Perseus.
Philip of Macedon died, B.C. 179, in the fifty-ninth year of his age and the forty-second of his reign, and his son Perseus succeeded to his throne at the age of thirty-one. Macedonia had been humbled rather than weakened by the Romans, and after eighteen years of peace, had renewed her resources. This kingdom chafed against the foreign power of Rome, as did the whole Hellenic world. A profound sentiment of discontent existed in both Asia and Europe. Perseus made alliances with the discontented cities—with the Byzantines, the Ætolians, and the Bœotians. But so prudently did he conduct his intrigues, that it was not till the seventh year of his reign that Rome declared war against him.
Makes war on Rome. Battle of Pydna.
The resources of Macedonia were still considerable. The army consisted of thirty thousand men, without considering mercenaries or contingents, and great quantities of military stores had been collected in the magazines. And Perseus himself was a monarch of great ability, trained and disciplined to war. He collected an army of forty-three thousand men, while the whole Roman force in Greece was scarcely more. Crassus conducted the Roman army, and in the first engagement at Ossa, was decidedly beaten. Perseus then sought peace, but the Romans never made peace after a defeat. The war continued, but the military result of two campaigns was null, while the political result was a disgrace to the Romans. The third campaign, conducted by Quintus Marcius Philippus, was equally undecisive, and had Perseus been willing to part with his money, he could have obtained the aid of twenty thousand Celts who would have given much trouble. At last, in the fourth year of the war, the Romans sent to Macedonia Lucius Æmilius Paulus, son of the consul that fell at Cannæ—an excellent general and incorruptible; a man sixty years of age, cultivated in Hellenic literature and art. Soon after his arrival at the camp at Heracleum, he brought about the battle of [pg 462] Pydna, which settled the fate of Macedonia. The overthrow of the Macedonians was fearful. Twenty thousand were killed and eleven thousand made prisoners. All Macedonia submitted in two days, and the king fled with his gold, some six thousand talents he had hoarded, to Samothrace, accompanied with only a few followers. The Persian monarch might have presented a more effectual resistance to Alexander had he scattered his treasures among the mercenary Greeks. So Perseus could have prolonged his contest had he employed the Celts. When a man is struggling desperately for his life or his crown, his treasures are of secondary importance. Perseus was soon after taken prisoner by the Romans, with all his treasures, and died a few years later at Alba.
Its decisive results. Supremacy of the Romans in the civilized world.
“Thus perished the empire of Alexander, which had subdued and Hellenized the East, one hundred and forty-four years from his death.” The kingdom of Macedonia was stricken out of the list of States, and the whole land was disarmed, and the fortress of Demetrias was razed. Illyria was treated in a similar way, and became a Roman province. All the Hellenic States were reduced to dependence upon Rome. Pergamus was humiliated. Rhodes was deprived of all possessions on the main land, although the Rhodians had not offended. Egypt voluntarily submitted to the Roman protectorate, and the whole empire of Alexander the Great fell to the Roman commonwealth. The universal empire of the Romans dates from the battle of Pydna—“the last battle in which a civilized State confronted Rome in the field on the footing of equality as a great power.” All subsequent struggles were with barbarians. Mithridates, of Pontus, made subsequently a desperate effort to rid the Oriental world of the dominion of Rome, but the battle of Pydna marks the real supremacy of the Romans in the civilized world. Mommsen asserts that it is a superficial view which sees in the wars of the Romans with tribes, cities, and kings, an insatiable longing after dominion and riches, and that it was [pg 463] only a desire to secure the complete sovereignty of Italy, unmolested by enemies, which prompted, to this period, the Roman wars—that the Romans earnestly opposed the introduction of Africa, Greece, and Asia into the pale of protectorship, till circumstances compelled the extension of that pale—that, in fact, they were driven to all their great wars, with the exception of that concerning Sicily, even those with Hannibal and Antiochus, either by direct aggression or disturbance of settled political relations. “The policy of Rome was that of a narrow-minded but very able deliberate assembly, which had far too little power of grand combination, and far too much instinctive desire for the preservation of its own commonwealth, to devise projects in the spirit of a Cæsar or a Napoleon.” Nor did the ancient world know of a balance of power among nations, and hence every nation strove to subdue its neighbors, or render them powerless, like the Grecian States. Had the Greeks combined for a great political unity, they might have defied even the Roman power, or had they been willing to see the growth of equal States without envy, like the modern nations of Europe, without destructive conflicts, the States of Sparta, Corinth, and Athens might have grown simultaneously, and united, would have been too powerful to be subdued. But they did not understand the balance of power, and they were inflamed with rival animosities, and thus destroyed each other.