The Hellenistic East and the background to Roman expansion

The term 'Hellenistic' is applied to those parts of the empire once established by Alexander the Great around the eastern end of the Mediterranean - Macedonian Greece, most of Asia Minor, the Levant and Egypt, because one of the effects of Alexander's conquests was the spread of Greek culture and language throughout this whole area.

The empire created by the military genius of Alexander began to fall apart almost immediately on his death in 323 in a struggle for power among his generals, none of whom was able to establish himself as sole ruler and maintain the empire's unity.

By about 275, three dynasties, descended from three of his generals, had taken over the main parts of Alexander's empire and established powerful kingdoms:
the Antigonids, who ruled over Macedonia and large parts of Greece from time to time;
the Ptolemies, who ruled Egypt but who also controlled from time to time possessions elsewhere, including islands in the Aegean and cities in the Thracian Chersonese and along the coast of Asia Minor;
and the Seleucids, who ruled over most of the old Persian empire, that is the western and southern parts of Asia Minor, northern Syria and at one time the more easterly parts stretching across to north western India.

It is important to remember that these were Greek dynasties imposing their rule on the native populations.

There were various minor Hellenistic states.

One was the kingdom of Pergamum established in the north-west corner of Asia Minor by Attalus I and ruled over by his successors, the Attalids, in the second half of the 3rd century; its wealth derived from agriculture and foreign trade, and it developed into a centre of art and literature and a champion of Greek culture.

Another important small state was the island republic of Rhodes, off the south-western end of Asia Minor; it operated as a free port and derived its wealth from sea-borne trade, which it guarded with a small but efficient navy.

In mainland Greece, the once-leading states of Athens, Sparta and Thebes had been able to maintain a precarious independence, though they did not exert any control over other Greek states.

Two political and military federations had grown up: the Aetolian League, made up of small townships and rural communities, to which by about 250 covered most of central Greece north of the Gulf of Corinth; and the Achaean League, which included many of the city states in the Peloponnese (but not Sparta, Elis and Messenia).

Not only were these two leagues rivals of each other, but there were also tensions within each league, resulting from the longstanding Greek city-state concept of autonomy (which the very idea of a league contradicted).

There was also the ever-present threat of Macedonia: from time to time Antigonid kings, following earlier precedent, thought it their right to attempt to take over, if not all, at least parts of Greece.

Map - The Roman Empire c. 120 B.C.

The three major Hellenistic kingdoms were rivals also, and from time to time, various kings, dreaming of imitating the exploits of Alexander as the archetypal conqueror, attempted to expand their kingdom, which meant taking territory away from one or both of the other two kingdoms.

If one of the major kingdoms succeeded in expanding its influence and territory, the other two generally combined against it, so that in the fifty years from about 275 to 225 there was not only continual competition but also a bewildering complexity of alliances and realignment of alliances, until a balance of power was established among the three main kingdoms of Egypt, Syria and Macedonia.

Though none of the three liked this balance of power, it did allow for the continued existence of Pergamum, Rhodes, the two Leagues in Greece, and Egypt itself.

When it was finally disturbed, all of these places made repeated appeals to Rome to intervene and restore the balance, which they saw as merely a continuation of the normal Hellenistic diplomatic game of creating an alliance in order to get the better of one's rivals.

What they did not realise was that eventually all of them, both great and small, would become subject to Roman domination.

The Roman conquest of the eastern Mediterranean: Greece

230-215 Campaigns against Illyrian pirates

Rome had little military contact with Greece until towards the end of the 3rd century.

From 230-215 the Romans decided to do something about the Illyrian pirates in the Adriatic Sea who had been troubling them; these pirates had been organised by Queen Teuta and by Demetrius, tyrant of Pharos.

Occasional expeditions were sent to smoke the pirates out, and Roman protectorates were established in Illyria to prevent their re-emergence, but Rome's attention was then diverted by the threat of the Hannibalic War.

214-205 The First Macedonian War

In 224 the Greek states had once again been brought under Macedonian control by Antigonus Doson, who was succeeded by Philip V, an ambitious, war-like and energetic ruler.

In 215 Philip drew up an alliance with Hannibal, hoping like many Hellenistic kings to use this alliance to help expand his kingdom.

