Rome Enters the Hellenistic World

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The old man scratched at his bald spot. In point of fact, calling it a bald spot was more than a bit generous. What had once been an exception to the rule of a hair-covered head was now the rule itself, as all traces of hair follicles had long since disappeared into the mists of time. Quintus Fulvius Flaccus would have preferred a hat on a sunny day like this, but one of Rome's patres conscripti.

The venerable body of senators simply couldn't be seen in some farmer's battered straw headgear. There were Greeks about, and they had to be shown what proper Romans looked like. The folds of his toga, a plain, unadorned white cloth, hung heavily around his stooped body. He remembered his pride all those years ago, when he had first stood for election and worn the brilliant white toga candida.

It had been 10 years since his last election, and he hadn't been a youngster even then. Now, by his reckoning, he was nearly 80 years old. That made Quintus one of the oldest men left in the Senate. an esteemed ex-consul and praetor, one of the few left who had fought in the first long war with Carthage. Victor over the fearsome Boii in his first consulship, master of horse to a dictator of the Republic, conqueror of Capua in his second consulship, and now...

at least in his opinion, an elder statesman. Quintus lacked neither pride nor self-regard. The young pups had all gathered over by the rostra, the speaker's platform in the forum, decorated with the prows of warships taken in battle more than a century ago. He spat at the side of the youngsters, hawking a goblet of phlegm under the worn paving stones. Fools, he thought, not a single one of them older than fifty.

though he had to admit that young Publius Cornelius Scipio had assuaged some of his doubts for this victory over Hannibal the past year. Some of his doubts, but not all. The gaggle of younger senators and officials were deep in conversation.

The news the Greek envoys brought from the east alarmed them. That much was obvious to Quintus, even with his failing eyesight and hearing. The news alarmed him, too, a strange moment of concordance with men he normally thought dangerously unprepared for the heady work of guiding the Respublika.

Quintus knew little about the kings of the Greeks, this Philip and Antiochus, and cared even less what happened in Egypt or Syria. But he knew threats to his precious city. He remembered his father talking about old Pyrrhus of Epirus. The stories of what Macedonian conquerors had done in the distant east had circulated this far west and lost nothing in the telling. He himself had put villages, towns, and even cities to the sword.

He still remembered the assembled grandees of Capua amid the ruins of their once-proud city, some of them bound for the slave market, others for the headsmen. That would never happen to Rome, Quintus promised himself. even if it meant making common cause with the likes of Scipio and his fools. The youngster's surrounding crowd of sons, cousins, clients, hangers-on, and nearly invisible slaves parted as Quintus approached.

He walked without the aid of a stick or an attendant, as upright as his years would allow, his own followers trailing at a respectful distance. His progress was slow and painful. That might have bothered him a decade ago. He would have thought it a sign of weakness, that his time was past. No longer. Now, he treated his infirmity as a sign of all he had accomplished, all Rome had accomplished during his long life. When he called out to Scipio, his voice was still strong and clear.

honed by a lifetime of speeches in the Curiae and on this very platform. Quintus looked at Scipio, his face beardless in the Greek style, his eyes keen and calculating, and wondered what the future held for Rome. He himself wouldn't be here to see it, that much he knew. but he could still help guide the Respublica on its path forward. These Greek kings must be dealt with, and they must be dealt with now. Not in 10 years, not in 50, but now.

Rome's entrance to the Hellenistic world was one of the most momentous events in ancient history, setting the stage for a thousand years or more of Roman rule over the Greeks. But it didn't have to happen. Rome's conquest of the whole Mediterranean was not foreordained. Today, we'll find out why it did happen.

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Thanks so much for joining me today. At the end of the Second Punic War in 201 BC, the Roman Republic stood astride the central and western Mediterranean like an exhausted colossus. Bruised and battered, worn down by nearly two decades of continuous warfare, but triumphant. No individual state or chieftain anywhere to the east of Macedonia could even think about beating Rome in a stand-up fight. Carthage, Syracuse, the rebellious city-states of Italy, the Gauls of the Po Valley,

the dozens of Iberian tribes dotted across the peninsula, all of them had taken their swing at Rome, and all of them had come up short. That doesn't mean Roman rule was unchallenged after Zama and the conclusion of the war. Far from it. but that for all intents and purposes, Rome's position as hegemon was set. There was simply nobody left who could mount a real challenge. The eastern Mediterranean, however, was a different story.

