und and the township, of which
they are at the time in possession, they shall continue to possess and
hold, so long as it shall please the people and senate of the Romans.
Done in camp on 12 Jan. [564 or 565]." (-L. Aimilius L. f. inpeirator
decreivit utei qui Hastensium servei in turri Lascutana habitarent,
leiberei essent, Agrum oppidumqu[e], guod ea tempestate posedissent,
item possidere habereque ioussit, dum poplus senatusque Romanus
vettet. Act. in castreis a. d. XII. k. Febr.-) This is the oldest
Roman document which we possess in the original, drawn up three years
earlier than the well-known edict of the consuls of the year 568 in
the affair of the Bacchanalia.

5. 1 Maccab. viii. 3. "And Judas heard what the Romans had done
to the land of Hispania to become masters of the silver and gold
mines there."

CHAPTER VIII

The Eastern States and the Second Macedonian War

The Hellenic East

The work, which Alexander king of Macedonia had begun a century
before the Romans acquired their first footing in the territory which
he had called his own, had in the course of time--while adhering
substantially to the great fundamental idea of Hellenizing the east
--changed and expanded into the construction of a system of Hellene-
Asiatic states. The unconquerable propensity of the Greeks for
migration and colonizing, which had formerly carried their traders
to Massilia and Cyrene, to the Nile and to the Black Sea, now firmly
held what the king had won; and under the protection of the -sarissae-,
Greek civilization peacefully domiciled itself everywhere throughout
the ancient empire of the Achaemenidae. The officers, who divided the
heritage of the great general, gradually settled their differences,
and a system of equilibrium was established, of which the very
Oscillations manifest some sort of regularity.

The Great States
Macedonia

Of the three states of the first rank belonging to this system
--Macedonia, Asia, and Egypt--Macedonia under Philip the Fifth, who
had occupied the throne since 534, was externally at least very much
what it had been under Philip the Second the father of Alexander
--a compact military state with its finances in good order. On its
northern frontier matters had resumed their former footing, after the
waves of the Gallic inundation had rolled away; the guard of the
frontier kept the Illyrian barbarians in check without difficulty,
at least in ordinary times. In the south, not o