WHEN Philip V of Macedon made an alliance with Hannibal against Rome (214) he hoped that all Greece would unite behind him to slay the growing young giant of the west. But rumors were about that he was planning, if Carthage won, to conquer all Greece with Carthage’s aid. As a result, the Aetolian League signed a pact to help Rome against Philip, and the clever Senate, before dispatching Scipio to Africa, used Philip’s discouragement by persuading him to a separate peace (205). The victory of Zama had hardly been won when the Senate, which never forgave an injury, began to plot revenge upon Macedon. Rome, the Senate felt, could never be secure with so strong a power at her back across a narrow sea. When the Senate moved for war, the Assembly demurred, and a tribune accused the patricians of seeking to divert attention from domestic ills.1 The opponents of war were easily silenced by charges of cowardice and lack of patriotism; and in 200 B.C.. T. Quinctius Flamininus sailed against Macedon.
He was a youth of thirty, one of that liberal Hellenizing circle which was gathering about the Scipios in Rome. After some careful maneuvering he met Philip at Cynoscephalae and overwhelmed him (197). Then he surprised all the Mediterranean nations, and perhaps Rome, by restoring the chastened Philip to a bankrupt and weakened throne, and offering freedom to all Greece. The imperialists in the Senate protested; but for a moment the liberals predominated, and in 196 the herald of Flamininus announced to a vast assemblage at the Isthmian games that Greece was to be free from Rome, from Macedon, from tribute, even from garrisons. So great a cheer rose from the multitude, says Plutarch, that crows flying over the stadium fell dead.2 When a cynical world questioned the sincerity of the Roman general he answered by withdrawing his army to Italy. It was a bright page in the history of war.
But one war always invites another. The Aetolian League resented Rome’s emancipation of Greek cities formerly subject to the League, and appealed to Antiochus III, the Seleucid king, to reliberate liberated Greece. Inflated with some easy victories in the East, Antiochus thought of extending his power over all western Asia. Pergamum, fearing him, called to Rome for help. The Senate sent Scipio Africanus and his brother Lucius with the first Roman army to touch Asiatic soil; the hostile forces met at Magnesia (189), and Rome’s victory inaugurated her conquest of the Hellenistic East. The Romans marched north, drove back into Galatia (Anatolia) the Gauls who had threatened Pergamum, and earned the gratitude of all Ionian Greeks.
The Greeks of Europe were not so pleased. Roman armies had spared Greek soil, but they now encompassed Greece on east and west. Rome had freed the Greeks, but on condition that both war and class war should end. Freedom without war was a novel and irksome life for the city-states that made up Hellas; the upper classes yearned to play power politics against neighboring cities, and the poor complained that Rome everywhere buttressed the rich against the poor. In 171 Perseus, son and successor of Philip V as King of Macedon, having arranged an alliance with Seleucus IV and Rhodes, called upon Greece to rise with him against Rome. Three years later Lucius Aemilius Paulus, son of the consul who had fallen at Cannae, defeated Perseus at Pydna, razed seventy Macedonian towns, and led Perseus captive to grace a magnificent triumph at Rome.I Rhodes was punished by the emancipation of her tributary cities in Asia, and by the establishment of a competitive port at Delos. A thousand Greek leaders, including the historian Polybius, were taken as hostages to Italy, where, in sixteen years of exile, 700 of them died.
During the next decade the relations between Greece and Rome moved even nearer to open enmity. The rival cities, factions, and classes of Hellas appealed to the Senate for support, and gave cause for interferences that made Greece actually subject though nominally free. The partisans of the Scipios in the Senate were overruled by realists who felt that there would be no lasting peace or order in Greece until it was completely under Roman rule. In 146 the cities of the Achaean League, while Rome was in conflict with Carthage and Spain, announced a war of liberation. Leaders of the poor seized control of the movement, freed and armed the slaves, declared a moratorium on debts, promised a redistribution of land, and added revolution to war. When the Romans under Mummius entered Greece they found a divided people and easily overcame the undisciplined Greek troops. Mummius burned Corinth, slew its males, sold its women and children into bondage, and carried nearly all its movable wealth and art to Rome. Greece and Macedon were made into a Roman province under a Roman governor; only Athens and Sparta were allowed to remain under their own laws. Greece disappeared from political history for two thousand years.