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195-194 B.C.

Achaean League, and only yielded to a powerful display of Roman arms; and, though his banditti were dispersed and Sparta captured, both the city and Nabis himself were left intact, the conquerors only requiring the cession of his foreign possessions and his adherence to the usual stipulations touching the right of waging war and of forming foreign alliances.

Peace was thus, outwardly at any rate, established among the petty Greek states. Flamininus acted with great fairness and patience throughout, and strove as far as possible to mete out justice to the claims of each Greek state. He showed an especially wise and tolerant moderation in his punishment of the rebellious Boeotians, who, in their eagerness to attach themselves again to Macedonia, did not refrain from putting to death isolated bands of Roman soldiers.

In 194 B.C. Flamininus, after holding a conference of all the Greek states at Corinth, withdrew his troops from every fortress and departed homeward, thus giving the lie to the Aetolian calumny that Rome had inherited from Philip "the fetters" of Greece.

We cannot doubt the nobleness and sincerity of the Roman endeavor to set Greece free; the reason of its failure was the complete demoralization of the Greek nation. In truth, the necessities of the case demanded the permanent presence of a superior power, not the pernicious boon of a fictitious freedom; the feeble policy of sentiment, with all its apparent humanity, was far more cruel than the sternest occupation. History has a Nemesis for every sin —for an impotent craving after freedom, as well as for an injudicious generosity. The Nemesis in this case was the war with Antiochus of Asia.

Chapter XV

WAR WITH ANTIOCHUS AND THE FINAL CONQUEST OF THE EAST. 192-168 B.C.

NTIOCHUS had long fixed his eyes upon the Syrian coast,

which had been wrested from Asia by the Egyptians, and had seized the occasion of Philopator's death, in 205 B.C., to concert measures with Philip for the partition of the kingdom of the Ptolemies. But he lacked the foresight to make common cause with Philip in repelling Roman interference, and had taken advantage of the second Macedonian war to secure Egypt for himself. At first he attacked the Egyptian possessions in Cilicia, Syria, and Palestine, and by a victory gained in 198 B.C., near the sources of the Jordan, he became absolute master of the two latter countries. He then proceeded with a strong fleet to occupy all the districts on the south and west coasts of Asia Minor, which had formerly belonged to Egypt, but had virtually fallen under the dominion of Philip. Rome had, however, bidden Philip to withdraw from these possessions, and to leave them free and untouched, and now Antiochus came forward to take Philip's place as the oppressor of the Greek cities and free kingdoms in those lands.

Already, in 198 B.C., Attalus of Pergamus had applied to Rome for aid against Antiochus; and in the following year the Rhodians openly protected the Carian cities of Halicarnassus, Caunus, Myndus, and the island of Samos against the attacks of the Great King. Other cities, such as Smyrna and Lampsacus, took heart to resist Antiochus, and they, one and all, called upon Rome to give effect to her promise that they should be free, and to prove that neither Macedonian tyrant nor Asian despot should be suffered to endanger Greek life and liberty. Rome, however, was slow to answer such a call; nor did she resort to other measures than those of diplomacy, when Antiochus, in 196 B.C., landed in Europe and invaded the Thracian Chersonese, and took active measures to convert Thrace into a dependent satrapy on the plea that he was merely reasserting his claim to the land conquered by his ancestor Seleucus.

192-190 B.C.

The delay of the Romans in forcibly opposing Antiochus, who plainly showed his designs not only on Asia Minor, but also on Greece, may be ascribed partly to their weariness of war, but chiefly to the vain wish of Flamininus to pose as the liberator of Greece and the extinguisher of the war in the East. Flamininus was thus induced to withdraw all the Roman garrisons from Greece in 194 B.C., and to blind the Romans to the fact that the embers of war still smoldered, soon to be rekindled into a flame by his own vanity and by the senate's culpable negligence.

In the year previous to the withdrawal of the Roman troops from Greece, Antiochus had accorded an honorable reception to the exiled Hannibal, which in itself was tantamount to a declaration of war; but Flamininus refused to regard it as such, and contented himself with addressing mere verbal remonstrances and demands to Antiochus. The latter did not fail to profit by the respite unexpectedly granted him by the Roman evacuation of Greece. He made alliances with all the states of Asia Minor and Greece that would listen to his proposals, and events soon reached such a pass that a rupture between the two nations became inevitable. After some fruitless discussion at Ephesus between the envoys of Rome and the Great King, war was declared in 192 B.C.

