While these testing campaigns were continuing Rome had also become involved in the east. In 215 Hannibal had made an alliance with Philip V of Macedon. Rome had sent a small fleet to Greece but primarily used the Aetolian League (see p. 339), traditionally hostile to Macedonia, to contain him. Peace had been made in 205 but many senators felt that Philip had not been sufficiently punished and so they responded when in 201 the king of Pergamum, Attalus, supported by Rhodes, came to Rome to appeal for help against the intrusions of Philip. There may also have been some who saw an attack on Macedonia as a chance for plunder to refill Rome’s treasury, and the senate persuaded the reluctant assemblies that despite the exhaustion of the state war was justified. The official pretext for war was that Rome was protecting the liberty of the Greeks against Macedonian expansionism. Rome was aware that the Greek city-states were much more sophisticated than the tribal peoples she was subduing elsewhere and seems to have had no interest in the annexation of Greek territory. (See as an introduction Erich Gruen, ‘Rome and the Greek World, in Harriet Flower (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic, Cambridge and New York, 2004.)
The war was entrusted to Titus Quinctius Flamininus, a commander who had proved so effective against Hannibal that he had won a consulship for 198 when still only 30. He managed to get his command in Greece renewed for a further three years (the consuls who succeeded him were both needed in Italy and there was a trend now towards giving longer commands and greater responsibilities to individual generals), and while he was there he was in a strong position to define Roman policy on his own initiative. After destroying Philip’s army at Cynoscephalae in Thessaly in 197, he used the Isthmian Games of 196 (over which he was asked to preside) to proclaim that Rome intended to leave Greece, including the coastal cities of Asia Minor, free and independent. The Greeks greeted the news with joy. It was, in fact, a shrewd move. Each city was now dependent on Rome for its protection and from this time onwards the inter-city embassies that were so much part of the Hellenistic world were directed at Rome. Flamininus himself was loaded with honours from grateful cities.
Rome now had direct links with the Greek world and regarded Greece as a sphere in which her interest, even though informal, was exclusive. It was the Seleu-cids who found this out to their cost. The Aetolian League had hoped to resume control over a number of cities surrendered by Philip and had sought the support of the Seleucid king Antiochus III. Antiochus had set himself the task of reviving the Seleucid kingdom and in 196 had crossed into Thrace, an area once held by the Seleucids. Roman suspicions had already been aroused and they had warned him not to come further. When, in 192, Antiochus agreed to support the Aetolian
League and crossed with a small army to the Greek mainland, the Romans reacted vigorously. In 191 at Thermopylae he was easily defeated by a Roman army twice his size. The following year he was defeated again, in Asia at Magnesia, near the old Lydian capital at Sardis.
Roman troops had now reached Asia, but while some opportunities were taken for plunder (a campaign was launched against the Galatians, who had given help to Antiochus), Rome still showed no interest in annexing territory. Again her main aim was to perpetuate her control by building up dependent allies, though her sphere of influence was now the whole Aegean area. Antiochus was excluded from the Aegean by depriving him of all his possessions along the Aegean coastline and restricting him to the east of the Taurus river. His navy was also disbanded. The cities of the coast were given their independence while the remaining territory was shared between Rhodes and the kingdom of Pergamum, which now became the largest state in Asia Minor.
So matters rested in comparative peace for twenty years, until a son of Philip of Macedon, Perseus, came to power on his father’s death in 179. Perseus made tentative moves to rebuild a Macedonian relationship with Greece. While Rome was happy to leave the small Greek cities to their own devices, she could not afford to allow a rival focus of power to emerge in Greece. In 172 the Romans shipped over an army and forced Perseus into a war he had never desired. He held out successfully for some time but once again Roman manpower and resilience triumphed. In 168 Perseus’ army was destroyed at the Battle of Pydna on the Macedonian coast.
It was in the settlement after Pydna that Roman power was first imposed effectively in Greece (the Romans even dedicated a monument to their victory at Delphi), and in that sense 168 marks a turning point. Macedonia was split up into four republics, each ruling itself through elected representatives and allowed only limited contact with the others. At least this was some kind of survival, with the Romans stopping short of creating directly administered provinces. Others were treated more harshly. The Molossians of Epirus who had aided Perseus found their cities plundered and, according to one source, 150,000 of their inhabitants sold into slavery. Rhodes, which had done nothing to support the Romans in the war, was undermined by the creation by the Romans of a free port of Delos, which took much of its trade and developed into one of the major slave-trading markets of the ancient world, capable of handling 10,000 transactions a day. The Seleucid king Antiochus IV, who had invaded Egypt in 168 without Roman approval, suddenly found himself confronted on the spot by a Roman envoy, Gaius Popillius Laenas, who drew a circle around the astonished monarch and forbade him to leave it until he had agreed to make peace and withdraw. He acquiesced. Other kings allowed even greater humiliation to take place. Polybius talks of Prusias II of Bithynia, who visited Rome in 166 and threw himself before the senators addressing them as ‘“Saviour Gods!”; thus making it impossible’, Polybius goes on, ‘for anyone after him to surpass him in unmanliness, effeminacy and servility’, while Eumenes, king of Pergamum, who had been a staunch ally of Rome until 168, was humiliated in his own country by a Roman commissioner who encouraged his subjects to publicly vilify him.
