20,000 Macedonians lay on the field of battle, 11,000 were
prisoners. The war was at an end, on the fifteenth day after Paullus
had assumed the command; all Macedonia submitted in two days. The
king fled with his gold--he still had more than 6000 talents
(1,460,000 pounds) in his chest--to Samothrace, accompanied by a few
faithful attendants. But he himself put to death one of these,
Evander of Crete, who was to be called to account as instigator of the
attempted assassination of Eumenes; and then the king's pages and his
last comrades also deserted him. For a moment he hoped that the right
of asylum would protect him; but he himself perceived that he was
clinging to a straw. An attempt to take flight to Cotys failed. So
he wrote to the consul; but the letter was not received, because he
had designated himself in it as king. He recognized his fate, and
surrendered to the Romans at discretion with his children and his
treasures, pusillanimous and weeping so as to disgust even his
conquerors. With a grave satisfaction, and with thoughts turning
rather on the mutability of fortune than on his own present success,
the consul received the most illustrious captive whom Roman general
had ever brought home. Perseus died a few years after, as a state
prisoner, at Alba on the Fucine lake;(5) his son in after years
earned a living in the same Italian country town as a clerk.

Thus perished the empire of Alexander the Great, which had subdued and
Hellenized the east, 144 years after its founder's death.

Defeat and Capture of Genthius

That the tragedy, moreover, might not be without its accompaniment of
farce, at the same time the war against "king" Genthius of Illyria was
also begun and ended by the praetor Lucius Anicius within thirty days.
The piratical fleet was taken, the capital Scodra was captured, and
the two kings, the heir of Alexander the Great and the heir of
Pleuratus, entered Rome side by side as prisoners.

Macedonia Broken Up

The senate had resolved that the peril, which the unseasonable
gentleness of Flamininus had brought on Rome, should not recur.
Macedonia was abolished. In the conference at Amphipolis on the
Strymon the Roman commission ordained that the compact, thoroughly
monarchical, single state should be broken up into four republican-
federative leagues moulded on the system of the Greek confederacies,
viz. that of Amphipolis in the eastern regions, that of Thessalonica
with the Chalcid