The Romans were able to send a small force in 214 to contain Philip in the Balkan peninsula; they were assisted by the Aetolian League (which had a standing dislike of the Macedonian monarchy) and by Attalus of Pergamum (who wished to expand in the north Aegean area at Macedonia's expense).

The war died out for lack of attention on both sides, and eventually in 205 a treaty was drawn up between Rome and Philip (though the Aetolian League had drawn up a separate treaty with him on their own initiative the year before).

200-196 The Second Macedonian War

In 203 Philip V turned his attention eastward, drawing up an alliance with Antiochus III, the current Seleucid king, and aiming to restore Macedonian control over Ptolemaic possessions in the Aegean.

The Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt had been on friendly terms with Rome since 273, but was now being poorly governed under the boy-king Ptolemy V and so in a weakened position.

For the following two years Philip captured several Egyptian outposts in the Aegean, but in the process several free Greek cities were attacked and Greek opinion was alienated by the barbarous methods of warfare used.

The people of Rhodes and the king of Pergamum, whose trading interests were threatened by this warfare, sent an embassy to the Romans, seeking their help since they realised they could not defeat Philip on their own.

After some hesitation, the Roman assembly voted that Philip was a 'public enemy' (hostis) and declared war on him, though they were weary of war (having just defeated Hannibal) and had no legal right to interfere in eastern affairs.

In 200 a relatively small force of 30,000 and a small fleet was sent under the command of the consul P. Sulpicius Galba, whose profitable enslavement of captured towns during the First Macedonian War in 211 when he held his first consulship had become notorious.

The Romans received active support from the Athenians, but the Aetolian and Achaean Leagues were reluctant to help, while Rhodes and Pergamum left the fighting to the Romans.

Philip had little support from any of the Greek states, since he had alienated their opinion.

In 199 Galba conducted ineffective campaigns in the area of what is now Albania, but in the following year a new commander, the consul for the year, T. Quinctius Flamininus, took over, and he pushed into Thessaly as far as the pass at Tempe where he linked up with the Aetolians who had now come into the war on the Roman side.

In 197 Philip ventured on a set battle against the Romans at Cynoscephalae in Thessaly, where he was soundly defeated in a clash between the Greek phalanx and the Roman legion.

Philip was forced to seek a peace agreement which was negotiated late in that same year: by it he was compelled to recognise the freedom of the Greeks, to withdraw all his garrisons from Greece, the Aegean and Illyria, to surrender his fleet, to reduce his army to 5000 troops, and to pay an indemnity of 1000 talents, half at once and the rest in ten annual instalments.

The terms were better than he might have expected; the majority of the Roman senate (who had to approve the terms negotiated by Flamininus) did not want to destroy the Macedonian state, as the Aetolians demanded, since it served as a buffer against restless native tribes to the north, and Philip might also serve as a useful ally in the future.

In July 196 Flamininus made a grand appearance at the Isthmian Games held in Corinth where he announced the promised freedom and independence of the Greek states, amid scenes of great joy and thanksgiving (Livy 33.31.132.9. = Rome and the Mediterranean, pp. 125-7 = Document 4/5 (a) = L&R2, pp. 174-6; L&R3, pp. 185-7).

Flamininus, who had remained on in Greece as proconsul in 197 and 196, stayed on another two years supervising the details of the necessary reorganisation of the Greek states; some were returned or added to membership of either the Aetolian or Achaean Leagues, while others were joined into local confederacies.

Each city was given carefully chosen municipal administrators, usually chosen from among the pro-Roman aristocrats.

During this time Flamininus also campaigned against Nabis, the king of Sparta, an able and energetic man, who had led a brief resurgence of Spartan influence in the Peloponnese.

This threat to the stability which the Romans were trying to establish had to be suppressed, and in doing so Flamininus won himself even more military glory and the Roman treasury received an indemnity of 500 talents.

In 194 Flamininus withdrew all Roman forces from Greece.

The Roman concern about Greek freedom had a strategic basis: the aim was to keep Greece politically fragmented and out of the hands of any strong power, without going to the trouble of annexing it and controlling it directly themselves.

The Romans expected that out of gratitude the Greeks would accept the Roman settlement and preserve the status quo.

The Greeks thought that the Roman 'liberation' meant a return to the Greek concept of 'autonomy', but they were to learn what the Romans really meant.