The final subjection of Greece was not far off. In 150 a revolt in Macedonia was met with the reduction of the kingdom of Philip II and Alexander into a Roman province (148). The Achaean League had also aroused increasing irritation in Rome. The League had been involved in a dispute with Sparta, whose independence had been upheld by Rome. Rome also insisted that other cities, including Corinth and Argos, be allowed to leave the League if they wished. The League realized its survival was at stake and it must make its final stand. Its hopes were quickly dashed by Lucius Mummius, consul for 146, who defeated the League’s forces. In an echo of Alexander’s treatment of Thebes 200 years earlier, the senate singled out one of its cities, Corinth, for centuries one of the major trading ports of the Aegean, for such complete destruction that the site remained deserted for a hundred years.
The same fate had already overtaken Carthage. The loss of the city’s territorial empire in 202 had not meant the end of its prosperity and its trade routes still stretched as far as the Red and the Black Sea. Evidence from excavations shows that the city may even have grown during the second century, and a population of 200,000-300,000 has been guessed at. Militarily, however, the city was weak, its men totally inexperienced in war after the peace enforced on the city by Rome fifty years before. When a Carthaginian army was mustered against the neighbouring king Massinissa of Numidia in 150 it was annihilated.
The very fact that Carthage had raised an army was now to be used by Rome as an excuse for declaring war, even though Rome’s consistent support of Massinissa against Carthage had contributed to the Carthaginian attack. There was no strategic need for such a war and it may simply have been that Roman hard-liners in the senate refused to countenance the continued existence of an old and still prosperous rival. After three years of siege, Carthage was finally stormed, appropriately by Scipio Aemilianus, the grandson by adoption of Scipio Africanus. The city was razed to the ground, at least 50,000 of its inhabitants sold into slavery, and its land ritually cursed, as well as contaminated with salt, to stifle any rebirth. For many Romans, however, this was a less than honourable war, and even Scipio was said to have had a premonition that the terrible fate of Carthage would one day be followed by a similar one for Rome. Carthage’s territory became the new province of Africa.
Within a few years, therefore, the balance of power in the Mediterranean had been transformed with both the Carthaginian empire and the Hellenistic monarchs humbled. The Romans held provinciae in Spain, Africa, and Greece. In 133 the last king of Pergamum bequeathed his kingdom to Rome and it became the province of Asia. The sacking of two great trading cities of the ancient world confirmed that Rome’s imperialism had moved into a new, more arrogant, phase.
Polybius and The Universal History
One contemporary of the events, the Greek historian Polybius (c.200-after 118 Bc), was so impressed by the triumph of Rome that he set out in his Universal History, the only example of Hellenistic history to survive, to explain how it had happened.
Polybius was a talented young aristocrat from Megalopolis, one of the members of the Achaean League. He had become a leader of the League’s cavalry by 170, but after Pydna he was one of a thousand nobles from the League taken as hostages to Italy. Rather than brood in exile, as many of his fellow hostages did in remote cities of Etruria, Polybius managed to get to Rome and become friendly with Scipio Aemilianus (later the victor over Carthage and Numantia). He soon had access to the leading families of the city while also managing to keep his contacts with Greece.
Polybius was also a man of action. During his exile he travelled widely, across Italy, Africa, Spain, Gaul, and through the Straits of Gibraltar. He was with Scipio at the destruction of Carthage. He had been allowed to return to Greece in 150, and after the humiliation of the Achaean League by Rome in 146 he was appointed to mastermind the settlement of their affairs that followed. He did this so successfully that he was honoured in many of the League’s cities and an inscription in Megalopolis pays tribute to the way he quenched the anger of the Romans. He was extraordinarily well placed to write the history of the Roman conquest of Greece, though he extended his history to take in the two Punic Wars as well.
It was the seriousness with which Polybius took his task that marks him out as one of the greater Greek historians. He had no doubt that the Romans deserved to defeat the Greeks, though one must remember that his sources were heavily biased towards his aristocratic Roman friends. The highly disciplined Roman armies, their resolute spirit, and, above all, the city’s balanced constitution gave them an overwhelming superiority. In that sense, the Roman victories were comprehensible. However, at the same time, Polybius recognized that chance, Tyche, always played a role in the unfolding of the events, and he sought to establish, through a careful analysis of events, how far chance had contributed to the Roman victory. Polybius was scrupulous in his search for the truth and appears to have been an avid interviewer of those who had witnessed the events of the past.
World History