There, the descendants of Alexander the Great and his friends had carved out a new world for themselves. Powerful kings ruled Macedonia, Egypt, and Western Asia. Hellenistic monarchs whose predecessors had spent the better part of a century fighting one another on a grand scale. The heirs of Alexander fought because war was a part of daily life, because it was the path to more power and resources for their states, and most of all, because it was what made them great.

They were dangerous and experienced in a way that ought to have given the Romans pause. 75 years before, Pyrrhus of Epirus, a relatively minor Hellenistic warlord, had put thousands of Romans and Italians in the grave. Rome had never faced one of the great Hellenistic powers in an open war. Would the farmers of Latium really be able to stand against phalanxes of Greek professionals numbering in the tens of thousands?

Could Roman aristocrats actually out-general men whose ancestors had ridden with the greatest conqueror in history? The world was about to find out. In the decades after the conclusion of the Second Punic War, almost without warning or preparation,

Rome found itself increasingly embroiled in the east. Now, the Romans weren't fools or ignorant of the world beyond their peninsula. Roman and Italian merchants had made fortunes trading with the Greeks. Roman aristocrats such as Scipio Africanus studied and appreciated Greek culture. But Rome's actual engagement with the East at the level of the state was pretty limited. It essentially amounted to a couple of diplomatic missions to the mainland Greeks before the Second Punic War.

a bit of minor conflict around the fringes of the Adriatic, and a vague awareness of the Hellenistic powers. Rome's concerns were always closer to home, for good reasons that we've covered pretty extensively. Carthage was the overriding priority for most of the 3rd century BC. Engagement with Carthage was what drew Rome into Sicily, Iberia, southern Gaul, and even the internal politics of the North African Numidians.

That was enough to keep them busy for a very long time. In fact, Rome never really stopped fighting in several of these places, as the Second Punic War simply bled into a new round of conflict driven by the consequences of Rome's victory.

But after the peace with Carthage was signed, and Rome's aristocracy was finally able to look up from the devastating effects of two decades of war, they quite suddenly realized that there was a whole world of potentially dangerous foes lying just over the narrow sea to the east.

The consequences of that realization are what we'll discuss today. Let's pause for a moment to take stock of what exactly was happening across the Mediterranean at the end of the Second Punic War. Despite the victory over Carthage, Italy was still a mess.

The Gauls of the North launched a major series of uprisings between 201 and 191 BC. They sacked Roman colonies. They even annihilated a Roman army sent against them. It took years of dedicated campaigning by multiple consular armies, a major deployment.

to eventually bring them under control. Liguria, the region around present-day Genoa in northwestern Italy, was likewise restive. The Ligurians raised their own armies in 193 BC, and for the next 40 years, the Romans campaigned against them on a regular basis.

Sicily was more peaceful, having been thoroughly conquered and then garrisoned throughout the last decade of the war. Our record of what was happening in Iberia is fragmentary, but the basic sense of the sources is that there was no significant gap between the final campaigns of the Second Punic War.

and the operations that followed. Roman armies went to Iberia, the same soldiers were stationed there, they continued campaigning, and new armies went out regularly. A bit later, in 198 BC, the Romans actually created two new provinces around Cordoba and Tarragona.

and dispatched praetors to govern them. Of course, this led to yet another round of campaigning. Cato the Elder, famous 50 years later for his refrain of Carthage must be destroyed, was assigned the command and campaigned for several years. Despite his claims to have crushed any resistance, more expeditions followed in the years to come. Up until 181 BC, there were thousands, or more often tens of thousands, of Roman soldiers in Iberia at any given moment.

Whether the Romans intended to or not, and there is much debate about this, the Republic had become a hegemonic imperial power by 201 BC. Its actions over the next decade bore that out. So... When I said a little while back that Rome's engagement with the Hellenistic world had been limited before the end of the Second Punic War, that left out one really important detail. The Republic had actually been at war with Philip V, the king of Macedonia, for the better part of a decade.

This was really part of the Second Punic War. Hannibal brought Philip in as an ally in the aftermath of his early victories, and Philip's engagement had no meaningful impact on the outcome. He never crossed the Adriatic to Italy and never sent troops to Hannibal.

Livy says that some of Philip's men fought at Zama, but this is pretty clearly a fabrication. Instead of launching their own campaign against Philip, the Romans enlisted some allies in Greece, the Aetolian League of City-States, and set them the task of making Philip's life difficult.