192-189 War with the Aetolian League and Antiochus III

Unfortunately for the Greeks there seemed always to be someone within Greece trying to upset the status quo and someone outside it willing to step in and take advantage of the situation.

The Aetolians were upset at the small reward they received for their recent assistance to the Romans: they had demanded the whole of Thessaly, but Flamininus conceded them only Phocis and the western part of Thessaly.

They therefore called on Antiochus, who was already involved against the Romans in Asia (see below), to occupy Greece.

He landed at Pegasae with 10,000 men and overran Thessaly, but received little support from the Greeks, who remained loyal to the Romans, still thankful for their 'liberation'.

M. Acilius Glabrio, one of the consuls for 191, was sent to Greece with 20,000 troops; the Romans received assistance from Philip V, Pergamum, Rhodes and the Achaean League.

This combined force eventually caught up with Antiochus at Thermopylae; once again the legion, although wavering at first, overcame the phalanx, and Antiochus lost nearly the whole of his army in the retreat.

In this campaign Philip V had assisted the Romans, since Antiochus' arrival was seen by him as a threat to his own position.

The Aetolians refused to surrender to Glabrio; his successor in 190, L. Cornelius Scipio, granted them an armistice since he needed his troops in Asia against Antiochus (see below).

In 189 M. Fulvius Nobilior came to terms with the Aetolians, confining them to their original territory and granting independence to the members of their League.

Thus restricted, Aetolia ceased to disturb Greek peace.

171-167 The Third Macedonian War

In 179 Perseus succeeded Philip V, despite the popularity of his younger brother Demetrius with the Romans.

He allied himself with Thrace and Illyria, built up his finances and troops, and interfered in the domestic politics of the Greek states.

Eumenes II of Pergamum played a typical role in keeping the Romans informed of Perseus' moves, putting the worst light on them, and in 172 he persuaded the Romans to declare war on him.

From 171 to 169 the Romans were unable to bring Perseus to grips but in 168 in a set battle at Pydna the Romans under L. Aemilius Paullus were victorious and Perseus was forced to surrender.

The Romans, to punish Epirus for the small amount of aid they had given Perseus, systematically raided the villages and enslaved the inhabitants:
for example, Paullus took 150,000 prisoners from Epirus alone in 167, and these, like other prisoners of war, were made into slaves, of which there was a tremendous increase in numbers due to Rome's wars of conquest in this century (Livy 45.33.8-34.6 = Document 4/S (b) = L&R2, pp. 192-3; L&R3, pp. 203-4).

The Achaean League and other Greek states who had not even assisted Perseus were required to send hostages to Rome.

This harsh treatment and the refusal of the Romans to govern directly but to require the states not to upset the peace brought discontent among the Greeks.

To remove the threat of Macedonia, the Romans abolished the monarchy and all the royal officials and divided the area into four republics, each with its own administration and with restrictions placed on the contact between them.

149-148 The Fourth Macedonian War

These four republics, because they were incapable of combined action were overrun in 150 by a pretender, Andriscus.

A Roman force sent in 149 was defeated and Andriscus' bands were able to seize Thessaly.

A stronger force sent under Q. Caecilius Metellus in 148 expelled Andriscus and he was finally caught and executed in Thrace.

The Romans now decided to annex Macedonia, incorporating Epirus and Thessaly, and turn it into a province; the areas of Illyria and Dalmatia were to be supervised by the governor of Macedonia.

The reduction of Greece

The Greek states left free from Macedonian interference resumed their ancient internal feuds: party differences were widened due to economic changes which followed the movement away from the Aegean and the commercial centre of the Eastern world after Alexander's conquests.

Roman interference in internal Greek affairs during the Third Macedonian War has aggravated their restlessness, particularly because they did not realise the Roman 'liberation' did not mean 'autonomy'.

After the battle of Pydna a thousand of the leading citizens from the Achaean League had been deported and held in Italian towns (among them was the historian Polybius); they were kept interned without a trial or hearing for sixteen years, and not released until seven hundred of them had died.

Treatment of this sort eventually led to the Achaean League rising in revolt in 146 under a dictator from Corinth, Critolaus, who overran central Greece but was defeated by Metellus who was still in Greece after expelling Andriscus.

Central and southern Greece was not made a province, and remained technically independent, but the Achaean League was dissolved and the Macedonian governor was authorised to interfere in Greek affairs.

