doing so, he might be attacked. Antiochus might perhaps avoid war by a frank acceptance of the existing position. But to this the heir of Seleucus could not reconcile himself. Greece had been a century before the prize for which the rival Macedonian houses fought; for a moment Seleucus Nicator had thought himself its master. And now the house of Seleucus saw its old rivals reduced to impotence, but Rome coming as an interloper among their family quarrels to take the coveted possession to herself. She could hardly do so unchallenged. At Rome itself the report which the ten commissioners delivered that spring (195) represented the prospects of peace as gloomy. They averred their belief that had not Antiochus been turned aside the preceding year by the report of Ptolemy's death, Greece would have been already ablaze. They called attention to the combustible material which existed in that country, where the most powerful of the Greek states, the Aetolian League, whose mountains the Macedonian conquerors had never been able to subdue, and whose alliance in the late war had been of substantial service to Rome, was profoundly dissatisfied with the terms of peace and in a dangerous frame of irritation.1 About the same time that the ten commissioners were delivering their pessimistic report in Rome, the ambassadors of Antiochus those presumably whom he had sent the previous autumn from Ephesus-had audience of Flamininus at Corinth. A great conference, to which all the Greek states in alliance with Rome sent delegates, had just been held in that city, under the presidency of the Roman proconsul, and had served to make plain the angry mood of the Aetolians. Their suspicions were roused by the Roman garrisons which continued to occupy Demetrias, Chalcis and the Corinthian citadel-the "fetters of Greece a measure which was in fact inspired by the apprehension of an attack on Greece by Antiochus.3 To the ambassadors Flamininus declared himself unable to say anything without the ten commissioners, and referred them to the Senate in Rome.1 Instead of proceeding 1 Liv. xxxiii. 44, 5 f.; 49, 8. 3 Liv. xxxiii. 31, 6. 2 Polyb. xviii. 11, 5. 4 Ibid. xxxiv. 25, 2. thither the ambassadors seem to have returned to report the answer of Flamininus to the King.1 A year passed, and the summer of 1942 was employed by Antiochus in completing the conquest of Thrace. He broke the yoke of the barbarians from the neck of the Greek cities. Byzantium had suffered heavily from the "eternal and grievous war" with the Thracian tribes, and had been accustomed to see its richest harvests carried off under its eyes. It now found itself the object of the King's especial solicitude. He courted with lavish favours the good-will of a city in whose hands it was to open and shut the gate of the Black Sea. The Gallic tribes settled during the last century in the country he also tried to win by his largess, in order to enrol under his standards more of these large-limbed men of the North. The following winter (194-193) he was once more in Ephesus.* It was in 194 that the evacuation of Greece was actually carried out by the Romans. After another conference of the Greek states, held at Corinth in the spring of that year under Titus Flamininus, the Roman garrisons had been withdrawn from Demetrias, Chalcis and the Corinthian akra. The philHellenic enthusiasts at Rome could now exult in the spectacle of a Greece really and absolutely free. Macedonian domination was a thing of the past; the days of Pericles would be restored. But Rome had yet to learn, as other nations with an imperial destiny have had to learn, that the process of expansion cannot be checked by creating a vacuum, that in such cases the alternatives for a conquering state are to assume the dominion itself, or to see it assumed by others. It was, in fact, an absurdity to declare it worth a war to prevent any foreign power establishing itself in Greece and at the same time to withdraw from the defence of its coasts. If, indeed, the Romans in retiring had left a united nation, devoted to Rome, and resolved to act together in excluding any third power from Greek soil, it might have been a practical, if not a magnanimous, 1 A fresh embassy is sent by Antiochus to Rome after the second campaign in Thrace. 2 Or, if the date given by Livy for Hannibal's coming to Ephesus be right, the summer of 195. If the earlier date be right for Hannibal's coming, we are uninformed as to where Antiochus spent 195. * ἀιδίῳ καὶ δυσχερεῖ πολέμῳ Polyb. iv. 45, 5. 4 App. Syr. 6. policy for Rome to maintain Greece as an independent "bufferstate on its western frontier. But, as a matter of fact, the jealousies and hatreds between the various Greek states were as violent as ever; two of the most powerful, Aetolia and Sparta, were anything but well disposed towards Rome, the one her late ally smarting under a grievance, the other an enemy with whom she had just concluded an uneasy truce. So far from helping to defend the frontier, the Aetolians were ready to welcome Antiochus, or their old foe the king of Macedonia, as a deliverer. When, thanks to the hesitation of Antiochus and the prudence of Philip, the departure of the Roman legions was followed by no immediate breach of tranquillity, the Aetolians set to work of their own accord to stir up trouble. Their envoys incited Philip and Nabis, the tyrant of Sparta, to break the peace; Dicaearchus, the brother of the Aetolian strategos, Thoas, was sent to Antiochus (end of 194).1 The common object of all these envoys was to bring about a great anti-Roman alliance of the houses of Antigonus and Seleucus, Aetolia and