From around 211 to 207 BC, the Greek allies did so, until it became clear that this was going to be the extent of Roman involvement, and they finally made peace with Philip. Nothing about this was at all out of the ordinary. Rome's participation in this war was essentially irrelevant. Macedonian kings and leagues of Greek city-states had been fighting for generations. They didn't need Rome to make them do it.

A Roman army did make the trip across the Adriatic in 205 BC and Philip marched south to offer battle, but the proconsul in charge of the expedition thought better of it and negotiated a ceasefire. For several years, that's where matters stayed. Now, this wasn't the first time a Roman army had crossed the Adriatic. In a few years between the major Gallic campaigns of the 220s BC and Hannibal's invasion of Italy, Rome had involved itself in Illyria.

Illyria lay just across the Adriatic from Italy, mostly in what are now Albania and Montenegro. The Illyrians were traditional enemies of the Macedonians, since their territories butted up against one another. This led to on-and-off conflicts that had lasted for generations and would continue. Philip V was not especially happy about Rome being so close to Macedonia itself, and this surely played some role in his decision to enter the Second Punic War on Hannibal's side.

Now, to be clear, scholars disagree pretty strongly about what Rome's involvement in Illyria and interest in Greece actually was at this time. Some have made the case that from 229 BC onward, the Romans had a well-developed plan for expansion in the east. According to this line of reasoning, they intentionally set about creating formal alliances with Illyrian tribes and kingdoms and making friends among the Greek city-states.

This process was interrupted by the Second Punic War, but then continued essentially unabated until Rome controlled the whole of Greece and then the Greek world beyond. I do not buy this, and neither do the second group of scholars working on this topic.

The historian Arthur Eckstein wrote what is, in my opinion, the best book on Rome's engagement with the East, and I will quote him directly here. The Romans merely acted energetically but sporadically from 230 BC to protect what they saw as their interests in the Greek East. but those interests were minimal and Roman political aims and gains quite limited. In my opinion, this fits much better with the way Roman politics actually worked.

When pickings were slim closer to home and ambitious consuls were looking for a war, sure, they would go to Illyria. When strategic necessity demanded that Philip be kept busy, sure, they were happy to find allies and even send a small army. But none of that amounted to a coherent plan. The Romans were not wide-eyed novices, but the whole idea of a long-term strategic project aimed at regional dominance does not align with how they thought about politics and war.

Even if some unattested group within Rome had been doing that during the 220s BC, the mass aristocratic casualties of the Second Punic War would have torn the heart out of that faction anyway. Our sources don't support the notion in a strict factual sense.

Polybius surely would have mentioned it if he'd heard about it, because he talks extensively about these conflicts. And the broader structure of Roman political life doesn't support it either. That's leaving aside the fact that it wouldn't have been a particularly strong approach to getting into the Greek world anyway.

On the whole, the best way of understanding the evidence we have is to say that there was simply no long-term plan at all. This speaks to a much bigger problem in how we treat the rise of Rome. Far too often, the Romans are the only ones with agency in the story.

They're the main characters, the driving force behind the narrative. If they went to war somewhere, the reasoning goes, it was because they wanted to, had thought about it beforehand, and had a sense for the benefits they might reap down the line. But that's just not how Republican Rome actually functioned as a political unit. More importantly, it ignores that other people living in this world were making choices. They had armies and strategic interests and old feuds that needed settling.

The Romans didn't erase any of that just because they were fighting and then won a big war with Carthage. Other things were happening in the Hellenistic world, really big things. Those are the things we need to understand if we want to figure out why Rome suddenly launched itself headfirst into the Greek world. The answer lies not in Illyria or Greece or even Macedonia, but in Egypt.

Things were looking pretty good for the Ptolemies when we last saw them, as Ptolemy IV won an improbable victory at Rathia in 217 BC over the Seleucid king Antiochus III. This might have led to a return to the general parody that characterized the Hellenistic world through most of the 3rd century BC. For about a decade, it did, but starting in 207 BC, Ptolemaic Egypt went through a series of convulsions that nearly destroyed the entire state.

The crisis of a great Hellenistic power destabilized the entire international system that had ensured basic stability for decades. It wasn't some grand Roman plan for Mediterranean domination that led the Senate to send armies to Greece and beyond after 201 BC. It was the Greeks themselves, at a time of extraordinary uncertainty and danger, who asked for aid.