The attitude of Philip of Macedon, of Eumenes, of the Achaean League, Rhodes, and Egypt, who all sided with Rome, showed at once how futile would be the attempts of Antiochus in Europe. Notwithstanding this he crossed the Aegean and anticipated his enemies by occupying Euboea and part of Thessaly. On the approach of the Roman army he retired to Thermopylae, but, being defeated there, was forced to withdraw from Europe altogether. Some time was now occupied by the Romans in a naval warfare for the purpose of clearing the Aegean Sea of the enemy's ships and opening the way to an invasion of Asia. The conduct of the war on land had been intrusted to Scipio Africanus, conqueror of Zama. In 190 B.C. he crossed the Hellespont and met the army of the Great King near Magnesia, at the foot of Mount Sipylus, not far from Smyrna. The cumbrous masses of the Asiatic troops proved their own destruction: the flower of their army, drawn up in Macedonian phalanx, was foiled in its efforts to reach the Roman legions by the confusion of their own light troops, and by the absence of the heavy cavalry under Antiochus, which had rushed off in pursuit of a small Roman squadron. At last the phalanx was

190-187 B.C.

broken up by its own elephants, and the whole army scattered in

utter rout.

The losses of Antiochus have been estimated at fifty thousand, those of the Romans at three hundred foot soldiers and twenty-four horsemen. Peace was concluded on the terms proposed by Scipio before the battle, by which Antiochus was condemned to pay all the costs of the war and to surrender the whole of Asia Minor. Antiochus himself was soon after, in 187 B.C., slain, while plundering a temple of Bel in Elymais, at the head of the Persian Gulf. 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.

The final settlement of Asia was determined by a commission presided over by Volso. The sum to be paid by Antiochus was fixed at fifteen thousand Euboic talents ($18,000,000); all possession in Europe, and all the country in Asia Minor west of the river Halys and the mountain chain of the Taurus, were now ceded by the Great King; lastly, certain restrictions were imposed upon his rights of waging war and of navigating the sea. Even beyond the boundaries of the Roman protectorate, Ariarathes, king of Cappadocia, though mulcted in a light fine for his alliance with Antiochus, retained his kingdom and was practically independent of Antiochus; moreover, the two satrapies of Armenia now rose under Roman influence into independent kingdoms. Prusias, king of Bithynia, was allowed to keep his possessions intact; nor were the Celts ousted from their territory, though bound to refrain in the future from sending out armed bands and levying blackmail from the Asiatic Greeks. The Greek cities, which were free and had joined the Romans, were confirmed in their ancient freedom and exempted from tribute to the various dynasts of Asia Minor; this exemption was not, however, extended to those which paid tribute to Eumenes. Rhodes obtained Lycia and the greater part of Caria as a reward for her zealous assistance. But the largest share of the spoil fell to the king of Pergamus. Eumenes received the Thracian Chersonese and the greater part of Asia Minor west of the Halys, the protectorate over and right of receiving tribute from such Greek cities as were not made absolutely free, and a contribution of nearly five hundred talents from Antiochus. Thus he was nobly recompensed for his sufferings and

188-183 B.C.

devotion to the Roman cause, and thus the kingdom of the Attalids became in Asia what Numidia was in Africa-a powerful state dependent on Rome, capable of acting as a check upon Macedonia and Syria without needing Roman support. Rome thus adhered strictly to its policy of acquiring no transmarine possessions, and in 188 B.C. the fleet and land army evacuated Asia.

The war with Antiochus had naturally agitated the ever quarrelsome and excitable states in European Greece. The Aetolians, who had tried to rekindle the flame of war by attacks on Philip of Macedon, were soon compelled to utter submission by the combined arms of the Roman consul, Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, and the Macedonians and Achaeans. The possessions taken from the Aetolians were divided among the allies of Rome, who reserved for herself nothing but the two islands of Cephallenia and Zacynthus. Neither Philip nor the Achaeans were satisfied with their share of the spoil. The last-named were foolish enough to attempt to display, their independence of Rome, and with a quasi-patriotic zeal to desire an extension of their power; though indignant at the advice of Flamininus to content themselves with the Peloponnese, and at the refusal of Rome to enlarge the territory of their league, they proved their incapacity to govern what they already possessed by constant quarrels with Sparta and Messene. The senate, after vain attempts to arbitrate, at last grew weary of these petty disputes, and left the Achaeans and the Greek states generally to settle such trifles among themselves.

After the defeat of Antiochus, Hannibal had taken refuge with Prusias, the king of Bithynia, and had successfully aided him in his wars with Eumenes. Now he, the only being on earth who was still a source of terror to Rome, was hunted down by his old enemies in a way unworthy of so great a nation, and compelled to take poison, dying in 183 B.C., at the age of sixty-seven.

About the same time died his great rival and lucky victor, Publius Scipio. The favorite of fortune, he had added to the empire of Rome, Spain, Africa, and Asia; and yet he, too, like Hannibal, spent his last years in bitter trouble and disappointment, a voluntary exile from the city of his fathers, for which he had spent his life, but in which he had forbidden his own remains to be buried. We do not exactly know what drove him from Rome. The charges of peculation brought against him and his brother Lucius were no doubt empty calumnies, but his arrogance and proud belief that he

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