026 - The Third Macedonian War

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 26, the Third Macedonian War. Having soundly beaten Macedon and Syria, the last two major powers in the east, Rome was now the dominant force in the Mediterranean, a distinction it would hold for the next 700 odd years. In the years after the Syrian war, the Romans were wrapped up with Gallic revolts in the Po Valley and persistent unrest in Spain. Though these territories had been officially conquered, the Romans found it as difficult to maintain their position in these territories as it had been to establish it in the first place. But for the most part, these were mere skirmishes in the wider scope of Mediterranean politics. The real center of attention remained Greece, where, like in Spain and Gaul, winning the prize was not the same as keeping the prize.

Yes, the Romans had demonstrated the superiority of their arms, and even the superiority of their diplomatic corps, but the fiercely independent Greeks would never passively stand by as a foreign power held final say over their lives. Rome had its allies, most notably the Kingdom of Pergamum in Asia Minor, but the majority of Greeks bristled at the presence of the barbarians from the west. Factions of nobles in most of the important cities schemed constantly to carve out as much autonomy as they could, with an eye on eventually throwing off the Roman yoke. Greece was, after all, the oldest and greatest civilization on earth. Surely Roman rule was merely temporary, and in time the Greeks would retake their place as the leaders of civilization, right?

In Macedon, Philip V had been put squarely in his place, and for all his pride and ambition he was able to do little about his sorry state after being defeated at Cynoscephalae. Though he hated Rome, he was a broken man who could not muster the energy for a full-scale revolt. That task would be left to his son, who would return the bravado and swagger to Macedon and renew their quest to drive the Italians from Greece forever.

The catalyst of the Third Macedonian War was Philip V's death in 179 BC, which was, by all accounts, directly related to a quarrel between his two sons, Perseus and Demetrius. After the peace between Macedon and Rome, young Demetrius, Philip's second son, had been sent to Rome as a hostage. Years spent in the city had left the young prince with a pro-Roman worldview. Perseus feared that the political leanings of his younger brother would manifest upon their father's death, that Rome would engineer a coup, and Perseus would be denied his rightful throne while Demetrius ruled a puppet kingdom for Rome. So when Demetrius returned to Macedon in 180 BC, Perseus moved quickly against his brother, convincing Philip that Demetrius was guilty of treason and was plotting with Rome to install himself as king. Philip allowed himself to be swayed and reluctantly ordered the execution of his son. Despite his belief that he had no choice, Philip never recovered from Demetrius' death and within a year, the old king was dead.

This left Perseus in control and Rome concerned about their eastern flank. The Macedonian king kept testing Roman patience, clearly violating the treaty his father had signed by taking control of neighboring territory outside Macedon proper and opening diplomatic relations with the Greek political syndicates. Most worrisome to Rome, Perseus arranged marriage to the daughter of Seleucus IV, who had succeeded his father Antiochus the Great as king of Syria. The Senate hoped for the best though, and, weary of war and unwilling to embrace a belligerent stance, they turned a blind eye to Perseus' actions.

The alliance between the two great Greek powers was a cause of concern in the Senate, but even more so for the kingdom of Pergamum, Rome's steadfast ally, whose territory bordered both Syria and Macedon. Envoys from Pergamum began to send dispatches detailing the outrages and offenses of Perseus, begging Rome to do something about the young upstart king of Macedon. Rome ignored the threat for as long as they could, but finally, Illyria began to rise in revolt against Rome, and the common belief was that Perseus was behind the violence. That, coupled with an assassination attempt against the king of Pergamum, sealed the deal, and in 172 BC, legions were sent back across the Adriatic.

At first, the Romans simply moved into Illyria to quell the uprising, and stood on the border of Macedon. But a year later, war was officially declared, and the legions headed into Macedon under the command of Licinius Crassus, an ancestor of the famous Triumvir, who would join with Julius Caesar and Pompey in their fatal three-way alliance a century later. Licinius Crassus did not get his familial legacy off to a great start, and promptly led the Romans to their first defeat in Greece. It was a minor engagement to be sure, but the propaganda value of the loss was a boon to Perseus, and Greek leaders who had kept their distance from an open conflict with Rome began to throw their support to Macedon. It was a decision that would haunt a lot of them, and lead not to freedom, but to the obliteration of freedom.

After direct confrontation with the Macedonians had proved to be more difficult than the Romans thought, the next two years saw the Roman army in the east turn toward more profitable and less dangerous pursuits, the plunder of defenseless Greek towns. The consuls in charge during these two years seemed to have had little ability or desire to control their men, and the legions became little more than a highly efficient band of marauders. A great deal of wealth, plunder, and slaves were hauled back to Rome. Everyone profited, so discipline went out the window. This, coupled with the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of Perseus, turned even more Greeks against Rome. There was little to be gained by standing with the Romans now. The Italian brutes had no interest in governing, or, indeed, the lives of Greeks in general, they just wanted to ransack the countryside.

In 168 BC, the new consul for the year was Aemilius Paulus, the son of the Paulus who had tried to halt the Battle of Cannae before it happened, and then died leading his troops into the massacre. More disciplined than the previous consuls, Paulus the Younger immediately restored a sense of purpose to the troops, reminding them that they were there to fight as soldiers against an army, not a thief from innocent Greeks, who were, after all, nominally under Roman protection, if that was not a complete contradiction in terms by now.

