Philip Matyszak - Roman Conquests Macedonia and Greece

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by
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Copyright Philip Matyszak

ISBN 978 1 84415 968 0

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Putting together a history as complex as the Macedonian Wars needed considerable research. I'd again like to thank Cambridge Faculty of Classics Library for their generous help, and also those including Jo Berry, Ian Hughes and Adrian Goldsworthy who read and commented on parts of the text. Special thanks go to Jackie Whalen and Avi Shah who took precious time on their visits to Thermopylae, Sparta and Athens to personally check and photograph the relevant terrain. Finally I'd like to thank those on the UNRV forum (particularly Nephele, Caldrail, Ursus and Viggen) without whose instructive feedback this would have been a much poorer book.

Map of the Roman Empire at its greatest extent with the area covered in this volume highlighted.

Map of the regions of the Greek mainland.

Map showing the topography of southern Italy and the Balkan Peninsula.

Map of the regions of northern Greece.

Map of Illyria.

Diagram of the Battle of Cynoscephalae.

Map of eastern Greece.

For who is so worthless or indolent as not to wish to know by what means ... the Romans have succeeded in subjecting nearly the whole inhabited world to their sole government a thing unique in history? Or who again is there so passionately devoted to other spectacles or studies as to regard anything as of greater moment than the acquisition of this knowledge?

Thus Polybius starts the story of how Rome grew in his own lifetime from being the dominant power on the Italian peninsula to ruler of an empire that included Spain and his own homeland of Greece.

There have been numerous debates as to the character of the Romans during this period of conquest and expansion. Were the Romans reluctant imperialists, forced into acquiring an empire by a process of mission creep; whereby securing one set of borders involved conquering the adjacent country which led to a fresh set of borders to secure? Or were the Romans, as one writer famously put it, the pirates of the land, aggressively bent on conquest and plunder at all costs? Did the Romans take the initiative in starting their wars, or were they reacting to the perceived hostile intentions of others? The answer to all these questions, as will become clear over the following chapters, is yes. Rome was not a monolithic polity. At this time Rome was a democracy, albeit a limited one, and Rome's foreign policy broadly reflected the electorate's swings in opinion. This opinion was, with greater or lesser success, manipulated by the senate, which was itself torn by faction fighting and the personal ambitions of powerful men.

Therefore we should not look for a Roman master plan underlying any aspect of the Roman conquest of Greece and Macedon. It will become clear that at times the Romans had no idea what they were doing from one year to the next, so far were they from having a master plan which they studiously followed during the century of intermittent fighting which it took to bring the Greek peninsula under their sway. It would be fair to describe the Roman conquest of Greece and Macedon as a strictly ad hoc affair, in which all of the attitudes described above prevailed at one time or another.

The footnotes in this book refer those readers interested to the minutiae of the accompanying academic debate (which is partly about these attitudes) and inform where further information can be found. However before one plunges into the debate as to why matters came to pass, it is essential to understand exactly what came to pass. This book is centred on this latter aspect; how Rome came to conquer Greece and Macedon, and exactly what happened in the century that this conquest took. This conquest was of epochal significance as it completed the merging of Greek and Roman culture into the single entity on which modern Europe is founded.

Given the massive importance of the topic, it is surprising that so little has been written about it, and much of what has been written is not for the general reader. In part this is because the story of the Roman conquest of Greece is a complex one, which shuttles between the convoluted internecine spats of relatively minor city-states and the complex strategies of trans-Mediterranean power politics. This means that it is not an easy tale to tell, especially as attempting to simplify it does violence to the reality of what took place.

Fortunately this is a tale with strong characters, including the grim yet brilliant Philip V, who lights many a page with his mordant humour even when his back was firmly pressed against the wall; the flamboyant and egotistical Flamininus, and Polybius himself, who watched fascinated and appalled as his world tumbled into ruin. Then there are the peoples of Greece: the Achaeans, caught between the millstones of Rome and Macedon; the tragi-comic Aetolians, an unlovable people with a fascinating knack for doing exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. There are the recalcitrant Spartans, and above all, the proud and stubborn Macedonians, a people on the wrong side of history who, for decade after decade, held back apparently unstoppable waves of enemies and for whom even the mighty Roman legions were just one more problem, albeit a major one.