaliate on the
fallen great power for all the injuries which since the times of
Philip the Second they had received at the hands of Macedonia. The
empty arrogance and venal anti-Macedonian patriotism of the Hellenes
of this period found vent at the diets of the different confederacies
and in ceaseless complaints addressed to the Roman senate. Philip had
been allowed by the Romans to retain what he had taken from the
Aetolians; but in Thessaly the confederacy of the Magnetes alone
had formally joined the Aetolians, while those towns which Philip
had wrested from the Aetolians in other two of the Thessalian
confederacies--the Thessalian in its narrower sense, and the
Perrhaebian--were demanded back by their leagues on the ground that
Philip had only liberated these towns, not conquered them. The
Athamahes too believed that they might crave their freedom; and
Eumenes demanded the maritime cities which Antiochus had possessed
in Thrace proper, especially Aenus and Maronea, although in the peace
with Antiochus the Thracian Chersonese alone had been expressly
promised to him. All these complaints and numerous minor ones from
all the neighbours of Philip as to his supporting king Prusias against
Eumenes, as to competition in trade, as to the violation of contracts
and the seizing of cattle, were poured forth at Rome. The king of
Macedonia had to submit to be accused by the sovereign rabble before
the Roman senate, and to accept justice or injustice as the senate
chose; he was compelled to witness judgment constantly going against
him; he had with deep chagrin to withdraw his garrisons from the
Thracian coast and from the Thessalian and Perrhaebian towns, and
courteously to receive the Roman commissioners, who came to see
whether everything required had been carried out in accordance with
instructions. The Romans were not so indignant against Philip as they
had been against Carthage; in fact, they were in many respects even
favourably disposed to the Macedonian ruler; there was not in his case
so reckless a violation of forms as in that of Libya; but the
situation of Macedonia was at bottom substantially the same as that of
Carthage. Philip, however, was by no means the man to submit to this
infliction with Phoenician patience. Passionate as he was, he had
after his defeat been more indignant with the faithless ally than with
the honourable antagonist; and, long accustomed to pursue a policy not
Macedonian but personal, he had seen in the war with Antiochus simply
an excellent opportunity of instantaneously revenging himself on the
ally who had disgracefully deserted and betrayed him. This object he
had attained; but the Romans, who saw very clearly that the Macedonian
was influenced not by friendship for Rome, but by enmity to Antiochus,
and who moreover were by no means in the habit of regulating their
policy by such feelings of liking and disliking, had carefully
abstained from bestowing any material advantages on Philip, and had
preferred to confer their favours on the Attalids. From their first
elevation the Attalids had been at vehement feud with Macedonia, and
were politically and personally the objects of Philip's bitterest
hatred; of all the eastern powers they had contributed most to maim
Macedonia and Syria, and to extend the protectorate of Rome in the
east; and in the last war, when Philip had voluntarily and loyally
embraced the side of Rome, they had been obliged to take the same side
for the sake of their very existence. The Romans had made use of
these Attalids for the purpose of reconstructing in all essential
points the kingdom of Lysimachus--the destruction of which had been
the most important achievement of the Macedonian rulers after
Alexander--and of placing alongside of Macedonia a state, which was
its equal in point of power and was at the same time a client of Rome.
In the special circumstances a wise sovereign, devoted to the
interests of his people, would perhaps have resolved not to resume the
unequal struggle with Rome; but Philip, in whose character the sense
of honour was the most powerful of all noble, and the thirst for
revenge the most potent of all ignoble, motives, was deaf to the voice
of timidity or of resignation, and nourished in the depths of his
heart a determination once more to try the hazard of the game. When
he received the report of fresh invectives, such as were wont to be
launched against Macedonia at the Thessalian diets, he replied with
the line of Theocritus, that his last sun had not yet set.(1)

