ern as possible about this tempest in a nut-shell, as is best
shown by the many complaints regarding the superficial, contradictory,
and obscure decisions of the senate; in fact, how could its decisions
be expected to be clear, when there were four parties from Sparta
simultaneously speaking against each other at its bar? Add to this
the personal impression, which most of these Peloponnesian statesmen
produced in Rome; even Flamininus shook his head, when one of them
showed him on the one day how to perform some dance, and on the next
entertained him with affairs of state. Matters went so far, that the
senate at last lost patience and informed the Peloponnesians that it
would no longer listen to them, and that they might do what they chose
(572). This was natural enough, but it was not right; situated as
the Romans were, they were under a moral and political obligation
earnestly and steadfastly to rectify this melancholy state of things.
Callicrates the Achaean, who went to the senate in 575 to enlighten
it as to the state of matters in the Peloponnesus and to demand a
consistent and calm intervention, may have had somewhat less worth as
a man than his countryman Philopoemen who was the main founder of that
patriotic policy; but he was in the right.

Death of Hannibal

Thus the protectorate of the Roman community now embraced all the
states from the eastern to the western end of the Mediterranean.
There nowhere existed a state that the Romans would have deemed it
worth while to fear. But there still lived a man to whom Rome
accorded this rare honour--the homeless Carthaginian, who had
raised in arms against Rome first all the west and then all the east,
and whose schemes perhaps had been only frustrated by infamous
aristocratic policy in the former case, and by stupid court policy in
the latter. Antiochus had been obliged to bind himself in the treaty
of peace to deliver up Hannibal; but the latter had escaped, first to
Crete, then to Bithynia,(8) and now lived at the court of Prusias king
of Bithynia, employed in aiding the latter in his wars with Eumenes,
and victorious as ever by sea and by land. It is affirmed that he was
desirous of stirring up Prusias also to make war on Rome; a folly,
which, as it is told, sounds very far from credible. It is more
certain that, while the Roman senate deemed it beneath its dignity to
have the old man hunted out in his last asylum--for the tradition
which inculpates the se