In Greece bitterness over the Romans’ actions in the aftermath of the Third Macedonian War lingered. Of the 1,000 hostages which the Romans had deported from Achaia, some 700 had died by 150 when the Romans finally consented to set the survivors free (Paus. VII 10). Since the Romans exercised no direct government over Greece, local disputes continued to crop up. The most troublesome involved Sparta’s desire to leave the Achaian League which controlled the entire Peloponnese. The two sides repeatedly came to blows, and Roman commissions which kept coming to Greece could not settle the dispute (Paus. VII 9).
In Macedonia, meanwhile, war broke out in 150. An adventurer named Andriscus, who called himself Philip and claimed to be a son of Perseus, united the four Macedonian republics in a rebellion against Rome. An army under Q. Caecilius Metellus destroyed him easily enough in 148 in the Fourth Macedonian War (Liv. Per. 49-50; Paus. VII 13), and shortly thereafter the Romans annexed Macedonia as a province, although the details remain murky.
In 147 the Senate ordered the Achaians to release Sparta, Corinth, and a few other towns from the League. The decision enraged the Achaians, and in the next year their new strategos Critolaus pursued a violently anti-Roman policy (Paus. VII 14). In 146 the Achaian League declared war on Rome (Pol. XXXVIII 7-11). Metellus, still in Macedonia, quickly marched into Greece and defeated Critolaus at Thermopylae (Paus. VII 15). A little later L. Mummius arrived in Greece with additional troops (Paus. VII 16); the Achaians meanwhile were desperately raising another army with mass manumissions of slaves (Pol. XXXIX 7). The final battle took place near Corinth, where the Achaians went down in utter defeat (Paus. VII 16). To set an example, the Romans razed the city of Corinth to the ground, killed the men, and sold the women and children into slavery. They dissolved the Leagues (albeit temporarily) into their constituent cities (Paus. VII 16). These they allowed to be “free” - but by now everyone knew what Roman freedom meant, and when the Romans later on allowed the Leagues to reconstitute themselves, the Leagues, knowing better now, remained quiet (Paus. VII 16). The Romans did not, it seems, officially organize Greece as a province (under the name Achaia - Paus. l. c.) until after the Battle of Actium in 31 BC (cf. Liv. Per. 134), but it was now clear to all who ruled. As Agelaus had supposedly predicted at Naupactus in 217, the Greeks no longer had the power to declare war and to make peace, or to resolve their own disputes among themselves (see chap. 24).
From now on all parties accepted that the Romans would settle disputes and that in the event of disagreement the best one could do was to try again when circumstances among the Romans changed. Thus after the Achaian War, Mummius awarded the Dentheliatis, a disputed border region between Sparta and Messenia, to Messenia. The Lacedaemonians accepted this, but a century later, when Julius Caesar dominated at Rome they tried again and received a favorable verdict. After Caesar’s assassination during the period of the ascendancy of M. Antonius (i. e., Mark Antony, Cleopatra VII’s lover) in the East, the Messenians in their turn raised the question again, only Antony confirmed Caesar’s decision (Tacitus, Ann. IV 43). At no point did either Messenians or Lacedaemonians resort to arms - the time for that had passed. With the destruction of Corinth in 146 BC, the political independence of the Greeks had come to an end.
In Asia Minor the Romans had been content, in effect, to let the kings of Pergamum, Bithynia, Pontus, and Cappadocia fight among themselves (see chap. 24). A rare effective intervention came when the Seleucid king Demetrius I Soter deposed Ariarathes III of Cappadocia in favor of the latter’s brother Olophernes: here Rome undid Demetrius I’s settlement immediately and - with the Roman tendency to weaken local government - made both brothers joint rulers (App. Syr. 47 - cf. Sallust, Jug. 16). In 133, however, Attalus III, the King of Pergamum died without heirs and bequeathed his kingdom to Rome. Other Hellenistic rulers would later emulate this measure though it remains unclear what reaction from Rome Attalus III expected - Roman acceptance of the bequest was by no means certain as the Romans would later demonstrate in the case of Cyrene (see below). Yet at Rome in 133 the tribune Ti. Sempro-nius Gracchus was attempting to carry out a redistribution of land and needed cash for his program. Accordingly he engineered the acceptance of Attalus III’s bequest (Plut. Tib. 14). After a brief insurrection at Pergamum M’. Aquilius oversaw its organization as the Province of Asia (Just. XXXVI 4).
World History