The Latter Years Of Philip

Philip displayed in the preparation and the concealment of his designs
a calmness, earnestness, and persistency which, had he shown them in
better times, would perhaps have given a different turn to the
destinies of the world. In particular the submissiveness towards
Rome, by which he purchased the time indispensable for his objects,
formed a severe trial for the fierce and haughty man; nevertheless he
courageously endured it, although his subjects and the innocent
occasions of the quarrel, such as the unfortunate Maronea, paid
severely for the suppression of his resentment. It seemed as if war
could not but break out as early as 571; but by Philip's instructions,
his younger son, Demetrius, effected a reconciliation between his
father and Rome, where he had lived some years as a hostage and was a
great favourite. The senate, and particularly Flamininus who managed
Greek affairs, sought to form in Macedonia a Roman party that would be
able to paralyze the exertions of Philip, which of course were not
unknown to the Romans; and had selected as its head, and perhaps as
the future king of Macedonia, the younger prince who was passionately
attached to Rome. With this purpose in view they gave it clearly to
be understood that the senate forgave the father for the sake of the
son; the natural effect of which was, that dissensions arose in the
royal household itself, and that the king's elder son, Perseus, who,
although the offspring of an unequal marriage, was destined by his
father for the succession, sought to ruin his brother as his future
rival. It does not appear that Demetrius was a party to the Roman
intrigues; it was only when he was falsely suspected that he was
forced to become guilty, and even then he intended, apparently,
nothing more than flight to Rome. But Perseus took care that his
father should be duly informed of this design; an intercepted letter
from Flamininus to Demetrius did the rest, and induced the father to
give orders that his son should be put to death. Philip learned, when
it was too late, the intrigues which Perseus had concocted; and death
overtook him, as he was meditating the punishment of the fratricide
and his exclusion from the throne. He died in 575 at Demetrias, in
his fifty-ninth year. He left behind him a shattered kingdom and a
distracted household, and with a broken heart confessed to himself
that all his toils and all his crimes had been in vain.

King Perseus

His son Perseus then entered on the government, without encountering
opposition either in Macedonia or in the Roman senate. He was a man
of stately aspect, expert in all bodily exercises, reared in the camp
and accustomed to command, imperious like his father and unscrupulous
in the choice of his means. Wine and women, which too often led
Philip to forget the duties of government, had no charm for Perseus;
he was as steady and persevering as his father had been fickle and
impulsive. Philip, a king while still a boy, and attended by good
fortune during the first twenty years of his reign, had been spoiled
and ruined by destiny; Perseus ascended the throne in his thirty-first
year, and, as he had while yet a boy borne a part in the unhappy war
with Rome and had grown up under the pressure of humiliation and under
the idea that a revival of the state was at hand, so he inherited
along with the kingdom of his father his troubles, resentments, and
hopes. In fact he entered with the utmost determination on the
continuance of his father's work, and prepared more zealously than
ever for war against Rome; he was stimulated, moreover, by the
reflection, that he was by no means indebted to the goodwill of the
Romans for his wearing the diadem of Macedonia. The proud Macedonian
nation looked with pride upon the prince whom they had been accustomed
to see marching and fighting at the head of their youth; his
countrymen, and many Hellenes of every variety of lineage, conceived
that in him they had found the right general for the impending war of
liberation. But he was not what he seemed. He wanted Philip's
geniality and Philip's elasticity--those truly royal qualities, which
success obscured and tarnished, but which under the purifying power of
adversity recovered their lustre. Philip was self-indulgent, and
allowed things to take their course; but, when there was occasion, he
found within himself the vigour necessary for rapid and earnest
action. Perseus devised comprehensive and subtle plans, and
prosecuted them with unwearied perseverance; but, when the moment
arrived for action and his plans and preparations confronted him in
living reality, he was frightened at his own work. As is the wont of
narrow minds, the means became to him the end; he heaped up treasures
on treasures for war with the Romans, and, when the Romans were in the
land, he was unable to part with his golden pieces. It is a
significant indication of character that after defeat the father first
hastened to destroy the papers in his cabinet that might compromise
him, whereas the son took his treasure-chests and embarked. In
ordinary times he might have made an average king, as good as or
better than many another; but he was not adapted for the conduct of
an enterprise, which was from the first a hopeless one unless some
extraordinary man should become the soul of the movement.

