CHAPTER X - THE THIRD MACEDONIAN WAR

Summary

Dissatisfaction of Philip with Rome

Philip of Maćedon was greatly annoyed by the treatment which he met with from the Romans after the peace with Antiochus; and the subsequent course of events was no fitted to appease his wrath. His neighbours in Greece and Thrace, mostly communities that had once trembled at the Macedonian name not less than now they trembled at the Roman, diligently sought, as was natural, to retaliate on the fallen great power for all the injuries which since the times of Philip the Second they had received at the hands of Macedon. The empty arrogance and venal anti-Macedonian patriotism of the Hellenes of this period found vent at the diets of the different confederacies, and in ceaseless complaints addressed to the Roman senate. Philip had been allowed by the Romans to retain what he had taken from the Ætolians; but in Thessaly the confederacy of the Magnetes alone had formally joined the Ætolians, while those towns which Philip had wrested from the Ætolians in two of the other Thessalian confederacies—the Thessalian in its narrower sense, and the Perrhæbian—were reclaimed by the latter on the ground that Philip had only liberated these towns, and not conquered them. The Athamanes conceived that they might request their freedom; and Eumenes demanded the maritime cities which Antiochus had possessed in Thrace proper, especially Ænus and Maronea, although in the peace with Antiochus the Thracian Chersonese alone had been expressly promised to him.