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Follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts and binge entire seasons early and ad-free on Wondery+. The idea that the reason for Rome's entrance into the Greek East should be found among the Greeks rather than the Romans used to be a controversial argument. Knowing what we'd do about how things would turn out with Rome in charge of the entire Mediterranean,

It's all too easy to read every single incident our sources describe through the lens of that outcome. The Romans, not the Greeks, become the prime movers. But if we stick with this perspective, then we dramatically misread the whole situation.

This is the argument of the historian Arthur Eckstein in his book Rome Enters the Greek East, which is now about 20 years old, and I think the basic thesis holds up admirably. Again, I'll quote it directly. Quote, a really existing and severe crisis in the balance of power in the state system of the Greek Mediterranean at the end of the third century, and not in internally generated and exceptionally predatory Roman imperialism,

was the crucial cause behind the Roman decision in 200 to intervene for the first time with great force in the Greek East. Okay, that's a lot to digest, I know, but let's break it down. When Eckstein says balance of power, what he means is the rough parity between the three major Hellenistic states, Ptolemaic Egypt, Antigonid Macedonia, and the Seleukids, that existed for most of the 3rd century BC. These kingdoms fought each other a great deal.

They spent a ton of money and resources on warfare with each other. They exchanged territory around the fringes, such as hegemony over the coastal cities of Asia Minor or ownership of southern Syria. But their conflicts, as occasionally gigantic and damaging as they were, never really changed the calculus of power in the region. No one state could take on the others regardless of how much they wanted to, and no one state could risk another becoming powerful enough to carry out that ambition.

When push came to shove, as it so often did, two would ally against the third for just long enough to prevent their shared enemy from winning. Then they would all go back to being enemies, the balance of power reset, and another cycle would begin. It may not have been fun for everyone, especially not the tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians who suffered whenever the great powers went to war, but it did function as a basically stable international system.

That changed at the end of the 3rd century BC. In 207 BC, a truly enormous rebellion broke out among the indigenous Egyptians of the Ptolemaic realm. The revolt was centered on Upper Egypt, the southern part around Thebes, the traditional heart of Egyptian religion, culture, and especially Egyptian kingship.

What made this rebellion so dangerous wasn't just that it left the Ptolemies without access to a major chunk of their resource and manpower base for decades, which was bad enough. It was that the rebels aimed to replace the Ptolemaic regime altogether. They were not trying to make a deal with the Ptolemies, but overthrow them. In 205 BC, the rebels proclaimed one of their leading generals as an indigenous pharaoh. They used the accepted religious practices of ancient Egypt.

Greek settlers and administrators in the areas the rebels controlled were killed in large numbers. The counter-regime began administering its territories, collecting taxes, even hiring large numbers of mercenaries. Much of the country was simply lost to Ptolemaic control, and even the areas that remained technically in their hands were more like occupied territories than a peaceful realm. Ptolemy IV, the victor of Raffia, died soon after the outbreak of the rebellion.

and left a five-year-old child, Ptolemy V, as his heir. Quite suddenly, maintaining the eastern Mediterranean balance of power was the furthest thing from the Ptolemy's minds. They were just trying to survive against an existential threat.

The problem for the Ptolemies was that the rest of the Hellenistic world wasn't going to just give them a breather. Antiochus III, the Seleucid king and loser at Raphia in 217 BC, had been busy in the past decade or so. After crushing his cousin and rival Achaeus in Asia Minor, he turned north and east, subjugating parts of present-day Armenia and Syria. Then he went still further, into Bactria and Marjana, present-day eastern Iran and Afghanistan.

and reached the shores of the Caspian Sea. Antiochus' major opponent here was the new kingdom of the Parthians, an Iranian-speaking people who had taken advantage of Seleucid weakness in the preceding decades to take over much of the eastern part of their empire. Antiochus crushed them in a brilliant two-year campaign that took him from Babylon to what's now Turkmenistan. By the end, Antiochus had reduced the Parthians to a tiny subordinate rump state.

and the Seleucid king returned in triumph to his western holdings. When he got back, Antiochus discovered just how much things had changed in his absence, particularly in Egypt. While he had been busily earning himself the nickname the Great,

The state system that had constrained and guided his predecessors for 80 years was crumbling. Arthur Eckstein points out that for experienced rulers like Antiochus, who knew the game, it must have been immediately clear that the old state of affairs was gone. It wouldn't come back, and the only question was what would replace it. And that was where the trouble started, because Antiochus was not the only one who figured that out. Everybody else in the Greek world was realizing it too.