Nabis. Dicaearchus endeavoured to impress upon Antiochus in what fierce earnest the Aetolians would act by enlarging upon their grievances; he magnified the Aetolian power; it was they who held the western door of Greece; they to whom Rome owed her late triumphs; and he paraded the great alliance before the dazzled eyes of the King, glozing the fact that it existed so far only in the heated brain of Greek intriguers.2 The influence of Hannibal at the Seleucid court was, of course, thrown into the scale of war. He saw a prospect of matching himself once more with the hated oppressor of his race, of renewing that struggle which had so nearly ended fatally for Rome. It is said that he began to urge upon Antiochus a plan of campaign, of which the outlines were that he should take himself 100 ships of war, 10,000 foot and 1000 horse, and with these effect a landing in Italy, while the King should simultaneously invade Greece, and Carthage should rise in rebellion. No telling blow-on this he insisted-could be dealt Rome so long as her base was secure; only when the adversary wrested to himself those 1 Liv. xxxv. 12, 2 Ibid. 12, 15 f. resources which Italy yielded her could Rome be really straitened. And who was there that knew the ground in Italy so well as the framer of this plan ?1 In pursuance, at any rate, of some such schemes, the secret agent of Hannibal, a Tyrian named Ariston, was dispatched from Ephesus to Carthage in the course of 194 to concert plans with the popular faction, whose leader Hannibal had been.2 But Antiochus had not yet brought his resolution or preparations to the point of an open rupture-not even when the suggestions of Hannibal were reinforced by the envoy of the Aetolians. In the winter of 193-1923 Antiochus was in Syria, and the marriage which he had announced in 196 to the Roman envoys at Lysimachia between his daughter Cleopatra and the young Ptolemy Epiphanes now took place. Antiochus escorted Cleopatra in person to the frontier. At Raphia they were met by the bridegroom, and the nuptial ceremonies were performed. Antiochus returned to Antioch, and Egypt knew the first of the famous Cleopatras. That name henceforward supersedes Arsinoë and Berenice as the characteristic name of a Ptolemaïc queen.* 4 Spring (192) was hardly yet come when Antiochus was on the move to Ephesus. He went this time by land across the Taurus, accompanied by the younger Antiochus, who, however, was sent back almost immediately to Syria to hold, as before, the place of king in that country. The elder Antiochus, with a view of consolidating his authority in the trans-Tauric country and securing the communications between Syria and Ionia, turned upon the immemorial foes of Asiatic empires, the Pisidians.5 In the spring of the preceding year (193) ambassadors from Antiochus had been given a hearing in Rome. They 1 Liv. xxxiv. 60; App. Syr. 7; Just. xxxi. 3, 5 f.; Nepos, Hannib. 8. 5 Liv. xxxv. 13, 4 f. See Appendix D. 6 This was probably the embassy mentioned by Appian (Syr. 6) as having been dispatched from Ephesus after the second campaign of Antiochus in Thrace (i.e. latter part of 194 according to Niese's reckoning). Livy (xxxiv. 57, 6) mentions Menippus and Hegesianax as the chiefs of the embassy; to those Appian adds Lysias. As Appian confuses similar occasions readily, Lysias very possibly were among the embassies from all parts of Greece and the East who thronged to Rome for the moment when Titus Flamininus should submit to the Senate for ratification the measures he had framed in concert with the ten commissioners. The Senate did not feel itself possessed of enough special knowledge, as a body, to engage the King's envoys in debate, and therefore deputed Flamininus and the original ten commissioners to hear them separately and to speak for Rome. It was ostensibly the object of the embassy to obtain a renewal of those friendly relations between the Seleucid court and the Republic which had been broken since the conference of Lysimachia, when Antiochus had repelled the Roman demands for the evacuation of Thrace and the liberation of the Greek cities of Asia. The real object of the mission was to ascertain how far Rome was prepared to go in sustaining these conditions. From the answer which Flamininus returned to the representations of Menippus it was plain that whilst only a sentimental interest was felt in the Asiatic cities, Rome was seriously concerned in dislodging Antiochus from Thrace. Flamininus intimated that if Antiochus evacuated Thrace, the other question would be suffered to drop. "The King contends Asia; then let him that we have no right of interference in keep his hands off Europe." It was not difficult for the King's envoy to point out the logical flaw in such an argument; the cases were not parallel; Antiochus had claims to Thrace, based both upon hereditary right and the sacrifices he had made to recover it from barbarism; the Romans had no such claims in Asia. Only it happens that such questions are not determined by formal logic. The newly-acquired ascendancy of Rome in Greece was threatened by the occupation of Thrace; in the face of this fact the legal reasonings of the Seleucid envoys missed the point. So long as the Seleucid court was obstinate on the Thracian question, Rome found it convenient to champion the liberty of the Asiatic cities. The orators of the Senate paraded this attitude to the assembled ambassadors from Greece and the East, contrasting the liberating policy of Rome with the tyrannic aggressions of the Seleucid King. appears here only because he was coupled with Hegesianax in the embassy of two years before. |