on after taken prisoner by the
Romans, with all his treasures, and died a few years later at Alba.

(M891) "Thus perished the empire of Alexander, which had subdued and
Hellenized the East, one hundred and forty-four years from his death." The
kingdom of Macedonia was stricken out of the list of States, and the whole
land was disarmed, and the fortress of Demetrias was razed. Illyria was
treated in a similar way, and became a Roman province. All the Hellenic
States were reduced to dependence upon Rome. Pergamus was humiliated.
Rhodes was deprived of all possessions on the main land, although the
Rhodians had not offended. Egypt voluntarily submitted to the Roman
protectorate, and the whole empire of Alexander the Great fell to the
Roman commonwealth. The universal empire of the Romans dates from the
battle of Pydna--"the last battle in which a civilized State confronted
Rome in the field on the footing of equality as a great power." All
subsequent struggles were with barbarians. Mithridates, of Pontus, made
subsequently a desperate effort to rid the Oriental world of the dominion
of Rome, but the battle of Pydna marks the real supremacy of the Romans in
the civilized world. Mommsen asserts that it is a superficial view which
sees in the wars of the Romans with tribes, cities, and kings, an
insatiable longing after dominion and riches, and that it was only a
desire to secure the complete sovereignty of Italy, unmolested by enemies,
which prompted, to this period, the Roman wars--that the Romans earnestly
opposed the introduction of Africa, Greece, and Asia into the pale of
protectorship, till circumstances compelled the extension of that
pale--that, in fact, they were driven to all their great wars, with the
exception of that concerning Sicily, even those with Hannibal and
Antiochus, either by direct aggression or disturbance of settled political
relations. "The policy of Rome was that of a narrow-minded but very able
deliberate assembly, which had far too little power of grand combination,
and far too much instinctive desire for the preservation of its own
commonwealth, to devise projects in the spirit of a Caesar or a Napoleon."
Nor did the ancient world know of a balance of power among nations, and
hence every nation strove to subdue its neighbors, or render them
powerless, like the Grecian States. Had the Greeks combined for a great
political unity, they might have defied even the Roman power, or had they
been willing