If the Antigonids, the rulers of Macedonia, wanted to make gains in the Aegean or Asia Minor, the Ptolemies weren't going to stop them. If Antiochus wanted Syria, there was precious little the Ptolemies could do about it.

This is a classic example of what political scientists and international relations specialists call a power transition crisis. The old world is gone. The new world hasn't yet been born. And the tool that the players use to shape that new world is almost always war. And not just any war. A hegemonic war, a winner-takes-all contest to determine the real-world distribution of power among contending states.

Maybe the two remaining great Hellenistic powers would hammer out of balance. Maybe one would emerge victorious. Nobody, so far as we can tell, thought the Romans would suddenly dominate the Greek East. If you were a Greek living somewhere between Epirus and Babylon, and you were looking at this situation in 204 BC, when Ptolemy IV dropped dead and the extent of the Ptolemaic breakdown was becoming clear, Rome was not your concern.

Antiochus III and Philip V of Macedonia were. Even before Ptolemy IV's death in 204 BC, the vultures were already circling. Seeing just how much trouble the rebellion in Egypt was causing, Philip V of Macedonia tried to marry one of his daughters to the heir, Ptolemy V, the five-year-old boy I mentioned. When Ptolemy IV died, the alliance became even more essential, because only with Macedonian support could the Ptolemies hope to retain even a fraction of their possessions.

These negotiations for a marriage alliance included an explicit Ptolemaic request for Macedonian aid in the event of a Seleucid invasion of Syria. As the situation worsened, the scope for Philip to involve himself in Egypt grew larger and larger.

A succession of regency governments based in Alexandria rose and fell. And in their desperation, one of them offered Philip something like a protectorate over the boy king. Now, Philip V was an ambitious man even by the standards of a Hellenistic warrior king. It was something his contemporaries remarked on repeatedly, and his track record as the king of Macedonia had made it clear that he was capable and dangerous.

The same could be said of Antiochus III, who, as you'll recall, had just spent the better part of a decade doing a miniature version of Alexander the Great's sojourn in the distant east.

These were the two kings who were looking hungrily at the vast, wealthy domains ruled by a poorly advised five-year-old. We don't know when or how exactly. But Philip and Antiochus realized that for the moment their interests coincided. Both of them wanted territories currently controlled by the Ptolemies, but they didn't want the same territories. The solution was pretty simple.

worked together to dismember the Ptolemaic Empire and take everything they could from the Aegean to the Nile. In the future, when their interests inevitably diverged, the two remaining great kings could fight it out and let the chips fall where they may. Alliances between the powers were nothing new, but the conclusion Antiochus and Philip reached that the carving up of a gigantic swath of territory was even possible was earth-shaking in the context of Hellenistic politics.

Previous alliances had been aimed at maintaining or restoring the balance of power. This one wanted to create a fundamentally new arrangement. The idea of completely destroying a great power and its long-lived dynasty is so fundamentally grandiose that modern scholars have often minimized or even rejected it altogether. It's simply too big, too much of a departure from how Hellenistic kings had done international politics for the better part of a century.

But while the evidence is confusing and fragmented, that's the easiest interpretation. In fact, it's exactly what the evidence says. Polybius tells us that the two kings reached an explicit agreement to work together to destroy the Ptolemies. His wording is unambiguous. Most of the confusion stems not from what Polybius says, but the inability of modern scholars to accept the sheer scale of Philip's and Antiochus' ambitions.

Unfortunately, because Polybius' account is fragmentary, we don't know what the actual terms of the agreement were, how the two kings had decided to split things up between them, or precisely how they would cooperate. But the pact's existence seems clear enough, and the actions we know the kings took in the immediate aftermath of it are perfectly in line with a formal plot to destroy the Ptolemies for good.

Philip spent 202 and 201 BC campaigning in the Aegean, where the Ptolemies still had a surprising amount of territory. The Macedonian king relieved the Ptolemies of their key naval base, the island of Samos, as well as the powerful fleet garrisoned there. This was an unexpected and hostile act. The Ptolemies still thought Philip was their ally. And while a revolt soon brought Samos back to Ptolemaic control, the damage was done. Philip also took a number of other islands, such as Kos.

and cities along the Thracian and Anatolian coast. When we read them together, this sure looks like a dedicated effort to take over every important Ptolemaic possession in the Aegean. Moreover, it was an effort that had at least some support from Antiochus III.