Paulus located the army of Perseus and announced his intention to make for the Macedonian army and defeat them. Perseus was well positioned with 40,000 troops on the Aegean coast, and dislodging him would take some doing. Paulus ordered one of his generals to take a chunk of the army and make a lot of noise approaching Perseus from the north. This maneuver convinced the Macedonians that the main Roman army would follow, and they prepared for an invasion from the north. However, as soon as darkness fell, the Roman expeditionary force kept right on walking, and swung around behind the Greeks. Only the timely intervention of a Roman deserter alerted Perseus to the danger. 12,000 Greeks were sent down to block the Romans coming up now from the south, but they were driven back in disarray. Realizing he was being encircled and unsure of where the rest of the Romans actually were, Perseus broke north out of his fortified position and set himself up near the village of Pydna, where the open, flat country would ensure the proper deployment of his phalanx.

Having flushed out his prey, Paulus immediately recombined his force and marched to meet Perseus. After spending the night camped across the plain from each other, the two sides rose the next morning eager to have it out. According to legend, Paulus, facing east, stalled his deployment until the afternoon when the sun would be in the eyes of the Macedonians. Whether this is true or not is a matter of debate, but it is true that the battle did not start until the afternoon, and despite the evenly matched sizes of the two armies, things quickly got away from Perseus. Whether or not the sun played any role is, again, a matter of debate.

The Greek phalanx pushed the Romans back initially, which was good. But they pushed the Romans back onto uneven hills bordering the plain, which was bad. The phalanx began to splinter, and the Romans were able to send individual maniples through the breaks in the Macedonian line, and not so much flank the Macedonians as eat them from the inside out. The Macedonian left disintegrated, and Perseus fled with his cavalry. Of the 40,000 or so Greeks in the Macedonian army, at least 25,000 died at Pydna, while the Romans lost maybe 1,000. 5,000 Greeks were captured along with Perseus himself.

Where his father had managed to negotiate a peace that left him in control of Macedon, Perseus received no such favors. The young king was paraded through Roman chains at Paulus's triumph, and then banished to exile in a small Italian village where he lived a miserable existence and died in obscurity. And he showed such promise.

The defeat at Pydna marked the end of the Macedonian kingdom, whose holdings under Alexander had once extended all the way to India. The Senate broke the kingdom up into four republics, which were forbidden to trade directly with one another or any other Greek city. All economic activity had to be brokered by Rome. This ensured that no undue consolidation of riches or power occurred, and that the Romans would never have to deal with trouble in Macedon again. Weak and divided, the Macedonians would attempt one last-ditch effort for independence years later, but that would merely present the Romans with an opportunity to officially incorporate the territory into the province of Macedonia.

Returning to Rome, Paulus, who had done so much to end the senseless pillaging of the legions, led his army on one of the great sadistic rampages of the ancient world. Passing through Epirus, the Romans, furious at the Greeks in general for turning on Rome, decided that an example had to be made of someone to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. They chose Epirus because it was convenient, even though the locals had nothing to do really with Perseus or his war against the Romans. At first, Paulus implied that if he was paid off, Epirus would be spared, and the seventy or so towns collected as much as they could and handed it willingly to the Romans. But the minute Paulus had collected it all, he simply let his men off their leashes and let them sack, rape, plunder, and burn anyone and anything they came across. Over 150,000 locals were bound up and sold into slavery. The rest were killed and left destitute or homeless.

It was a harsh lesson for the Greeks, harsher still for the relative innocence of Epirus. After driving off Philip and proclaiming freedom for Greece, the Romans were universally loved. But now, a mere thirty years later, that love was gone, replaced with fear. Machiavelli's point that it is better to be feared than loved is backed up by the Roman experience in Greece. Loved, the Romans dealt constantly with backstabbing and conspiracies to do away with them. Feared, the Romans ruled in peace and unchallenged. There is no accounting for the horror and immorality on display in Epirus, but the cold fact remains that it worked. Future Greeks knew what the wrath of Rome meant, and they wanted no part of it. Better to drink wine and tutor the Romans in math and philosophy than attempt to cross swords with them.

One of the other legacies left to us by the Roman victory in the Third Macedonian War was the transportation of a great number of Greek hostages to Rome, including a young scholar named Polybius. Taken in by the family of Aemilius Paulus, Polybius would become the instructor of Paulus's son, Scipio Aemilianus, who would grow up to be one of the most famous and influential of all Roman statesmen, and really, the last of the great political figures who was not connected to the crises that would consume the Republic in the next century. In an attempt to explain to his fellow Greeks who the Romans were and where they came from, Polybius constructed a massive history of Rome, which exists largely intact today and stands as one of the pillars of our own understanding of Rome. The histories of Polybius have, indeed, played an integral part in our very own History of Rome podcast, and we owe him a great debt for his excellent work.

Next week, we will return for the last time to Carthage and Macedon. The two great enemies who had so consumed the Romans for the last century were beaten, but for Rome, it would not be enough to simply beat them, they had to be crushed. Cato the Elder had made a point of ending every speech before the Senate, whatever the topic, be it garbage collection or loan repayment, with the line, Furthermore, it is my opinion that Carthage must be destroyed. Cato, like many of his countrymen, feared the return of Carthage and so set out to annihilate once and for all their nemesis from Africa, and quite literally, sow their fields with salt.