HKB
[Sidenote: War against Persia (583).]
X. For twenty-six years had peace been maintained with Philip, the Ætolians vanquished, the peoples of Asia subdued, and the greater part of Greece restored to liberty. Profiting by its co-operation with the Romans against Antiochus, the Achæan league had largely increased, and Philopœmen had brought into it Sparta, Messene, and the island of Zacynthus; but these countries, impatient of the Achæan rule, soon sought to free themselves from it. Thus was realised the prediction of Philip, who told the Thessalian envoys, after the battle of Cynoscephalæ, that the Romans would soon repent of having given liberty to peoples incapable of enjoying it, and whose dissensions and jealousies would always keep up a dangerous agitation.[573] In fact, Sparta and Messene rebelled, and sued for help from Rome. Philopœmen, after having cruelly punished the first of these cities, perished in his struggle with the second. Thessaly and Ætolia were torn by anarchy and civil war.
Whilst the Republic was occupied in restoring tranquillity to these countries, a new adversary came to imprudently attract its wrath. One would say that Fortune, while raising up so many enemies against Rome, took pleasure in delivering them, one after the other, into her hands. The old legend of Horatius killing the three Curiatii in succession was a lesson which the Senate had never forgotten.
Perseus, heir to his father’s crown and enmities, had taken advantage of the peace to increase his army and his resources, to make allies, and to rouse up the kings and peoples of the East against Rome. Besides the warlike population of his own country, he had at his beck barbarous peoples like the Illyrians, the Thracians, and the Bastarnæ, dwelling not far from the Danube. Notwithstanding the treaty, which forbad Macedonia to make war without the consent of the Senate, Perseus had silently aggrandised himself on the side of Thrace; he had placed garrisons in the maritime cities of Oenoe and Maronia, excited the Dardanians[574] to war, brought under subjection the Dolopes, and advanced as far as Delphi.[575] He endeavored to draw the Achæans into an alliance, and skilfully obtained the good-will of the Greeks. Eumenes II., king of Pergamus, who, like his father Attalus I., feared the encroachments of Macedonia, denounced at Rome this infraction of the old treaties. The fear with which a powerful prince inspired him, and the gratitude which he owed to the Republic for the aggrandisement of his kingdom after the Asian war, obliged him to cultivate the friendship of the Roman people. In 582 he came to Rome, and, honourably received by the Senate, forgot nothing which might excite it against Perseus, whom he accused of ambitious designs hostile to the Republic. This denunciation raised violent enmities against Eumenes. On his way back to his kingdom, he was attacked by assassins, and dangerously wounded. Suspicion fell on the Macedonian monarch, not without show of reason, and was taken by the Republic as sufficient ground for declaring war on a prince whose power began to offend it.