When Philip was campaigning in Caria to take some Ptolemaic territories in Anatolia, the governor of the neighboring Seluchid province gave him supplies. At the same time, though we know less about it, fragmentary evidence tells us that local Seluchid forces were doing pretty much the same thing.

seizing stray pieces of the Ptolemies' territory with Philip's support. At no point in this did the two kings attack each other, nor was their involvement limited to simply staying out of one another's way.

They were actively cooperating, precisely as Polybius says they had agreed to. For the Greeks of the region who were not formally in any king's sphere of influence, or those who had until recently relied on the Ptolemies for protection,

This was an existential crisis. Imagine these events from their perspective. As bad as the wars of the great kings were, and they were bad, The vast number of tiny to middling Greek states that remained pretty much autonomous relied on their competition for leverage. Offering your allegiance or military and financial support to a Ptolemy or Seleucid or Antigonid was often the least bad option for a Greek police facing down a threat from a local rival or one of the other great powers.

If you were being bullied, you simply found a bigger bully to help you. In crude terms, this was the dynamic that had kept many Greek peleis from being burnt to the ground, their citizens sold into slavery, their very existence erased from the planet. The agreement Philip and Antiochus reached threatened that dynamic. Not only would there be one fewer patron to bargain with, now the great kings might not need to bargain at all.

If Philip or Antiochus decided they wanted your harbor or your nice irrigated plain or your warships or your treasury, well, then that was that. Unless, of course, there happened to be another, even bigger and meaner bully just on the other side of the Adriatic. And that, not a decades-long plan or an irresistible thirst for conquest, is how Rome was drawn into the Hellenistic world. The Greeks were afraid, for good reason. They wanted a new friend.

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No matter how alarmed they were about this new situation, most of the Greeks couldn't do a dang thing about the machinations of the two great kings. If your polis had a few thousand citizens, that meant you could muster a few hundred soldiers and a couple of warships. You had no leverage because nobody needed your paltry military forces, your subpar farmland, or your little harbor. As much as we might focus on the bigger Greek states, most of the Greeks didn't actually live in one.

But there was still something we might call a middle class of Greek powers between those little autonomous communities and the major Hellenistic monarchs. These communities did have some leverage because they controlled strategic locations and could muster a few thousand soldiers, maybe a strong fleet.

Not enough to beat one of the great powers in a stand-up fight, but enough that even Antiochus or Philip had to actively consider what you might do. It was this middle class of Greek powers that stood to lose the most from the dismemberment of the Ptolemaic Empire. and this middle class that had the prestige and resources to do something about it. Two of those middling states are essential to understanding how Rome got involved, the Republic of Rhodes and the Kingdom of Pergamum.

Rhodes, an island off the southern coast of Asia Minor, was a small but wealthy sea power that had long played something of a swing role in the politics of the Hellenistic world. Sometimes they fought the Ptolemies, but mostly they found their interests aligned with Egypt in opposition to the nearby Seleucid threat. Pergamum was not a polis, but another Hellenistic kingdom. Still wealthy and powerful, but on a much smaller scale.

that had emerged in the margins between the Antigonids and the Seleucids in western Anatolia. Rhodes and Pergamum, traditional enemies, had allied to face Philip V after 203 BC. That tells you how serious the threat was. They narrowly halted his plans for expansion, but by 201, they were out of options. So too were the Ptolemies, who had also, at least temporarily, been reduced to this middling class of powers. If they did nothing…

the great kings would eventually settle the eastern Mediterranean as they wished. There was in fact only one power left for these three states, soon joined by Athens, to petition, and that was Rome. It's easy to look back from the present day and think that these Greeks were overreacting, that they were letting an irrational fear blind them to the very real danger that Rome presented. After all...

We know that this was going to be the beginning of about 700 years of uninterrupted Roman rule over the whole Greek-speaking world. Maybe even longer, depending on when you place the end of the Byzantines. But they didn't know that. They couldn't have known that. It's bad history and bad analytical reasoning to hold them responsible for a quite literally unprecedented development that happened in the aftermath of their decision. At this specific moment in 201 and 200 BC,

Rome was the least threatening option available to the Greeks. They knew what they were going to get from Philip and Antiochus. At best, an honored place among a great king's many subjects where the all-important freedom of the Greeks was a dark joke. At worst...

watching their cities burn because the Antigonid or Selucid king woke up on the wrong side of the bed one morning. This was a real fear, not an irrational one. The stakes of the political game in the Hellenistic Mediterranean were literally life and death.

