p had created in mines,
customs, and tenths, and through the flourishing state of agriculture
and commerce, he had succeeded in replenishing his treasury,
granaries, and arsenals. When the war began, there was in the
Macedonian treasury money enough to pay the existing army and 10,000
hired troops for ten years, and there were in the public magazines
stores of grain for as long a period (18,000,000 medimni or 27,000,000
bushels), and arms for an army of three times the strength of the
existing one. In fact, Macedonia had become a very different state
from what it was when surprised by the outbreak of the second war with
Rome. The power of the kingdom was in all respects at least doubled:
with a power in every point of view far inferior Hannibal had been
able to shake Rome to its foundations.

Attempted Coalition against Rome

Its external relations were not in so favourable a position. The
nature of the case required that Macedonia should now take up the
plans of Hannibal and Antiochus, and should try to place herself at
the head of a coalition of all oppressed states against the supremacy
of Rome; and certainly threads of intrigue ramified in all directions
from the court of Pydna. But their success was slight. It was indeed
asserted that the allegiance of the Italians was wavering; but neither
friend nor foe could fail to see that an immediate resumption of the
Samnite wars was not at all probable. The nocturnal conferences
likewise between Macedonian deputies and the Carthaginian senate,
which Massinissa denounced at Rome, could occasion no alarm to serious
and sagacious men, even if they were not, as is very possible, an
utter fiction. The Macedonian court sought to attach the kings of
Syria and Bithynia to its interests by intermarriages; but nothing
further came of it, except that the immortal simplicity of the
diplomacy which seeks to gain political ends by matrimonial means once
more exposed itself to derision. Eumenes, whom it would have been
ridiculous to attempt to gain, the agents of Perseus would have gladly
put out of the way: he was to have been murdered at Delphi on his way
homeward from Rome, where he had been active against Macedonia; but
the pretty project miscarried.

Bastarnae
Genthius

Of greater moment were the efforts made to stir up the northern
barbarians and the Hellenes to rebellion against Rome. Philip had
conceived the project of crushing the old enemies of Macedonia,
the D