There was something in these rumors. Ten senatorial commissioners advised Flamininus on the details of the settlement of Greece, and took the view that the fetters should remain in Roman hands. This would be a disaster, the commander felt, for when announced it would justify the suspicions of the Aetolians. With some difficulty, he persuaded the commission to change its mind.
Flamininus decided to dispel the fractious mood by staging a public-relations spectacular in Corinth, the wealthy entrepôt on the isthmus connecting the Peloponnese to northern Greece and the capital of the Achaean League. The Isthmian Games, an athletics and arts festival, were held there every two years (before and after the quadrennial Olympic Games) in the summer. A general truce was declared, to guarantee free passage to athletes, and people came from all over Greece to watch chariot races, boxing, wrestling, and the pankration, a blend of boxing and wrestling but with no rules except for a ban on eye-gouging and biting. There were also poetry and music contests, in which women were, apparently and unusually, allowed to compete.
At the Games of 196, the first peacetime festival for some years, a large crowd gathered in the stadium. Flamininus arranged for a trumpeter to signal a general silence. A public crier then stepped forward and announced:
The Senate of Rome and Titus Quinctius Flamininus the proconsul, having defeated King Philip and the Macedonians in battle, leave the following states and cities free, without garrisons, subject to no tribute and in full enjoyment of their ancestral laws: the peoples of Corinth, Phocis, Locri, Euboea, Phthiotic Achaea, Magnesia, Thessaly and Perrhaebia.
The states and cities mentioned were all those which had recognized claims to independence and had been directly governed by Philip.
At the beginning of the proclamation, there was a deafening shout and some people did not hear what was said. Most did, though, and could not believe their ears. Polybius writes:
What had happened was so unexpected that it was as if they were listening to the words in a kind of dream. They clamored and shouted, each of them moved perhaps by a different impulse, for the herald and the trumpeter to come forward into the middle of the stadium and repeat the proclamation. They wished, no doubt, not only to hear the speaker but to see him, so difficult did it seem to believe what he was saying.
As requested, the trumpeter blew his trumpet and the crier read out the text for a second time. A tremendous burst of cheering arose, so loud that it was heard at sea, and the entire audience got to its feet. Eyewitnesses many years later said it was difficult for those who could only read of the event in the present day to imagine how it sounded. Some ravens that happened to be flying over the stadium were so startled by the unexpected noise that they fell out of the sky.
When the shouting finally died away, it was replaced by a hubbub of excited chatter. Nobody paid the slightest attention to the athletic contests, but mobbed Flamininus. People pressed forward to touch his hand, garlands and headbands made from ribbon were thrown over him, and he was hailed as the savior of the Greeks. He only just escaped from the congratulations unharmed.
This was the reception that every liberator throughout history has dreamed of, but, as so many benevolent invaders have found to their cost, the moment of joy was shortlived.
The Greek cities, now to be freed, were as unquenchably quarrelsome as ever; Flamininus and his commission had to spend a year adjudicating and settling various disputes. Inevitably, this was unpopular work, not helped by the proconsul’s de haut en bas manner, but once it was completed the Senate fervently hoped that it would not have to concern itself any more with Greek affairs. In the fall of 194, the Romans at last removed their garrisons from the fetters, and evacuated from Greece. Flamininus brought back cartloads of Greek art and much treasure, which decorated his triumph.
PHILIP OF MACEDON’S onetime partner in crime, Antiochus the Great, was tired of Rome’s intrusion into what he regarded as his sphere of influence—namely, Asia Minor. For its part, the Senate feared that he planned to attack Rome—a fear much enhanced by Hannibal’s arrival at his court. In fact, the Syrian monarch had no such intention. His vision was to restore the empire that his dynastic ancestor, Seleucus, had carved from the dead Alexander’s domains, and that was the extent of his ambitions. As far as the Romans were concerned, he simply wanted them to leave him alone. If only a pact could be agreed, along with a few platitudes about perpetual friendship, the two states could pursue their separate courses unhindered.
On the face of it, Antiochus was a highly successful ruler. Born in about 241, he was a young man when he inherited the throne and a disorganized realm from his elder brother, who had been assassinated. He and the other Successors were of Macedonian or sometimes Greek stock. They were absolute despots, devoted to the perpetuation of their dynasties and to enriching themselves at the expense of their subjects. Seleucus told his army bluntly toward the end of his reign, “And I tell you that it is not the customs of the Persians and other such nations that I shall impose on you rather than this one law, common to them all, that whatever the king decides is always right.”
Philosophers developed a meritocratic theory that kingship was a reward for noble deeds, and the next natural step upward (not unlike the cursus honorum for elected magistrates in Rome) was promotion to godhead. Heracles (the Greek version of Hercules) had pointed the way, transcending his mortality. Homer had given his imprimatur to the concept of a divided self, when his wanderer Odysseus descends into hell and meets the hero’s ghost:
I observed the powerful Heracles—his image, that is, but he himself banquets at ease among the immortal gods.
Some monarchs reserved their divinity à la Heracles until after their death, but alive they were at least isotheoi, or godlike. Others put in a claim to deification before the tomb. A king of Macedon in the previous century was greeted on his entry into Athens by a choir singing a specially written hymn:
This attitude, which combined rational skepticism with divine worship, was widespread in the sophisticated East among rulers such as Antiochus and his subjects.
On his accession, the energetic and ambitious Antiochus set about rebuilding his empire. He failed to take back from the Ptolemies Syrian lands into which they had encroached, but he had more success in pressing his cause in Asia Minor. Then he decided to follow in Alexander’s footsteps and marched east into Parthia and Bactria. He crossed into the Kabul Valley and descended into India, where he made friends with an Indian king, Subhashsena, from whom he procured elephants for his army. After a short expedition down the Persian Gulf, he returned home to general applause. He had restored his father’s empire and on his return acquired the complimentary title of “the Great.” He took to styling himself the Great King, after the long-gone Persian monarchs.