Resources Of Macedonia

The power of Macedonia was far from inconsiderable. The devotion of
the land to the house of the Antigonids was unimpaired; in this one
respect the national feeling was not paralyzed by the dissensions
of political parties. A monarchical constitution has the great
advantage, that every change of sovereign supersedes old resentments
and quarrels and introduces a new era of other men and fresh hopes.
The king had judiciously availed himself of this, and had begun his
reign with a general amnesty, with the recall of fugitive bankrupts,
and with the remission of arrears of taxes. The hateful severity of
the father thus not only yielded benefit, but conciliated affection,
to the son. Twenty-six years of peace had partly of themselves filled
up the blanks in the Macedonian population, partly given opportunity
to the government to take serious steps towards rectifying this which
was really the weak point of the land. Philip urged the Macedonians
to marry and raise up children; he occupied the coast towns, whose
inhabitants he carried into the interior, with Thracian colonists of
trusty valour and fidelity. He formed a barrier on the north to check
once for all the desolating incursions of the Dardani, by converting
the space intervening between the Macedonian frontier and the
barbarian territory into a desert, and by founding new towns in the
northern provinces. In short he took step by step the same course in
Macedonia, as Augustus afterwards took when he laid afresh the
foundations of the Roman empire. The army was numerous--30,000 men
without reckoning contingents and hired troops--and the younger men
were well exercised in the constant border warfare with the Thracian
barbarians. It is strange that Philip did not try, like Hannibal, to
organize his army after the Roman fashion; but we can understand it
when we recollect the value which the Macedonians set upon their
phalanx, often conquered, but still withal believed to be invincible.
Through the new sources of revenue which Philip had created in mines,
customs, and tenths, and through the flourishing state of agriculture
and commerce, he had succeeded in replenishing his treasury,
granaries, and arsenals. When the war began, there was in the
Macedonian treasury money enough to pay the existing army and 10,000
hired troops for ten years, and there were in the public magazines
stores of grain for as long a period (18,000,000 medimni or 27,000,000
bushels), and arms for an army of three times the strength of the
existing one. In fact, Macedonia had become a very different state
from what it was when surprised by the outbreak of the second war with
Rome. The power of the kingdom was in all respects at least doubled:
with a power in every point of view far inferior Hannibal had been
able to shake Rome to its foundations.

Attempted Coalition Against Rome

Its external relations were not in so favourable a position. The
nature of the case required that Macedonia should now take up the
plans of Hannibal and Antiochus, and should try to place herself at
the head of a coalition of all oppressed states against the supremacy
of Rome; and certainly threads of intrigue ramified in all directions
from the court of Pydna. But their success was slight. It was indeed
asserted that the allegiance of the Italians was wavering; but neither
friend nor foe could fail to see that an immediate resumption of the
Samnite wars was not at all probable. The nocturnal conferences
likewise between Macedonian deputies and the Carthaginian senate,
which Massinissa denounced at Rome, could occasion no alarm to serious
and sagacious men, even if they were not, as is very possible, an
utter fiction. The Macedonian court sought to attach the kings of
Syria and Bithynia to its interests by intermarriages; but nothing
further came of it, except that the immortal simplicity of the
diplomacy which seeks to gain political ends by matrimonial means once
more exposed itself to derision. Eumenes, whom it would have been
ridiculous to attempt to gain, the agents of Perseus would have gladly
put out of the way: he was to have been murdered at Delphi on his way
homeward from Rome, where he had been active against Macedonia; but
the pretty project miscarried.

Bastarnae
Genthius

Of greater moment were the efforts made to stir up the northern
barbarians and the Hellenes to rebellion against Rome. Philip had
conceived the project of crushing the old enemies of Macedonia,
the Dardani in what is now Servia, by means of another still more
barbarous horde of Germanic descent brought from the left bank of the
Danube, the Bastarnae, and of then marching in person with these and
with the whole avalanche of peoples thus set in motion by the land-
route to Italy and invading Lombardy, the Alpine passes leading to
which he had already sent spies to reconnoitre--a grand project,
worthy of Hannibal, and doubtless immediately suggested by Hannibal's
passage of the Alps. It is more than probable that this gave occasion
to the founding of the Roman fortress of Aquileia,(2) which was formed
towards the end of the reign of Philip (573), and did not harmonize
with the system followed elsewhere by the Romans in the establishment
of fortresses in Italy. The plan, however, was thwarted by the
desperate resistance of the Dardani and of the adjoining tribes
concerned; the Bastarnae were obliged to retreat, and the whole horde
were drowned in returning home by the giving way of the ice on the
Danube. The king now sought at least to extend his clientship among
the chieftains of the Illyrian land, the modern Dalmatia and northern
Albania. One of these who faithfully adhered to Rome, Arthetaurus,
perished, not without the cognizance of Perseus, by the hand of an
assassin. The most considerable of the whole, Genthius the son and
heir of Pleuratus, was, like his father, nominally in alliance with
Rome; but the ambassadors of Issa, a Greek town on one of the
Dalmatian islands, informed the senate, that Perseus had a secret
understanding with the young, weak, and drunken prince, and that
the envoys of Genthius served as spies for Perseus in Rome.