To push home the idea that Roman 'liberation' meant in fact complete subjection to Roman wishes and to show what happened to those who upset Roman plans, the city of Corinth, the centre of the Achaean League, was razed to the ground in 146 by the new Roman commander, the consul L. Mummius; the inhabitants were massacred, many more were sold off as slaves, and numerous art treasures were shipped back to Rome (Pausanias, Description of Greece, 7.16.7-10 = Documents 4/5 (c) = L&R2, pp. 198-9; L&R3, pp. 209-10).

The Roman conquest of the eastern Mediterranean - Asia, Syria and Egypt

The war against Antiochus

Antiochus III (the 'Great') had expanded the Seleucid Empire as far as the Indian border, and had joined with Philip V of Macedon in attempting to take over Ptolemaic outposts in the Aegean area; Antiochus also recovered Syria and Palestine.

Although he did not interfere in their affairs, Rhodes and Pergamum, called on the Romans in 196 to deal with Antiochus.

The Romans opened negotiations over two cities on the Hellespont, whose liberty Antiochus was supposed to be threatening, through Flamininus who was then in Greece.

But the negotiations proved ineffective since Antiochus took the disputed cities and when he left Greece Flamininus withdrew all his troops as if he expected no war in Asia against Antiochus.

In 195 Hannibal in flight from Carthage was received at Antiochus' court and he stiffened the King's resolve to resist Roman pressure.

A further round of negotiations broke down when the king's envoy insisted on retaining a foothold in Asia Minor and Thrace.

Antiochus overplayed his hand and invaded Greece at the invitation of the Aetolians, which only led to a declaration of war (see above).

He was defeated in Greece, and after some naval skirmishing in the Aegean in which his fleet of seventy warships was easily outnumbered by the combined fleet of Rome, Pergamum and Rhodes, he was defeated in a set battle at Magnesia in 189 by L. Cornelius Scipio and his brother, Scipio Africanus, who accompanied the Roman commander as a legate.

Antiochus fled inland to Apamea, from where he sent envoys to sue for peace.

The peace terms, as negotiated, are known as the Treaty of Apamea (Polybius 21.42.1 ff. and Livy 37.45. 10-21, 55.1-65.1, 38.38 = Rome and the Mediterranean, pp. 368-71 = Document 4/5 (d) = L&R2, pp. 179-84; L&R3, pp. 190-4).

Under its terms Antiochus was forced to surrender his warships and elephants and to pay an indemnity of 15,000 talents; the territory west of the Taurus Mountains was to be evacuated.

The territories gained in Asia Minor were distributed between Rhodes and Pergamum.

Following this settlement a Roman expedition entered Galatia, an independent Celtic dynasty in central Asia Minor, to quell the mountain tribes, which was a benefit to the surrounding peoples.

Roman contact down to 130 B.C.

The Romans played little active part in Asia, but continued to send envoys to settle the many disputes between the small states.

Hannibal who had assisted Antiochus finally eluded the Romans by taking poison in 183.

The people of Rhodes and Eumenes of Pergamum incurred Roman displeasure by attempting to mediate in the dispute between Rome and Perseus (see above), but they were thought to be assisting Perseus' cause.

Rhodes had her economy crippled by the liberation of her trading posts and the creation of a free port at Delos - (Livy 45.24.9-25.4 = Rome and the Mediterranean, pp. 621-3 = Document 4/5 (e) = L&R2, pp. 193-4; L&R3, pp. 204-5).

The decline of the Seleucid dynasty caused by the settlement of 188 was temporarily halted by Antiochus IV who ruled from 175 to 164 and who invaded Egypt and besieged Alexandria in 169-168; but when warned off by the Romans, he withdrew, not wishing to contest Roman power.

He also tried to turn Judaea into a strongly Hellenised state as a buffer between Syria and the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt; when he tried to turn the temple worship of Jehovah into worship of the universal deity Baal and when he revoked his father's decree allowing the Jews freedom to live and worship in their traditional way, they rebelled under the leadership of Judas Maccabaeus ('the revolt of the Maccabees'), inflicting a series of defeats on Antiochus IV's forces.

With his death in 164 and the subsequent disintegration of the Seleucid empire, the Maccabees were able to remove all traces of Hellenism in Jerusalem and restore the ancient temple state.

In 161 the Romans recognised this restored state as a 'friend and ally', seeing in it a means of checking any further Seleucid ambitions in Palestine and Egypt.

