8 - Rome against Philip and Antiochus

Summary

THE EAST AFTER THE PEACE OF PHOENICE

The Peace of Phoenice was intended to give Rome a free hand in Africa by closing the Balkan front. The peace terms seemed to secure the safety of the Straits of Otranto, therefore to protect Italy from Philip. Whether the Senate regarded this as a long-term settlement with Philip we cannot tell. It is quite possible that in 205 some senators would happily have returned to the status quo before 215. But events rapidly took another course, which enhanced the influence of those senators who wished to continue Roman intervention, and the new watchdog role established by the Peace lasted a mere five years – which sufficed, however, to defeat Carthage.

The Peace of Phoenice was in no sense a settlement of Balkan affairs; it regulated merely the relationship between the two principals. The traditional friendships and enmities of the Greek states among themselves were not fundamentally affected by several of them being adscripti to the treaty. Thus in the Peloponnese the border war between Philip's friend the Achaean League and Rome's friend Sparta continued sporadically even after the peace; thus Philip felt free to develop an aggressive policy in the Aegean (an area which was not mentioned in the treaty), a policy which affected the balance of power there, which Rome's friend Attalus of Pergamum, and also Rhodes and Egypt, wished to maintain. Nor were these the only new political developments in the Greek world during the five years. Antiochus III, who in less than twenty years had restored the Seleucid empire in Iran, Mesopotamia and in central Asia Minor, had thereby won himself a mighty military reputation, which he broadcast by taking the traditional Greek title for the Persian King, ‘Great King’ (βασιλενς μεγας). In 204 or 203 he set out to recover western Asia Minor, which had for some years after the death of Lysimachus (281) been largely controlled by the Seleucids.