Whether you started the war or not, whether you wanted the war or not, if you lost to Philip or Antiochus, your state would be gone, your leading citizens or royal family murdered or exiled, your finest cities plundered and razed, your populace sold into slavery. Moreover, unlike the Hellenistic great kings, the Romans had always gone back to their corner of the Mediterranean after they intervened in the east. There was no obvious reason why this time should have been different.

I really like the way that Arthur Eckstein talks about this dynamic. Everything the decision makers in these middling Greek polities had experienced told them that the world was a harsh and threatening place. They knew that because they, just as much as the great kings, were perfectly capable of and willing to do awful violence to their enemies. To a small police, Rhodes was just as threatening as Philip V. They had all sacked cities and sold the survivors into slavery.

burned farms and villages and delivered impossible-to-meet diplomatic ultimatums. From their perspective, wars were going to happen, and it was better to be on the winning side than the losing one. For this reason, and this is Eckstein's phrase, The smaller Greek states instinctively sought balance among the larger powers rather than appeasement. The whole idea of being the right hand of the devil rather than in his path did not hold water for these Greeks.

because they knew that the devil had a short memory and zero sense of obligation. That was reality as the participants in these events understood it, and the Greeks acted accordingly after 205 BC. At first, they fought on their own, but as the implications of the pact between the great kings became clear, they knew it was time to try something new. And so, in the autumn of 201 BC, envoys from across the Greek world...

Pergamum, Rhodes, Egypt, and Athens arrived in Rome to plead their case for intervention. Given how little source material we often have for this period, it is a miracle that we know as much about the embassies and the Roman response to them as we do. This allows us to treat the Roman decision to intervene not as a historical inevitability, something that had to happen, but a contingency where there were paths not taken.

There was absolutely nothing that said the Romans had to start sending armies to the eastern Mediterranean after 201 BC. In fact, there was a lot that said they shouldn't do it. The long war with Carthage had quite literally just ended mere months before the Greek embassies arrived in Rome. The city's treasury contained little but cobwebs.

The extraordinary manpower reserves that had carried Rome through two decades of war were severely depleted by tens of thousands of deaths in battle and from disease. Whole regions of Italy had barely recovered from the ravages of Hannibal and his Roman opponents. Tens of thousands of Roman soldiers were still deployed everywhere from Sicily to Iberia to the Po Valley. To say that the Romans were catching their breath after the Second Punic War would be wrong.

That's because they were still fighting many of the same conflicts that we tend to gather under the umbrella of the Second Punic War as a whole. In fact, months before the Greek envoys arrived, a Roman army led by a consul had been severely defeated in northern Italy. It would have been entirely understandable if the Romans decided to ignore the emissary's pleas for aid, no matter how convincing their arguments might have been, simply because they were exhausted.

Rome was built for war, but following up the largest war in Mediterranean history with another massive undertaking might have been a bit much. For older scholars, there was no trouble explaining the Roman decision to intervene. Rome was simply so militaristic, so dedicated to war that they would take any opportunity to fight. By this reasoning, the Greeks were jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, and they should have known better. But it's just simply not the case.

The Romans were no more or less militaristic than any other ancient Mediterranean polity, whether we're talking about a Celtic-speaking tribal community in the Po Valley, or Athens, or the Kingdom of Macedonia. They all existed in a world where it was kill or be killed, conquer or be conquered. We now know why the Greeks brought them an open invitation.

The answer lies in the justified fear created by the crisis of the Ptolemies and the pact of Philip V and Antiochus the followed. But the Romans were under no obligation to accept the invitation, and the fact that they did requires explaining. What were they thinking when they looked to the east? What the Romans saw as they gazed into the little-known world of the eastern Mediterranean was the emergence of a threat they believed they had to take seriously.

Prior to this, as we talked about earlier, the Romans really hadn't been interested in what was happening in Egypt or Syria or the Greek world more broadly. A few years after this, when the war with the The Senate actually required a basic geography lesson just to grasp exactly where Roman armies were going in Greece. And it's not like Greece and the Balkans to the north were far from Italy. The only thing separating them was a couple of days' travel by sea.