Cotys

In the regions on the east of Macedonia towards the lower Danube the
most powerful of the Thracian chieftains, the brave and sagacious
Cotys, prince of the Odrysians and ruler of all eastern Thrace from
the Macedonian frontier on the Hebrus (Maritza) down to the fringe of
coast covered with Greek towns, was in the closest alliance with
Perseus. Of the other minor chiefs who in that quarter took part
with Rome, one, Abrupolis prince of the Sagaei, was, in consequence
of a predatory expedition directed against Amphipolis on the Strymon,
defeated by Perseus and driven out of the country. From these regions
Philip had drawn numerous colonists, and mercenaries were to be had
there at any time and in any number.

Greek National Party

Among the unhappy nation of the Hellenes Philip and Perseus had, long
before declaring war against Rome carried on a lively double system of
proselytizing, attempting to gain over to the side of Macedonia on the
one hand the national, and on the other--if we may be permitted the
expression--the communistic, party. As a matter of course, the whole
national party among the Asiatic as well as the European Greeks was
now at heart Macedonian; not on account of isolated unrighteous acts
on the part of the Roman deliverers, but because the restoration of
Hellenic nationality by a foreign power involved a contradiction in
terms, and now, when it was in truth too late, every one perceived
that the most detestable form of Macedonian rule was less fraught with
evil for Greece than a free constitution springing from the noblest
intentions of honourable foreigners. That the most able and upright
men throughout Greece should be opposed to Rome was to be expected;
the venal aristocracy alone was favourable to the Romans, and here
and there an isolated man of worth, who, unlike the great majority,
was under no delusion as to the circumstances and the future of the
nation. This was most painfully felt by Eumenes of Pergamus, the main
upholder of that extraneous freedom among the Greeks. In vain he
treated the cities subject to him with every sort of consideration;
in vain he sued for the favour of the communities and diets by fair-
sounding words and still better-sounding gold; he had to learn that
his presents were declined, and that all the statues that had formerly
been erected to him were broken in pieces and the honorary tablets
were melted down, in accordance with a decree of the diet,
simultaneously throughout the Peloponnesus (584). The name of Perseus
was on all lips; even the states that formerly were most decidedly
anti-Macedonian, such as the Achaeans, deliberated as to the
cancelling of the laws directed against Macedonia; Byzantium,
although situated within the kingdom of Pergamus, sought and obtained
protection and a garrison against the Thracians not from Eumenes, but
from Perseus, and in like manner Lampsacus on the Hellespont joined
the Macedonian: the powerful and prudent Rhodians escorted the Syrian
bride of king Perseus from Antioch with their whole magnificent war-
fleet--for the Syrian war-vessels were not allowed to appear in the
Aegean--and returned home highly honoured and furnished with rich
presents, more especially with wood for shipbuilding; commissioners
from the Asiatic cities, and consequently subjects of Eumenes, held
secret conferences with Macedonian deputies in Samothrace. That
sending of the Rhodian war-fleet had at least the aspect of a
demonstration; and such, certainly, was the object of king Perseus,
when he exhibited himself and all his army before the eyes of the
Hellenes under pretext of performing a religious ceremony at Delphi.
That the king should appeal to the support of this national
partisanship in the impending war, was only natural. But it was wrong
in him to take advantage of the fearful economic disorganization of
Greece for the purpose of attaching to Macedonia all those who desired
a revolution in matters of property and of debt. It is difficult to
form any adequate idea of the unparalleled extent to which the
commonwealths as well as individuals in European Greece--excepting the
Peloponnesus, which was in a somewhat better position in this respect
--were involved in debt. Instances occurred of one city attacking and
pillaging another merely to get money--the Athenians, for example,
thus attacked Oropus--and among the Aetolians, Perrhaebians, and
Thessalians formal battles took place between those that had property
and those that had none. Under such circumstances the worst outrages
were perpetrated as a matter of course; among the Aetolians, for
instance, a general amnesty was proclaimed and a new public peace was
made up solely for the purpose of entrapping and putting to death a
number of emigrants. The Romans attempted to mediate; but their
envoys returned without success, and announced that both parties were
equally bad and that their animosities were not to be restrained. In
this case there was, in fact, no longer other help than the officer
and the executioner; sentimental Hellenism began to be as repulsive as
from the first it had been ridiculous. Yet king Perseus sought to
gain the support of this party, if it deserve to be called such--of
people who had nothing, and least of all an honourable name, to lose
--and not only issued edicts in favour of Macedonian bankrupts, but
also caused placards to be put up at Larisa, Delphi, and Delos, which
summoned all Greeks that were exiled on account of political or other
offences or on account of their debts to come to Macedonia and to
look for full restitution of their former honours and estates. As may
easily be supposed, they came; the social revolution smouldering
throughout northern Greece now broke out into open flame, and the
national-social party there sent to Perseus for help. If Hellenic
nationality was to be saved only by such means, the question might
well be asked, with all respect for Sophocles and Phidias, whether
the object was worth the cost.