On the death of Antiochus IV the Romans intervened in Syria and sent three commissioners to rule for the boy-king who succeeded.

When a rival claimant to the throne, Demetrius, escaped from Rome, where he was being kept as a hostage, and seized the throne, the Senate recognised his position.

Gradually the Seleucid monarchy grew weaker, and after 150 the Romans paid no further attention to it.

Rome's relations with Egypt

Rome had little cause to intervene in Egypt, which had recognised Rome as a power very early: in 273 (at a time when Rome was being recognised in a wider field with the renewal of its treaty with Carthage) Ptolemy II offered and obtained an agreement with Rome, which was not a formal treaty but a grant of amicitia ('friendship').

This was simply a gesture of diplomatic courtesy, but it did imply the recognition of Rome as a 'world power'.

In 173, the amicitia was formally renewed on its one hundredth anniversary; under its terms Rome intervened when Antiochus IV attacked Alexandria in 169-168 (see above), and its envoy, C. Popillius Laenas, forcibly persuaded him to withdraw (see above, and read Livy 45.12.1-7 = Rome and the Mediterranean, pp. 610-1 = Document 4/5 (fl).

There were continual internal squabbles between rival claimants to the throne, such as that between the brothers Ptolemy VI and VII in the 160s and 140s, in which the Roman senate became occasionally involved as mediator, and that between Ptolemy VII (following his brother's death in 145) and his two successive queens, which led the senate to send a delegation to investigate c. 140, headed by no less a person than Scipio Aemilianus.

The fact that Scipio made the fat king, whose nickname was Physcon ('Puffing Billy'), bustle around after him on foot shows the disdain which Roman aristocrats felt now for eastern monarchs.

Earlier in 163, the same Ptolemy who had been relegated to Cyrene by his brother, had been awarded the island of Cyprus by the senate (though they did not provide him with the means to take possession of it).

Subsequently in 154 he published a will in which he bequeathed Cyrene to Rome in the event of his death without an heir.

The Roman senate did not take up the bequest for almost a hundred years, but it was an act of calculated generosity, which was followed by other Hellenistic rulers.

Domestic warfare in Egypt dragged fitfully on, which meant that the Ptolemaic dynasty was so pre-occupied with its own affairs that the Romans had no need to intervene.

Nevertheless, Roman prestige remained high: for example, at the end of the 2nd century Roman senators making private journeys in Egypt were treated like royal personages.

The Kingdom of Pergamum

The kings of Pergamum had consistently favoured the Roman cause and had often been instrumental in pressuring the Romans to interfere in eastern affairs.

Under the terms of the Treaty of Apamea in 188 Pergamum was rewarded with grants of territory surrendered by Antiochus, which increased the size of the kingdom by about ten times.

But the attempted mediation by both Eumenes II of Pergamum and Rhodes in the dispute between Rome and Perseus just prior to the Third Macedonian War (which was undertaken not so much out of sympathy for Perseus but out of fear that Rome might disturb the balance in the eastern Mediterranean) incurred the displeasure of the Roman senate, who took it for collusion with Perseus.

Both Pergamum and Rhodes, despite the help they had given Rome, were now seen as potential threats and stripped of many of the possessions they had been awarded earlier.

On the death of Eumenes in 159, his brother, Attalus II, succeeded.

He continued the policy of friendship with Rome and promotion of Pergamum as a centre of Hellenic cultural and intellectual activity.

He was followed in 138 by the scholarly Attalus III, who died in 133 and, having no heirs, bequeathed his kingdom to Rome, on the condition that the city of Pergamum itself and many of the coastal Greek cities should be autonomous and free of tribute.

The Roman senate accepted the bequest on these terms, but internal politics intervened and Tiberius Gracchus attempted to seize the Pergamene revenues to finance his agrarian reforms (see Topic 8).

On his death, the senate decided to take over the kingdom and, after suppressing a rebellion led by a pretender, Aristonicus, they made it into the province of Asia (129).

The province suffered subsequently as the result of another political decision arising out of factional competition in Rome: from 122 on it became the victim of the system of tax 'farming' as a result of Gaius Gracchus' law allowing equestrian businessmen to bid for the rights to collect the taxes from this wealthy province in return for their support for his own political ambitions (see Topic 9).