Still, even they were only an occasional concern. To the extent that the Romans cared what happened to their east, it was in the context of real or potential threats to Rome. The Illyrian Wars of the 220s BC came at the intersection of few other opportunities for consuls to fight, and some genuine concerns about piracy in the Adriatic.

The diplomacy and military involvement with the Greeks after 215 BC was only because of Philip V's alliance with Hannibal. Otherwise, there is just nothing to suggest that the Romans had any grand designs on the Greek world. But when the Greek embassies arrived, with their news of an alliance between two great kings and the real possibility of a new superpower emerging from the ashes of the Hellenistic world, the Romans were primed to listen.

Just as much as the desperate Greeks, the Romans knew that the consequences for failing to deal with a serious threat were total. Hannibal had come uncomfortably close to destroying Rome. Fighting a Hellenistic warrior king with all the resources of Greece, Asia, and Egypt behind him would make Hannibal's war look like a warm-up bout.

Without the Greek embassies, however, the Roman Senate never would have known about this threat or been able to understand why they needed to face it now. We can imagine that the envoys inflated the danger because they had every reason to want the Romans to get involved.

But their fears really were genuine. They weren't trying to hoodwink the Romans into cleaning up their mess for them. The crisis was real. Philip and Antiochus were not a joke. Now, as an institution guiding Roman state policy, the Senate had many shortcomings.

The lack of continuity in high offices, the incessant scheming and plotting, the labyrinthine ties between aristocratic clans, the dearth of subject matter experts who could explain something like the politics of the Greek world to a bunch of rich, powerful, self-interested men.

All of that added up to a fundamental difficulty in dealing with medium and long-term issues. A great many scholars of Republican politics have used phrases like muddling through to describe the Senate's actual process of governance, and I tend to agree with that. There were enough experienced, talented, and influential people in the Senate to ensure that it usually made at least a decent decision in how to deal with a problem, if not the optimal one.

But they were usually solving an immediate problem, not looking forward to how they might deal with even a looming issue years down the road. Not here. All the Greek envoys had to do was state the obvious.

The Seluchids could muster field armies of 70,000 highly trained men, as a young Antiochus III had at Raphia 16 years earlier. Philip V's resources were smaller, but he could still put out fleets that dwarfed anything the Romans or Carthaginians had employed during the Second Punic War. On their own,

Either Philip or Antiochus would be a major problem for Rome, especially if they pulled off an invasion of Italy in the vein of a Pyrrhus or a Hannibal. If either were able to add even some of Egypt's vast resources to their own, They could simply overwhelm even the largest Roman armies and fleets. Ptolemy IV had about 70,000 troops at Raffia, and dozens of warships housed at military ports around the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean.

Those resources added to either Philip or Antiochus would have given them a massive edge over Rome. Eckstein estimates that a Seleucid-Ptolemaic Union would have given Antiochus three times the military capacity of Rome. A Macedonian-Ptolemaic combination would provide Philip twice the capacity of Rome. The Patres of Rome were not experts in the Greek world, but they knew war, and they knew what they themselves were capable of.

That was why the Senate had never given up, even in the depths of despair after Cannae. They still had advantages over Carthage and Hannibal even at their lowest point, and if they fought the right way, they could use them and win.

But the prospective threat of Philip and or Antiochus left no margin for error, no long game that could be played to Rome's advantage. If the Senate was going to deal with a threat while it was still manageable, it would have to be now. Next time on Tides of History, we'll continue the story of Rome's entrance into the Hellenistic world. War with Macedonia and the Seleucids loomed. Very soon, it would arrive with shocking force and ferocity.

If you like Tides of History, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. Tides of History is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. Sound design by Gabriel Gould for Airship.

The sound engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Tides of History is produced by Morgan Jaffe. From Wondery, the executive producers are Jenny Lower Beckman and Marshall Louis. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, from Wondery, this has been Tides of History. I'm Cassie DePeckel, the host of Wondery's podcast Against the Odds. In each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who live to tell the tale. In our next season, it's August 3rd, 1991.

A Greek cruise ship, the Oceanos, sets sail into a brutal storm off South Africa's wild coast. Soon after, disaster strikes. A breach in the hull knocks out power and floods the ship. But instead of helping, the senior officers abandon their posts. With no leadership, the entertainers must step up and lead a desperate evacuation to save hundreds of lives before the ship sinks beneath the sea.

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