Rupture With Perseus

The senate saw that it had delayed too long already, and that it was
time to put an end to such proceedings. The expulsion of the Thracian
chieftain Abrupolis who was in alliance with the Romans, and the
alliances of Macedonia with the Byzantines, Aetolians, and part of the
Boeotian cities, were equally violations of the peace of 557, and
sufficed for the official war-manifesto: the real ground of war was
that Macedonia was seeking to convert her formal sovereignty into a
real one, and to supplant Rome in the protectorate of the Hellenes.
As early as 581 the Roman envoys at the Achaean diet stated pretty
plainly, that an alliance with Perseus was equivalent to casting off
the alliance of Rome. In 582 king Eumenes came in person to Rome with
a long list of grievances and laid open to the senate the whole
situation of affairs; upon which the senate unexpectedly in a secret
sitting resolved on an immediate declaration of war, and furnished the
landing-places in Epirus with garrisons. For the sake of form an
embassy was sent to Macedonia, but its message was of such a nature
that Perseus, perceiving that he could not recede, replied that he
was ready to conclude with Rome a new alliance on really equal terms,
but that he looked upon the treaty of 557 as cancelled; and he bade
the envoys leave the kingdom within three days. Thus war was
practically declared.

This was in the autumn of 582. Perseus, had he wished, might have
occupied all Greece and brought the Macedonian party everywhere to the
helm, and he might perhaps have crushed the Roman division of 5000 men
stationed under Gnaeus Sicinius at Apollonia and have disputed the
landing of the Romans. But the king, who already began to tremble at
the serious aspect of affairs, entered into discussions with his
guest-friend the consular Quintus Marcius Philippus, as to the
frivolousness of the Roman declaration of war, and allowed himself to
be thereby induced to postpone the attack and once more to make an
effort for peace with Rome: to which the senate, as might have been
expected, only replied by the dismissal of all Macedonians from Italy
and the embarkation of the legions. Senators of the older school no
doubt censured the "new wisdom" of their colleague, and his un-Roman
artifice; but the object was gained and the winter passed away without
any movement on the part of Perseus. The Romati diplomatists made all
the more zealous use of the interval to deprive Perseus of any support
in Greece. They were sure of the Achaeans. Even the patriotic party
among them--who had neither agreed with those social movements, nor
had soared higher than the longing after a prudent neutrality--had no
idea of throwing themselves into the arms of Perseus; and, besides,
the opposition party there had now been brought by Roman influence to
the helm, and attached itself absolutely to Rome. The Aetolian league
had doubtless asked aid from Perseus in its internal troubles; but
the new strategus, Lyciscus, chosen under the eyes of the Roman
ambassadors, was more of a Roman partisan than the Romans themselves.
Among the Thessalians also the Roman party retained the ascendency.
Even the Boeotians, old partisans as they were of Macedonia, and sunk
in the utmost financial disorder, had not in their collective capacity
declared openly for Perseus; nevertheless at least three of their
cities, Thisbae, Haliartus and Coronea, had of their own accord
entered into engagements with him. When on the complaint of the Roman
envoy the government of the Boeotian confederacy communicated to him
the position of things, he declared that it would best appear which
cities adhered to Rome, and which did not, if they would severally
pronounce their decision in his presence; and thereupon the Boeotian
confederacy fell at once to pieces. It is not true that the great
structure of Epaminondas was destroyed by the Romans; it actually
collapsed before they touched it, and thus indeed became the prelude
to the dissolution of the other still more firmly consolidated leagues
of Greek cities.(3) With the forces of the Boeotian towns friendly
to Rome the Roman envoy Publius Lentulus laid siege to Haliartus,
even before the Roman fleet appeared in the Aegean.

