or
even at Alexandria, led to the breaking off of the conferences without
coming to any conclusion, still less producing any result. In the
following year, 559, Antiochus returned to Lysimachia with his fleet
and army reinforced, and employed himself in organizing the new
satrapy which he destined for his son Seleucus. Hannibal, who had
been obliged to flee from Carthage, came to him at Ephesus; and the
singularly honourable reception accorded to the exile was virtually a
declaration of war against Rome. Nevertheless Flamininus in the
spring of 560 withdrew all the Roman garrisons from Greece. This was
under the existing circumstances at least a mischievous error, if not
a criminal acting in opposition to his own better knowledge; for we
cannot dismiss the idea that Flamininus, in order to carry home with
him the undiminished glory of having wholly terminated the war and
liberated Hellas, contented himself with superficially covering up for
the moment the smouldering embers of revolt and war. The Roman
statesman might perhaps be right, when he pronounced any attempt to
bring Greece directly under the dominion of the Romans, and any
intervention of the Romans in Asiatic affairs, to be a political
blunder; but the opposition fermenting in Greece, the feeble arrogance
of the Asiatic king, the residence, at the Syrian head-quarters, of
the bitter enemy of the Romans who had already raised the west in arms
against Rome--all these were clear signs of the approach of a fresh
rising in arms on the part of the Hellenic east, which could not but
have for its aim at least to transfer Greece from the clientship of
Rome to that of the states opposed to Rome, and, if this object should
be attained, would immediately extend the circle of its operations.
It is plain that Rome could not allow this to take place. When
Flamininus, ignoring all these sure indications of war, withdrew the
garrisons from Greece, and yet at the same time made demands on the
king of Asia which he had no intention of employing his army to
support, he overdid his part in words as much as he fell short in
action, and forgot his duty as a general and as a citizen in the
indulgence of his personal vanity--a vanity, which wished to confer,
and imagined that it had conferred, peace on Rome and freedom
on the Greeks of both continents.

Preparations of Antiochus for War with Rome

Antiochus employed the unexpected respite in strengthening his
position at home