Preparations For War

Chalcis was occupied with Achaean, and the province of Orestis with
Epirot, forces: the fortresses of the Dassaretae and Illyrians on the
west frontier of Macedonia were occupied by the troops of Gnaeus
Sicinius; and as soon as the navigation was resumed, Larisa received a
garrison of 2000 men. Perseus during all this remained inactive and
had not a foot's breadth of land beyond his own territory, when in the
spring, or according to the official calendar in June, of 583, the
Roman legions landed on the west coast. It is doubtful whether
Perseus would have found allies of any mark, even had he shown as much
energy as he displayed remissness; but, as circumstances stood, he
remained of course completely isolated, and those prolonged attempts
at proselytism led, for the time at least, to no result. Carthage,
Genthius of Illyria, Rhodes and the free cities of Asia Minor, and
even Byzantium hitherto so very friendly with Perseus, offered to the
Romans vessels of war; which these, however, declined. Eumenes put
his land army and his ships on a war footing. Ariarathes king of
Cappadocia sent hostages, unsolicited, to Rome. The brother-in-law of
Perseus, Prusias II. king of Bithynia, remained neutral. No one
stirred in all Greece. Antiochus IV. king of Syria, designated
in court style "the god, the brilliant bringer of victory," to
distinguish him from his father the "Great," bestirred himself, but
only to wrest the Syrian coast during this war from the entirely
impotent Egypt.

Beginning Of The War

But, though Perseus stood almost alone, he was no contemptible
antagonist. His army numbered 43,000 men; of these 21,000 were
phalangites, and 4000 Macedonian and Thracian cavalry; the rest were
chiefly mercenaries. The whole force of the Romans in Greece amounted
to between 30,000 and 40,000 Italian troops, besides more than 10,000
men belonging to Numidian, Ligurian, Greek, Cretan, and especially
Pergamene contingents. To these was added the fleet, which numbered
only 40 decked vessels, as there was no fleet of the enemy to oppose
it--Perseus, who had been prohibited from building ships of war by the
treaty with Rome, was only now erecting docks at Thessalonica--but it
had on board 10,000 troops, as it was destined chiefly to co-operate
in sieges. The fleet was commanded by Gaius Lucretius, the land army
by the consul Publius Licinius Crassus.

The Romans Invade Thessaly

The consul left a strong division in Illyria to harass Macedonia
from the west, while with the main force he started, as usual, from
Apollonia for Thessaly. Perseus did not think of disturbing their
arduous march, but contented himself with advancing into Perrhaebia
and occupying the nearest fortresses. He awaited the enemy at Ossa,
and not far from Larisa the first conflict took place between the
cavalry and light troops on both sides. The Romans were decidedly
beaten. Cotys with the Thracian horse had defeated and broken the
Italian, and Perseus with his Macedonian horse the Greek, cavalry; the
Romans had 2000 foot and 200 horsemen killed, and 600 horsemen made
prisoners, and had to deem themselves fortunate in being allowed to
cross the Peneius without hindrance. Perseus employed the victory to
ask peace on the same terms which Philip had obtained: he was ready
even to pay the same sum. The Romans refused his request: they never
concluded peace after a defeat, and in this case the conclusion
of peace would certainly have involved as a consequence the loss
of Greece.

Their Lax And Unsuccessful Management Of The War

The wretched Roman commander, however, knew not how or where to
attack; the army marched to and fro in Thessaly, without accomplishing
anything of importance. Perseus might have assumed the offensive; he
saw that the Romans were badly led and dilatory; the news had passed
like wildfire through Greece, that the Greek army had been brilliantly
victorious in the first engagement; a second victory might lead to a
general rising of the patriot party, and, by commencing a guerilla
warfare, might produce incalculable results. But Perseus, while a
good soldier, was not a general like his father; he had made his
preparations for a defensive war, and, when things took a different
turn, he felt himself as it were paralyzed. He made an unimportant
success, which the Romans obtained in a second cavalry combai near
Phalanna, a pretext for reverting, as is the habit of narrow and
obstinate minds, to his first plan and evacuating Thessaly.
This was of course equivalent to renouncing all idea of a Hellenic
insurrection: what might have been attained by a different course was
shown by the fact that, notwithstanding what had occurred, the Epirots
changed sides. Thenceforth nothing serious was accomplished on either
side. Perseus subdued king Genthius, chastised the Dardani, and, by
means of Cotys, expelled from Thrace the Thracians friendly to Rome
and the Pergamene troops. On the other hand the western Roman army
took some Illyrian towns, and the consul busied himself in clearing
Thessaly of the Macedonian garrisons and making sure of the turbulent
Aetolians and Acarnanians by occupying Ambracia. But the heroic
courage of the Romans was most severely felt by the unfortunate
Boeotian towns which took part with Perseus; the inhabitants as well
of Thisbae, which surrendered without resistance as soon as the Roman


 


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